Mislaid

by Nell Zink

  With time Byrd and his friends became more adventurous, on one occasion flying in a chartered plane from Fredericksburg to Savannah to board a chartered fishing boat.

  That trip was subsidized by a frustrated boy from Detroit whose parents had sent him away to boarding school as a punishment. He wasn’t sure what he’d done wrong that finally clinched it. Paint his room black, probably. He’d done plenty his family would never have found out about. But paint your own room black, and you’ve blown your cover.

  His initial idea for revenge on his parents was to charge calls to them. He would chat with friends at home for as long as he could stand it and leave the phone off the hook at both ends, so that his parents were assured a phone bill of $400 or more for every week they kept him at Woodberry. This earned him widespread resentment, since there was only one pay phone per hall. Meanwhile, he let his grades suffer, applying himself to learning only useless skills such as landing a switchblade over and over in the center of the dartboard that hung on the back of the door to his room.

  Byrd Fleming opened his eyes to the possibilities. Fleming didn’t have money, but he had something many boys don’t know exists and many men never learn: He knew how to spend it. He convinced the boy from Detroit that the closest contact to be found anywhere between the high culture parents aspire to and the sordidness their sons crave takes place in the general vicinity of off-Broadway theaters. Obediently, the boy worked on his parents for months, raving of Brechtian virtues such as mind-numbing tedium and repetition, until they hauled him and Byrdie to New York over Thanksgiving in a Learjet. They left at the first intermission, leaving their son in the care of Byrdie with money for dinner and a taxi. The boys sat out the performance and followed a beautiful woman of around thirty-five in a tight, silky sea-green dress to a diner on the West Side Highway. They made friends with her, letting her mother them for hours, watching theater people and (they hoped) thieves and hustlers come and go. They drank coffee.

  They didn’t feel any older afterward. Just cooler. Not cool like an imprisoned gangster condemned to shank a dartboard five hundred times a day, but cool like rich, free young geniuses, eyes open to all that is human.

  They tipped the waitress twenty dollars and hailed a cab back to the Waldorf. The next morning, they told the boy’s parents exactly where they had been and what they had done. They were met with open delight. It turned out parents don’t mind if you seek and cling to the dark underbelly of the naked city, as long as you do it in a well-lit, public place, high on coffee and testosterone.

  The boys were turned loose the next day, Saturday, to explore the Village on their own. They had proved their trustworthiness. They came to dinner at a steak house in midtown with a bag of records and only very slightly dilated pupils. That evening they were allowed to leave yet again, to attend a folk music concert, trailed by praise for their youthful energy. They walked deep into Alphabet City, where no cab would take them, and slam-danced to a girl band playing in half-slips pulled up over their tits and no underwear, surrounded by junkies. The parents complimented each other on the positive effect of the steadying hand of Byrd Fleming.

  But that was before the trip to Savannah. Who cares, it was worth it, and Byrd knew he would always be welcome at the Gothic revival castle on Lake Shore Drive, once the parents were dead.

  The second pigeonhole where he didn’t quite fit was that of the romantic egoist—that figure from This Side of Paradise or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man who takes himself seriously but doesn’t yet know why. Who takes not knowing as a first symptom of seriousness and wears its ignorance accordingly—right side out. Such young men are commonly mama’s boys and lazy as sin. Byrd worked hard on trig and calculus, even though he was sure they had nothing to do with him. He read William Styron novels in secret, but for school he wrote precise prose, as dry as he could make it.

  A teacher once asked him about his mother, folding his hands like a guidance counselor. There were stories. Byrd replied, “My mother was a God-fearing Christian woman like my father.” It sounded like a joke. It was in fact the quintessence of how he explained her to himself. He couldn’t imagine anyone staying with his father for more than five days, and she had stayed for ten years. He distinctly recalled telling her to leave and save herself, an act of supreme self-sacrifice on his part. He never missed her, not consciously.

  In his more roving thoughts, not distilled to their quintessence, he believed she was a worthless cunt. Because what kind of monster leaves her little son and never even sends a postcard?

  Yet he didn’t remember her being any kind of monster. Just crazy and busy and embarrassing. All his friends’ mothers looked like J. Press catalog models. They would lounge against their cars, waiting for their sons on Sundays, with clever clothes on, sporty garments like baseball jackets and anoraks reconceived as pale silk leisurewear. Their legs were stunning, much better than the legs of the girls who showed up at mixers, cylinders scarred by battles with field hockey sticks and all-you-can-eat doughnuts. His mother hadn’t even looked like a woman. She was a boy in a rugby shirt.

  And his sister? A wraith. A taboo subject, indistinct and unthinkable. None of his friends knew she had existed.

  Lee felt played out as a poet. Utterly spent. Increasingly, he relied on methods he had once tolerated only in houseguests—cut-ups, free association, automatic writing. After he published a found poem culled from a magazine ad and learned it had been licensed from the estate of Elizabeth Bishop, he gave up and turned to criticism.

  Criticism carried social rewards of its own. For one, you can rave about Boris Vian or Viktor Shklovsky in essay after essay without running the risk that either one of them is going to turn up on your doorstep wanting to swim in your already nearly nonexistent lake or taste a genuine Virginia ham biscuit, which involves going somewhere to pick out a ham, soaking it for two days, and baking it for a day after that, so that you’re stuck with Boris or Viktor for four days, moping around the yard frowning at the mud and slapping mosquitoes, before you even addict him to your food.

  Anyone still living who took the trouble to drive all the way to Stillwater was generally there for the duration—five days minimum—and visitors increasingly brought along magazine-inspired ideas of Southern living. Particularly if they were out as queens and took pride in reacting to every low flagstone in the front walk like a cat being asked to swim a river. They dressed in pale and delicate fabrics like men from a mythological filmic era before the invention of dirt. They expected Lee to provide them with croissants and two fresh towels every day, as if he were running a resort. They expected salad with quixotic greens like watercress and arugula and compared pasta to Treblinka. He stopped inviting them.

  Solitude, however, was boring. Before long Lee got the idea of cultivating writers who were not poets. Fiction was still too close to poetry for his taste, so he focused on literary journalists. Living with the Hells Angels, digging up Neanderthals in Armenia—he didn’t care as long as they wrote it up with some smidgen of formal innovation adequate to justify charging their travel expenses to the college. The writer-adventurers would speak to the girls at length in podium discussions open to the public. When the event was over they would switch sides of the podium table and keep talking. When the crowd was down to four or five of the most determined students, they would retire to the new campus center and continue talking of the girls’ hopes and dreams for their art until late at night. They would drive back to his place at two in the morning in their rental cars, their balls deep blue, laden with lurid confessional manuscripts.

  For a couple of years the college was willing to indulge Lee’s interest in writer-adventurers by bankrolling nonfiction residencies to anchor a “journalism” track in the English department. Four semesters, four miserable men. They all ended up sleeping with the same bartender at the same roadhouse (no blue laws anymore) out on the state highway. The entertainment value for Lee was minimal, and he let “journalism” lapse.

 
; Lee had his theories as to why writers never had any fun at the college. Theory A was that upper-middle-class girls no longer thought of older men as male. They got along so well with their relaxed, friendly dads that relaxed, friendly guys twenty-two and over immediately reminded them of Dad. Theory B was that Stillwater was still wall-to-wall dykes. Lee felt he had no way of knowing. When he was coming up, a girl in cat’s-eye glasses wearing a red bra and baggy boxer shorts over fishnet stockings was—he couldn’t think of a word for it—not even a slut, because why would a slut wear glasses or baggy shorts? A girl dressed that way in 1958 might have been going to a Mardi Gras party at library school, but only if it was down the hall. These girls confronted him in class every day. Its being a girls’ college that rejected men like stray kidneys, there were no overeager, pawing gazes from boys to put the brakes on them. Lee’s eyes never wandered below their faces. He feared his indifference egged them on.

  He couldn’t tell what went through their heads. Since the rise of fashion, which he dated to the day the campus got cable TV, there had been a disconnect between the way people dressed and their backgrounds and opinions. The college’s Russ Meyer film festival was organized by a little-red-book-carrying Maoist. Tri-Delts in leotards picketed the campus health center to protest condoms. Girls in fair-isle sweaters and pearls would engage him in discussions of Michael Harrington. The Christian student association sponsored dances, of all things, and its most popular DJ, a Cure fan in flowing hippie skirts, founded a short-lived campus Republicans chapter, disbanded when she transferred to UC Santa Cruz to study the history of consciousness. There was no rhyme or reason to it anymore. You couldn’t trust the signals. Rugby shirts, once the trademark of Stillwater’s hardest-bitten bulldaggers, were now an option for anyone, any time. Still resembling gunnysacks made from signal flags, but considered sexy status symbols by girls who brought them back from road trips as souvenirs of one-night stands.

  College girls on the road! One-night stands! Lee felt like an Austro-Hungarian emperor attended on his deathbed by flappers. He felt them stealing his life—literally going back in time and taking, through their incoherent lifestyles, the little he had struggled so hard to attain. They didn’t look up to him as a poet. They thanked his generation for inventing the methods of appropriation (“found poetry”) and spontaneity (carelessness) that consecrated their impromptus as art. They didn’t know the concepts of the work, of personhood, of authorship. He had always been looking for things to bind himself to, relations and contexts. Or at least the meaningful absence of both. Now his students skittered over the surface of life like water bugs. They made casual sexual conquests, while he made traditional ham biscuits that took four days.

  The Maoist Russ Meyer fan was an especial thorn in his side. She was an outspoken lesbian feminist à la Adrienne Rich (in 1984!) and self-proclaimed local chairman of the Society for Cutting Up Men (provincial eclecticism and the so-called postmodern: discuss). She was pretty with beautiful chestnut hair and could hold forth all night with her acolytes gathered around her. Soon she had the editorial staff of the Stillwater Review convinced you couldn’t read poetry aloud if a man was in the room and, furthermore, that a man couldn’t judge poetry written by a woman. It was still a women’s college, with mostly women on the faculty, particularly in the humanities, so there wasn’t a man for them to exclude besides Lee. She went so far as to lead a rebellion against his magazine’s publishing poetry by men. With more difficulty than he dreamed possible, he bargained them down to one female issue a year.

  And she wasn’t even on the editorial board! She was too busy running her film festivals and writing an honor’s thesis on Warren Beatty’s ass in Shampoo. She told him Marge Piercy’s poetry was more emotionally available than his and thus more radical. This girl’s lesbianism didn’t mean she slept with women. Quite the opposite. She believed men were necessary sex objects, while whatever drove her to manipulate girls into banding together to do her will was a higher, sacred form of libido. She regarded the token male Lee as a dull-witted, penile one-trick pony (to her, consistency was evidence of a mind standing erect), while women were polymath geniuses until proven otherwise. Lee fantasized about accidentally fucking her to death. Not as a sexual fantasy, just as a way of seeing her dead that he might be able to pass off as an accident.

  He had been hammered into an unmentionable existential crisis by one of those annoying letters gay men were getting in those days. It began, “Dear Lee, you may not remember me . . .”

  He remembered the writer vividly: a black-haired, post-Appalachian Trollope devotee with a singsong British accent, affectations born of a desire so blatant it can only have been unconscious to be everything his parents were not. The boy would do things like stumble in the kitchen and fall against Lee, lingering pressed against him, pushing off flat-handed against Lee’s legs to stand up again. He had no idea what he wanted. Lee let him fall deeply and helplessly in love, too far to say no to anything, before he made his move. The boy had serious literary ambitions, and Lee had promoted his career with every resource at his command, gotten him a scholarship to Columbia. And there his troubles began. The boy thought he was a little insignificant speck of a person who needed a strong guiding hand. Which worked fine if he was being passed around hand to hand by men who cared, but not so well running the club gauntlet in New York.

  Oh, the tragedy of it, this object of great loves who regarded himself as a speck. And now the hostile takeover, the body making explicit how little of ourselves we can claim to own. Syphilis rising from deep down organs you never knew you had, diseases of all kinds seeping through the body and stopping at its limits as if projected on a screen. The tissues like autumn leaves falling from this alien tree, infecting lookers-on with ridiculous viruses and strange contagious cancers, and the beautiful boy, who thought himself unlovable, telling Lee he had no idea who had infected him with this thing. To Lee’s mind, the situation flung nihilism in all directions like an exploding volcano. He burned the letter in the sink and fled straight out the door, tying his shoes and buttoning his shirt as he drove down the highway to a free clinic in North Carolina. He was less likely to see someone he knew at a free clinic than at any medical practice in the Commonwealth, and the Carolinas might as well have been the moon. Eight days later he drove back for his results: negative. But the intervening time had marked him. He had been a beautiful boy once himself. The boy he liked so much would die piteously, radiating horrors like a Three Mile Island reactor block.

  He envied straight men’s lives of duty and gaiety, their world bounded by pregnancy and the clap. Nothing you couldn’t laugh off or submit to. A shallow place, but how to tell them gently? Best not try. They were more fun innocent.

  Case in point: Byrdie, the son growing effortlessly into lifelong boyhood. Still a schoolboy, soon to be an old boy, blithely accepting accidents as privileges—for instance, his natural immunity to HIV. (Byrdie liked studious, upper-class females. They were not exactly high risk.) Byrdie was the phoenix edition of Lee, adapted to the novel environment, and Lee was a useless relic. He had positioned himself all his life as a rebel against a hegemonic order no one was interested in questioning anymore. It had lost its power to crush and all its clumsy weapons that inspired active fear. Its dominance was equal, but separate. Its monopoly was over, by design, because it had finally figured out that if you put the oppressed in charge of their own destinies they will trouble you no longer.

  Thus the editorial staff informed him that they had an innovative plan to put out the next all-women’s issue as a public reading in Richmond. Not entirely public. More precisely semipublic, since no men would be allowed inside and it would be by invitation only to female subscribers and women they told about it. No male would ever see, read, or be aware of the poems. Publishing poems on paper makes authors invisible, which is what men want.

  Lee sat quietly for many seconds, pondering what he knew of Mao, then countered, with a hopeful air, “Mightn’t presenting
authors onstage encourage a cult of personality?”

  “We all read together, in unison,” the poetry editor explained. “It’s a symbol of our solidarity. We’re not invisible anymore, we’re invincible.” She glanced at the Maoist self-appointed editor at large, who signaled her approval with a smile.

  Looking cautiously at his own hands on the table, Lee objected that institutional subscribers were paying an inflated price up front and reasonably expected four issues a year.

  “If the librarians can’t come to our readings, we can add an extra issue to their subscriptions,” the managing editor suggested.

  “So if people insist on authors and the cold, dead printed word, we hand them an extra book for free.”

  The irony was too heavy for her, and she said, “Yes!”

  Lee spread his arms over the empty chairs to his left and right and said, “Let’s just save the reading, give everybody three issues for the price of four, and tell them to fuck themselves. It would be more like performance art.”

  There was a silence at the oblong table studded with cups of oat straw tea. The Maoist sat leaned over her notepad, writing fast.

  Lee added, “Do you all mind if I ask you all something? Because there’s one thing I don’t get. You think men are cold, unfeeling two-bit Caligulas and you hate them. So far so good.”

  “You shouldn’t take it personally,” the poetry editor said.

  “You think if you fence men out, women will finally flower and go to seed. I’m not wild about men myself, and they definitely can’t stand me. I teach poetry at a women’s college, for fuck’s sake. So could you please find another scapegoat for your struggle against patriarchy? I’d like to produce a magazine, if I may.”

  The Maoist looked up. “Lee, if you’re alluding to your homosexuality, the notion that homosexuality is less patriarchal than heterosexuality has been conclusively disproven. Gay culture is based on male bonding, which reinforces patriarchal structures instead of undermining them, and it produces exaggerated forms of dominance, for example in the leather and B&D subcultures or in its celebration of pornography, prostitution, and promiscuity. I realize it’s not your field, but gay liberation is turning back the clock on a hundred years of feminism.”