Loudermilk

by Lucy Ives

  WANTED

  Janitor

  Get paid $$$$ and get an awesome,

  awesome place to live at!!!

  Delta Psi Kappa needs a janitor now!

  There was below this a drawing of what appeared to be a plantation manor surrounded by a heart in pink highlighter, and there was a phone number.

  Loudermilk was gazing calmly over at Harry, who by then was holding the poster. “I called them, dude,” Loudermilk was saying. “The Seminars rents their shit out for functions all the goddamn time. This place is a known quantity.”

  Harry was examining Loudermilk’s face.

  “I really,” Loudermilk was saying, “think that you shouldn’t get weird about this. I think it could be an opportunity for you, Harrison. I would really think you could get into this, if you know what I mean.”

  Harry demurred.

  “Harry? Pussy, and I am not talking about felines, OK? Ya heard of it?”

  Harry said, “Thanks for being disgusting and, as ever, super literal.”

  “Except, dude, that I am not being literal and would you listen to me for one half a second, please? I called them, right? And it sounds like nobody answered the ad at all so they’re totally desperate, basically, plus, like, bethonged? And I got you an interview. It’ll be easy, I swear to god. I know it’s something you can do. I mean, I feel partially responsible for the fact that you never get laid and this is, like, my Christmas present to you this year, you know? I feel totally guilty, man. I mean, look at you.”

  Harry asked what Loudermilk planned to do without him.

  “Without you? Don’t you worry about me! Dude, for one I’m not going to constantly obsess over the possibility of offending your intense-crazy paranoid-schizoid sense of smell every time I fucking have to unleash a totally normal, healthy, and respectable duke or dukes here in the free-form cuarto de baño de Evelyn. And I’m also totally going to finally be able to stop bothering you while you’re at work writing something epic and being an insane genius, by the way?”

  The very next day Harry went. He’d very compliantly let Loudermilk walk him over to the Delta Psi Kappa HQ, and then as usual he’d let Loudermilk do the talking. The girls did not bat an eye. Two of them were blondes who seemed to have recently had the opportunity to cook their hides in the full heat of the equatorial sun, while the third was a speckled redhead with a fat if well-shaped face who kept touching her narrow mouth, as if to reassure herself of its persistence between nose and chin. All three of them kept nodding at whatever anyone said, and the shorter blonde was all, “I totally bet he would so be at home up there, oh my god! My cousin is kind of sad or whatever and he lived in an attic for a while and it totally worked for him.”

  “Nice,” the redhead told her.

  There was some whispering, and then the three of them brought Harry up the back stairs while Loudermilk loitered, examining the nap, or so he claimed, of a pool table in a bookless room with a very big bar and a creepy coffered ceiling they apparently liked to call the Library.

  Harry didn’t know what else to do, so he let them guide him. To be honest, he didn’t feel that weird. He either said nothing or made a motion with his head if it was absolutely necessary. They took him up to a small suite of rooms rank with mildew and said some things about when trash had to be moved and where it went. They were smiling at him a lot, blinking and staring as if he were a baby animal. Mostly, he felt like they were harmless enough.

  Harry was looking around the space. It was a room under an eave, and it had a sink on top of a janky-looking cabinet and there was a toilet down the hall, but it was a place where he could supposedly exist in solitude, without Loudermilk and without everything that Loudermilk had begun to stand for in Harry’s mind, which included not just violent early-morning shits, but also a weird kind of authority Harry wasn’t sure, suddenly, looking around, that he so much wanted or even required anymore.

  Harry wished he could say something like they did on television, where they shouted, “I’ll take it!” but his stomach froze and he had to wait until the “ladies” had gone back downstairs again and he could follow and then indicate to Loudermilk by means of one of his signature meaningful looks that he was into the proposition.

  Loudermilk hammered out the details and they went home to pack Harry up.

  Now, in the middle of the day sometimes, the whole house will just be still, and Harry will know that everyone, down to the last sorority sister, is out, and he will descend to the main level and dust and straighten and empty trash cans. He does whatever it seems to him like a good idea to do and then returns to his own quarters. Sorority girls really like sex toys: This is something that he didn’t know before he took this position. Anything even vaguely penis-shaped he finds lying around he’s made it a rule to leave perfectly undisturbed. So far no one’s said boo. An envelope of cash appears under his door every other week.

  Harry guesses they must be relatively OK with his job performance, uncertain though he still is of the exact nature of the task.

  More important is what is happening to the writing. Sometimes he’ll write a poem that he doesn’t even give to Loudermilk. He’s using a typewriter to make drafts and clean copies. The narrow window over the counter he uses as a desk has a view out onto the blue tops of a pair of pines. Today’s result, a two-fer, is as follows:

  Rush Job

  I was a member of a firm of twins,

  A single box that could be blamed

  For rising unilateralism, the crime-

  Genius connection, not to mention

  Any trail of long ionic air. In truth,

  I kind of flunked the interview . . .

  A preponderance of green dots here

  Indicates the so-called Westerner

  Crossing a laconic California coast

  At 15,000 MPH, absolutely no re-

  Guard for overhangs of debt or

  Breaking no news to one’s vendors.

  Not the shuttle itself but the sheath.

  I guess it comes down to intangibles.

  —T. A. LOUDERMILK

  We Will Bury You

  It was Death, aptly enough, that brought me back to

  A distant, looming ceiling red with coffered gold,

  Among other environmental bona fides.

  I was somebody I wished I’d met,

  As the cult of martyrs developed in the West;

  You get the impression SUVs are decadent, somehow.

  Brandishing a phallic wand, an archaeologist with clear blond eyes, a Bob,

  I guess I’ll woo these impolitic wonks

  At the necropolis, ha!

  Striding among them,

  A charioteer, I watch as some are wrapped

  In spotted pelts and set alight like dogs. This post-flight ritual

  Stands as a contemporary analogue.

  Military leaders lead themselves.

  —T. A. LOUDERMILK

  Thirty-Five

  Love

  Clare is, even, writing.

  She knows the story is fake and sounds nothing like her, but she has discovered that one way a person can write is not to. Clare shouldn’t write, because Clare cannot. However, Clare can write something that someone else would write, no problem. And there happen to be a lot of prototypes floating around.

  Clare thinks, for example, about what other students are producing: the tale of the demise, by compression van and obstructed rearview, of a hapless young husband on Rollerblades in an icy moonlit parking lot; the legend of the conflicted political allegiances of an entrepreneurial DJ and former child chess prodigy in Buenos Aires; a prose ballad concerning the mystery of one incommunicative mother and her real-estate addiction. What these well-crafted works share is an overweening dedication to both psychological and empirical detail; their authors seem to believe in the existence of an actual, real world subject to capitalism but also, and more significantly, to the laws of attachment and causality. Romantic and/or familial love is the eterna
l cultural dynamo to end all cultural dynamos and/or mediating entities. They fuck you up, your mum and dad. It makes some sense.

  Too much sense, if you’re asking Clare, which, let us check for one brief moment—ah, yes, no one is!

  Clare, having descended into solipsistic obsession regarding the story she has not yet written, missed the university’s registration deadline. She had been thinking, before she lost track of the calendar year, about enrolling in a Sanskrit reading course or maybe something on documentary film, but now she’s come up against a virtual barricade in the online catalogue. No amount of refreshing can save her. She has been forced to turn herself over to the administrators in Building 109, who have pertly informed Clare that her options are few but luckily there is more than one way to skin a cat and there does happen to be a seminar—if Clare will condescend to take a class in the department from which she is receiving her degree—with some availability.

  This is how Clare manages to become the unique pupil in poet Don Hillary’s Spring 2004 offering. This seminar bears the extremely disheartening one-word title “Love.” Thanks to Clare, it will now not be canceled.

  Clare wants to consider this misbegotten sequence of events as little as possible. She is, additionally, almost certain now that Hillary, formerly a character in her one good story, knew her father when they were both in the Seminars together, how bizarre. And, as Clare apprehends on day one, Hillary’s class is not just distressingly unpopular, given the universalist topic, but more than slightly unbalanced and very, very verbose. Hillary gallops around a sonnet by Keats for approximately 135 percent of the allotted class time and then, spent, summarily dismisses her. It is a routine, if not intentional.

  Hillary will say, “I guess we’re going to get started.”

  “Am I sitting too far away?” Clare, at the other end of the table, will foolishly inquire.

  “Too far away for what?”

  Clare will change the subject. “Are we going to wait for anyone?”

  “I’m not going to.” It’s a now-breezy Hillary, shuffling papers.

  Clare reminds him that she is in fiction.

  “Why’s that?”

  “That I’m in fiction?”

  “That you should mention it.”

  “This is a poetry class?”

  “I told you I have no prerequisites. Neither should you.” Hillary’s voice is treacly, lascivious, but his eyes are dead. Clare thinks he may have forgotten her name.

  “This is about living, about writing and living,” Hillary seems helpless to prevent himself from insisting. “Real things. How people live,” he repeats, “in writing, and how they write. What is true. It’s about great poetry, the great themes. This is about how—” Hillary trembles.

  Clare bites her lip. “I didn’t do the reading,” she announces.

  “No one here does the reading,” Hillary tells her.

  It is even stranger than the fiction Clare must laud and eviscerate on a weekly basis.

  However, Hillary’s shaky pedagogy is having one salutary effect: it has caused Clare to recognize that, in spite of her own difficulties and loneliness, she is, at least, not the one in charge.

  Even if she must give up the old dream of flawless self-expression, even if that is no longer possible, given the mess that is/are the channels via which her feeling circulates, yet she can do other things. She can imitate. She can become someone she is not. She can mimic and she can compete. And the reason she can do this is that there really is no other means of expression, speaking of what is true.

  Clare remembers reading somewhere that when the mind is like a passageway where someone is talking, the voice belongs to someone else. Was it an academic poet who said this? Maybe Heraclitus? Virginia Woolf?

  In any case, it’s a notion she can reverse-engineer.

  Because Clare can write, as long as she does not do it.

  And she’s been thinking, for example, about what others in her fiction cohort would write, were they her. She deliberates in a casual fashion regarding the timeline of her existence. She scouts out appropriate stopping places—places/stages/days/events on or at which a prose portraitist of the human condition could linger, gently stroking in stirring, and romantic, and uplifting, and potentially emotionally devastating, touches.

  Clare considers her childhood. It encompasses the brief period during which her parents were to be regularly found on the same continent and, at times, within the same open-plan loft space, if not the very same room. There might be some sort of symbolism one could use to indicate that, despite their best attempts to sacrifice their child on the altar of their arbitrary decision to couple, the child’s imaginary death and (very) real emotional suffering were not sufficient tribute. Clare imagines the story that a fiction writer named Dev O’Shaughnessy might compose. Dev has lately turned in a tremendous narrative about suburban front yards and what they meant to wicked, soulful tweens of the male persuasion in 1987. It is couched as the report of an imaginary anthropologist. Dev’s tale made a splash and Dev now has an agent and, apparently, a book deal. It happened in two weeks. Dev, if he were Clare or she he, could compose an edgy and prismatic short story about parents who observe their child knocking a cup off the edge of a table. The parents start talking about suicide. The story could be just their dialogue. It would be an allegory for the slow death of the republic, the narcissism of semi-elites. It would be a well-made mirror. It would make D. H. Lawrence’s corpse roll over and shed a tiny tear. Dev would surely garner another book deal from it.

  But Dev and Clare are not the same person, and this is why the idea of writing a story by him so fascinates her. As long as she doesn’t care too much, the task amuses. And she will not write about being a child or being a cup on a table. She won’t write about the most obvious subject, as far as she is concerned: the long string of failures to either kill herself or be abruptly destroyed that have made up her triangulation within her mother’s sense of modern love. Clare won’t talk about this, because she doesn’t have to. No one can force her to do it.

  Not the incident with the ice-skate blade she somehow fell on in a wet elevator one winter afternoon, ripping open the interior of her left cheek, staining her white gloves brown. Not the other unforced injuries to her face, the broken teeth and split lips, the black eyes and cut cheeks and lumps to the forehead, though she’s never broken a bone and has barely had so much as a cut anywhere else on her body. Not the year of shoplifting nor the year of dealing speed. Not the week of the gentle busboy she’d had unprotected sex with against a boulder in Central Park. Not the hellish lethargy she’d fallen into late freshman year of college, when she’d begun sending manic emails to professors she suspected of wanting to bed her, emails she later saw in her outbox but could not recall typing, nor the unsuccessful attempts to fail out of school, when her mother had called off plans for a third marriage because of her daughter’s “instability,” when Clare’s mother had wetly sobbed late one night in her newest loft that Clare was ruining Trudy Elwil’s renowned existence but that over Trudy’s dead body would Clare start seeing a psychiatrist. None of this. And certainly not the road trip Clare had taken alone at the end of sophomore year, when she’d briefly shared a hotel room with an electronics salesman in Las Vegas. None of these times. Not the stories of all the airplanes Clare has missed because of hearing voices, long before the accident, not that day at the Orsay, long before anything went wrong. Not the unforeseen accident itself. Clare does not care about the accident, and it will be far better to write about things that she does care about, at least a little, while pretending not to care about them, because in these cases you can pretend not to care. What you write has to be a choice, Clare thinks. You have to choose. You have to have something to do. It has to be work. It cannot be the truth.

  Thirty-Six

  The Iceberg

  Lizzie tells herself for the umpteenth time that she’s only practicing using binoculars, because what they never show you in movies is tha
t it’s actually kind of hard to do! They don’t go into focus all that easily, and you never know when you could be invited to go on some sort of bird-watching safari by some very advanced boy you are likely to meet in college and then look like a total scrub when you can’t even make out whatever rare plover it is you’re meant to be stalking. In 2004, it is all about being well-rounded!

  Lizzie keeps a diary of her observations. This makes it a little classier. It’s the first thing she does when she gets home from school, or home from whatever: pick up the binoculars, check out what it is that’s going on at the moment. She has a pretty good view of the snow-filled yard and pool house and neighbors’ places, and just between Lizzie and Lizzie’s diary, Lizzie has seen some things! Anyway, it’s not like there’s that much going on in this town. It’s not like Lizzie’s a perv. Everyone should just be grateful that she doesn’t try to date frat boys like every other underage girl!

  It’s late afternoon, and Lizzie is sitting by her beloved window, her best friend. She has a bowl of Pirate’s Booty and the binoculars to her eyes, but then she hears something below her, on her very own lawn. She sets down her accessories. It’s just her mother, of course, stalking the whiteness of the yard, cell phone jammed to face. Her mother has nice legs and decent hair, Lizzie thinks, which is good because you can always go to the salon, and her mom does look pretty good for her age. She watches her mother draw a figure eight with one hand. Her mother pauses, tucks phone to chin. She lights a cigarette, untucks phone.

  Her mother never used to smoke like this. But she also never used to stand in one place in the freezing cold for over an hour, listening to somebody talk, interjecting various adamant things in German.

  Lizzie scratches her elbow. She wonders if she should say something to her dad about this. Like maybe this would be a good opportunity to find out what’s up. She could test her dad, say something like, “Oh, I think mom has a pretty serious friend or something now,” and see what her dad’s reaction is. Not that Lizzie even wants to know, because she doesn’t. If her father is fully aware of what’s going on with her mom, Lizzie doesn’t know if she could take it. She doesn’t know if she would be incredibly sad or really, really angry, or some combination. She doesn’t even want to find out how she would feel, to be honest, which is why she hasn’t said anything. Plus, they haven’t talked about splitting up for a while, so maybe they’ve changed their minds.