Chapter 17 The Most Beautiful Thing I Had Seen in the Natural World #2
Tina was there at Capen House. She was downstairs in the living room with a half dozen other girls.
They had punch bowls of popcorn and were using a credenza as a bar, the bottles mostly uncapped, and drinking from coffee mugs and little juice glasses they’d purloined from the dining room.
It looked like some of them had been playing the board game Risk, until they either got too drunk or too bored and left the game half finished on a card table near one of the windows.
The new Blondie album was spinning on the turntable.
When the group saw Ethan and me, the room instantly went silent, and it was almost too perfect that I heard one of the song lyrics suggesting a couple having to choose between a movie and a line of coke.
(Me? I’d do both and had done both, though it’s harder than you think to sit still in a movie theater wired with blow.) No one stood for a moment, but they all stared.
The air of sisterly bonhomie in the room was instantly replaced with rectitude and disapproval.
Still, Ethan was just behind me, and Tina went to him. She gave him one of those half hugs, not touching torsos but draping a single arm in a comradely fashion around his waist before taking a step back.
“Who died?” Ethan asked facetiously, reading the room as well as I had.
“You know Annie Bainbridge, right?” Tina asked me.
“Of course.” The girl had been two years ahead of me at the high school in Tallmadge.
That meant, given my year off, she was now a senior at Mount Holyoke.
“I mean, I don’t know her well. She’s older than me.
But Tallmadge is a pretty small school. And a couple of times I was in a foursome with her father. ”
One of the girls giggled at this, and another asked, “Foursome: orgy or gang bang?”
“I meant a round of golf,” I answered, more baffled than offended. “Did…did something happen to Annie?” I asked.
“No,” said Jean Lee, one of my other housemates, another first-year student.
“She’s fine. But Annie’s friends with Dora, and she told her about…
about you, Mira. About all the awful shit you did in high school with older men and the families you wrecked and how you might go to jail. She even told us about the baby.”
“Baby? What are you talking about?”
A few of the girls rolled their eyes theatrically. One shook her head in disgust.
“We all know. You went to live with your aunt and uncle in New York City when you were pregnant. You had the baby there and then gave it up to some orphanage for adoption,” said a housemate named Taffy.
“That’s crazy! I went to New York City to work at a travel magazine! I never had a baby!”
“What, you had an abortion?”
“If I had gotten myself knocked up, you can bet your ass I would have, yes. But I didn’t. Neither of those things happened. No baby, no abortion. I’ve never been pregnant, ever!”
“Why would Annie make that up?”
“I have no idea. I have no idea who would even have started a rumor like that.”
“I suppose you didn’t really kill a person, either, and you’re not ever going to jail for manslaughter? I suppose you didn’t try to hide the evidence in your golf bag?”
My roommate knew that I had killed Kenny Foster, but I had told her alone about it. Now, it seemed, everyone had heard something. “The golfing accident,” I said. “I don’t really talk about it, and all the lawyers tell me I’m not supposed to. I’m sorry.”
“So, that part is true?” asked Jean. “You did try to stash this target or whatever in your golf bag?”
“No. I don’t know what you heard. Yes, there was a golfing incident—”
“Incident? You fucking killed someone!”
“Not on purpose!”
“And you were also screwing a married man!” said Tina, as if it was her I had betrayed by not revealing this part of my past. “That is so gross. So disgusting. I mean, obviously, it takes two to tango, but you broke up a marriage and you ruined his wife’s life.
His kids wound up with divorced parents because of you. ”
Because of you. Yes, she said that. It was 1979.
Today we might say I was “doxed” or “slut-shamed.” I didn’t respond right away, though I considered the feeble retort “He came on to me first.” Or “Lots of kids have divorced parents.” But, then, that wasn’t how I felt at the time: I viewed myself as more predator than prey, responsible for what Theo and I did because I had liked it and I had liked him.
When he gave me his phone number on the scorecard that day, I thought I knew what I was signing up for.
“He has two kids, and Annie used to babysit them. She says they’re a mess,” Tina continued. “Really fucked-up. Annie’s still friends with their mom, and she just can’t believe how you ruined their family.”
In hindsight, I should simply have asked, “Me?” and allowed my jaw to drop to the room’s thin gray carpet.
“I mean,” asked Jean, “who does that? You were in high school, and you wrecked everything for them. Everything! The older girl tried to kill herself, you know—because of you.”
Because of you. There it was again. But the older girl hadn’t tried to kill herself, unless something had happened I was unaware of.
Winnie had once screeched at her father in the supermarket parking lot after her father’s and my story had come out, “I’m so embarrassed I want to die!
” but that was a far cry from the sorts of dark places where my mind had been going.
“Kind of wrecked two families, when you think about it,” observed another of my housemates somberly, a girl named Shelby whose father was a minister in North Carolina.
“You, this superstar golfer, had to know that net was falling apart because someone—and it had to be you—had ripped off some hanging target-thingy. But you used it anyway.”
“I didn’t know,” I said, my voice tremulous and barely audible. I started to say something about the target but lost the thread.
“Tina,” said Ethan, jumping in for the first time, “come on. You just said the words yourself: it takes two. This married man isn’t exactly innocent. And why would Mira have used the golf net if she knew it was broken?”
“It wasn’t broken when I used it!” I snapped, everyone surprised by the way my voice had abruptly gone from soft to shrill.
And then I bleated a confession, three words that I had meant one way—recall Mira Land, and the magical thinking cause and effect of fucking Theo Catton and killing Kenny Foster—but they heard another: “I broke it!”
I broke it. As if it had been a murderous act of sabotage. Country club sedition.
Then I started toward the stairs to leave them all, to run away, but Ethan tried to take my arm. I brushed his fingers away.
“I just can’t believe you never told me,” Tina hissed. Then she said to Jean, “My stuff is in a pile on my bed. I’ll go get it.”
“Your stuff?” I asked. “What the hell?”
“I can’t bear to spend another night in the room with you. I just can’t. Abortions or babies, all the men—”
“All the men? There were four!” I said. (To this day, I am unsure what faith I had in the truth that I rolled the bartender and my “holes and poles” professor into the litany in my mind.)
“And your drugs,” Tina went on. “I put up with your drugs—”
“My drugs?”
“Our room stinks of marijuana. I found coke tonight on my Fleetwood Mac album cover. I just can’t deal with your drugs and your lying one more night! LSD? Cocaine? I mean, I guess it all goes hand in hand. Addicts are liars.”
“I’m many things, but I’m not an addict.”
She scowled at me. “For all I know, you’ll burn down our room.”
“What?”
“Annie Bainbridge said you set a door on fire at Princeton and nearly killed a student. That’s arson! I mean, are any of us safe here with you around? This whole house is a tinderbox!”
“It…the door…it was fireproof,” I tried to protest, but it was feeble.
“Well, the doors here aren’t.”
“Where are you going to sleep tonight?” I asked.
Jean Lee raised her hand. “I’ve got a super-comfy sleeping bag. It’s called a mummy bag. She’s going to sleep in Connie’s and my room.”
“I’ve already spoken to the dean. They’re going to find me a new room and a new roommate,” Tina told me. “They know you’re always high or stoned.”
“You told them? Are you trying to get me expelled?”
“I’m trying not to live in a room that smells like it’s one big bong!”
“I think you’re overreacting, Tina,” Ethan told her. “Take a breath.”
“And I think you’re making a big mistake to hang out with her.
Among her addictions are older men. You’re not the first or even the second.
It sounds like you’re not even the third.
But there was definitely her neighbor growing up and a professor at NYU.
Someone named Marie—a high school classmate of your friend here—told Annie Bainbridge at Mount Holyoke. ”
“Marie Morris?” I asked. My shock at my friend’s disloyalty, I’m sure, was evident on my face.
“I don’t know. Maybe. Let’s face it, Mira, you kind of ruin everything you touch. I don’t know what the worst thing you’ve done is, but you’re just a hurricane of swirling shit. That girl who tried to kill herself because of you? That’s just terrible.”
“Tina, that’s enough!” Ethan snapped at her, but she didn’t back down even when her older brother’s friend glared at her with parental-like disapproval.
“She didn’t try to kill herself,” I said weakly.
“You don’t know that for sure. But you sure as hell did mess up her life.”
“And kill someone,” murmured Shelby.
Looking back, the thing that surprises me most is how never once that moment did I have to blink back tears.
I’d defended myself, but with little commitment.
I think that’s because, at the time, I felt that even if the girls in the room had plenty of facts wrong, they’d gotten the gist of my history right.