Loudermilk

by Lucy Ives

  If Loudermilk were, for just one moment, able to get it through his thick (admittedly unusually well-formed) Cro-Magnon skull what a dedicated adversary he has now actively nurtured for himself in Anton Beans, surely Loudermilk would never dare to repeat a stunt like the one he pulled two packets ago, submitting a poem with a title that was obviously a muted commentary on Beans’s own extraordinarily natural, well-maintained pelisse. When Beans had graciously offered to provide a close reading, Loudermilk’s response had been, “No, dude, it’s chill,” by which he indicated that Beans should not trouble himself. The other workshop participants found this absurd demurral at first baffling and then, distressingly for Beans, very, very funny. Beans is still trying to get their ringing giggles and guffaws out of his brain, where he fears these echoes of ignorance and folly may have permanently lodged, due to his own infallible memory.

  That any of this happened at all bespeaks a towering lack of perspicuity and gross miscalculation on the part of Loudermilk. Exhibit A, Beans does not hail from Maryland. Exhibit B, Loudermilk is an obvious philistine. Loudermilk will, Beans reasons, have to pay. And not at a seasonal discount, either.

  Anyway, Anton Beans has for a while been pretty sure that he knows something about young T. A. Loudermilk. He’s been taking notes on Loudermilk, on this wonder stud’s speech patterns. They are a mishmash of several regionalisms, dominated by the normalizing argot of American television and movies, nothing so very out of the ordinary. What is extraordinary, then, is the fact that Loudermilk should have been able to compose the poems attributed to him in the workshop packet, which, even Anton Beans cannot deny, are fairly excellent poems. These poems are written using a highly literate, if eccentric, style. It’s not so much that they’re full of big words, but that the lines are so exactly composed—and with so little effort, or so it appears. The writing is limpid, almost prosy. The command of contemporary syntax is breathtaking. Loudermilk could not have composed these poems, not without a truly aggravated case of personality disorder.

  This, at any rate, is Anton Beans’s professional hunch, in his capacity as Doctor of Linguistics.

  But Beans wants concrete proof. It is for this reason that he has renewed a conversation with one of his former Bay Area associates, a programmer with a side interest in natural language, someone with a few experimental tools. Beans has made transcriptions of Loudermilk’s more coherent utterances during the course of their workshops together. He has emailed these transcriptions, along with several poems by “T. A. Loudermilk,” to his contact. He wants to know, based on the contact’s research so far, what the likelihood is that the author of the speech of Loudermilk is also the author of the poems attributed to T. A. Loudermilk.

  The contact has just gotten back to Beans, now that the semester has concluded with an inebriated whimper. He tells Beans next time, please, more of a challenge if at all possible. Beans skims the data. It’s statistically pretty unlikely, is the long and the short. It’s a significant result.

  Loudermilk and T. A. Loudermilk are not the same person.

  Beans logs out. He lives on a hill above town in a pointy Victorian, where he rents a monastic, high-ceilinged room. Beans could afford something considerably better but, because he is a sage man, prefers to keep his true assets under wraps.

  If Loudermilk is not the author of the poems of Loudermilk . . .

  Anton Beans paces. He goes over to his wall chart of outstanding poetry journal submissions and updates it: one new rejection. He puts an X in the column for Electronic Mail, in the row for Method of Reply.

  Anton Beans frowns. He needs a change of scene. There is a white-hot feeling in his gut. For some reason Beans’s thoughts turn to Chelsea Clinton, who has just graduated from Stanford. He thinks of the decade of brutal magnification of what is probably in fact a very slight asymmetry in her face by candid photography. The American media, if not the world, is cruel.

  Beans recalls a section from Marta Hillary’s interview with the Paris Review of three years ago, an article he had savored and virtually memorized. Marta (b. 1957) narrates her childhood. It was peripatetic, partly continental. Installed in West Berlin with her free-spirited American mother, Marta had traveled, after 1971’s Four Power Agreement, between East and West with some frequency. She made it sound like a spy novel. “It was an object lesson in contrasts: the sick glamour that seemed to have come from the Americans, the austerity of the other side. We had next to nothing so I was sometimes glad to be out of that, the Ku’damm and this aggressively good life that was pumping through the West. There is a way in which everything I’ve done comes out of the experience of standing at a checkpoint, feeling the presence of that faceless power. You have to have something that no one can take away from you, that you can do even if you are in prison. That is what poetry is.”

  Though calculated, it was adroit, nearly seamless. Marta is someone who can teach him how to move between worlds.

  Anton Beans decides he will go for a walk. He sets out for the center of town, noting that he will refresh with a wheatgrass shot as necessary, but he ends up following Chapel Street all the way to its intersection with Van Veldt. It’s not until he comes to the intersection itself that he stops and realizes what it is he is doing.

  Beans recalls a conversation he’d overheard on the first day of workshop, when Loudermilk had admitted his allegedly strategic choice of residence to two eager members of his cohort. Beans recalls Loudermilk’s slick little bad-boy prepster, nouveau Bret Easton Ellis ensemble, the haze of Axe body spray and suggestion of a scandalous succession of boarding schools that surrounded him, his bland homosocial banter and early provocation of Don Hillary.

  It is getting to be dusk, and Anton Beans recognizes what must be the Loudermilkian shanty among Greek edifices. Sadly for Loudermilk, his early citation of the intersection gives him entirely away, since everything else around here is an enormous manor inhabited by upper-middle-class thugs. Beans slides into a stand of trees bordering the run-down property and approaches the shelter, such as it is, without much difficulty. There is one light on.

  Obligingly, the sky continues to dim. Beans scuttles across the snowy lawn and gets below the illuminated window. He waits.

  Once his breathing has slowed Beans decides to risk it. He is crouching, facing the building. Slowly, cautiously, Beans raises his eyes above the sill.

  In the room before him, someone in a baggy black T-shirt is hunched over a card table. Beans gazes. Beans stares. The person is writing. Beans strains his ears and can hear dull scratches of a pen, an occasional labored breath. The person is not Loudermilk.

  Anton Beans cannot believe his luck.

  III

  VOLTA

  Thirty-One

  Images

  Clare Elwil has not returned to New York for the holiday interregnum. Instead, she remains in furnished midwestern rooms, combing over the past. She has come to the conclusion that—but she pauses, midtrain. It is 11:00 a.m. For the moment, Clare ignores the day of the week, the date. The sky is white, edged with orange. Clare is in bed, testing her senses with the cold against her exposed face, the chill end of her nose. The radiator whispers. Is it OK to not be working?

  It is the same question. Clare has asked it for at least a month now. Is it OK to not be working, to be unable to work? Her mind begins to speed up and she knows that she will spend the next twenty minutes only trying to slow it enough so that it will remain with the sentence, with the dim containers that are words, so that it will willingly squeeze through, into and out of, words to produce articulation, so that the world will not end, the plane will not fall out of the sky, the officer will lay down his arm, the children may hold reasonable opinions rather than signs imploring U.S. aid; so Clare may do what is called thinking, may experience discrete thought rather than bounding through the endless black and rainbow that is the mountain-heap of images constituting the trash heap of her being. The world keeps ending, in myriad and novel, fresh and sudden, gradual, mec
hanized ways. It isn’t quite her memory, she thinks, this ferocious slideshow. The visions aren’t organized in the style of a narrative, something personal that follows a human agent from cradle to eventual grave. If she only sits here, the images cycle at a terrific rate; they clatter and swish and fold in half. They shiver and multiply. She thinks of names. It gets a little better. She thinks, hotly, of her own small success—but mostly she thinks of failure and death. She cannot find her way out of the labyrinthine enclosure, this psychotic office park. She must recall her body. She must gently alert it to the necessity of getting out of bed, of washing face and hands and stepping to the kitchenette to heat water. She must stay here, with the hands, with her face. Yes, she foresees the possibility of rising, but at a great distance, a horizon. It inspires nausea. A bunker buster is a type of bomb designed to penetrate hardened targets. She can’t think. Therefore, she cannot work. And, meanwhile, the world keeps ending. Yet how can she live in the time that remains without work, or, rather, work in the paltry time that remains? For surely it is not OK to not work. This is the price that must be paid for being, for the condition of being squired around in a sentient frame. One must work to justify one’s being. There is no right, otherwise. Oh, certainly, for others there is a right. Some people—the poet Loudermilk, for example—are perfect. They have appeared in the world with automatic integration. They are one and whole and true and would never engage in this sort of dialogue. For the question persists: Is it OK to not work? We will all die so soon. Clare can barely breathe and the end of her nose is cold. Others are probably better than she is. With a lurching motion she forces herself out of bed. She fights up through the thicket of images. She tastes chalk. There is nothing to be done. She wobbles toward the kettle. Aeneas prayed to be allowed to descend to the underworld. She has hardly spoken to another human for nearly a month. The Bill Clinton head hangs by its neckhole from the knob of the closet door.

  Later, with coffee, Clare sits. She will, she tells herself, begin. She breathes. Yesterday, she almost wrote. A sentence, she tries to coax herself, just one smooth sentence, please.

  Clare checks her email. Her mother sends messages from South Beach where she has descended to muse out the holiday season. Each missive concludes, Love~ Mommy, the tilde a flourish. Clare’s own words, or, rather, the little shuttles she was once pleased to drive among them, dissipate, are sucked back up into the black heaven of her nonsensical mind. Why can she not move? She stares at the latest tiding, a happy Christmas. Something else always comes to pass. This is not writing. There has been no new story.

  Compelled to hand something in for her workshop during the semester, Clare surrendered, at the very last moment possible, the first pages of a piece she had begun that dreadful winter before the accident, a time of radical restructuring of the federal government and the spontaneous invention of new police. The story was not her best work, but it seemed, somehow, topical? Perhaps it was even an oracular vision, a warning she had attempted to relay to herself but, subsequently, failed to interpret. It was intended as a gothic tale and had clearly been composed by a terrifyingly industrious version of herself who was thinking about the fun of getting into genre, like how her main bag would be realism but from time to time she might dabble. This thing read:

  A Killing

  By Clare Elwil

  Stefanie Segal was the only daughter of Harvey and Tabitha Grace Segal (now Tabitha Grace Greene). She was born in 1982 and raised on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. In the first week of January 2002 she was nineteen.

  Stefanie had returned from school and was staying in the Dorchester on Park and 76th, where her mother resided with a new husband, a bankruptcy lawyer.

  The lawyer, Glenn Greene, liked modern. A lot was white, and there were clean lines, minimal pottery, brutalist shelving.

  Glenn was short, with a gut. He dressed well and styled his thinning hair unpretentiously. He appeared briefly, made nice.

  He was always disguised by mauve corrective lenses and went straight to Stefanie’s mother, caressing her hands.

  Stefanie’s mother was enmeshed in a social saga that had occupied her since before the time of Stefanie’s birth. The liberating advent of pagers and cell phones had done little to inspire in this parent a more sanguine view of the outdoors. She stayed in until dinner, in constant dialogue with a BlackBerry. She subsisted on powders.

  Stefanie felt, it being already her sophomore year of college, that she must soon devise an interim profession for herself. As her mother had once said, there was no point in kidding yourself: men always made the best money. In Stefanie’s own estimation, it was important to think of one’s gender. For this reason she had begun to reflect more seriously upon the employment opportunities offered by auction houses, particularly with reference to the slightly masculine, she felt, sector of decorative arts, earlier American antiques. She intuited this would provide the correct frame for her own mostly wholesome excellence, her patriotism. She was ready to go entrepreneurial, if need be.

  Stefanie’s best friend at school was Kathy Hu, who was about to become president of the college Democrats, which for Stefanie right now was perfect.

  Both she and Kathy were interested in a devout wonk named Rory. Rory’s issue was global debt. More than once Rory had been coaxed into a three-way over fro’yo and seasonal berries in a secluded corner of the cafeteria. Kathy preached management. Stefanie prided herself on her command of historical fact.

  At any rate, Stefanie was very much caught up in work. And, actually, although she was in the city for a good stretch, she’d felt more than a little sluggish about contacting her old group. She’d worked through a new introduction to finance and done some very successful sartorial negotiation with her mother, who had been happy to be convinced of the sagacity of replacing every item of clothing Stefanie had arrived home for the holidays with with a more current and upmarket version. It was obvious, then, to both of them, what time in Stefanie’s life it was getting to be. Stefanie felt cheerful. She would be restored to her field, fully armed.

  Four days before Stefanie was scheduled to make her return to school, Glenn knocked on the door of the generous guest bedroom.

  Stefanie switched off CNN but didn’t have time to get off the king.

  “Hey, you,” Glenn said, as his face appeared.

  “Hi,” said Stefanie.

  “Your mother and I were just about to take off, but I want you to know I got something for ya.”

  Stefanie smiled. She slid to her feet.

  Glenn opened the door wider. “From a client. Here ya go.” He was holding out a white envelope.

  “Oh,” said Stefanie.

  “Didn’t know what the hell to do with this, but I’m like, I know she likes history, right?” Glenn smiled, flicking the envelope at Stefanie.

  You had to hand it to Glenn.

  “Thank you.”

  “Don’t mention it,” Glenn said. He was already at the other end of the hallway.

  “Bye, baby doll,” she heard her mother trill.

  Stefanie was halfway through an outdated documentary on Madison when she remembered Glenn’s envelope. She had been giving herself a pedicure and IM’ing halfheartedly with Kathy, who was obsessing over the nomination procedure for an all-female eating club that recent alumnae in finance were setting up, when she saw it again, out of the corner of her eye.

  Glenn got me something

  what Kathy wanted to know.

  my mom’s husband

  i know / what?

  don’t know

  u like him?

  of course, typed Stefanie. Then she wrote, crap gotta run

  She closed the window rapidly, semi-rudely, as if she had been compelled.

  She hauled her body across the bed and seized the envelope from the marble bedside stand, tore the top. They were membership cards, two of them. She extracted one. MUSEUM OF THE DECORATIVE ARTS OF THE COLONIAL AMERICAS SUSTAINING MEMBER. There was some sort of urn imprinted.
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  It was so perfect.

  Stefanie was on Fifth in 7 For All Mankind jeans, Ferragamo loafers, a Theory top, a vintage peacoat from Searle, and a Longchamp bag she was borrowing even if they were so played out. She avoided the cobblestoned side where ice had been permitted to set in threatening welts. She was wearing cashmere gloves from J.Crew in “Flurry.”

  She thought about Kathy.

  She didn’t know why, come to think of it, she could never bring herself to compete with K-Hu. It was of course what made their relationship possible to begin with, and it wasn’t like Kat wasn’t worthy of your jealousy or like Kat didn’t occasionally groom herself with the misfortunes of others, but she was just so convinced of herself in the end, and she wanted these things that made actually interesting men kind of hate you, so that was strange.

  It was winter, and there was nothing on the trees, and even the blue in the sky looked damp. Salt-stained taxis hurtled by.

  Stefanie was about a block away, and she resolved she would not look at her phone again until she was at least done with the museum.

  She waited at the light. What she was doing right now, if she were forced to admit this to herself, which she was not sure that she was, was she was thinking about her parents’ marriage. She was, if she had to describe what she was doing, trying to “see” it. What she could remember from the apparently better years wasn’t much, just some brief scenes. Her father with the paper and a calculator. Her mother giving some instruction to the nanny, who in turn gave Stefanie a triangle of toast with a red layer of jam. The noise of the rapidly, and perhaps irritably, perused paper.

  Her father lived in Boston now, so he was close. She was thinking, maybe in the next semester, that might be the time, once spring was fully on, she’d go by. She’d contact the offices, make an appointment. He would like that. Then she’d show up better dressed than the secretaries, turn heads. They would certainly discuss the markets. She would read up on currency, she thought. It would be a very, very good restaurant, and afterward he would ask if she would be by more often, if they could make it a monthly thing. “You know, I think sometimes I just need to hear from someone like you.” Then, “It was difficult, what with your mother’s condition. But now that we know she’s settled . . .” His eyebrows would knit. Stefanie would silently indicate that there was no need to enter into distressing detail.