Loudermilk

by Lucy Ives

  Harry’s mother would get on the phone with Harry’s grandmother.

  Harry didn’t know what his grandmother was saying, but Harry’s mother seemed to talk a lot about how well Harry was doing. Sometimes Harry’s mother said Harry was asleep when Harry was not asleep. Harry’s mother regretted her inability to bring Harry to visit his grandmother.

  At this time, they had a sofa bed they shared. Harry’s mother was a quiet sleeper. In the morning, Harry’s mother made corned beef hash that, once cooked, she divided in half. She placed half of the corned beef hash in the refrigerator for Harry’s lunch. He remembers it as a beautiful time. There was ketchup and milk.

  One of Harry’s favorite games was to lie on his back and look at the molding on the ceiling. He imagined how it would be if the ceiling were the floor of a room, if the ceiling were somehow made available to him as a floor upon which he alone could walk, and which he alone could furnish. The lamp suspended on a dust-bearded chain from a filigreed lozenge at the center of the ceiling would be a blazing flower. He’d put a chair nearby so that he could sit and gaze into it.

  Harry stared out the window at telephone wires. He imagined himself leaping through the air from post to post. He’d spring from a post onto the eave of a building.

  He’d ascend a distant church spire.

  Harry sometimes spent twenty minutes imagining that the glass top of the side table in the second room was a frozen surface beneath which Paleolithic fish were swimming. He gazed down onto their black, spiny bodies. Harry set himself tasks. He placed books in a stack and he placed the radio with a pen and a notepaper block on the kitchen table. He copied down the words he heard on the radio, and sometimes he wrote other things.

  Harry was six. His mother said that he could go to school the next year but then this never happened. It seemed like they went outside about once a week. Sometimes they went to the library.

  Harry read a children’s book about a young girl who goes driving with her mother, and they pack chicken in newspaper to eat along the way. The mother wears a scarf in her hair.

  Harry listened to the radio because it was a fun game to write down the words. There was an advertisement about fur storage in Albany.

  Harry felt, when he was writing down the words, that he was doing something that brought him closer to people, not to the people on the radio but to the idea of people. It was like a secret about human living that he was whispering to himself over and over as he formed each letter, as he devoted each letter to a complete word.

  There was a crumbling paperback dictionary and Harry knew how to use it.

  Harry drew words from the sound. He pulled the words from the extent of sound, from sound’s event, someone speaking.

  When Harry was seven, Harry’s mother started asking him to tell her about what he was reading. She brought him paperbacks from Tops to read and tell her about.

  Harry’s mother did not like to read. She said that Harry’s talent was a testament to what a trick it is anybody makes anyone feel that school is the answer. She said that she was glad that she could do something for her son. She found Harry some old copies of Reader’s Digest at the Salvation Army.

  When Harry was eight, Harry’s grandmother showed up for a surprise visit. She looked exactly the way she looked in a certain photograph, but for some reason Harry did not know her on sight. It took her over an hour’s cajolement to convince him to let her in the front door. When she did come inside she started crying. Harry was afraid and went into the other room. His grandmother followed him and sat beside him and told him that the only reason she was crying was that he was so handsome. Harry’s grandmother said that Harry had grown into such a handsome boy. That he was so handsome on the outside must mean that he was handsome on the inside, too. Harry was still afraid, but he did not say anything or try to move away from her again. After this, Harry had to go to school. It was not that he avoided the other children so much as he was so satisfied by the act of observing them from a distance that actually speaking to them seemed somehow wrong.

  The teachers at the school moved Harry into the fourth grade, then the seventh grade.

  Someone threw yogurt at the back of Harry’s head and he stopped going to the cafeteria. During recess and lunch he sat in a locked bathroom stall and read.

  Things were worse at the next school. Harry saw boys trap a girl under the bleachers beside the running track. A messenger from a central clique approached him and informed him that he should begin praying to god every night in hopes that, for his own sake, he would die soon.

  A woman came to the house to make sure Harry was going to school. Her hair was coarse and crimped.

  Harry began to cultivate unobtrusiveness in himself. The school was the kind of place where discipline was in such short supply that Harry’s absence from certain nonacademic classes and occasions of assembly was not just overlooked but privately condoned by a quorum of the better-seasoned staff. They knew what was waiting for him at the area high.

  The woman with the crimped hair retired. A new, stout woman came.

  Harry’s mother got another job and they moved to a small house. Harry had his own room.

  Early on, the stout woman suggested the idea of community college classes. Harry was bagging groceries at Tops. He could afford one class a semester. In the summer he did lawn work, and he could afford two classes. He got his GED his sophomore year after someone stomped on his foot in the hall between classes and broke two of his toes.

  The stout woman helped Harry apply for a scholarship. Harry took out a small loan, which he has since deferred.

  Harry was fifteen the year he went to college. Harry’s mother was thirty-one.

  Nineteen

  Motivation

  Harry mentally replays a conversation of earlier in the week, when he requested to know if Loudermilk had ever read Tristes tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss. Harry pointed out that if Loudermilk hadn’t yet laid eyes on this classic he probably should, because the book contains some pretty relevant notes for their project, to which Loudermilk was like, “What, dude?”

  Harry repeated, Tristes tropiques, englishing for Loudermilk’s benefit. He cited a paragraph in which Lévi-Strauss contends that the main function of writing in human history has been as a tool of enslavement. Harry said, “It makes you think.” Harry wonders now just exactly what he’d meant by this.

  Harry’s also been—here literally—replaying the remarkable documentary tapes Loudermilk brings back from workshop, how on week one you hear Loudermilk come into the class and the first thing he says is, “Apologies, sir.”

  He’s late.

  “I don’t usually let in stragglers,” a man, the instructor, rumbles.

  “Completely.” Loudermilk moves into the room. “Understood.”

  “But I guess now you’re here we can make an accommodation and try, at last, to begin. As I was saying,” the meticulously hungover individual who is apparently the poet Don Hillary pursues, “I don’t give one donkey fuck what you do while you’re here. I honest to god do not. This is not a contest and I do not give out prizes. And the first of you knuckleheads gets that through his or her skull will be the lucky recipient of absolutely nothing.” Don Hillary pauses. He has to acknowledge someone. “Yes? You already have something you need to tell me?”

  It’s Loudermilk. “Hi, everyone. I’m Loudermilk.”

  There comes a deafening stillness.

  “Dear Class,” Don Hillary finally hisses, “please meet Loudermilk. He’s new here.”

  No one says a donkey-fucking thing.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” the remarkably expressive Hillary continues. “How rude of me. And this is everyone else. Loudermilk, please meet every fucking body in your brand-new class.” Harry can tell that Hillary is about to ram it home. “Here, by the way, is every fucking person who is going to make your life a goddamn living hell for the next four months, did I mention that? But don’t worry, they’re all going to be your bestest little
cuddle buddies, too. That’s the irony of this province and its charming customs. Remember how you used to write to get away from it all? To be alone and at peace? Well, you can forget about that now, because it’s time to start writing by committee. Every time you sit down to write any bloody effing thing, these idiots are going to be up there in your brain all over it, offering anodyne suggestions. See Kari over here? I had her in this same impotent time-suck last semester. She doesn’t like pigeons. God forbid you might put a pigeon in your poem because she will dig that thing out like a terrier. I’m not even kidding you. And, by the way, I’m Don. Though you must already know that. And, by the way, I don’t care about you. You are not my responsibility. Only thing I have the time or, I should add, inclination to care about is the work. Period. End of story.” Hillary’s chair creaks.

  This is for starters.

  In class number two, Loudermilk’s first poem, aka Harry’s first poem, aka “Writing Teacher,” is up for discussion.

  On the tape, the students ponder “Writing Teacher.” They labor to describe it. They say it seems at once familiar to them and unlike anything they’ve read. They admit that they don’t know what it means but that they like it. It feels mysterious. They think it’s a poem about America, recent imperial foibles. They treasure the part about the “cool, dim Easter / Basket,” whatever that is.

  Harry smiles at that.

  Harry knows, intuitively, that this is the right kind of response to be getting—that this means something, he’s done well—and he wants to dig further into this effect. He wants to solicit pleasure and this other thing, which is kind of like some form of fear. He has mixed his registers and included some ominous references to historical violence as well as contemporary war. He’s been thinking a lot about men. He worked in a few neologisms as well, which, his listening has informed him, is a thing that really gets his audience going.

  Even Don Hillary, grumpus numero uno, special agent of the fugue state, was not entirely without respect for Harry’s, which is to say Loudermilk’s, debut effort, and seemed willing to forget about the first session’s rancorous exchange. Hillary murmurs, “There’s something kinda . . . mystic about this thing.” It’s not the most original observation, but it also isn’t Hillary telling Loudermilk to go frig himself in the dick with a freshly sharpened number 2 pencil. This is a pensive Don, slowly licking drooping literary chops, savoring the pedagogical present, wondering aloud about Loudermilk’s motivations. “Who is this ‘Writing Teacher’?” Hillary asks no one in particular. “What does this guy want?”

  Twenty

  Allegory

  L’Origine du monde, The Origin of the World was painted by Gustave Courbet at the commission of Khalil-Bey, a Turkish-Egyptian diplomat and playboy, in 1866, probably from a pornographic photograph. Small, approximately twenty-one by eighteen inches, the painting was, as per various accounts in the prose of local decadents and critics, reputed to have hung in Khalil-Bey’s vast pink bathroom, veiled by a green curtain that might be drawn aside to amaze the eyes of the fashionable and wicked. Khalil-Bey, who was reported to spend fourteen thousand francs per day on his own wicked lifestyle, fell out of fashion and cash in late 1867, departing Paris for Constantinople.

  Sold privately during the latter part of the intervening decade, The Origin was masked with a specially constructed cabinet, topped by another Courbet painting of 1875, The Château de Blonay, a likable picture of a castle in snow. When next traceable, The Origin had come, cabinet and all, into the possession of the Baron Ferenc Hatvany, of Budapest. It was now the early twentieth century. Something—no one is sure what—happened to the painting during the Second World War. It was seized by the Red Army from the depths of a Budapest bank in 1945, and/or Baron Hatvany, who was Jewish and who benefited from a passport provided by Raoul Wallenberg, escaped with the painting concealed in the false bottom of a suitcase two years earlier, and/or the baron simply escaped at some time or another, perhaps as late as 1950, from behind the Iron Curtain, bringing the painting with him. What is known is that after the war Hatvany set up house on the rue de Rivoli in Paris, where he concluded his days writing a study of the influence of photography on nineteenth-century painting. The Origin appears in this learned text as an exemplary canvas; strangely, the baron misremembered its name, retitling it The Creation of the World. In 1958, he passed away.

  The Origin had in fact resurfaced in polite French society some years earlier, in 1954, having been purchased, as if in a novel, by the celebrated psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. The painting took up residence in Lacan’s country home at Guitrancourt, a space he shared with his second wife, Sylvia Bataille, née Maklès, the film actress and former spouse of Georges Bataille, author of Histoire de l’oeil, that major literary blossom of the slow death of French cultural dominance. At Sylvia’s request, the painting was masked again, now with a vaguely vaginal landscape daubed on wood by André Masson.

  After Lacan’s death in 1981—he had suffered a car accident on the peripheral highway in 1978 and gone into decline—the painting disappeared again, or nearly. Lacan was rich and his two wives, along with their respective children, were at odds. Sylvia Lacan, formerly Bataille, would claim that it was she who had first noticed Courbet’s canvas in the 1950s, that it was she who had asked her husband to acquire it on her behalf, that perhaps they had split the cost. Sylvia—who had apparently removed The Origin from Guitrancourt in secret—was only discovered to be the clandestine owner by another woman, the perspicacious American curator Linda Nochlin. In 1988, after the painting traveled to the Brooklyn Museum, where it was exhibited before the public for the first time, it was also properly reproduced in color. As the catalogue, Courbet Reconsidered, circulated, the painting at last entered into general notoriety. In 1995, in a final burst of glory, it was collected by the Orsay.

  This is, at least, Clare’s understanding.

  When she thought about all this before, it was before, then, truly. It was before the accident, and she had truly been in Paris.

  She had not told her father she was coming to his city. She had had the idea that she would wait and see. What, she thought, if I see him, just by accident? What if he spontaneously appears?

  She does not know now if that idea is what inspired the trip, or if the idea came to her later, after she was there, crunching through the Jardin des Plantes, etc. What had come first? Clare cannot now remember.

  Also—and this is the greater problem, perhaps—Clare cannot remember if she did see her father when she was standing there, in Room 19, in the Orsay. She tries to go back to the moment, but the moment is already a story. She tries to go back to the time before the accident and know what she knew then, when things hung together in an order, but she is unable.

  What had she known then and there, in her last year of college? Had she really seen her father, or was it all a convenient ruse for plot?

  She had planned to visit Paris in the spring. In Paris, she had been inspired with an idea for a story while staring into a mysterious and often (as research informed her) veiled painting. She had returned to the U.S., yes. This might be what had happened.

  But it might also be the case that she had planned to visit Paris in order to write a story, and then what she had planned to write had in fact occurred. That she had thought she might wish to write this scene, in which her estranged father appears, and her wish had summoned him. Or, her wish was no different from the writing. Thus was she able, as in a realist painting, to write from life, because there was no difference between writing and life. Thus did she encounter what Courbet might have termed “real allegory,” a portrait of the world that is completely accurate yet not devoid of symbolism. The allegory is real, because there is allegory in the world.

  Clare had graduated. She had returned to Paris. It was summer. She returned to the scene of a nonencounter—because she needed to know, which is to say, what had happened. She called her father and they met.

  Clare wants to force herself to tell
an ending. She wants to get there fast. But in the search for ending, the beginning disappears. It is sucked up into a pale void.

  She remembers researching the Courbet painting in spring, after she got back the first time, before the second trip. She remembers realizing that she couldn’t write the story, not without her father, because she did not know where it begins.

  At least, this is what she thinks she remembers.

  But which time was it? Which was the penultimate? Had he actually been present on that day with the painting, flashing through that secure room?

  Clare had read, too, Lacan’s 1957 lecture on veils.

  By 1957, the painting would have been hanging, for at least three years, on the wall in the study where Lacan retired each Sunday to plan his classes. Three years of staring at it masked or unmasked, as the analyst liked. Headless, legless, armless, a sort of globe, this pelvis in creams and pinks and browns.

  Lacan says, meanwhile, in the text derived from his 1957 seminar, that it does not matter. He’s talking about love. He says that what is instructive is to think about veils. He says if you put a veil in front of something that does not exist, you create an image of something that is there, only hidden. And if you put a veil in front of something that does exist, you create an image of something that is there, only hidden. The crucial thing is not whether it is there. Real presence does not matter. The thing is, whether we can imagine it—and at the same time imagine its absence. This is what the veil permits: it is a screen on which loss and gain mix, in which something that is not there and something that is become equivalent. The veil is the image of a loss, an image we cannot otherwise picture. We give ourselves this veil. We give ourselves this image. We put it in the world. This is how we love.

  Twenty-One