Loudermilk

by Lucy Ives

  Clare is a year late. She should have been making this bizarrely perilous short flight, like being thrown across the state of Illinois, at the end of the summer of 2002, when she was still a great writer. Admittedly, she had been a very young great writer, but all magnificently accomplished persons have had to be something before the period of universally acknowledged dominance—and Clare was evidently, tellingly being what she was then, which was very, very promising. It is in description now that Clare has a tendency to become most mired. No, now it is in description that Clare has a tendency to become the most mired. The tendency? Is that the word? Mired? The? She slides back and forth, on wheels, mobile yet unable to pass over the hump that stands between her and poised, proper articulation. What was it she was? Who was there? The very sentence is unnatural. The sentence is very unnatural. Who? Had anyone in fact said or believed this of her? The sense that this had happened somewhere, the naming of her, the praise of her, the walking to the home of the doughty publisher, the short man, his cobbled streets. She was to receive the award before a polished black piano. His piano, not her mother’s. To someone, oh someone, then one Clare Elwil, these events had occurred. “You have a name for a book cover,” an anemic woman in a pair of avant-garde earrings, nests of silver thread, had whispered. Clare was a stylist, a judicious narrator. She sold her story to the room. She was someone, the worthies said, who should be driving the bus, and there were daffodils jangling everywhere in Cambridge.

  Here, the plane touches earth. Clare gags. A black star blooms, and she maintains herself in a kind of (obviously wishful) corporeal stillness, by force of will. The pink man stirs.

  The plane bounces. There comes a smattering of applause.

  Clare Elwil is in the middle of nowhere, where she will remain for the next two years, and what no one knows but they will soon discover is that she can no longer write.

  Three

  Fate

  Loudermilk and Harry have spent Friday night at a squalid split-level rented by half a dozen rising seniors who have, or so their hosts’ story goes, been lately kicked out of their sororities for various infractions. Four are currently away on a DUI-related sobriety retreat—though utilizing separate cars on separate occasions, they succumbed identically post-finals last spring—and won’t be back until after the holiday.

  Harry was placed downstairs on a squealing corduroy couch, while Loudermilk’s non-negligible gifts were shared by the nubile pair who originally picked them up at a downtown bar. Harry cannot remember their names, though the two co-eds are basically distinguishable. For ease of mental reference and to render these alien beings slightly more palatable, he has christened them “Shortstack” and “Skylar.” Shortstack is short (obviously) and deeply, artificially bronzed, with prominent cone-shaped breasts, while Skylar is tall and languid and blond, her face a vivid hybrid of Christie Brinkley and Jean Seberg. Both are, however, in Harry’s less than generous assessment, dumb as dirt and would willingly have mated with Loudermilk in an actual pile of this substance they saw near a parked backhoe on the way back from the fifty-cents-a-cup piss emporium where the initial connection was made.

  An attempt to set Skylar up with Harry was of course a complete failure, with Harry staring stonily past her right ear as she droned on about how awesome it must have been to go to college so close to New York City, but how scared she would be, like, if she ever went there, because she had heard that a woman had been dragged for, like, a mile once by a purse-snatcher on a moped who, no joke, literally pulled her into traffic, and she had her entire face torn off. “That is not normal!” Skylar exclaimed, as if there were some chance Harry might be so unfamiliar with the project of human existence that the sensorial implications of being separated from one’s face by means of asphalt-induced abrasion might not be entirely clear.

  Loudermilk knew enough not to take Harry aside and demand to know why he did not get how to act when high-quality poontang was being thrown in his general direction. Instead, Loudermilk just tapped Skylar on the shoulder mid-narrative and subtly renegotiated matters.

  It is currently 7:34 a.m. by Harry’s watch, and the moaning and sighing and thumping in the room next door finally ceased a little over twenty minutes ago. Harry has not really slept. He has on all of his clothes except for his shoes, and there is a large beach towel depicting a penguin in sunglasses covering him. Not only is it too hot in this room, it also stinks of something all kinds of rank that Harry peevishly identifies as pizza farts plus Vagisil. He is afraid of what he will find if he gets up to go look for the bathroom.

  Harry screws his eyes shut and tries again for sleep. In his mind, images of Loudermilk blossom, fade, recur. Loudermilk glides across a lawn in Oswego, New York, nods his head in time, tells Harry to stick with him, it’s going to be cool, they know more than everyone, drives Harry down to Rochester, where they contemplate the lilacs and talk about making it big one day, passes him another beer, convinces him to defer his student loans, is inexplicably but so familiarly there. Of course there was an era before Loudermilk, but it’s only worth remembering insofar as it was a time when Harry was alone. And Harry’s alone no more. What a gift, their unity. It’s more than he’d hoped for. It’s Harry’s fate, maybe. And, as fates do, it demands things.

  Four

  Same

  It’s the morning of her first full day in Crete, and Clare, out of furnished rooms, is on her own recognizance. She has been told the name of the progressive supermarket, and now she’s in it, shopping. Given the prices—like imports in Oslo—it’s unlikely there will be a repeat excursion. One must invest in a membership, plus a monthly work shift, and this seems like an incredibly complex proposition given the ubiquity, at least in Clare’s experience, of food.

  In one aisle, Clare’s perverse eye lights on a short middle-aged man, still damp from his shower, who is wrangling a chiming case of wine. Clare is momentarily baffled by the unknown man’s familiarity, but is relieved to recognize him, not as a former professor or family friend inconveniently obscured by the disorienting experience of having just relocated to the center of the country, but rather as a slightly more unhinged version of a character of hers, the protagonist from her prize-winning short story, “The Lift,” written now more than three years ago. It is, unmistakably, him. Or, rather, a him, someone further along in the process. Clare skips to two of her favorite short paragraphs in which the female villain’s triumph is revealed:

  “No. It’s OK. We can lend you some money.” Then he says, “You aren’t in trouble, are you?”

  Her face turns up. “No,” she says. “I just need money.” And very quickly, so he can’t laugh with her, she laughs.

  Clare smiles. Here she had done well. Clare watches the man struggle. He is only living a limited life, a life of deadly certainties, and good for him. She will never be anything like this.

  She had, for example, not known that what was going to happen to her would happen and yet how had the event not been present in her life already, at all times and in all she did? It would take place. A tragedy may be well dispersed even previous to its occurrence. One learns that one could not have known and yet one also perceives in the present, with anguish, that there were certain signs, certain tells. Clare had gone to visit her father with some foreboding and had pretended that this foreboding did not exist. She had almost not traveled that June, finding Manhattan very mild and good. Only she did not want to be boring, which is to say she believed herself a promising writer and had lusted delicately after new material, and so she had gone to see her father in Paris, to see his life and learn just how disconcerting each of them would find this encounter after years of separation.

  Clare’s American father refused to write in English and therefore he was at once a writer of a certain interest and a writer of middling renown. His death, Clare was finding, was doing something to elevate him, but it was possible even this would pass. The query emails had of late slackened. Her father resented French but also resented so
mething he termed, in one essay, “the Usonian,” i.e., what people speak in the U.S. of A. To Clare he was a stern and distant voice, if ever he was a presence. If she could understand him now, he had been unworldly but ambitious, driven by notions of authenticity and craft that had, before the accident, seemed to Clare a fantasy designed to shelter him from the realities of the international literary market, such as it was, plus history; there was nothing for him in the country into which he had been born and little his adopted language could mean to Americans. His whole life was, in Clare’s prematurely jaded opinion, an exercise in refusing to abandon what was already, and very definitively, lost. The peach tree behind his parents’ Yonkers Victorian had come in for special consideration in one volume of poetry widely cited as his best in the French press. Clare had been contacted by her father’s English translator several years ago while in college. The translator had wanted to meet with her. Apparently her father was—what had been the term?—not inscrutable or tricky but, oh yes, that perfect word, elusive. “An elusive guy,” ugh. Clare had declined, coldly. For she wanted to be her own writer and did not wish to seed her sentences with baleful references to postwar peach trees.

  On another occasion, a well-meaning scholar of comparative literature had approached her in Harvard’s Barker Center and below a chandelier of bleached antlers introduced himself in order to express his affection for her father’s verses and critical essays. This one was a floating worm, a scoundrel too distracted by his tenure file to recognize that he was effectively robbing Clare of her dream, which was to be anyone she pleased, rather than the daughter of an under-read poet whose crowning achievement was, in the early 1990s, to have been profiled in the New Yorker.

  Academics like this obsequious comparatist were blissfully unaware of their lack of tact. They approached her as if she were an unusual nocturnal amphibian, glowing bluely at the edge of a poststructuralist lagoon. They were untroubled by the obvious signal of Clare’s surname, which was of course her mother’s, and which had been permitted to stand as a way of indicating her father’s lack of participation in her early—and, then, her increasingly less early—existence. But Clare had begun to be known for her own fiction in her own sophomoric circles, among her friends, and when this began to occur more and more it was by audiences who did not read poetry and who had little French and who resembled Clare herself, linguistically at least, and who were therefore unlikely to be aware of her father’s biography, much less his literary career, such as, it had to be said, it was.

  These, then, were the terms on which Clare had, college diploma and acceptance into the Seminars firmly in her grasp, deigned, at the advanced age of twenty-two, to make her estival pilgrimage to an apartment in northern Paris so that she and her dad could take tea nearby and drive to a friend’s country estate, where, Clare’s father maintained, there was a magnificent library including several modernist first editions which would assuredly be of interest, even to his benighted offspring.

  Her father, who was in his late sixties, had grown thinner rather than absolutely old. He had on a good scarf and a very good linen blazer and took her hand somewhat formally before kissing her on both cheeks. Clare knew that she was not radiantly beautiful but her father’s handling of her made her feel plausibly physically accomplished. He spoke to her in a pretentious combination of English and French that was mostly comprehensible. He took her downstairs to his local café, where a younger waiter with one dead front tooth was compelled to make much of monsieur’s daughter, la vraie Newyorkaise. When they were left alone the conversation passed from Clare’s plans to her father’s early life, his own time as a student in the Seminars. They were pressés for some reason, perhaps because the friend with the library wished to dine at a certain hour; Clare is now unsure. They must have exited the café and found her father’s car, yet this memory is extremely uncertain. It takes many forms and her father seems now to have had many possible cars. It is a dream retold to Clare by someone else and she bites her tongue so as not to interrupt but alas the narrative makes little sense, there are no nouns or verbs, only prepositions, and their order will not remain clear, they keep hopping over one another, becoming tangled and messed, and she has been assured that it is normal that she can but imperfectly remember these introductory moments as well as the impact itself, which occurred as they were accessing the Périphérique and the ancient Peugeot belonging to her father in which she, Clare, was also riding was impacted by a speeding Eurovan and they went together into a concrete barrier and Clare was painfully retained while her father, beltless, flew forward to be decapitated.

  Five

  Fine Arts

  Around 2:00 p.m. Harry is reawakened by the sensation of something stiff and damp prodding his face. His eyelids are gummy so it takes a few seconds to orient. He remembers, before he perceives, where he is.

  Harry is up and on his feet with an alacrity that surprises even him. His head is pounding.

  Shortstack is standing too close to him. She has one hand over her mouth, and her head is rapidly moving back and forth on her orange neck as if she is rehearsing some hyperadvanced fellatio technique, though in fact she is only giggling uncontrollably, which is much worse. Also she is holding an uncapped Sharpie in her right hand. The smell of it suffuses Harry’s wrath. It’s so pronounced in fact it’s like he’s smelling his own upper lip.

  Loudermilk is somewhere and will pay for this later.

  Harry stalks wordlessly back to the moldy grotto that is their restroom and spends twenty minutes scrubbing his face with a washcloth he finds wadded up behind the toilet bowl. He succeeds in dimming the elaborate spiral mustache that now adorns his right upper lip and a large portion of his right cheek. The cross with which Shortstack has seen fit to decorate his forehead is more stubborn. It’s possible that she got in two or three coats there.

  Harry storms back out to the front room.

  Loudermilk is standing alone in the kitchen area slowly consuming a Pop-Tart. He hands Harry a plastic tumbler of water emblazoned with an image of the school’s mascot, a goofy Minotaur.

  “I don’t know how you do it, man,” Loudermilk is saying.

  Harry really wants to discuss the matter of his own face, but Loudermilk is basking in some sort of postcoital reverie and is difficult to reach.

  Loudermilk languidly lowers himself onto a food-spattered stool. He says, “They fuckin’ loved you.” He ingests the last of his postmodern strudel. “Not, of course, that they didn’t love me.” He blinks. “What? They had to go to work. You know they work there, right?” He means the bar.

  “Handy.” Harry means the location. Either the tap water or the novelty cup tastes of heavy metals. Perhaps both.

  “You know, that’s exactly what I was thinking? But anyways, what I’m trying to tell you is they were so into you. They were so totally into it, dude.” Loudermilk gazes guilelessly at Harry. He asks to know what happened to Harry’s face.

  “Fuck you, Loudermilk,” Harry says.

  Loudermilk counters with what he deems a better activity. He says that they should go check out the lay of the land, maybe take a gander at a certain awesome apartment he’s heard about, pick up their fellowship check.

  This is to say, Troy Augustus Loudermilk has been accepted into the Seminars for Writing with full funding for the next two years. It is, of course, the reason they are here. Loudermilk will receive an annual stipend of twenty-five K. In the local economy this is a pretty significant chunk of change. It’s enough, even, for two people to live on, no problem. Plus, Maxim magazine, in its annual February “Campus Lyfe” feature, has rated this the nation’s most sexually adventurous Greek community with the lowest rate of STD infection. Other undergrad communities are infinitesimally more adventurous, but none is so pure. That was really the clincher. Loudermilk had underlined the article and taken notes in the margin and taped it to his bedroom wall back at SUNY Oswego. Only one other school into whose graduate poetry-writing program Troy Augustus Loude
rmilk was accepted even made it onto the list, the University of Texas at Austin, which had a pretty weak showing, anyway, at number 17 overall.

  This is the sense in which the Seminars was a no-brainer for them.

  They’ve mentioned none of this to Greg, their former college roommate and unwitting chaperone in the world of graduate-level creative writing. Greg, a genuine American poet, was unsuccessful in his own applications to programs conferring the degree of Master of Fine Arts and has returned home to live with his parents and temp at a bank for the next year. They are probably going to lose touch with him.

  Six

  In Loco Parentis

  Loudermilk and Harry wander the gelatinous Cretan afternoon.

  The campus should be just a few blocks off, but they don’t really know where they are. Loudermilk has donned a hot-pink trucker hat he found on the floor of the sorority-reject house. Whiteout has been used to write KEEP IT KNOCKIN! across the front of its foam dome. Loudermilk is also wearing a pair of long khaki cutoff shorts and a white T-shirt. He wears green-and-white Adidas. He is six foot three and built like a water polo champion. His face is hard to look away from. His square jaw resolves itself into a gentle cleft above which shapely lips give levity to otherwise chiseled features. His blondish hair has recently been bleached blonder. Beside Loudermilk, Harry is aware that he resembles, by comparison, a half- or subhuman, a hobbit or shaved teddy bear. He also wears shorts, T-shirt, sneakers. He has no hat, and the sun pains his sensitive eyes.