Mislaid (11 page)

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.”

“Christ,” he said in exasperation. “Where’d you read that,
Ladies’ Home Journal
? You think women don’t sleep around, just because they bring a moving van on the second date? Feminism was cooked up to keep the black man and the homosexuals down. ‘Hey, Mr. Charlie, why don’t you hire your wife? That way you can double your money, instead of letting some faggot make enough to feed his kids!’”

The girls gasped.

Lee paused to double back and revise what he had just said, but he saw it was impossible. Returning to poetry, his rock of abstraction in the storm of reality, he proclaimed, “I built up this magazine from scratch, and I’m proud of it. It’s mine, not the college’s. And I can move it to another college, if that’s what I have to do to publish poetry.” He closed his notebook and stood up from the table. “My final offer,” he said. “You publish four issues of a poetry magazine a year, in book form, or you resign.”

“We resign!” the Maoist called out, but she felt a hand on her arm.

“I need this for my résumé,” the girl next to her whispered.

Lee turned around. “That’s exactly it. You need this for your résumé. Guess what? You’re all fired. I don’t need you for my résumé. I don’t need to read unsolicited poems to reject them. I can get the best poets in America by asking if they’ve got anything for me. Suck on that.” He wiped his sweaty palms on his pants and flounced out.

“He wouldn’t dare fire us,” a girl said anxiously.

“Maybe he has a point. It was his idea, having a magazine and all. And it’s not his fault he’s a man.”

“It doesn’t make any difference,” the poetry editor pointed out. “We can put it on our résumés either way.”

“He needs us to do layout and stuff envelopes,” one girl said hopefully.

There was instantaneous consensus that the last speaker was right. Lee would hardly type up copy, open mail, maintain the mailing list, or do anything else except call the shots.

So there was no point in taking the mass firing seriously. They continued the editorial meeting without him as though nothing had happened, tacitly assuming four printed issues a year, one featuring black writers and one with women, both with interviews to add context.

Out on the placid, viscous lake, heading home, Lee raged bitterly . . . but inwardly, not enough to rock the canoe. To be at once a disinherited black sheep and a straw man liable for the sins of patriarchy! It was too rich. In their stupidity and immaturity, the Stillwater students of recent years increasingly called to mind the fact that he had a daughter. A daughter who would already be too old to start on time at Foxcroft, should he ever find her. A daughter old enough now to come calling. But she didn’t, meaning she didn’t know he existed. The closer she got to the age of his students, the more he hated them. The more options
bright women had, the fewer of them turned up in places like Stillwater. He gazed down at the green broth beneath his keel and thought, They ought to change the name to Pillwater. The college’s primitive septic system was letting so much untreated urine into the lake that its hermaphroditic mollusk species had all turned female and died out.

Lee often thought of his children.

That is, he thought of them whenever he was alone and angry, which was often. To feel angrier, he thought of Mireille. When the adrenaline spiked uncomfortably, he would console himself with Byrdie. Of course Byrdie had the potential to become an arrogant ass because everybody worshipped him, but so far he was safe in the secondary phase of education where things still revolve around universal ethical values. No one sat him down to say, “You are the type boys imitate and girls fuck. You are the phallus spoken of by Lacan. You have power. Now abuse it.” Back then they saved that stuff for MBA programs, and something kept Byrdie from picking it up on his own. Perhaps being abandoned by his mother had put a dent in his self-esteem?

Woodberry’s prettiest, richest day student made a desperate play for Byrdie. But he had no interest in long-term alliances forged at teen summit meetings. His Stillwater babysitters had taught him all about being a sexy girl’s favorite spoiled darling, and he wanted more. That naive faith shielded him from false coin.

He recognized her tactics at once, partly because the student body included the heir to a very large ranch and a Bostonian who would be king of France just as soon as France reintroduced the monarchy, and he’d seen girls stalk them. The girls worked slowly, studying every trace and footprint, keeping their quarry moving for months until it lay down exhausted. At which point, in Byrdie’s opinion, a girl in love would have pounced. Her hands
would have gone out and encircled the boy she loved, drawing him away from human society and down to a mattress. Whereas an aspiring bride-to-be would establish a public surveillance post at a distance of five feet and never budge.

The pretty day student became known as his girlfriend almost before he’d exchanged a word with her. They ate lunch together every day, or certainly at the same table. And in fact she was charming, pretty, and very smart. They were in AP calculus together. They attended basketball games and formal dances. But she didn’t pounce, and Byrdie knew a woman worth fucking would make the first move in spite of herself. She would know what she wanted and coax it out of him, absolving him of all responsibility and bathing him in a flame of eternal femininity that would make sex so unlike masturbation that nobody in his right mind could ever get them mixed up.

That romantic belief in transcendent submissiveness, borrowed from Hesse’s
Steppenwolf,
kept him a virgin until college.

Lee’s sex life was a lot like Byrdie’s, but he knew the reason. Beyond his little AIDS scare, he had gained weight. His back bothered him. Riding English hurt his knees. Riding Western gave him hemorrhoids. He couldn’t have fucked a Maoist to death if he tried. He would drive up to Orange occasionally to take Byrdie out to dinner and sometimes play a few holes of golf, but mostly he was avoiding full-length mirrors. He saw Byrdie coasting through school on gentlemen’s Bs, singing in the chorus, playing piano, painting in the art room, brooding over novels, getting into stylish and inconsequential trouble, sublimating frustrations into golf, being a major cunt tease to his poor innocent girlfriend, and otherwise doing everything a boy should be doing at his age, and he was satisfied in every way. The perfect child, goddamn it.