Ethan Lamplighter’s house is filled with unopened boxes, lost-capped pens, and shoes that are missing their pairs. On his coffee table, there is only one book: The Game Was Hers, by Mark Suttree, 2006.
On a Sunday morning in mid-July, he wanders the floor of his living room, wearing a five-o’clock shadow, and his gold-band wedding ring on the wrong finger. You would be tempted to ask why he keeps a proclaimed enemy’s book on display. Ethan keeps it out like the Bible. He swears to have read it more than once, but the spine is fresh, and the cover clean.
“Start at the beginning,” I have to remind him. “This sorority formal, in 1986?”
He finally stops pacing, and settles down. “That wasn’t the beginning,” he says simply. “The beginning…well,” he finally sighs, and throws up his hands. “Mark and I used to be friends.”
The two men met at Rutgers University, in the mid-80s. We should rather say, these two boys met; on the campus lawn, where they would toss around a pigskin between classes. To this day, there remains something elegantly boyish about either one: Ethan, with his sense of dress, and exasperated movements—and Mark, with his love, of course, for Amy.
Through their respective Greek life organizations, Mark and Ethan both came to meet Amy Suttree at around the same time. Both will say the same thing about the girl who has come to define their lives: that she was beautiful, and crazy.
Which is perhaps a misfortunate word, but we must remember that this was the 1980s. Ronald Reagan was president. Colleges had been desegregated by only about a dozen years. We can picture a time traveler, a hapless Marty Mcfly, asking a passerby, “Which way to the college mental health center?” And being laughed in his face.
“The beginning…” Ethan fidgets with the first pages of Mark’s book. The cover shows a below-the-waist photo of a woman in a green golf skirt, taking a perfect swing. “It gets a little fuzzy, being so long ago. The short-and-skinny is: Mark and I both met her at around the same time, and we both asked her out—at around the same time.”
“And who did she say yes to?”
“Well,” Ethan chuckles. “Both of us. And only about a dozen other guys. You see, Amy was…touched. She had this mental…condition,” he sighs. “Sorry, I’m struggling to explain.”
“She was crazy.”
A sad, slow nod. “Someone called it. Psychosis? Some counselor, at the time—like I said, it gets fuzzy. But this is all covered in Mark’s book.” He picks it up, The Game Was Hers, and thumbs through the pages. “Have you talked to him at all?”
Mark is hard to get to. He lives on a hill that doesn’t have cell-connection. A deliberate choice. In all our phone calls—which is as close as I could get to a meeting—he was out of breath, having jogged to the bottom of his street to answer.
“I’ve talked to Marilyn—Mary,” I correct myself to the name that Ethan would know.
His eyebrows rise, and a wistful smile creeps across his lips. A smile that says: I used to know a girl named Mary.
“She told me to ask about this formal. Fall formal. 1986.”
“Yes,” Ethan says. “That was our final year in college. Amy had dated both of us, and some other guys, throughout the last three years––but she was mostly just going out with me, by the end.” I click my pen, and scratch a quick note. Not how Mary told it.
“But that was just a ball,” Ethan continues. “Amy was wearing this bright green dress, that really…hugged her, you know? I remember it so vividly,” he sits back on his couch. “She pulls me out of her room, drags me to the top of her sorority’s staircase: half of all our friends are gathered at the bottom, and gives me this one, incredible kiss.”
“You could hear a pin drop,” he says. “She pulls away—there’s lipstick, probably on my chin—and swoops down to join the party, like a real life Cinderella.” Ethan sighs, his eyes far-away. “The guys were so jealous.”
I underline my previous note. Not how Mary told it.
When you ask about the story, Mary laughs like she’s seen it all. “It’s just so ridiculous,” she says, wielding a glass of iced tea around her New York apartment. “Two grown men, arguing over a girl, like we’re all back in high school.”
She gives that laugh again. “I feel positively young again!”
I lean forward, and put my pen down for a spell. “There seems to be some discrepancy about the timing of events. I was hoping you could shed some light on your version of everything.”
She raises her eyebrows. “Meaning?”
“Mark and Ethan both met Amy—and dated her, it seems—at the same time. And while they were each trying to win her over, she was seeing several other members of their college fraternity,” I flip back through my notes. “Am I to believe that a young girl was dating a dozen men in the 1980s, and no one raised an alarm?”
Mary sighs, and finally sets down her glass. “Well, Amy was very popular, you know. The boys all loved her––she was this golf super-star! She told them all what they wanted to hear, jumping from one bed to the next—all the while convincing both Mark and Ethan that she was well-and-truly in love with them.”
“Did they know about each other?”
“Who, M and E?” She asks. “Or all the boys she was seeing at the time.”
I raise my hand, for her to answer either or.
“For the most part, they all knew. M and E especially knew, and for the first years, they treated it as a game; like their, ‘touch football’. They each vied for her affections, showing up with flowers, jewelry, chocolates shaped like hearts.
By Fall of ‘86, she had narrowed down to Ethan. And by that time, it had gotten through to them that this wasn’t a fair game—that she needed help. But, everyone was getting what they wanted,” Mary sighs. “And no, it wasn’t no one.”
“Sorry?”
“Who raised an alarm,” Mary says. “It wasn’t no one. It was me.”
“Tell me more about this event—the formal, was it?”
“Yes, the fall formal. I wore a hand-sewn dress from Italy, but it was the same story as it’d been for the past four years: Amy stole the show. She breezes down the bannister, after giving Ethan the sloppiest, most attention-grabbing kiss of his entire life, and jumps on the pool table for a one-woman burlesque show. She was like a girl out of a movie. If you were there for just one night, you would have thought she was the most captivating, and most confident woman in the entire world.”
“But you knew better?” I ask.
“By that point—everyone did,” Mary replies. “Even Ethan. He practically limps down the staircase, with his hair sticking straight up, from what she’d just done to him. And he walks over to me,” Mary says, speaking slowly, trying to get the memory right. “He’s got this, drubby suit on, he leans in oh-so-tragic, and he says, ‘Mary, I don’t know what to do about this psy-chosis thing.’”
“So, by that time, the situation was coming to light?”
“In a sense, yes. Her coaches were starting to inquire after her welfare. Parents, and professors, probably, too. It was all falling to Ethan, the ‘boyfriend’, everyone wanted to know, ‘What’s wrong with Amy?’ And they were all asking the same person.”
“Ethan.”
“Who handled it as well as he could have, I suppose. But at a certain point…” Mary pauses for a moment, remembering old wounds.
“Can I ask, what ‘did’ it? What was the turning point, where everyone knew?”
She thinks to herself. “I don’t know if there was just one. It was always, ‘oh that Amy,’ and then one day, ‘does Amy seem alright to you?’”
“If I had to pick one,” she says. “It’d have to be the tea-towels.”
“Tea towels?”
“You know, serviettes. She had a spending problem, Amy. I broke into her room one day, and found piles of these fancy, frilly, embroidered, silk, lace, tea towels: stacked to the ceiling, practically. I remember throwing them out by the handful, trying to reach the floor—you shouldn’t have been able to buy so many tea towels; I mean, someone should have been there to stop you.
See, in her touch of ‘psychosis’, Amy seemed to believe that she was collecting an army of loyal attendants in these men, whom she kept enthralled with tricks she gleaned from some dime-store porno rag. She believed they would handle everything for her: finances, class schedules, day-to-day chores that she stopped having to do.
She spent, a massive amount of money, on makeup, jewelry—”
“Tea towels.”
“Exactly! Amy was deeply in debt, and no one knew how to help her—least of all me.” She corrects herself. “Least of all Ethan.”
“And…” I rifle back through my notes. “How did she get from E back to M?”
“That’s a better story to hear from the man himself,” she replies. “Mister Writer. Last I saw Amy, she was hobbling across the stage at graduation, accepting her diploma in golf gloves and seven-inch heels.”
“Sorry,” she corrects herself. “I saw her once after that,” she waves her hands in a flashy motion, “On the cover of Sports Magazine.”
Mark is breathless from running to take my call. He answers in a brusquely casual manner, which tells me he isn’t thrilled by this: the second of our calls to discuss Ethan’s memoir.
“So, do you have more questions?” He jumps right in. “We’ve got an appointment later this afternoon,” he puts this out there, in case he wants to end our call abruptly.
“I’m just trying to nail down a timeline. I take it that you and Amy weren’t dating, at the time of your graduation. But four years after that, you’re married?”
“Listen—” There’s some static on Mark’s end, but I can catch the gist of his statement. “Amy and I were only ever friends in college. Friends, got it? That’s not to say I didn’t love her,” his voice cuts out. “––the moment I saw her. But that wasn’t reciprocated until after college.”
“And thank god it wasn’t,” he adds shortly. “Those men she was seeing ought to be in jail—considering the state she was in.”
“So, during this four year interlude, how did you get back into contact?”
“We never lost it in the first place. She was in an awful way, coming out of college. And her good-for-nothing father rented an apartment for her downtown, without any roommates, or friends in the city—where she could live, and degrade, in total isolation.”
“I see,” I say. “So you stepped in to save her?”
“To help her,” he corrects me. “I stepped in to help. It was not a cheap neighborhood to live in, but I managed to rent a spot at the bottom of the street—in the basement of an apartment, more of a boiler-room, really—and I picked up a few jobs, washing dishes, doing maintenance work, so I could get enough money.”
“To?”
“Pay my rent, and buy us groceries—she had these awful eating habits, and I was blowing through my paychecks on tuna fish,” Mark stops to greet a neighbor, and I wait for him to return. “Sorry, where was I?”
“You were trying to make enough money.”
“Right,” he says. “I wanted to help pay off her debt, and finally, to take her around to different psychiatrists. We eventually met a good one, Dr. Levi, who got her back on the pro-golf circuit. He’s mentioned in the book.”
“Your book?”
“Yes,” he snaps at my mistake. “Ethan would never know—listen, I don’t know if you’ve read that trashy little diary, but it doesn’t come close to describing my wife’s situation. It’s presumptuous, and arrogant, and one typo away from libelous.”
“Does your wife feel as strongly about Ethan’s book?”
“I won’t speak for her,” he replies. “Unlike Mr. Lamplighter. This should all be well-reported by now. Ethan comes to me, an old friend––water under the bridge from our time in college—and says he’s writing a memoir.
He asks to interview me, and we talk in my kitchen for about an hour. At one point, my daughter comes in for a cup of water. They exchange words. The interview finishes, we shake hands—eight months later, the book comes out. I swear to god—”
“Mr. Suttree?”
“He quoted my daughter,” he seethes. “He manipulated our conversation into the better half of his book. Have you read it, sir?”
“No,” I reply. “He gave me a copy, but I didn’t get around––”
“Just its title,” he says. “Go on, read me the title.”
I pick the book off my desk: a paperback, jaundice-yellow cover, the font in big-print letters, diminishing the author’s name.
“She Had it All.”
“I mean,” his voice sounds distant on the phone. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
“It sounds like your title,” I observe.
“The meaning is completely different,” he says. “My title is about a woman at the pinnacle of her game––the kind of player that no one could touch.”
“His,” he says, “Is a joke at her expense. ‘She had it all’—until mania killed her career, he means to say; now, everyone come, and point and laugh at her ‘fall from grace’.”
He scoffs into the receiver. “Well, she’s doing just fine, if you ask me.”
“This rivalry certainly hasn’t hurt your book’s sales.”
“It was never about money,” he tells me. “Look, I had a simple dream: of my wife being healthy, and fit for play, so that I could follow her as a professional sports writer, documenting her stronghold on women’s golf.”
“And for a few years,” Mark says, “That dream was my life. I accompanied her on the circuit, writing extensively about her wins. We published in S.I., Golf Monthly, essays in the Athletic––I even got two poems in Poetry Magazine.
I helped make Amy Suttree a household name. Ethan Lamplighter came in after the hard work was done, and wrote a true-crime fantasy novel about a woman who’s too messed-up in the head to swing a golf club.”
He takes a deep breath. “Look, I’m not trying to say that he’s a bad person. We had a long phone call, many months ago, where he attempted to apologize—and I attempted to forgive him. He said the editors kept pushing him in another direction, until his book finally looked nothing like what he’d intended it to be.”
“Ultimately, I threatened litigation,” Mark says. “He used my daughter’s words without permission—the man has no integrity.”
“But he gave you the afterword.”
“Ehh, his editors conceded—they thought it would drum up sales to get my name in his book. But it was worth it, to say what I needed to say.”
“Listen,” he starts to slow down, “A lot of words have been thrown around. And as a writer, I should know better than to use strong language lightly. It’s just, when it comes to my wife, I can’t help but get angry. Love brings that out, wouldn’t you say?”
“Certainly,” I answer. “I think I have enough for now, Mr. Suttree. Thank you for your time; and for your energy—I know it can’t be easy, climbing up that hill.”
He laughs, and the line disconnects. I stare out my window, where the sky is just starting to lighten into morning. After a long night of compiling notes, I finally open up the book that started such a frenzy. She Had it All.
I flip to the very end, curious to see what Mark wrote.
Dear Reader,
Some will tell you that my wife’s story is a tragedy. And true, her legacy is marked by a difficult struggle, against something which I hope you never have to face.
But you should know that my wife did not lose her battle. If you came into this book, hoping to find a story about a woman who loses everything—I hope you did not find it.
My wife, Amy, is a champion, who dominated the golf circuit for a ten-year stretch—which, mental illness excepted, is more than most players could hope for.
She is a brilliant mother to our wonderful child, whose words were unscrupulously used by this book’s author without her permission.
And finally, Amy’s is a love story: of living up the street from a young man, who saw the troubles she was facing, and wanted nothing more than to help her through them.
She will always be a champion, no matter what anyone may tell you—and I will always be that man: walking up the hill, to see her again.
-Mark