by Nell Zink
Ike said, “Not if he can’t get his nose out of a book he ain’t.”
Dee laughed at Ike and said to Meg, “He doesn’t know where I got this egghead boy, but the other boys take after him so much. I said it’s time a woman had a son for a change.”
Meg said she was down with that.
Temple’s first great love was a white girl in the drama club whose father had a hereditary union job with the power company. “Union job” was a phrase redolent of wealth and luxury. Her expensive clothes fit perfectly. She had flunked two grades, so she was the most physically mature girl in the entire “academic” track. She did not fear Temple’s dark skin. What troubled her was his prose. Being too shy to speak to her, he wrote letters. Close-written pages, front and back, torn from a spiral notebook. She felt she had a sex slave for the asking: a boy of whom she could ask absolute devotion, offering no social acknowledgment in return. No hand-holding, no publicity, no parental interference. It was an alluring prospect. But she couldn’t make sense of the letters. She brought them to Karen for interpretation.
Sitting with the girl in the school’s new media center, Karen read over a typical passage:
You are my Beatrice, my Odette. The passion that rules my nights, the vise grip on my trachea that cleaves my mind from the disgraced preponderance of me, wafting my spirit aloft while my body plunges into darkness with only one despairing, shameful possibility of release. Through the clenched fist of joy its tongues reach upward into my mind, the intractable flame of sorrow. All I beg is one touch of your soft hand to cool my burning eyes.
She frowned.
“Is it dirty?”
“He wants you to touch him on the eyes.”
“Didn’t you see where he talks about his Thomas?”
Karen looked the letter over and recognized a passage copied from Native Son. “Bigger Thomas is a character in a book,” she explained.
She read further. The modernist literature Temple preferred was not rich in seduction scenes, or indeed in any model that might have aided him in formulating compliments. Consequently the letter was filthy. It was a pastiche of public library porn from Irving Stone to Philip Roth. It went on for nineteen pages. “He’s ambivalent,” Karen summed up.
Karen looked forward to their daily rendezvous very much. But as the weeks passed the girl became uneasy. She realized that Temple would never ravish her unbidden, but he might be very close to asking her to junior prom. Temple for his part suffered the tortures of the damned and compared his chosen to the Dark Lady of the sonnets. Finally she asked her mother what she should do. The answer was simple and immediate: boarding school. He never saw her again.
One afternoon Meg saw out the window that a large red tanker truck was backing through the courtyard, right over Karen’s mouse town. The town for mice was something between a garden railway and the Lilliputian village in Mistress Masham’s Repose. It was small and inconspicuous, being modeled on the county’s towns of one or two stores each. It was very childish and in Meg’s view due for destruction, but still the truck went right over it like it was nothing.
Meg marched outside, said “Excuse me,” saw the driver’s face, and marched back inside shivering. She knew that face. She even knew the name on the truck: Fleming. FLEMING’S OIL, GAS, AND PROPANE.
The driver had been a junior garbage man at the college, one of the kids who rides on the side of the truck, strong enough to heave full trash cans higher than his head. As he lowered his hose into Centerville’s oil tank, Meg sat down on the kitchen floor with her back to the cabinets. There was no sign that he had recognized her.
“Mrs. Fleming?” he called out. “That you, Mrs. Fleming?” He knocked on her back door and tried the knob, but didn’t come in. Cha Cha started yapping. One last time he called out, a little louder, “Mrs. Fleming! That you? I ain’t going to hurt you.”
Meg made herself very small and pressed into the corner under the sink. He opened the door.
“I’ll be damned,” he said. “I know you from Stillwater.” Meg hyperventilated and hugged Cha Cha tight. “I’m pleased to see you. People was worried. Running away like that, taking y’all’s kid. People thought you had ended it all.”
“Just get out of my house,” Meg said.
“That ain’t going to help you,” he said. “I’m looking right at you. I ain’t going to forget I saw you.”
“And can I do something for you? What do you want?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Nothing, probably. I’m just surprised. I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to make sure it was you. Now I’ll be on my way, if you don’t mind. I got deliveries to make. Good day to you.” He tapped his fingernails on the counter and didn’t turn toward the door.
Briefly, Meg thought of cash. Then she remembered something more likely to keep him quiet. “You like to get high?” she asked, getting to her feet and putting the dog down.
“Do I like to get high,” he said. “Do I like to get high.”
“I can see that you like to get high,” she said. “You want to be my partner in crime? If you would step outside for a moment. You don’t want to see where I keep my stash. It’s personal.”
“I’ll be right outside here,” he said.
Meg unfolded her little magnesium stepladder so she could reach the inaccessible cabinet over the fridge. From it she removed a pressure cooker containing an ungodly number—a highly illegal number—of Baggies filled with white powder, enough to get her forty years in the pen, and removed four Baggies. Then she rummaged through her hardware drawer until she found her .38. She called out, “Just a second!” Her ammo was in the next room, locked in a desk drawer. But would she have fired it?
She decided she didn’t need the ammo, because she wasn’t about to shoot anybody in her own kitchen.
It was a spontaneous sense: Don’t shoot him in your kitchen.
It proved that at last she had become truly black inside. Her mother would have shot a strange black man in her kitchen and called the cleaning lady before she called the coroner. But Meg wasn’t so sure she could get away with it. She even considered the effect on the man’s family, needing his income.
She waved at him through the window to come back inside.
“This is it,” she said, pointing the gun in his general direction and handing him the drugs. The gun was heavy and she wondered if she could have hit anything she wasn’t actually touching with the muzzle. Not that it mattered. “That’s all there is. There’s no more where this came from. Once a year, when you deliver fuel oil. That’s it.”
“Twice a year!” he protested. “You people use up a lot of oil down here. You should try to save on it sometimes. Y’all keep y’all’s windows open all winter.” He put the Baggies in his pocket and politely tipped his welder’s cap.
He was tempted to take the gun, but he was unsure whether it might not be loaded. He recalled that Mrs. Fleming was crazy.
Two hours later, he was dead. He had greatly misjudged the speed of an oncoming dump truck as he made a left turn from a stop sign. The other driver also died. Even the drugs and Baggies burned, leaving no trace.
He was already two counties away, so Meg never heard about the accident.
She was scared of him for months. Visibly scared, as in jumpy. But not rational jumpiness, the kind that makes you pack your stuff and head for the hills. She put the fuel truck driver out of her mind—so far out she couldn’t get at him—and worried about things she could talk about with Dee. Temple’s love life. Karen’s grades.
Gradually her fear faded to the existential angst that incessantly haunts all mankind in modernity.
The existential angst served to mask her fear of Lee. The angst was: That you only live once. That you shouldn’t waste your youth. She had no lover, no close friends, no underground theater group to perform her self-censored plays. She had to fake poverty to keep the fuzz off her back. If she wore stylish clothes or drove a reliable car, social services would get suspicious. She didn’t spend enough time honing her c
raft. Et cetera, ad nauseam. It was the worry about not making the most of herself. The thing that troubles nearly all of us, nearly every day.
The fear of Lee was: That he would catch up with her, turn her child against her, wring her heart out like a dishrag, confront her with Byrdie, make her loathe herself, and get her in trouble.
That fear of Lee was useful to her, because it served to mask a deeper fear. One she never feared consciously, because it was unfearable. There was no way to shoehorn it into her emotions, and thus it could not be properly feared—the same way unthinkable things (such as potentially causing an accident by giving an on-duty driver enough drugs to fuck up a twenty-mule team) can’t be thought.
The unfearable fear was: Here she was, on her own with a little daughter entirely dependent, surviving in a way that could get her sent up for a near lifetime, or even killed.
And all to protect herself from what? From Lee’s emotional manipulation, her powerlessness in a relationship? From being looked down on?
Risking her freedom and her life, the only life she would ever have.
Lee had given her a choice between eviction and therapy. So basically the worst he would have done was throw her out. No way on earth she would have let herself be cornered into getting committed. So the worst-case scenario with Lee was—literally—that she might have to live somewhere other than Stillwater Lake, and miss her kids.
And the worst the state would do with her, if it found that pressure cooker? The worst Lomax might do, if he learned of her mutual blackmail with the driver? He was protective of his supply chain, his income stream, his inventory, his privacy.
Imagine the look on Karen’s face, watching Meg be taken away in handcuffs, never to return. Or coming in after school, past the corpse of Cha Cha, to find her tied up in bed with a piece of her head missing.
Or rather, don’t imagine it. Meg never did.
When a different driver showed up for the next fuel oil delivery in a different truck, she knew she had been wrong to worry, even unconsciously. She received cosmic reassurance that she would always survive.
Seven
On Byrdie’s arrival at the University of Virginia, he was tapped for a secret society, the FHC. Its strict conditions of membership do not permit disclosure of its ritual practice, but suffice it to say that Byrdie had a sheaf of FHC letterhead and used it to write poetry. He liked “Acquainted with the Night” and “Tears, Idle Tears,” so his poetry was generally composed of old-fashioned scholar-and-gentleman-type rondos and villanelles on philosophical themes. He showed it to a girl he liked, and she became his lover—a third-year suburban brunette with thigh-high socks and formal training in vocal jazz who swam sixty laps a day. Her praise of the poetry was so effusive that Byrdie showed it to Lee. In the aftermath Lee did not shoot himself, but in silently disavowing his once-perfect son called out one of the great hangovers of our time.
Byrdie got rushed to some degree by every white frat on campus, with bids from all but the one that said the Lost Cause would rise again. He made no effort to join any of them. He would drop by with drinking buddies on Friday or Saturday night for free beer. He did the shag to jangle pop with girls who were suitably prep. That was all. His buddies came from his courses—boys with shared interests who said clever things in class—and collectively they had no shared background or affiliation whatsoever, unless you counted the house where they gathered early in the evening, nearly every day, to smoke pot.
For reasons no one understands, otherwise intelligent young people are often drawn to illicit mind-altering drugs. A cross section of society would probably show comparable interest among the brightest and dullest young people, but at The University it was a matter of public record that the young men not drawn to drugs were less bright: Thetan House had the highest mean, median, and mode GPA on campus, and its students were concentrated in the most challenging majors. Possibly it takes a great deal of intelligence to ace school stoned. Byrdie liked their soundtrack, and if nothing else, he was going to need cheap rent after he’d sat out the first-year campus residency requirement.
So he joined.
The initiation was uncomplicated compared with other frats, since Thetan had lost its charter and was a locus of lackadaisical haphazardness for boys who worked hard in school. No one invested energy or creativity in scaring off potential pledges. There was no hazing involved, unless you counted being forced to do bong hits until you said “No, thanks, I’ll pass.” For plenty of boys, despite their pride in their intelligence, the challenge was too great. They would do thirty-five and lie there looking unhappy until morning. Prudent Byrdie did four. Then he got talking to some guy about Witness for Peace, maxed and chilled until maybe two, briefly fell asleep in a black-lit attic “meditation room” listening to Bach, and went home to bed. It wasn’t far to his dorm. The house was in an excellent location, between campus and the Confederate cemetery, a most awesome place to smoke a joint, as was revealed to him upon his accession to the frat.
Due to his relatively strong interests in arithmetic and cleanliness, Byrdie was named hegemon-elect before his freshman year was out. The drug frat had alternative druggy names for all its officers. Hegemon was more or less the CEO.
To Lee’s additional discomfort, Byrdie became strangely noncommittal about his major. He had started off talking of business administration. Then he began suggesting that many community organizing projects needed help with their business models. Then he proposed founding progressive urban communities on a sound financial footing. He wished to use his hereditary power and influence to help others help themselves. He was thinking of designing an interdisciplinary major that combined architecture, business administration, and social work, and then running for office. He wasn’t sure. He spent the next summer working for Habitat for Humanity in Richmond and still didn’t know. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” Lee said to him.
“My task is to discover and respond to community needs,” Byrdie replied, seeming to presume that he would never have needs of his own.
Lee met Cary for dinner at the yacht club in Norfolk. They sat opposite each other at a square table decked with several layers of linen and picked at soft-shell crabs. “Two points abaft the port beam,” Lee said.
Cary turned to the left and looked over his shoulder. “Swish!” he said. “Those slacks make her look like Quentin Crisp.”
The object of their attention was a well-built young man wearing a blue blazer and dove-gray pleated-front gabardine pants. He took no notice of Lee and Cary, but pulled out a chair for his dinner date, a man in a seersucker suit whose forelock had been bleached and cellophaned such a shiny peach shade that it put Cary in mind of daylilies, as he said immediately.
He and Lee were wearing the clone look (white oxford cloth button-downs with distressed jeans and white Reeboks) because they wanted to go dancing later on at one of those new non-underground—as in highly conspicuous, with neon and a line out the door—discotheques where they played sped-up music and featured drag queens so tall and square-jawed they couldn’t live as women and had to spend their lives on the run, a.k.a. on tour. Actually Cary was somewhat shy of the mark, with red-soled white bucks on his feet, but his jeans were more distressed than Lee’s.
Cary had read and reread the jeans-distressing tutorial in The Joy of Gay Sex, struggling to make sense of new tricks’ demands on old dogs (Lee’s line). His first pair was a total loss (too much bleach). The second pair came out soft and robin’s-egg blue, but he ruined them during the “lay them out in the driveway and run them over a couple of times” stage. Maybe the guys in the book had flat driveways made of concrete and not rippled heaps of oyster shells? The guys all looked kind of urban in the drawings. The third pair came out just right.
Cary himself wasn’t quite right—soft in the middle, with stubble hiding in folds in his face he was too lazy to shave—but you couldn’t really fault him for not trying. Lee had the look down cold, but he, too, was getting old for it. His hair
was thinning on top and had to be fluffed with mousse. They stirred their drinks in silence, watching the younger men.
“Où sont les neiges d’antan?” Lee asked.
“They should build a monument,” Cary said. “All the times I got my ass beat to a pulp so the youth of today could get dolled up like faggots to go out in public.”
“They ought to come over here and kiss your hand.”
Suddenly, unexpectedly, two women in little black dresses and eye-catching funky accessories entered the room and approached the young men. The men jumped up and kissed them on alternate cheeks, European style. Their collective fluttering wafted odors of Antaeus and Eau Sauvage all the way to Lee and Cary’s table. After securing the attention of the entire room, the two couples sat down again. It was unmistakable. They were straight. All four of them.
And the misfits who had shown America the way to flamboyant self-promotion—originally a way of finding comfort in one another’s brashness as they cowered in basements, fearing for their lives—sat nipping Scotch in identical shirts and 501s, drilled to conformity and finding scant comfort in other people’s flouting it. Lee sighed and lowered his voice. “Cary, are you wearing eyeliner?”
“You are not getting a rise out of me. I cannot abide teasing.”
“God, I feel like a Romanov,” Lee said. “Deposed monarch of the ancien régime, awaiting execution.”
“Welcome to the No South.”
“You mean New South.”
“I mean No South. You can’t have ‘New’ and ‘South.’ It’s oxymoronic. I’m talking about the No South. The unstoppable force that’s putting in central air everywhere until you don’t know whether it’s day or night. Fat boys used to spend their lives in bed and only come out to fish and hunt. Now they go into politics and make our lives hell. One little thing, all by itself—AC—made the South go away overnight.”
“Very astute,” Lee said. “Claude Lévi-Strauss, Sad Subtropics.”
