Loudermilk

by Lucy Ives

  She sounds good to him. “Hello, Eloise.” He gets off the chairlift awkwardly, taking too many steps. He comes obediently to a stop in front of her and wipes the water from his face, pulling it down and shaking it off his hand in one motion. “Well, I’m here.”

  She doesn’t smile at him. She tells him, “I’d like to talk for a second if that’s OK.”

  “I’ve come all the way up the mountain, Eloise. Let’s talk.”

  She looks past his shoulder, then back at him. “OK. Come with me.” But she doesn’t take him into the cabin. She walks back toward the thin woods where the two trails begin. “Someone’s in there.” She nods at the cabin. Water rolls down her nose and over her mouth.

  “Oh,” he says.

  “But it’s raining.” She drags out the rain of raining. “It’s raining. And you came all the way up here.”

  “It wasn’t raining before,” he says stupidly.

  “No, this is no good.” She’s looking around her. The trees are small and far apart. “There’s no place comfortable. Shit,” she says, and pulls at her coat.

  “Look, Eloise, maybe we should just go back down the mountain.”

  “No. I have to do this here.”

  “Oh,” he says.

  “Look, I need to ask you something. That’s why I called.” The woods are shaking. The sound of weight on paper is everywhere.

  “But you couldn’t ask me over the phone?” he tries.

  “No. Your wife hates me and you would have been too surprised.”

  “Yes?”

  “Shit,” she says. “Yeah. I need money. No, this is the wrong way to do this. Shit. This was my brother’s idea. Dr. Lehren, please, I need a loan. I’m sorry. I’m so worried about things right now, I can’t do anything right.”

  “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.

  She is angry, and he walks toward her. “We’re happy to help out. We’ve known you for nearly eight years now. We’ll talk about this.”

  “OK,” she says. “I guess I’m acting crazy,” and she turns and starts walking out of the trees, back to the lift.

  “It’s just like for one of our own daughters. We’ll help you out.” But it’s not like for one of his daughters, and rain has made him a necklace at the tight neck of the other man’s coat.

  Clare closes the document. As she remembers it, it had been an exercise in style: How precise could she be in her descriptions, how flat a protagonist could she get away with, what sorts of interventions could she make into this most American form. And then, unrelated to style, at least not directly: Whether she could manage to say something about class. Most unusual among her formal “touches” here is a mix of present- and past-tense narration. Clare knows she had a reason for indulging the whim, that it wasn’t a whim, but she cannot recall that reason now. Kafka had somewhere done something similar. Perhaps that was it, a man with five letters in each of his names, just like her, a mirror image: Franz Kafka, Clare Elwil, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, yes. His matching letters: f times two, a times three. Her matching letters: l times three, e times two. Chiasmus, Christmas, etc.! Clare wins the game! But never mind.

  Because this is not a story about her life. At least, she doesn’t think so.

  At any rate, her father never had any money. He was from New York, born in the Bronx on the eve of the Second World War. Before he became a poet, he was a Marine. And before he was a Marine he was a petty thief. And before that, he had been a child, presumably. Clare’s father’s name is John Dariush. As he recounts in his early book-length poem, Of Thee, written when he still deigned to employ the English language, he has a mother of uncertain Polish extraction and a father who as a preadolescent during the second decade of the twentieth century fled the persecution of Christian villagers in a remote eastern pocket of the Ottoman Empire, to settle first in Melbourne and then, as a teen, in the Big Apple. Clare has never met her paternal grandparents and doubts they are alive, given the date of her father’s birth. Her mother seems to know nothing about them.

  Clare’s father attended the Seminars, starting in 1960, on a fellowship for vets. In 1963 he returned to New York City, where he hovered around St. Marks and became briefly attached to Warhol, appearing in a screen test that flatters his pale eyes. Later, scholars associate him with Ted Berrigan, so-called magus of the LES poetry scene. There is a passage in one of Berrigan’s journals in which he and “Johnny” steal steaks from a deli, mashing them into their pockets and sauntering bloodily out. A nominally more established Dariush met Trudy Elwil a decade later at a gallery opening when he offered her a fresh apricot from a pint he had recently lifted. Trudy saw her chance and proceeded to offend her family. Clare, born in 1980 and brought home to a Spring Street loft, is proof of these activities. It is no nominal piece of luck that Trudy is as talented a paramour and general social being as she is. Dariush’s presence waned in direct proportion to the accrual of years and memory on the part of his daughter, until he was permanently residing in a chambre de bonne within striking distance of the Buttes-Chaumont, somewhat famously and very perversely composing all his work in French, and, in a final twist, dead.

  Though Clare remembers little enough of the writing of “The Lift,” she does recall thinking something like, This is what happens to girls who don’t have fathers. All the same, even as she knows that she at one point thought this was her story, a story about her, she now disagrees with herself. Because this isn’t what happens to “girls who don’t have fathers”; it’s what happens to girls who have too many fathers. And the story isn’t in fact about that, about Eloise, the girl. Eloise doesn’t really matter. It’s a story about Richard Lehren, about reading Richard, about how we cannot really determine Richard’s motivations, because Richard’s own comprehension of himself is so paltry. He is led forward by fantasy; grasps at soft things and believes the world is a smile turned in his direction. Richard could be one of Trudy Elwil’s various husbands, lovers, and associates, but he might also be a version of Clare. Indeed, he is perhaps the embodiment of Clare’s own weird existential virginity, if not that of almost everybody. He is Clare before anything happened.

  “Goodbye, Richard,” Clare thinks, exiting the document. Today she is managing to feel less sad than usual about her lack of production. She’s amused to have discovered herself here in her own story, for she is more and more convinced that it is, indeed, she. It’s a curious self-portrait her past self seems to have hidden on behalf of her present self, in plain sight.

  Clare is supposed to write while she is here and decides, for this reason, to pretend to try. She knows that, as usual, nothing will happen and so doesn’t feel concerned. It’s been like this for months now. Clare opens a new document and observes the cursor at the top of the page, how it appears and drops out of view again like a pulse. Clare has had an idea for a story. Or: it’s not so much an idea as a memory, a short vision of being in the Musée d’Orsay her last year of college when she had gone to Paris for a few days on a whim and had not informed her father of her presence there. She’d wondered once during those days whether she might see him by chance but never did. She remembers this. At least, she remembers walking through the Orsay and viewing Gustave Courbet’s small canvas L’Origine du monde, The Origin of the World. She remembers thinking—as she now also thinks—that this painting looks nothing like anyone’s cunt.

  She is unsure, at this moment, what the story is in this, but she can feel the tension that once indicated to her a beginning. She isn’t sure if this familiar feeling is only imagined by her. She hopes she’s just imagining it. Nevertheless, she begins making a list of possible elements for the story. It feels fine to do this because she knows she will never manage to turn this into anything, fin
d the reason for these clues. It’s too hard to begin.

  •Paris

  •College

  •Father

  •Courbet

  •Lie by omission

  Clare pauses, adds a sixth bullet:

  •About recognition

  Sixteen

  That Person

  Sometimes it seems to Harry that there is someone else. Who the person is doesn’t matter.

  It’s just, someone else is here. The person, that person—mythic and free, an indefinite being—sifts through experience alongside Harry. You wouldn’t see that person, like, in real life, but Harry knows that person is there. The reason Harry knows is that often Harry thinks, or even sees, things that he couldn’t possibly think and see, or, for that matter, hear. Knowing this, about that other person who is there, that person, explains how Harry can sometimes be capable of acts of perception obviously beyond him.

  Take, for example, today’s issue of The Sentinel. Harry has been underlining phrases that interest him. Sometimes when he finds a phrase, he writes it down on an index card. He then files the card away in a metal box with a hinged lid that he recently acquired via a tub of FREE STUFF (CLEAN) on the nicer residential block between here and the library.

  Harry creates a card for civilian status, derived from an article on overseas deployment. Are there, he wonders, other statuses?

  There are. Harry is living in America.

  Harry knows, based on his limited poetical reading, but whatever, that he’s supposed to be using language that might “mean more than one thing” when he’s creating a poem. But it’s confusing to him how exactly this should work, from the point of view of production. For this reason, he’s developing a work-around. He’s decided to find language that definitely means one thing and then to try his best to use it in another way, so that it definitely cannot mean the very thing it usually means—which is to say, exclusively.

  On one level, this seems complicated, but in practice it’s been simple. It’s like switching price tags in the grocery store. It’s so satisfying to remove that fragile gummy fragment. To place it on a different can.

  Harry sighs.

  He closes the top of his tin box and shakes. The cards make a sound.

  There is some pressure to make a poem.

  Harry flips to the crossword.

  The Great Communicator is a nice clue, 23 across, so he writes that down on a card.

  Harry stands, stares at the door, sits.

  There’s this feeling he’s been having, like the feeling of wanting to tell a story, but that’s not the word for it. The thing about stories is, you do need quite a lot of confidence about the way things come to pass in the actual world to write one. You need to be pretty sure that the world contains humans, along with these other discrete entities, aka, events.

  Harry thinks about going into an imaginary grocery store and peeling all the labels off everything, prices and names and bar codes, images of kittens and blond children and delicately sweating grapes. It is late—in the human project, but additionally the store would probably need to be closed—and perhaps all the signs will have fallen off the walls, too.

  Yes: Harry wades to a display window and begins culling from the linguistic, numerical, symbolical heap. Truth be told, the torn paper is so copious it comes up over his ankles.

  After the deluge, he thinks, me. He wets his fingers in his mouth, turns the page of the tabloid. He turns the radio back on, picks up a pen.

  But it isn’t, he thinks, me.

  Seventeen

  Predictably

  Anton Beans is not having the best of all possible semesters. Tuesday’s introductory workshop was trash, and for the past four days he’s barely been able to squeeze out a single coherent line, not to speak of a full-on poem. Beans has put pen to paper but the energies are in no way flowing. He’s tried cutting up and collaging a few paragraphs from the Patriot Act but to no effect. His chakras are hermetically sealed, his mojo pathetically quiescent, his lower intestine acting up again. He has reorganized his bookshelves and updated his wall chart of outstanding poetry journal submissions: one acceptance, four rejections; five down and one hundred sixteen more to go.

  On top of this, his meeting an hour ago with Don Hillary was total shit. All Hillary would say about Beans’s work was that he thinks Beans’s stuff is “very advanced,” that Beans is definitely onto some “high-level concepts.” He is looking forward to Beans’s “perspective.” Beans knows this is just code for Don Hillary hating everything he does, but for whatever reason Hillary didn’t find it convenient to come out and say so, perhaps because he’s checking to make sure Beans isn’t going to report him for fueling his office hours with gin conveyed via Sprite can. Instead of providing any sort of usable feedback, Hillary launched into one of his down-home routines about how he, Hillary, is but a poetry simpleton who can’t get beyond the basic themes of love and death and war. Hillary went off on a tear about the finesse of Frost, the aplomb of Lowell, the swagger of Berryman. He told Beans he just wished he could tune into that erudite postmodern frequency Beans has locked as the permanent station on his “poem radio.” That was literally, no joke, Hillary’s metaphor. Poem radio.

  Hillary owns a ranch in Colorado and knows how to ride a horse and shoot a gun. But everyone knows that Don Hillary hails from a wealthy Connecticut clan and was a legacy at Princeton, like both his grandfather and father, pioneering psychiatrists. People will, as they say, talk. And while it’s not entirely clear how the heavy drinking fits in with the true-blue cowboy routine, whether the former excuses the latter or it’s the other way around, any kind of proximity to Hillary’s person will let you know that he is either slowly embalming himself as a source of obdurate patrician fun or is unaware that suicide is best accomplished by more direct means.

  Because Marta Hillary and Donald Hillary, as everyone knows, have gone well beyond being on the rocks. To further mix the metaphor, they’re straight out of the bottle, paper-bagging it. Or, at least, they would be, if Marta hadn’t so clearly moved on. As things stand, these days only Don seems to indulge on the job.

  There is speculation among the students about what will happen to the poetry program if their marriage collapses this academic year, in medias res, for example. Would one of them leave town? Who would take the hatchet?

  Anton Beans is slouching his way to Building 109. He has to pick up the packet for next Tuesday’s class. This would be a dramatically less irksome task if it weren’t for some of the other individuals Beans will have to confront across the seminar table once the weekend has come to a close. Foremost in Beans’s mind is, of course, the newcomer, Loudermilk. This person isn’t a real writer, and Beans would like very much to know what Loudermilk is doing in the Seminars, besides, for example, living a subsidized oversexed lifestyle that it’s better not to even begin to visualize.

  Just so Loudermilk keeps his distance from Marta: If he can do that, then Beans doesn’t care. But let him start currying favor with Marta Hillary, then Beans and Loudermilk will have words.

  Beans grinds his teeth crossing the threshold of Building 109. He glowers at the oversized oil portrait of Rainer Dodds, founder of the Seminars, encountering Henry Ford amid rolling fields. The two giants clasp hands beneath a candied sun.

  Beans pauses before the cubbies where the new packets appear once they have been photocopied by the all-female administrative staff. He searches the labels and finds his workshop. He selects one packet from the center of the warm pile.

  Flipping through, Beans exits. He’s hot and his shoulders are too tight. On the first square of sidewalk he reads something that stops him in his tracks.

  II

  WRITING TEACHER

  Writing Teacher

  The person was a civilian status.

  He had no part in the creation

  Of a mass grave near his home.

  Like being in a cool, dim Easter

  Basket, a gift for the unblinking self,
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  A one-way mirror was produced

  And held up to the soul.

  In an age of collapsed distances

  There’s no such thing as might

  Or day. He orchestrated

  Their emotional surrender

  With roving satellites

  And hoods. The person was

  Advised to disappear

  And he has said he would—

  To live among the best

  Communicators, in a crackling

  Mural of persuasion.

  —T. A. LOUDERMILK

  Eighteen

  Early Poems

  When Harry was younger by a lot, very young, there was a woman living next door, and whenever she would knock on the wall, Harry had to knock right back. Harry had been staying with his grandmother, but his mother said she couldn’t stand it anymore, she had to have him with her. So Harry was alone while his mother went to work at Tops.

  When Harry was a kid, he often thought about Tops, the word and the name. He was always alone, then, in the first apartment. He imagined one day his mother would come home and say, “Harry, it’s Tops time!” And together they would climb into the air.

  They were living in a former mill town (mill now defunct), and they did not have a television, an anomaly that would become apparent to Harry only much later. Harry was four when he learned to read.

  “Thank you for being my good boy!” Harry’s mother always said when she came home. She threw her arms around his back and cradled his head with one hand. Harry clung to her neck, the perfume of which (fabric softener) was the sweetest of all scents, or so he believed.

  Harry’s mother made Harry Chef Boyardee, and she smoked out the window. He liked to pierce the raviolis, to divide them into perfect quarters before he consumed them. He examined the brown meat inside, the white edge of the pasta envelope. He read the label on the can.