Mislaid (10 page)

Even Meg couldn’t have seen Karen in it. And the description gave her race as white. So even if it had been a good likeness, people who knew her would have said, “Funny how that missing white girl Karen Brown almost looks like our Karen Brown!” But almost no one saw it. Snatched children on milk cartons
were still years away. Eventually it appeared in a pamphlet aimed at school administrators and teachers. Distribution was hit or miss, and it missed.

If Lee had known how Mickey was living, how would he have reacted? If he had known his daughter had but one toy, a rabbit-skin mouse Lomax bought her at Horne’s?

She carried it in her hand. She would balance it on a fallen log and lie down to squint at it with one eye closed so that it loomed like a buffalo. Her spiritual kinship with Lee would have been obvious to any impartial observer, were there such a thing as an impartial observer. What is a poem, if not a toy mouse viewed from an angle that makes it appear to take over the world?

Lee was not that observer. His thoughts on his back porch surrounded him like a carpet of mice, immobilizing him via his unwillingness to cause them pain. The mice of introspection were as effective as any buffalo herd. He was strong, and the energy that kept him motionless was his own. Expending it on self-defeat exhausted him every day.

A
t school Byrd Fleming was accounted slightly weird but
popular, neatly straddling two pigeonholes without fitting in either. He could hang around with rich kids, slinging derogatory remarks about the middle classes with blasé aplomb, without being regarded as a wannabe. When it came to food, beverages, and drugs, he was unsurpassed, awing even the teachers with his disdain for clove cigarettes and Tokay. All the boys copied his way of making gin and tonics. The rich kids liked him because he never claimed to have done anything he hadn’t done. Deep powder skiing: Sounds cool. Twelve-meter yacht: Sounds cool. Orgy in a model apartment: Sounds cool. In exchange he offered them solidly grounded, reliable secondhand knowledge of nightclubs, high culture, and sex for hire.

He finagled a single room his junior year and stayed in it senior year, because it was on the ground floor and he could get in and out without using the door. In warm weather he could often be seen and heard sitting in the window, picking out Jerry Garcia guitar solos on a Gibson Hummingbird somebody left at his dad’s house. He dressed perfectly in boat mocs, oversized khakis,
threadbare button-downs, and a navy blazer with
OMNIA PRO DEO
on the breast pocket. He shrugged when people asked what school. Said somebody left it at his dad’s house. His black cashmere overcoat soft as chambray: Don’t know, some faggot forgot it at my dad’s house. Fleming’s dad’s house was widely regarded as something akin to the Xanadu where Kubla Khan decreed his stately pleasure dome.

And compared with the other kids’ homes, it was. But no one had seen it. Lee and Byrdie had had a minor disagreement after Lee’s first parents’ weekend, freshman year. “You should tell your little friends to stop coming on to me,” Lee had said.

“Dad, are you bonkers? What are you talking about?”

“The tall kid, what’s-his-name. Chad. Thad?”

“Thad’s a senior. He has two girlfriends, one at Madeira and one at Chatham Hall!”

“And they use him and don’t put out, and he thinks he can work that magic on me. If I fucked every high school senior who wanted his poetry in the
Stillwater Review,
my dick would be worn down to a nub and it would still be useless juvenilia. You tell him that.”

Byrdie drew back as though a cream puff had exploded in his hand. He closed his eyes and resolved to avoid boys who wanted to meet his father.

The first couple of times he was invited to friends’ houses for the weekend, he went. He sat waiting for their moms to serve roast that was getting cold while their dads carved it, and played Monopoly with their little brothers until bedtime. Then it occurred to him that the school administration wasn’t in the habit of calling parents to check whether visitors had arrived. He and a friend would sign out for the weekend, take a taxi to the Greyhound station in Orange, and check into the residence hotel where the more alcoholic members of the school’s kitchen staff lived. Given a
sufficient bribe, the taxi driver would continue to the ABC store, pick up two fifths of Tanqueray, and deliver it to the hotel.

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.