Chapter 10 Fore! #3
“Fine,” said Mr. Wilson. “But, as the person at the club who used that net most, did you ever question why they placed the driving range net where they did? Its proximity to the caddies?”
“No. Never once. It was just there, like the practice putting green and the parking lot and the spot where the caddies hung out. It was like the moon. Who questions where the moon is? So, the net? Nope, nope, nope. Never. It was just there. Good God, why don’t you ask the country club management why in holy hell they put the practice net there? It wasn’t my job!”
“I understand, Miss Winston,” said the Fosters’ attorney.
“But day after day, for years, you and other members of the country club were driving golf balls into a net that faced directly where the caddies were waiting. A net no more than fifteen yards from where Kenneth Foster was sitting that day. Did you honestly never think about the danger?”
“No!”
“But you did notice the target was gone,” observed the Fosters’ lawyer.
“I did. Yes, I did. I noticed the target was gone. I was at the net and it was gone and I was aware it had been gone a couple of days. No target. Just netting. No target. It was like, poof, into the air. Evaporation central. Chemistry. It just—”
My attorney gently patted my forearm to silence me.
“Okay, then,” said Mr. Wilson. “You knew it was gone. Did you check to see if the fact it was missing in any way affected the nylon netting?”
Looking back, there probably were many very good reasons in addition to the target why the Fosters’ legal eagles wanted to depose me that second time.
We touched on a lot of them, but we didn’t get to all of them that day.
I was shaking from the coke and tipsy from the scotch and annoyed with this roomful of lawyers, and now my body was too small to weigh down my hands, and they were waving in the air as if I were a castaway on an island and a plane were flying overhead, and I was babbling, “I didn’t check the net.
Never crossed my mind. But that’s not the point!
Look, all of you are looking for someone to blame, I get it, I get it, I really do, I get it, I totally get it, but it wasn’t the net’s fault or the club’s fault or Harry Fallows’s fault, it was all me and only me, and it was only me not because I didn’t check the fucking net or because I did hit the golf ball, but because I was fucking Theo Catton and that was wrong—so wrong!
—and this is the price I’m going to have to pay forever. Forever!”
Two fucks in one sentence was a lot in 1979, and for a few seconds no one said anything. Then one of the lawyers for the company that had manufactured the net said calmly and politely and with parental concern, “Forgive me. But, please, who in the world is Theo Catton?”
If anyone suspected I was a chemical dumpster fire that morning, no one said anything.
The features editor at the magazine, whom I saw only fleetingly even though he was nominally in charge of me, certainly didn’t.
He was old enough to be my grandfather, and I assumed this magazine stint was his farewell to the business.
And, perhaps, his fuck-you-farewell to the business, because it was evident he was phoning it in in ways that even a coke-addled and all too often stoned intern like me thought were impressive.
One day when I was in the office early to proofread a very long essay—and I was there at seven a.m. because I’d never gone to bed the night before, finding one club and party and after-party after another—he surprised me by arriving only ten minutes after me.
“Mira,” he said, “good to see that kind of work ethic.”
When I asked what had brought him in so early, he shrugged and said, “Getting my squash racket. I’m an idea man.
If I don’t have an idea by seven in the morning, I call it a day and head for the athletic club.
” I didn’t see him again until the next afternoon.
He was fond of teaching me things via sweeping pronouncements:
At business lunches, always order the table a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé. People will think you know wine.
Join the button club when you’re giving a presentation: button that blazer.
Tell every story like you’re a spy finally dumping all the intel you know.
After the deposition, I actually went to the magazine and got people their coffee and xeroxed layouts and typed in editorial revisions.
I fact-checked when El Escorial was built and how many bodies were in the royal burial vaults for an article on Spain, and confirmed how many rooms were in specific hotels in Key West and Key Largo, and where you were most likely to see sharks.
This is what I mean about being functional: I was that pretty little sports car that leaks oil, but if you kept a quart in the back seat and refilled the oil tank every hundred miles or so, it wasn’t a bad ride.
Until that day you forget the oil at home, which eventually you will, and then the engine overheats and fails.
And the damage, more times than not, is irreparable.