by Nell Zink
When they brought the boat back in, Meg was waiting for them on the dock. “You kids were in trouble for a while there,” she said. “He wanted to tie you to the boat and burn it. But we talked it out. He’s cool now.”
After that, no power on earth could have induced Byrdie to be on poor terms with Meg.
As for the rapprochement between Karen and Lee, it took several minutes. “I underestimated you,” he said, as soon as they were alone together at a gay (the owner, not the patrons; it’s important to realize that progress isn’t when minorities come out of the closet—generally speaking, black people have been out of the closet since time immemorial—but when they can make money selling vital necessities, not cream soda and carrot cake) bakery on Cary Street in Richmond. Byrdie’s sojourn with Meg, Luke, Lomax, et al. had gone on for nearly a month, but Lee was still wearing his bike shorts. Karen had invested in a nine-gore hip-hugger suede wrap miniskirt, red cable-knit sweater, khaki trench coat, orange tights, and saddle shoes. It was a thrift-shop look that combined punk, golf, and Antonioni in a way Lee could not help but admire. “Compared to you,” he declared, “we all have frontal lobe damage. You’re the one who noticed the ground rules had changed.”
“Thanks!” Karen said.
“Yes, our brains are like Swiss cheese,” he added, sort of undermining his compliment after the fact. “So what do you plan to do with your newfound freedom, besides follow Temple around?”
“Just be myself. I like having a new identity. It’s like being in witness protection. I can drop everything and start a new life like Mom.”
“Ooh, and what does Temple say to being dropped?”
“He doesn’t care about my identity. He’s been calling me Blondi, like Hitler’s dog.”
“You should make him stop that.”
“No, it’s just since this morning. I think it might be his art. Nicknames are a major art form in the black community. Mom’s girlfriend is a scholar of black culture. She’s been collecting them. It’s so aggravating. Temple’s meeting her halfway, and then some. He started calling Mom Hal, like the insane computer in 2001.”
Lee said, “Priceless. So back to my question. Is there anything else you might want or need, as part of your new life? I’m here to help!”
“I think a new life is plenty enough on its own. It’s confusing but exciting. I mean, I’m glad I grew up black, because it’s cooler, but it’s white people who run the place, obviously.”
“Not all white people.”
“Well, some of them. Like Byrdie at his trial, telling the judge what to do. That was cool. I want to be white like that.”
“So your goal in life is to be white? Isn’t that a tad, uh, minimal?”
“What do I need a life goal for?”
“You refuse to be pinned down.”
“What do you mean? With a pin like a bug, or somebody holding my arms?”
“You’re your mother’s child.”
“Well, if you really want to know, I was thinking I could go to law school like Uncle Trip. I could help Byrdie. His housing projects are a really horrible idea, because what’s cool is when poor people get to move into rich-people neighborhoods. The houses they build for poor people are not nice. Houses should be for rich people only, but shouldn’t discriminate by income. Let people live in them even after they lose all their money.”
Lee sighed. “Listen, kiddo. That’s cute, and insightful, but there’s something imperialist—something third world—something profoundly Southern and just wrong about the way you and your brother both approach thinking on this issue. Neither of you has ever seen money being invested, just harvested, and you think it grows in the ground. It’s what the structuralists call a homology, like people believing in the trickle-down effect after they spend their lives waiting for their inheritance to trickle down. Byrdie’s my son, I raised him, but more than that he’s a child of his generation. And his generation can kiss my ass. Freelance city planner. My God. He’s going to wake up fifty years old in a squat on Church Hill. And Temple is worse. Temple ought to be at West Point, learning discipline, with a job when he gets out and a place to stay. But no, it’s got to be comp fucking lit. Those pretty-boy parasites are going to bankrupt both of us. I won’t be around to see it, but I can see you already. Picking up the pieces, paying their bills. The levelheaded little woman, keeping things in line. Darling, take my advice and major in accounting. Get your CPA.”
To this outburst, Karen replied evenly, “That’s why I’m glad we might move to New York. Mom says the wife needs to keep control over the purse strings and be the chatelaine. In New York they have an aboveground economy, so I can practice. This cake is so great. Mmm. It’s the first real buttercream I ever ate.”
As he finished his Death by Chocolate, Lee pondered how he might steer the conversation around to a survivable second date. He wanted to get to know his daughter, he really did. Yet drawing her out was possibly not the most rewarding exercise, while doing the talking himself was evidently also a piss-poor idea.
Ever quick on his feet, he concocted a fallback strategy: See her in action, preferably doing something that would endear him to her if not vice versa. That is, get her to have fun at his expense while looking pretty and not getting sticky or irritable. She might not inspire his love, but he could command hers.
“Mireille,” he began, “the truth is, when I said goals, I meant stuff you might need or want, like fall clothes for school. I’m well aware you’re a teenage girl. I’m lucky you didn’t ask for world peace and a cure for cancer.” He paused, made a mental note that errant and rueful was not the aesthetic to go for, and continued. “You need a winter coat and some clothes that fit you a little better. How about a shopping trip to New York? You need everything, and I think it would be nice to go on a father-daughter excursion before school starts up again. You should let me spoil you a little. See the world. Your experience thus far has been rather circumscribed.”
“A shopping trip?” Karen said.
“We can hit the highlights,” Lee said. “Stay at the Plaza. Go to shows. Art museums. Get you a haircut. Eat some sushi.”
“But I’m going to New York anyway,” Karen said. “That’s where Luke lives.”
“If you don’t want to go there, we can go anywhere. London, Paris, you name it. All you need is a passport. We could have lots of fun.”
“Anywhere at all?”
“Anywhere.”
She hesitated. “Anywhere?”
Lee rolled his eyes and said firmly, “Yes.”
“Well, there is one place I always wanted to go.”
“If it’s Disney and Epcot, summer is out of the question.”
“Dad. I can call you Dad, right?”
“Of course.”
“Did you ever read Kaputt?”
Lee did not answer, so she went on. “It’s my favorite book. It’s a memoir of World War II by a guy named Curzio Malaparte. He starts out by visiting his friend Axel Munthe on the Isle of Capri, and he thinks his friend Axel is, like, dumb, for caring a lot about birds. But before that, he visits his other friend, King Bernadotte, whose hobby is embroidery.” She pronounced the names “Mallaparty,” “Monthy,” and “Burnadotty,” but Lee did not smile. “He’s the king of Sweden, but what he does all day is embroider, like, napkins! And then Malaparte goes to the war. And he realizes that people really are exactly like birds. They’re innocent bystanders only an asshole would kill”—here Karen developed fierce-looking tears in her eyes—“and embroidery is symbolic of the very best part about them. He goes all around the war, seeing beautiful people and animals suffer and die for no reason, but he never looks away. He writes it all down. And in the end he goes back to Capri to build himself this house . . .”
Her voice slowed as she saw his eyes, which had turned glassy, being squeezed shut. “Dad, why are you crying? Do you think he’s a fascist? Temple says he’s a fascist.”
She lowered her eyes to her empty plate. She saw that to
a sophisticate like Lee, reading Malaparte was equal in puerility to eating scabs, and that she would soon be in New York, acquiring modish things to make herself less of a rube.
Lee said, “Don’t mind me. It’s just my life flashing before my eyes. You were raised under a rock, yet your life’s dream is to see the Villa Malaparte. And now I realize I must have passed something down to you in my semen after all. The divine spark. It’s the first time in my life I ever felt like a man.”
The hush in the room was punctuated by a creaking of chair legs as interested parties leaned closer. The hush deepened, and a quiet stillness fell. A girl begging for something to do with fascism, a man in spandex moved to tears by semen: Everyone present felt that something significant was happening. Awed silence is the universe’s clutch. Which it now released, propelling Karen and Lee from lives of neutral idling into a world of irreversible events and irreplaceable objects. She had a parent. He had a child. A busybody approached their table and whispered, “Sir—”
As one, they rose and walked together out of the café to take possession of their new abode, the sky over Capri, which just then was glowing dark blue over Cary Street.
The press had wheedled the gist of the story out of various onlookers, so it wasn’t long before Karen got a letter from The University saying her minority scholarship and financial aid package were in jeopardy.
“Quand même,” she said, tucking it under a placemat. She and Temple were transferring together to NYU on the best scholarship of all: Daddy’s Money. It turned out Lee’s parents had not spent everything. There was still plenty left over, plus the land, and he had forgotten all about his one great-grandfather who was alive somewhere in a home. Until suddenly he wasn’t. He left a huge estate in Albemarle County to so many people it had to be sold for cash. A great deal of trickling occurred. Lee could even get the Corps of Engineers to come in and stabilize the level of Stillwater Lake. He was landscaping the banks with poet habitat—clematis arbors, espaliered fruit. Slowly, the poets were coming back.
Conveniently, certain people who taught at CUNY owned a studio apartment in the Village and were planning to pool their money with Meg’s to buy a loft in Chinatown. Karen and Temple didn’t even have to apartment hunt.
Meg had confessed to all manner of wrongdoing. Luke’s response had been to become sexually aroused and steer the conversation around to Meg’s body, which she compared to a Stradivarius. Meg knew then that she was in the presence of something inconceivably precious: a woman literally crazy about her. She began to subscribe to Luke’s belief that she had never made a mistake in her life. Luke was her destiny, and her life was the road leading to Luke.
Absolved of her guilt, she got up the courage to visit her parents. They were unchanged. She was floored. Here she was, a woman with grown children and a story to tell, and her mother was still putting peonies and irises in exactly the same places. Her hair had gone gray, but it was still in the same symmetrical little perm. Her dad had no new hobbies or opinions. Between them lay an unbridgeable emotional gulf. It had been there ever since the day she told them she would grow up to be a man. Her mother had stopped expecting any joy from her that day. Her father had never started. As far as she could tell, her role in their plan for producing descendants had been to bear Byrdie.
Karen was collateral damage. They refused to let her visit. They said they would see her if and when she left Temple, but not before. “That will put a crimp in Thanksgiving,” Meg said. “You’re alienating your only granddaughter, and I don’t think your grandson really goes for this kind of thing either.”
“You’ll all face facts soon and come to your senses,” her father said. “Until then, we can look after ourselves.”
“We’re retiring to Vermont,” her mother added.
Meg drove out past the Browns’ house, where she saw Leon out in the yard, trimming a hedge. Her borrowing of his dead daughter seemed to have caused no ill effects. A little son or grandson was helping him out by squashing a nest of gypsy moth caterpillars one by one with a brickbat. A contented child.
That is not to say that Lee immediately kept his promise to be nice all the time. But his redeemer Karen disapproved of meanness, so he had to stop making fun of people, even sitting ducks like Temple and Meg, and then he got out of the habit. He had never meant to be cold. All his life he had been out of his depth. Sexual abuse, domestic violence, a transparently evil social order, poets, academia, etc., had taught him to respect people’s boundaries. In a world where people have fixed limits, it’s safest to be an arrogant bastard and push yourself and others to come out on top. But Karen was larger on the inside than on the outside. She had no boundaries. Anything might affect her. She was significant everywhere, like one of those atom bombs that fits in a suitcase. He began to speak and listen and care about the world, and it made him a different person.
He did not mention life goals again. Life has a goal, he noted, and harping on it is counterproductive.
Given Lee’s love, Karen started paying somewhat less attention to Temple—which was not a bad thing! She was sixteen! Does a sixteen-year-old really need nonstop trysts with a wild-eyed fiancé? Wouldn’t she be better off benefiting from the sophistication and knowledge of a supportive, attentive parent? What if it was your daughter, assuming you were that kind of parent?
Still, she insisted on living with Temple, explaining to Lee that with him around she could always be assured of finding leftover pizza in the refrigerator. She would never have to cook. Lee admitted it was a strong argument.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photograph by Fred Filkorn
NELL ZINK grew up in rural Virginia. She has worked in a variety of trades, including masonry and technical writing. In the early 1990s, she edited an indie rock fanzine. Her writing has also appeared in n+1. Her debut novel, The Wallcreeper, was published in 2014. She lives near Berlin, Germany.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
ALSO BY NELL ZINK
The Wallcreeper
CREDITS
Cover design by Allison Saltzman
COPYRIGHT
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
MISLAID. Copyright © 2015 by Nell Zink. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-236477-7
EPub Edition May 2015 ISBN 9780062364791
15 16 17 18 19 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers Australia Pty. Ltd.
Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street
Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia
www.harpercollins.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Canada
2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor
Toronto, ON M4W 1A8, Canada
www.harpercollins.ca
New Zealand
HarperCollins Publishers New Zealand
Unit D1, 63 Apollo Drive
Rosedale 0632
Auckland, New Zealand
www.harpercollins.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF, UK
www.harpercollins.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
195 Broadway
New York, NY 10007
www.harpercollins.com
