Loudermilk

by Lucy Ives

  The visiting instructor nodded and said that risks are good. Risks are, the visitor maintained, the “salt of life.” She looked at Clare. “Our shared human tragedy is, historically, that in order to have power, you must exercise power. I can see how this story understands that.”

  Clare’s colleagues, meanwhile, had discovered a new substance. They blew on it and sniffed. They examined its color. They applied it tentatively to their lips, providing detailed commentary.

  Later, in the hall, Clare stood near the sign-up sheets for meetings with agents; these were an offering to the fiction students, who were meant to begin peddling their wares by proxy. Clare had something now. And she entered her name in small caps, trying to make it look as if it had been printed by machine.

  At the center of one particularly crowded schedule pertaining to Alex Levendorff, who was presumably able to make his or her clients into instant thousandaires, Clare noted the name LOUDERMILK slashed across two time slots and enclosed in a heavily inked-in rectangle. Clare had never heard of a poet having an agent, but then again Loudermilk seems entirely unlike other poets. That long poem of his from earlier in the semester had made the rounds even with the fiction students, and Clare still can’t get the part about “lots and lots of sofas” out of her head. Sofas across America, Clare thinks.

  But Clare does not want to think. If she thinks too concertedly about Loudermilk’s enviable situation—his two perfect bodies, the one literary, the other flesh and blood—the bubble generated by her own small success may burst, the image fade. She reminds herself that she does, more than in the past, seem to have a future today.

  Instead of thinking, Clare goes over to the narrow fridge. Inside is a single food item, an enormous plastic vat of pickled peppers she purchased across the train tracks at the Aldi. They have a strange, dull, dusty taste and she has stopped eating them but does not know how to dispose of a bulk amount of yellow brine. But perhaps the pickles taste fine.

  Clare tastes the pickles.

  They do not taste fine.

  Clare is going out tonight.

  It is something the Seminars calls its “prom.”

  Forty-Three

  Persistence

  Lizzie has never been to the Seminars prom. She’s underage, but it’s more than this: Her dad is usually in attendance. It’s kind of his thing. Therefore, it’s, like, incest taboo, much? Not to mention that Marta has historically seemed to sanction her father’s grossness on this particular evening.

  Lizzie gags a little. Though no one is watching her, she pretends to vomit delicately into her own mouth.

  What is freaky, though, is that tonight of all nights, night of PROM ’04 CONSPICUOUS, surely destined to be one unshy soiree, Lizzie has just moments ago observed her father crawl from the dinner table with a tumbler of whiskey to ensconce himself in his leathery man cave with the supposedly subversive pabulum of Comedy Central. Until his enrollment numbers improve, he’s in the doghouse, big-time. Her mom is pointedly addressing herself to dishes.

  Lizzie takes one brief look at this scenario and hops upstairs. She’s rapidly in her room and considers her television along with her computer. Maybe one of these devices can save her from herself! But the prospect of re-watching Clueless or messaging with Des Moines skaters only further convinces her of the need to execute her cherished plan. There’s just this undeniable matter of a certain boy whose name rhymes with “powder ilk,” or “chowder silk,” and kind of also with “redder elk,” along with other variants? (Lizzie is not the child of two poets for nothing.) He really needs to know what she’s all about. O Loudermilk, who are currently probably already slammed and grinding in public, Lizzie silently prays, hear my call!

  Lizzie whirls to her closet. She burrows through to locate a garment that was her size at the turning of the millennium and that has now, given changes wrought by developmental hormones, become rather more bandage-like. It is, Lizzie reflects, tugging it down over her boobs and butt, perfect. Lizzie adds a platinum-blond bob-shaped wig and sunglasses. Yes, she reflects, this all makes her look old. She is ready, she thinks, to execute her plan. Tonight she will show everyone who is really an artist, not to mention what a real artist is. Good thing Lizzie cares enough to snoop. Without this propensity she would have zero material, plus it is past being time to let inspiration strike. And, because Lizzie is super aggravated as far as her mother is concerned on this particular evening, she takes her shoes in hand and jumps out the second-story window, a practice her mother has for years been on her case about.

  Forty-Four

  And Then

  Anton Beans is achieving something rare: he’s attending a party with enthusiasm. He has on bleached-out denim, a color more festive, to his mind, than cold, cool white or onyx. He wears black sneakers, having decided, uncharacteristically, not to match his footgear to the rest of the ensemble. He has combed and scented his beard.

  Anton Beans moves without haste. He is savoring this moment. Around him, members of his Seminars cohort pogo and wiggle. They’re slick with perspiration. Mascara is migrating and dark disks of sweat have begun to emerge. The DJ throws on anti-folk party anthem “Blister in the Sun” by the Violent Femmes, and the floor loses its collective shit. Anton Beans nods.

  At last Beans sees. There amid the lashing, thrusting bodies is the golden head of Loudermilk. Loudermilk is frowning with eyes shut, engrossed in absorbing the pelvic attention lavished on him by two female fiction first-years, who have made of their Adonis a human sandwich meat. It is distressingly typical, but Beans wills himself not to focus on this aspect of the situation. It’s important to keep his mind on political task, not to be distracted by taste. What amazes Beans is how negligible the effect of Loudermilk’s public humiliation in workshop has been. Nobody seems to care that everyone’s idol has been brought low. Marta said something shockingly vapid about how we all have “our days,” and no one else appears to be reflecting on what has happened—at all. And this is why Beans must take action.

  He has made inroads with the minion. Harry, he believes this person’s name is. So far, so good, but nothing will be settled as far as Beans is concerned without a full reveal—

  Forty-Five

  Mingling

  Clare has arrived at “prom” and things already look fairly debauched, with a strong chance of “meat stink plus portable bidets” before midnight.

  Clare squeezes through the vestibule, which is crowded with Seminars people deliberating about how best to walk outside to have a smoke, an undertaking rendered somewhat more complex by quantities of Everclear plus Kool-Aid dwelling redly in translucent cups. People are sloppy, and in her radical sobriety Clare is anxious.

  A Chicagolander named Zach—famed for his father’s unusual career as first a stand-up comedian, then state senator, a trajectory explored to withering ends in Zach’s own short fiction—seizes Clare’s shoulder. His eyes have this diagonal softness. He wants to take this opportunity, i.e., intoxication, to convey to Clare his newfound respect for her writing. “The Origin of the World” was really something and he’s sorry not to have acknowledged her earlier. She should feel free to share her work with him outside of class.

  Clare uses her eyes to convey that she so very much gets it. In spite of herself, she’s flattered.

  Zach manifests relief. He is about to say something about his difficult childhood but is abruptly pulled outside by two bigger men Clare recognizes as second-year poets. She hears the phrase “local talent.”

  Clare moves on.

  She will bear witness to whatever the center of this thing is. This will be close enough to having had a “good time” to justify the trip.

  She goes down a hallway that is half rotting wood and half moldering paper printed with a design of interlocking spools of thread. Music increases in volume.

  Clare enters the room with dancing. It is a confusing chamber—she exits quickly.

  She wants a bathroom. On the second floor of this alarmingly ornamen
tal sorority, she discovers one. She finds herself looking down at a tarnished and possibly mold-dressed faucet knob. It is in the shape of a pair of bull’s horns.

  Clare examines her reflection in the chipped mirror. She looks thin, meeker than usual. She pinches her cheeks. She wonders, briefly, if Zach had been intimating that he might be willing to date her. She considers what that might be like, fondue parties and lectures on blow-job technique, before doing away with the notion by rinsing her hands.

  Exiting the WC with its bovine fixtures, Clare is surprised to discover a smallish male form observing the goings-on downstairs from the relatively safe vantage of the second-floor balcony. The rear of the room where the Seminars people are dancing gives out onto a two-story atrium with elaborate double stair. The voyeur appears fixated on the activities under way in the dance-designated zone.

  Clare wonders if she knows who this is. Though she does not have time to meditate on the matter, she does find it strange that someone like this individual has somehow found his way to a party. However, it’s as if this person has not come to the party, but rather emerged from the depths of this excessively complex house. She wants to approach him but something holds her back. He seems, how can she put this, psychologically feral, if that is even an expression? He has the appearance somehow, in outline and from the rear, of being a creature able to approach others only in their dreams, a kind of humanoid lemur or gentle bat-boy hybrid.

  Clare wonders if she’s come upon him here because she is in need of a message. Maybe he knows the way out.

  However, Clare’s reverie is abruptly pierced by an individual in pale double denim who is bounding up the stairs. It is a manchild with a significant black beard, a second-year poet.

  “There you are,” the bearded one pants.

  Clare notes that the bearded one is also in possession of a broken arm, the sleeve of his pale denim jacket having been tailored to sit neatly above the cast.

  “I need you!” the Canadian tuxedo wearer informs Clare’s weirdo, entirely ignoring her.

  Clare watches with a mix of disappointment and shock as this odd, slight person is dragged away, down the stairs and into the dance.

  Forty-Six

  You

  Harry has made an error. He has ventured out of the secure zone of his upstairs enclosure with the more or less idiotic idea of viewing the inanities of his audience, those professional readers he has served lo these many days and months.

  This was not a prudent move.

  Harry was laboring under the delusion that it might be possible to sneak up on the setting, eye the fauna, blend. The thought of descrying Loudermilk in his natural milieu hadn’t been entirely un-intriguing, either. What did it look like when Loudermilk was “out there”? How great was the liberty of Loudermilk these days, really?

  Harry is willing to bet that it is pretty great.

  However, now Harry’s arm is clamped in the clammy clamp of Anton Beans’s good hand, and more than this, Harry seems to have been fully apprehended by the thought and belief of Anton Beans, meaning that Harry has become a sort of literal and material idée fixe as far as Beans is concerned.

  Beans drags Harry—aka, the concept of Harry, plus Harry’s body, to which said concept is attached—downstairs.

  It’s all Harry can do to keep himself upright, not to mention his teeth in his face rather than knocked out by the dowels of the intricate banister.

  Music surges and thuds. Harry’s vision is striated, a confusing mist. The music is louder and louder. “I’m. In. Hea-ea-ven,” sings Mariah Carey. Harry allows himself to go limp. Moist bodies brush revoltingly against him.

  Somewhere, perhaps even very near to him, Anton Beans is instructing people to get out of his way. Beans seems to know where he is going. Beans is bellowing something about turn off the music. Beans is possibly roaring himself hoarse. He keeps yelling this command regarding the music until other writers on the floor, believing that something of actual import may be going on, take up the chant, too.

  The music dies.

  Harry is a faded flower, a dried squid. He is draped limply across the somewhat-more-solid form of Anton Beans. He is tiny and sans volume and awaits oblivion.

  “You,” Anton Beans is saying, by which Harry assumes Anton Beans means Harry. “Yes, you,” Anton Beans repeats.

  Harry’s eyes are closed. He imagines himself stretched out upon a sacrificial altar.

  “Moi?” inquires someone.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact. I’m talking to you.”

  “No offense, dude, but moi is a little indisposed. What up with the jams?”

  It is, as it was always going to be, him. It’s Loudermilk. Harry wills himself to shrivel further. His eyes are sealed and he pretends that he is, in addition, dead.

  “Shut up,” Beans rumbles. The room, if it was not particularly noisy before, becomes pristinely still. “I’ve brought you something.”

  “Thanks, man! What exactly might that be?”

  “You know,” says Beans, “what I’m talking about. You know who this is.”

  “I’m sorry, what?”

  “You know what’s about to happen here.”

  Loudermilk gives this a beat. “Uh, you’re going to get the fuck out of my grill?”

  There is a smattering of giggles from the crowd. Loudermilk has his adherents.

  Beans is unfazed. “I’d like to do that, I really would,” he says, “but unfortunate circumstances prevent me from being able to do so. Instead of getting, as you put it, ‘the fuck out of’ your ‘grill,’ I’m going, instead, to get further and far more intimately ‘up’ into it, because I and everyone else here tonight require an explanation. For example”—Beans begins shaking Harry loose from his shoulder—“who this is. Who is this person, Troy Loudermilk? You can’t honestly say that you’ve never seen him before.”

  Harry hears the mutters of the crowd. They remark upon this person’s familiarity, though really he is difficult to place. And so pale!

  “I don’t really—” Loudermilk begins to say.

  “Oh yes you do.” Beans gives Harry a more pronounced shake, causing Harry’s eyes to pop inadvertently open.

  “I have no idea who—” Loudermilk avers, as his face comes, as ever, gorgeously into focus. Harry finds himself staring into the copper eyes of his life’s great frenemy.

  “Hi,” Harry whispers.

  Loudermilk does not say anything.

  Forty-Seven

  Persona

  Lizzie knows she is late. She has been, after all, just the littlest tiny bit busy. She’s a creative type, and one can’t be everywhere at once, and when inspiration strikes, as they say. And she’s proud to have at last completed her artwork. However, there is no way she was prepared for the party to have already ended before she arrived! There is what seems at first like complete silence inside the Delta Psi Kappa house. Lizzie very nearly begins to cry. Then she hears a voice. The voice is coming from farther back inside the building, and Lizzie decides that she will walk toward it. This is how Lizzie comes upon a scene that she will later describe to herself as the supreme all-time competition of the world.

  Everyone in the Seminars, all the current students, are gathered in this room Lizzie thinks was originally intended for something more serious and elegant than the use (party rentals) to which it is currently being applied. It has all this carved stuff and seems kind of, how can Lizzie put this, evil? But the Seminars people are at this point behaving in potentially surprising ways. Like, they aren’t awkwardly rubbing up against one another but are rather standing in this sort of shocked formation, like they are anticipating witnessing an impromptu execution. The little hairs at the back of Lizzie’s neck come to attention. Also, and perhaps more important, at the center of the circle are Loudermilk and this asshole self-promoter second-year poet Lizzie thinks is named Anton and then, in a final shocker, there is a very wan Harry.

  Harry! Lizzie thinks.

  Everyone is looking at H
arry, but Asshole Anton is the one speaking. Lizzie attempts to appear nonchalant yet somehow purposeful, as if she’s supposed to be there, especially given the wig. She hopes Loudermilk hasn’t seen her, though, of course, who is she kidding, she also really hopes that Loudermilk did see her, that he is contemplating her superhot dress among other worthwhile reflections.

  Anton is hissing something triumphant about how he’s been waiting for this moment. Lizzie tries not to roll her eyes. If Anton the Poet knew how obvious and predictable his resentment is, he’d probably die on the spot, not that Lizzie is wishing for anyone to become deceased this evening or anytime soon!

  She tries to give Anton the benefit of the doubt. Anton’s broken arm does make him look slightly more sincere, like a general in a movie.

  But there’s Loudermilk. He’s very distracting. He’s standing so his face is in profile from her point of view. This makes it a little harder to see his expression. Loudermilk looks—and how to put this with the correct delicacy—like he’s been flash-frozen. He’s as suave as ever, but it’s like his outlines have become just a little too congealed, too straight and thick and real? He resembles a cardboard cutout of himself. If he sways, he may fall to the floor with a little slap.

  Lizzie kind of wants to rush up to him, to stroke his perfect satin face and moisten his lips with hers and reassure herself that he’s still breathing, but she also kind of, very briefly, feels like she wants to never touch him again, which is just so weird. It’s hard to believe that a being such as Loudermilk is capable of inspiring total revulsion but apparently this is how it is when he, like, does that. He doesn’t really look any older, but the thing is, he looks so incredibly old? Like a massive shimmering mummy, someone who’s been freshly embalmed and set up in state.

  But Lizzie has to remember that what’s crucial at this stage is that she listen to the words of Anton Beans. It’s not easy, considering the fascinating visuals.