Chapter 11 “Be a Banker.”
“Be a Banker.”
I was also intrigued by how much weight I had lost. I wasn’t anorexic—Lord knows, I never thought twice about the calories in a martini, a margarita, or a scotch and soda—but eating really didn’t interest me.
(I’ve had young women in my novels who suffered from bulimia, anorexia, cutting, self-burning, and addictions to Oxy and Adderall, but not a word of any of that was autobiographical, I promise.
I have plenty of demons, but I seem to have saved them for this memoir.) That night I was wearing a jean jacket, but underneath was a sleeveless tee.
I took the jacket off and my arms looked serpentine, and I was relieved I no longer played golf.
I probably couldn’t drive a ball very far, I thought.
Of course, with heroin-chic triceps like that, it was also unlikely I could have hit one hard enough to kill a kid.
You want to know more about Kenny Foster.
You deserve to know more about Kenny Foster.
You will.
Be patient.
Soon enough, we will spend some time with one of his younger sisters.
And, that spring, I continued to write. I wrote in my free time at the magazine on typewriters, and I wrote in bed at my aunt and uncle’s on yellow legal pads with fine-point Bic pens.
Dennis had given me a used paperback with Hemingway’s tips on writing, and in some of them he stressed the importance of productivity, and so I began counting the number of words I wrote on each page and noting it in the bottom right-hand corner.
346. 291. 411. My fictional version of Theo, the fellow I’d christened Bradley, grew more real to me, and some days and nights I was making up almost nothing.
I wasn’t writing from anger, and I wasn’t writing with fury that he had seduced me when I was as young as fifteen.
Remember, this was 1979, not 2026, and I was only eighteen and then nineteen now myself.
Sometimes, I thought I was writing a tragic romance about doomed lovers, but usually I was writing from the perspective of a terrible young woman who’d broken up a marriage and left two children shuttling between the homes of parents who had divorced because of her.
All of my guilt at killing Kenny Foster I transmogrified into hatred for my teenage home-wrecker.
When I tried to envision new scenes or craft new moments, I imagined my mother and Sam Stetson.
(Not their literal fornication or whatever they did together in bed.
I was a mess, but even I was able to steer clear of that axle-shattering pothole.) I tried to concoct the sorts of things those two middle-aged adults might discuss or do if they hadn’t needed to keep each rendezvous clandestine.
Or I tried to reel them in from their illicit shadows, and see them at dinner parties or the theater or playing bridge in my mind.
It was all very sophisticated, nothing like the way I was for Theo little more than a moist young orifice. A receptacle for his midlife yearning.
And I included plenty of recognizable autobiographical minutiae, including the details of my first run-in with the police.
When I had smashed in the car window of Frank Pendleton’s Ford Maverick, there had been, I’d felt at the time, a very good reason: it wasn’t merely that he had tried to rape me.
He had put me in a position in which I had violated one of Theo Catton’s most weighty and unconditional rules. He’d come on me.
Theo knew I would be fooling around with high school boys and, in fact, encouraged it.
It would keep the spotlight off him by making me seem like more of a typical teen.
“Go on dates,” he said affably, “let ’em try and get their hands under your sweater.
” But under no circumstances could I have intercourse with any of those boys or, just in case, allow them to ejaculate anywhere near my vagina.
He couldn’t risk my becoming pregnant: even if he wasn’t the father, the last thing he wanted was the sort of messy paternity testing that would destroy his reputation even if it wasn’t his sperm that had led to the fetus.
I assured him I’d have an abortion if I wound up pregnant, but he countered that at fifteen, I had no idea what I’d do.
At that point, when he gave me this edict, we’d had sex only three times.
And so when I refused to let Frank fuck me in the back of his car—and he tried, he tried with a fury I matched in defense—he gave up, held me down, and jacked off onto my stomach.
It all happened very, very fast. He came below my navel and near the lip of my underwear, close enough to the money spot that I was enraged and later took my revenge on his car.
I would use lots of my life in my books, and I used that in my first serious stab at fiction. (All novelists do this. Our imaginations begin with memory. As a friend of mine who has won the National Book Award twice said to me, “You’re not doing your job if your family doesn’t hate your guts.”)
In late April, I had something that was too long for a short story and too short for a novella. It was roughly fifteen thousand words. I was excited and proud, and I made the egregious mistake of showing it to Dennis.
I changed the young home-wrecker from a golf prodigy to a high school tennis star.
I tried in a few short scenes to convey the tension of a match, two young women on the clay, grunting with masculine abandon on each backhand.
I knew those moments were lacking, however, and tried to channel the pressure I felt in the most intense golf matches.
But even that didn’t work because I never felt much pressure playing golf. Oh, I would have, had I tried to reach the next level. I would have gotten my ass kicked and discovered what separates the women from the girls, and felt the burden—the heaviness—of competitive sports at an elite level.
As a teenager, however, cocooned amidst the country club courses of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, I usually felt like a cat with a baby mouse I could toy with as long as I wanted.
I remember one women’s tournament at a course in Scarsdale.
There was a club pro from Hastings who was in the group ahead of me, and so I knew her score on each hole.
I was one stroke up on her the last day, the top of the leaderboard, but she birdied twelve, thirteen, and fourteen, while I only made par on each of them.
Suddenly, I was two strokes down with only four holes remaining.
A lot of golfers would have supposed it was over: they weren’t winning this one. Not me.
She parred fifteen, a dogleg that stretched 488 yards from the women’s tee to the hole, the green bunkered on three sides.
As I’ve told you, I could drive a ball far, but not far like a man; my strength was my short game.
So, I didn’t try to do more than par fifteen, too, knowing that the last three holes were all par fours, and if my competition managed to finish them in twelve—though I suspected she’d bogey seventeen, because the green was massive and she’d missed a couple of putts she should have made that tournament—I could still force sudden death by nailing birdies on any two holes that remained.
Par fours were my sweet spot, given my putting game: often, if I could reach the green in two, I had a shot at a birdie.
So, I may have been behind, but I was thinking ahead.
Sure enough, she three-putted on seventeen, taking a bogey, while I birdied sixteen.
She was so rattled by the fact that the teen from Tallmadge had regained a tie that she hooked her tee shot on eighteen into the rough.
My drive on eighteen was easily twenty-five yards shorter but landed smack in the middle of the fairway.
She finished with a second consecutive bogey, and I two-putted for par and won by a stroke.
It was an even easier tourney win than I had expected, and certainly easier than anyone would have anticipated when I was down by two strokes with only four holes to go.
Anyone, that is, but me.
There were plenty of reasons why Dennis might have hated my story, including the reality it most certainly was terrible.
It was apprentice fiction at its worst, and I had next to no idea what I was doing.
Still, I was unprepared for the vehemence of his reaction.
It was a Friday night, the late-April air steaming like July, and he had opened the windows in his loft, which did little to cool the apartment while inviting inside the summer dumpster smells of the city, and the sounds of the traffic and the revelers staggering home from the neighborhood bars.
We had just fucked and he had gone to get his weed, and so I went to my shoulder bag with the pages of my story.
We were sitting naked on the bed and he was packing the bowl when I dropped the pages on the sheets before him.
“What’s that?” he asked, reaching with his free hand for his lighter.
“I wrote something.”
“And it’s finished?”
“Yup.”
He handed me the pipe, I brought it to my lips, and he held the lighter against the marijuana. As I inhaled, he murmured, “You know the first draft isn’t the last draft. I’ve told you that, right?”
I held the smoke in my lungs for a long delicious moment, but I felt my body starting to tense. Sharing this story with Dennis—the novelist, the professor, the lover—was an act of vulnerability that dwarfed having his hands on my wrists, my hands over my head, his cock inside me.
“I do,” I said, after exhaling, and then added, a shameless attempt to curry his approval and influence his reception to the tale, “you taught me that. Whatever works in this story is something you taught me.”
“Well, I’ll read it in the next few weeks.”
The story was long enough that I didn’t expect him to read it right there while I watched. But I did expect a more supportive reaction.
Oh, Mira, wow! Well done!
My God, Mira, I can’t wait to dive in!
Or, worst case, remarking as he picked up the stack and appreciated its heft, This is a lot of pages. You’ve been working hard.
After all, hadn’t this been his idea?
I tried not to reveal that I was hurt, saying simply, “Thank you.”
And that might have been it. We both grew quiet, but the silence was awkward, my story the screaming toddler on the airplane that demands you focus on nothing else.
We lay back down and smoked, stared up at the ceiling, saying nothing for easily ten minutes.
Finally, I decided that I might as well get dressed and walk home to my aunt and uncle’s apartment.
For a bit he watched me climbing into my jeans and buttoning my shirt.
But then he surprised me by asking, “What’s it about? ”
“The story?”
“Obviously.”
“An older man and a young girl.”
He sat up as if I had poked him in the ribs with a knitting needle. “What in holy fuck? You wrote about us?”
“No. I wrote about Theo and me.”
He rolled over and grabbed the pages off the nightstand. He started reading, and I watched, waiting, a little breathless. Suddenly, he was brandishing them like a conductor’s baton. He waved the stack, roaring, “When someone tells you to write what you know, they don’t fucking mean it!”
“Are you joking?”
“Are you? Writing about a girl and a man twice her age?”
“Two and a half times,” I corrected him.
“Lolita was just a novel. Those two people—all of Nabokov’s people—were made up! You can’t write about yourself and Theo. Have you lost your mind?”
“You were the one who suggested I do it! You were the one who said I should put all my feelings down on paper.”
“I meant your parents and golf and that Foster kid—not the fact you let a married man fuck you when you were in high school.”
You let…
It would be years before I would look back on his phrasing, those words, and grow furious.
“Maybe you should read it all before having a shit fit,” I said simply.
“Maybe you should think about the consequences of what you’re writing.”
Which was when I did that thing that so many young women do: I acquiesced. I tried to make peace through capitulation. “It’s probably not very good. It’s probably never going to be published anyway, so what damage could it do? It’s just, I don’t know, an exercise.”
Of course, it wasn’t just an exercise. I was still naive enough to believe that because I had—as Dennis himself had suggested, quoting Hemingway—opened a vein, it was writing that would change the world.
Or, at least, be published in an obscure literary magazine that would pay me with a couple of free copies.
Shaking his head, he read the first pages a second time as I stood in my jeans at the side of the bed.
“This isn’t Theo,” he said. “It’s me.”
“No, it’s not!”
“And anyone who knows you at all will recognize you. When the girl takes her dad’s golf club to a car window? You did that, for fuck’s sake.”
“So? I can’t be the only girl who’s done that.”
“Yeah, maybe you can be,” he bristled, which was when he did the unthinkable.
He started ripping the pages into shreds, long strips of kindling.
If this had been Little Women, he would have channeled his inner Amy March and tossed them into a fireplace.
There were too many for him to tear all at once, and so I was able to grab easily half of them back, and suddenly we were wrestling half on and half off the bed, and I was weirdly repulsed now by his nakedness.
(I don’t doubt that Olympic wrestling back in the day when the Greeks grappled nude near Mount Kronos was a legitimate spectator sport, but it sure as hell wasn’t a pretty one.) He was stronger than me, but my clothing gave me an edge: a part of him was protecting his junk, especially after I kneed him in the thigh—aiming, in the heat of the battle, for said junk.
Also, as angry as he was, he wasn’t the sort of man who would actually have hit a woman.
I think I understood that even as he was trying to pry the papers from me.
I retreated to the kitchen section of the loft, and he stood by the bed, steaming, his cock having retreated into his pubic hair like a baby swallow into its nest.
“I still have my handwritten draft,” I told him. “It doesn’t matter what you ripped up.”
“It’s not very good, Mira,” he said, panting. “It’s not good enough to ruin my life.”
“It’s not—”
“Fine! It’s not good enough to ruin Theo’s life!”
“It’s just a story I wrote.”
“You’re not a writer. My advice? Go back to golf.”
I felt my eyes welling up and blinked back the tears. “I’m not a golfer,” I said. “Not anymore.”
And then he said the four words that ended any hope that we might have a future together, but gave me my future without him: “Then be a banker.”
Nothing could have lit more of a fire in my belly than those four words.