Mislaid (15 page)

The sun went down and the whole club drifted outside. A waiter served drinks and turned up the music. The younger people played in the pool, or sat on the edge dangling their feet in the water. Cary and Lee had about all the fun they could handle, which wasn’t much. Wriggling on a lounger in tight, wet denim will make you miss madras and khakis, and wet boxers: no. Then it was late, and they headed home to sleep while they were both still able to drive to their own satisfaction.

They couldn’t go to the Cockpit. It was closed. It had never been an underground club. It had a liquor license and a sprinkler system and clean sanitary facilities. The authorities tolerated it. Hardly anybody knew about it. Then it made the paper in a celebratory article by a well-meaning journalist. He thought hundreds
of happy men dancing unmolested to a jukebox in a crowded bar was a sign of gay liberation, which he strongly supported. The name alone: Cockpit. Naval air station or no naval air station, it had to go. Public pressure shuttered it overnight for zoning violations. So many men, so little parking.

Karen Brown was a good year and a half older than Mireille Fleming, and she had skipped a grade. At fifteen and eight months, when it came time for her to get her learner’s permit and start driving the car, she had in reality just turned fourteen.

But what was Meg going to do? Confess? She recalled hearing somewhere that the legal age to drive in Texas was twelve. Besides, adulthood is never something girls grow into. It is something they have thrust upon them, menstruation being only the first of many two-edged swords subsumed under the rubric “becoming a woman,” all of them occasions to stay home from school and weep. Not so long ago, Karen’s pregnant schoolmates, who reliably came to Dee for help and were driven to a clinic in DC (it was called Sigma, but Dee called it Stigma or—if they came out crying—Smegma), would have been tied to their assailants for life. Amber Schmidt was already dead of a self-administered abortion (the time-honored handgun method, right on her grandmother’s grave at the memorial park). If these girls were “women,” with all the responsibility that entailed, why shouldn’t Karen drive a car?

Temple volunteered to teach her. It amused Dee to see him in the passenger seat looking perturbed as Karen drew one leg up under her to get a better view of the road. It’s not like you need both feet to drive an automatic. Meg ran out with a pillow and made Karen sit on it. She could see the pillow fly over the bench seat into the back as they drove away.

“I have a little shadow who goes in and out with me, and what can be the use of her is more than I can see,” Dee remarked after Karen backed over a rock, heard the grating sound, and kept going, explaining that once you hit the rock the damage is done and you might as well just go ahead and park the car. Everyone was relieved when Karen finally got her license and gave up driving. The nickname “Shadow” stuck. Even Meg called her Shadow sometimes.

When Karen theorized that Tiffany’s, the famous pancake house in New York City, must be fancy enough to have waiters, Meg took her to Pizza Hut. Karen was so impressed. The romantic lighting, the soft music, the groups of happy people enjoying pizzas together. The helpful service personnel! She had never seen anything like it. Meg cried a little after Karen went to bed.

Karen related her wonderful experience to Temple, and he submitted a request to Dee. She explained that pizza is sugared bread strewn with scraps, and that no waiter would survive serving her a pizza, much less a bill for it. Then Temple recalled that Meg had told him about certain excellent ham biscuits served in a restaurant located at Stratford Hall, birthplace of Robert E. Lee. He informed Dee that if having eaten in a restaurant was a necessary qualification for life beyond the sticks, he would start with those biscuits.

It was Dee’s one authentic encounter with the supernatural. Temple at Stratford Hall became eerily quiet. He ditched the tour group inside of ten minutes, between the basement and the first floor. She found nothing in the tour to offend her; the black reenactment staff was gone, and even the white staff had lost its awe of Robert E. Lee, pointing to the cradle in a corner of the playroom only to say it had been exposed as a fraud. When she finally found Temple among the outbuildings—she had completed the tour and eaten a stale store-bought gingersnap proffered
by a well-groomed black college girl—he was dancing with a billy goat. Standing at the fence, he would raise his hands, and the goat would rear, standing upright. When he lowered them, the goat would crash down, lodging splinters in its horns. He did it over and over and over, making the goat charge straight at him, oblivious to his surroundings and everything else, concentrating on his game. When Dee approached him, he stopped and walked toward her as calmly as if he’d been hired by the foundation to hypnotize goats into killing themselves and just gotten off work. Neither of them said a word about Robert E. Lee, who had still been presented, despite superficial updates, as a reluctant participant in the war and the best of men. They drove to the restaurant. It still had the ham biscuits Meg remembered. Temple ate six.

The spring of his junior year, Temple was nominated by the school district to attend Governor’s School for the Gifted. It was a summer program to give Virginia’s gifted students hope by exposing them to college-level work. He almost failed the qualifying test, which had been introduced to keep schools from appointing their best-dressed pupils. Arguably it retained a certain bias. One question was “Boat is to sheet as car is to (a) fuel (b) accelerator,” and it was pretty easy to think the sheet was the sail if you hadn’t grown up reading your father’s copy of
Royce’s Sailing Illustrated
. Another question asked the gifted to distinguish between golf and bridge foursomes.

Temple was adrift when it came to questions that addressed his environment rather than literature. He had the wrong environment for that. Karen did better on the test, which surprised the school administration briefly and gave them pause. But there was another program they could stick her in, and Temple seemed
wasted on it: a three-week enrichment program for minority students at Old Dominion.

Temple knew he was weak in math and science, so he checked on his Governor’s School application that those were his main interests. He ended up being assigned for the monthlong session to Virginia Polytechnic Institute, socially isolated and misunderstood, surrounded by people who had never heard of John Barth, who wanted to major in hydraulics or agriculture, and with a crush on a girl who programmed computers in Fortran and—to his profound fascination—was learning to speak Russian from her father, a diplomat. Temple came back from Blacksburg intent on two things in life: to learn Russian and to become a diplomat.

The ODU program they put Karen in was amorphous by comparison. There was little actual instruction, and no budget for college professors—just a few grad students with experience as teaching assistants. Writing was by far the cheapest form of enrichment. You just send them to their rooms and tell them to keep a journal, and the next day you make them read it aloud. You give assignments like “My Most Embarrassing Moment.”

The writing workshops felled them all with their hilarity. With no required reading, the children were free to reinvent the wheel and wrote stirring narratives of first sexual encounters and regrettable drug binges. The TAs were awed by their talent and daring, unaware that working-class writing—from biker porn to
True Confessions
—is sparse, economical, and lurid in a way that can only remind grad students of Carver and Bukowski.

Karen couldn’t help thinking she had gotten the short end of the stick, especially when she got letters from Temple that started with “Dear Karen” spelled out in Cyrillic. But she had fun reducing the group to hysterics with her tall tales, and she did meet a girl who made her feel almost normal. Angela Mendez was far whiter than Karen, if you score whiteness on a scale from black
to pink. Karen in summer was platinum blond with skin like lightly toasted marshmallow. Angela was white as a cotton ball. An hour at the pool gave her a sunburn you could peel off in sheets. “What minority are you?” Karen asked at their first tête-à-tête.

“Hispanic,” Angela said. “We’ve never done the genealogy, but you can tell by my name.”

Meg took advantage of Karen’s absence to start another play. It was about the commander of a death squad in El Salvador who falls in love with a nun he’s supposed to massacre. In the early drafts, they were a man and a woman. They were always in bed by act 1, scene 2, because they didn’t have much to say to each other.

She decided to draft them as lesbians to make them more communicative. Afterward she could go back and change the death squad commander character to be male. But it didn’t work. The openhearted death squad commander refused to seem male to her.

She rewrote him as a man. Pouty and sarcastic. Instantly the nun became a solicitous bore. He ignored her. And there they were again, back in bed.

She tried again, establishing the female character first, in scenes with other nuns. Now the death squad commander seemed superfluous. She made him win her heart away from the nice nuns by being even nicer, but they were both so unsexy as affectionate chatterboxes, the love story just fell apart. They had to ignore each other to get anything done.

She tried one last time. She rewrote him as a complete jerk. Instead of falling in love with anybody, the commander said he would kill his own death squad to have sex with the nun. Afterward
the nun went to bed with him to reward him. It was kind of sexy.

Meg saw a distinct pattern to it: patriarchy.

She had wanted to write about idealized partners. But the impressive men she had known weren’t anybody’s partner. They were lone wolves and dictatorial heads of families. The idea of partnering with a powerful man—well, it sounds nice enough, but even on paper it won’t fly. A novel ends with a wedding for a reason. Partnership is antidramatic. Partners are not adversaries. Partners don’t fuck. Yet she dreamed of loving a lesbian partner. Was she stupid?

Lee had been sexy to her at one time. But it wasn’t because they had a relationship. It was the opposite. Because they didn’t. And then she stupidly became his partner. She wasted her love on a wolf. What an excellent use of her youth and beauty! She glared at the typewriter, blaming it for her existential angst.

She finished the play with the nun sacrificing the other nuns one by one to protect the death squad commander from the revenge of his dead death squad’s death squad friends. She tore it into very small pieces and buried it deep in the trash can.

Over milk and cookies after Karen’s return, she confessed to Karen that she had no idea what Karen wanted out of life. “You’re a cipher,” she said. “A mystery. What are your ambitions and desires? When I was your age, I wanted to write plays.”

“I want to get good grades and go to college.”

“And what are you going to do when you get there?”

“How would I know? I need to get there first and see what it’s like. There are all these majors that sound neat, but I don’t know what they are. Like ‘sociology.’ What is it?”

Meg sighed. “Don’t play dumb. Come on. If money were no object, where would you want to go to college?”—Meg had something specific in mind involving her now rather large collection
of cash. Her native, self-compounding black/WASP/drug dealer aversion to public display—her low profile—need not apply to college tuition. Busybodies who learned that Karen was away at a Seven Sisters school would assume the numbers added up because she was black.

“Wherever Temple gets in.” Seeing her mother’s expression, she added, “You didn’t even go to college! So don’t pretend you know what it’s like to be away from your friends.”

Karen took a few cookies off the plate and went outside to lie in her hammock. Meg could see her from the window. Having developed a sensitivity to poison ivy, Karen seldom went in the woods anymore, but the effects of her early training persisted. She would stare at the sky as if it were a TV—as if clouds were more fun than a barrel of monkeys, as Dee put it.

Karen’s mind was racing. She had just finished reading Malaparte’s
Kaputt
and was deeply moved. (The library, like the thrift shop, specialized in the leavings of the elderly dead.) She wanted to talk to Temple about it. She seldom confided in Meg. Like many fresh human beings new to the world, Karen assumed people’s thoughts resembled the things they said. So she didn’t know her mother very well. She had no idea.

Lomax’s financial situation had improved to the point where he was considering investing. Not in anything megalomaniac, like his business partner the ex-SEAL who read
Soldier of Fortune
and wanted to buy an Antonov and start flying to Chihuahua, but in something more pleasant, the overture to a well-earned retirement. He had always wanted to retire by age thirty. “Live fast, die young,” he would say as he cracked another beer on his grandmother’s flowered glider, barely having moved in ten days except to lie down on her sleeping porch. Lassitude was an accepted
hallmark of Southern culture even among Indians on disability, perhaps even more so if their non-Indian (“Irish”) ancestors were mostly Tajik und Uzbek like Lomax’s.

Nonetheless, as it is for many people living more conventional lifestyles, his retirement was supposed to be more exciting than his working life had been. His plan was that in retirement he would fish on the ocean. He had his eye on a deep-V cabin cruiser belonging to a friend who owed him money. He knew it was only a matter of time before it would be his. Then he would lounge on the upholstered bench seat that curved around the back of the boat and watch big marlin come to his lure. He wasn’t yet sure how it worked, but he knew that if you played your cards right, you could land dangerous-looking fish that tasted scrumptious (a word that always wormed its way into his vocabulary after three or four days with his grandmother).

Then came the day when the friend handed over the keys to the boat, saying he had no place to park it anymore since he was moving to a hiding place at an unnamed location until it all blew over. Lomax priced the boat at eight grand and accepted thanks for his generosity. Except he had no place to park it either. He visited his more ambitious friend.