Chapter 10 Fore! #2
When my father had confronted Theo Catton about the fact the man was fucking me, it hadn’t gone the way either had expected.
Theo had hoped to confine the conversation to the driveway outside his house and spare his family the drama.
This was, of course, self-interest. Self-preservation.
It was also delusional. Meanwhile, my father had expected that as paterfamilias, as a man with what he viewed as unassailable moral values, he would cow his deviant neighbor.
This, too, was absolute fantasy. My father said later that he had never planned to hit Theo.
But even the sort of legalistic hairsplitter that was Peter Winston had an ego; even a father who favored sons over daughters—or, perhaps, simply loved Spencer more than me—had a breaking point.
Unlike his daughter, my father was not mercurial, but he was angry and he felt disrespected: he felt an unexpected and unfamiliar need to protect his child.
And, suddenly, the two men were brawling.
Right there in the Cattons’ driveway and their front yard.
Two wealthy, middle-aged executives, a lawyer and a management consultant, the sorts of guys who wore suspenders and power red ties, neither of whom (thank God) had the slightest idea how to actually throw a punch.
Still, Eleanor Catton had no clue who was—her opinion from the vantage point of the front door—attacking her husband, and so she called the police.
And while Theo never filed charges and his (and my) story held that the two of us had had sex only after I was eighteen, the reason why my father had stormed over to the Cattons’ came out.
The girl who killed Kenny Foster was also sleeping with Theo Catton—a married man two and a half times her age!
If The Jerry Springer Show had been around in 1978, the producers would have moved heaven and earth to book me.
And while it would turn out that my mother was correct when she said Eleanor Catton would not want to see her husband behind bars, she also did not want to see her husband beside her in bed.
The marriage didn’t survive the revelation that Theo had taken eighteen-year-old Mira Winston to a hotel in Manhattan.
And everyone in Tallmadge knew why the marriage was over, including their kids.
“If Eleanor and I run into each other,” said my mother, “I doubt we will speak. At least not voluntarily. I keep my eyes out for her at the grocery store, and she, I suppose, keeps her eyes out for me. And people are sensitive to that. They don’t invite us to the same parties.
And there’s no longer any chance we’ll run into each other at school functions because you’ve graduated. ”
“What about the club?”
She sat back in her chair, crossing one leg over the other, and dangled her shoe by her toes. “Your father and I haven’t gone to any club functions this winter. I rather doubt Eleanor has, either,” she answered.
I didn’t have to ask whether Theo had. He was living in exile, in an apartment somewhere in Westchester. I had no idea where. I had never run into him in Manhattan, but I did keep my eyes out for him whenever I was within blocks of his office.
“I have no grudge with her, and she should have no grudge with me,” my mother continued, “except for one thing.”
She raised a single eyebrow, and I waited.
“She probably doesn’t think much of me as a mother—of how I raised you. Sometimes when children act out, we blame the parents. And sometimes that’s fair.”
I did not say, Are you actually blaming me? Are you so out of your fucking mind that you are blaming your daughter because a man your age took her to bed when she was fifteen? But my mother didn’t know the “at fifteen” part.
And, back then, my own self-loathing had the deep, entrenched roots of switchgrass. Remember, in Mira Land there was a precise cause and effect: the price you pay for fucking a married man is the death of Kenny Foster.
So, perhaps, it is also worth noting that I did not ask my mother at that moment, And what price will you pay for fucking Sam Stetson?
It’s possible that some of you either skipped over my aside a moment ago about my father loving Spencer more than me or it didn’t register. Or, maybe, you thought the memoirist had opted for melodrama over memory.
My parents had nicknamed Spencer the Pinnacle, as in “Is the Pinnacle calling tonight?” They pretended they were being sarcastic, they acted like they were teasing him, that it was their way of putting him in his place because he thought so highly of himself.
It wasn’t. They meant it. They viewed him as all but flawless, the Pinnacle being shorthand for his perfection.
And why shouldn’t they feel that way? He was—he is—charismatic and kind, funny and smart. Good God, I always loved him a thousand times more than I ever loved myself.
The next day, in the ladies’ bathroom at Cleon Barker’s law firm, before the second time I was going to be deposed, I did a line of coke and took three long swallows of scotch from the flask I had bought at a pawn shop in the East Village.
I had not been with Dennis the night before, but I had arrived at my aunt and uncle’s apartment later than usual, worrying them, because I had been at CBGB till one a.m., jumping up and down (it would be a stretch to call it dancing) to a band called Safety Pin Pricks, the music so loud I likely lost thousands of tiny hearing hair cells in my ears, and doing more coke in yet another ladies’ bathroom.
This might not have been the perfect way to approach a ten a.m. deposition, but I was reveling in my imperfections—which is a literary way of saying that I was falling fast down the stairs.
Once more, other than the stenographer, I was the only woman in the room. Once again, my father was but one of eight male lawyers in Brooks Brothers suits.
“I want to go back to last summer,” said Paul Wilson, one of the Fosters’ lawyers, once we were done with the pleasantries.
(Burt Montgomery, the other of the Fosters’ attorneys, had actually apologized to me for stealing me away from the travel magazine for a couple of hours.
I’d reassured him that the editors had their bagels and coffee and the next issue would be on the newsstands on time.) “Since we last met, we’ve deposed your club pro.
Harry Fallows. He says he didn’t remove the target from the driving range net. ”
“Okay.”
“But he did say you complained about it. You’ve admitted that you complained about it rather passionately not long before it disappeared.”
Instantly Mr. Barker jumped in: “Come on, Paul. That in no way implicates this young girl.”
“This is my turn,” said the Fosters’ attorney, his tone petulant and aggrieved. Then to me, he pressed, “Did Mr. Fallows ever tell you he did what you asked and removed it?”
“No.”
“Okay, then. So, one day, it was just gone—the target?”
“Yeah, yeah, that was pretty much it.”
“What did you think?”
“I probably thought, Yay! Or something like that. Yay! I told you the last time we did this, I thought the target was stupid, I thought the target actually made golfers worse, I thought it gave us bad habits. It’s a dumb design, dumb as a box of rocks, and the whole net was ridiculous.
The target was insane and dorky, and I don’t play golf now and the target’s a reason if you really look at what happened that day, and I have no idea why the company thought it was a good idea in the first place and—”
This was, of course, the cocaine talking.
I was a locomotive, and I stopped only when I saw my father’s eyes growing wide and my attorney looking alarmed.
I had been prepped to keep my answers short.
So, I shut up and sat on my hands. Sitting on my hands seemed like a logical way to stop speaking, as if my fingers controlled my larynx.
After a moment, all the adults still wondering why, unlike the last time we had done this, I was speaking like a 33? RPM record spun like a 45, and thus sounded like a chipmunk, Paul Wilson said, “Okay, Mira, let’s suppose you’re on the golf course.
You know to yell Fore! if, accidentally, you send a golf ball toward other golfers, correct? ”
“I wasn’t on a golf course!” I snapped, my resolve to slow down instantly gone at what at the time struck me as the utter idiocy of the question.
“I was at the club’s driving net, remember?
Who yells ‘Fore!’ there? There isn’t time!
Give me a break. Give. Me. A. Break. So, the answer?
No one yells ‘Fore!’ there, no one, not ever, makes no sense, it would be like yelling ‘Fore!’ as you drive through a red light, just ignoring the signal! ”
Mr. Barker looked at me as if I had just confessed to taking a potshot with a rifle at the president.
Even as coked up as I was, I got the message and went on, “I mean, whacking a golf ball at a driving range practice net and zooming through a red light aren’t the same thing. Right? Totally, totally not.”
“I understand,” the other lawyer said calmly. “That wasn’t my point. Mira, you know to yell ‘Fore!’ and, no doubt, you’ve yelled it, right?”
“Not for years. Not. For. Years. I don’t think I’ve sliced a ball that badly since I was fourteen or fifteen.
Maybe you do, but I don’t. Excuse me, I didn’t.
I was good. Really good. I was a winner.
A champion. No more, of course. Now I’m nothing—zilch, zero, nada.
But then? I was pretty goddamn good. I could beat the men, I could beat Harry Fallows. I owned that course!”
It would be a stretch to say my parents looked aghast, but everyone was curious who this new girl was and why she was so agitated and intense this morning.
They were all sitting forward in their seats, waiting to jump in and, if necessary, muzzle me.
I didn’t care. I noticed the shadows through the Park Avenue windows and wanted them to move faster.
The world was just too slow. The adults were just too slow.