Mislaid (2 page)

Lee was serious about poetry. He thought America was where all the most important work of the 1960s was being done. He really meant it, and could explain it. John Ashbery, Howard Nemerov, and his favorite, Robert Penn Warren. Then the Beats. He had met them all in New York, and they all had a weakness for handsome Southerners who owned counties.

At first Lee had nothing to do with the college. But then a poet friend remarked that a girls’ college in the middle of nowhere sounds like something from Fellini, and he got an idea. He asked the English department to pay for a visit from Gregory Corso.

Poets came all the way from Richmond to hear him. But the girls stayed cool and distant, even through “Marriage.” Corso went back to New York and told people Lee lived in a time capsule where Southern womanhood was not dead. Two publishers and a novelist transferred their daughters to Stillwater.

In short, the college helped Lee and Lee helped the college, and they signed him up to teach a poetry course. He didn’t ask for a salary at first. Instead he asked the college to pay for his literary magazine, to be called
Stillwater Review
.

Three years later, the
Stillwater Review
was selling thousands of copies and keeping ten students busy reading submissions, and Lee was teaching three courses a semester: English poetry in the
fall or American poetry in the spring, criticism, and a writing workshop.

He commuted to work in a canoe, rain or shine. When he pulled it up in front of his house, it plugged the gap in the bamboo like a garden gate. No student had ever been invited to the house. There were stories. John Ashbery shooting a sleeping whitetail fawn from a distance of three yards. Howard Nemerov on mescaline putting peppermint extract in spaghetti sauce. To hear one of the stories, you had to know someone from somewhere else who knew someone who had been invited—a cousin at Sarah Lawrence whose boyfriend’s brother was queer. Stillwater Lake might as well have been the Berlin Wall.

Freshmen were not eligible for Lee Fleming’s writing workshop. You had to take his other courses first.

Peggy thought this a ridiculous barrier. “How am I supposed to understand poetry if I’ve never written any myself?” she said to Lee in the third week of her first semester in his cozy office in a garret of the main building.

“How do you expect to get into my workshop if you’ve never written a poem?”

“Aren’t you supposed to teach us?”

“You’ve already missed the first two meetings.”

“Can I audit?”

“It’s impossible to audit a workshop. You have to do the work.”

“So can I enroll?”

“Name me one poet you admire.”

“Anne Sexton.”

Lee leaned back. “Anne Sexton? Why?”

“She doesn’t sound so good, but she’s got something to say. I read Hopkins or Dylan Thomas and I think, These cats sound cool all right, but do they have something to say?”

“Maybe they’re saying something you don’t understand.”

“Then make me understand it.”

“That’s like saying, ‘Make me live.’”

“Then make me take your workshop.”

“No. You think poetry is supposed to be about you, and you don’t know how to read. If you can’t read Milton, you can’t read Dylan Thomas. Take my course in English poetry.”

“And read Milton? No, thanks.”

“Then you’ll never be my student.”

“I’m changing my major to French.”

“Don’t be childish.”

“Is it childish to know what you want?”

“I want you to take my course,” Lee began, then stopped, realizing he had said something unusual and slightly embarrassing.

Peggy stood glaring at him, and he glared back.

She offered him a cigarillo. She sat down on the edge of his desk to light it for him, leaning over gracefully with her hands cupped around the match, a smiling seventeen-year-old girl with curly hair like springs, and he realized he had a hard-on.

“Forget the whole thing,” Peggy was saying. “I can write plays without your help. I don’t even need Anne Sexton’s help. Screw her and Milton and the horse they rode in on.”

“Sounds like a natural-born writer to me,” he said. “I would very much appreciate your taking my course in English poetry.”

“I was serious. I don’t want in your workshop, even if it means I never see you again.”

He looked around as if to indicate their surroundings—the Stillwater campus, all eight acres of it—and laughed.

Peggy didn’t take his course. A week later she accepted his invitation to kneel in the front of his canoe while he pushed off from the marshy, leech-infested bank with a paddle. The first thing he said was “This is not a date.” Then he moved toward her in the darkness and pulled her hips toward his, sliding his hands down the sides of her butt, and kissed her, because to be honest with himself (as he became much later), he didn’t know any other mode of behavior in the canoe. The canoe tipped from side to side and Peggy was very still and solemn. It was so exciting he couldn’t figure it out. She was androgynous like the boys he liked, but she made him wonder if he liked boys or just had been meeting the wrong kind of girl. He thought about her genitalia and decided it didn’t make much difference. Her body was female, female, female. Everywhere he touched, it curved away from him, fleeing. He felt between her legs, and it vanished. The abyss.

Peggy felt she was being held in the palm of God’s hand. Not because he was a famous poet and the most respected teacher at her school, but because he was a man and powerful, physically. In all her fantasies she’d been the man, and had to please some pleading lover. But now a person had voluntarily dedicated himself to serving her desires. She had never expected that, ever. It violated her work ethic. She felt a wish to speak and opened her eyes, and the poet in the black mackintosh was staring down into them, rain beating down around them, and they were surrounded on every side by water. It was a good bit more sexy and romantic than she had dared to imagine anything.

Each was mystified, but for very different reasons. Peggy had thought she would die a virgin and had never given a moment’s thought to birth control. And now it looked as though she might be a virgin for maybe ten more minutes. “I’m a virgin,” she said.

“That can be taken care of,” Lee said.

“No, I mean it,” she said. “This is a big deal. You have to promise me.”

“I promise you everything.” He kissed her. “Everything.”

He was mystified that he would say something like that to anyone—male, female, eunuch, hermaphrodite, sheep, tree. He looked her in the eyes and decided she wasn’t paying attention.

He landed the canoe and carried her into the house.

Peggy was young and her patience for sexual activity was just about infinite. Her sex drive was strong, plus pent up, since she’d been looking at girls and thinking about fucking them for five solid years. And Lee was no slouch either. Between his teaching only three courses and her willingness to skip class, they found a lot of time to inhabit his conversation pit as well as the bed that hung on brass chains from the ceiling and the Bengal tiger skin. Sometimes they talked, and sometimes he just sat and typed while she went through the bookshelves, reading Genet and Huysmans but mostly thinking about what she thought about all the time now: sex with Lee. She was feeling new feelings, emotional and physical, new pains and longings, and she couldn’t make notes—there was no point; there was no way you could work them into a play, and somebody might find them and read them—but she kept careful track of them, mentally.

Being a lesbian had given her practice keeping secrets. She walked to his house through the woods even when it took her two hours. Or she waited by the road for his car. Moonless nights in Stillwater were dark as the inside of a cow. When he didn’t have time to see her, she would sit on a bench overlooking the lake and stare at his bamboo.

Lee had promised Peggy everything, but he hadn’t thought to include a promise that she wouldn’t be kicked out of school for fraternization. Lee sleeping with a student was a scandal, and it had to be stopped. Lee was in loco parentis, but he was also indispensable. Thus Peggy was deemed to have found her calling. Girls quit coed schools to get married all the time. That’s what they go there for—to get their MRS degree. Stillwater was supposed to be different, but any school could let in the wrong girl. They asked her not to come back after Christmas vacation.

It was a difficult discussion with her mother. Peggy thought she was bringing good news. Not a lesbian. Shacking up with a famous poet. Quitting that third-rate college. Her life was back on track. Right?

Her mother shook her head with red-rimmed eyes. “I knew you would regret choosing to be a lesbian. But you are making the wrong choice, honey. I wanted you to get an education. Now you’re seventeen and there’s nothing I can do.”

Her father said, “You’re saving me a bundle, you know that? You’re Lee Fleming’s problem now, and I wish him luck.”

“How am I Lee’s problem? I’m going to transfer to another school! I applied to the New School for Social Research!”

Her father rolled his eyes. To him it was a cruel joke being played on him by his supervisor God. A social superior with an intellectual bent and a fortune in land: he had prayed many times for a husband like that for Peggy.

Peggy’s mother’s parting gift was a trip to the gynecologist. Peggy had never seen a gynecologist before and didn’t like it. He was supposed to fit her with a diaphragm. Instead he took one look at her cervix and said, “Miss Vaillaincourt, you are fixing to have a baby and I would say it’s not going to take so long that you
shouldn’t get married at the earliest possible opportunity.” She said she didn’t want a baby, and he repeated the sentence word for word with the same exact identical intonation, like a machine.

Lee saw it coming. She came back from Christmas vacation looking bloated. He reflected that he had fucked her nearly every day since September. He asked, “Punky, don’t you ever get the curse?” She broke down and begged him for a Mexican abortion. “Why would you do that?” he said. “I’d give my child a name.” She stared in horror like he was a giant spider, then clasped her fists against her abdomen and moaned like a cow. “Are you feeling sick? That’s all right, it’s normal.”

He hadn’t anticipated having a wedding at all, ever, but he felt up to the task. Fatherhood surprised him pleasantly. As a male he assumed no unpleasant duties would accrue to him. He would be responsible for teaching the child conversational skills once it reached its teens.

It was up to Peggy’s parents to pay for the wedding. Peggy got as far as asking them. Her mother called her Lee’s doxy and said the baby would be born deformed because Flemings marry their cousins. Her father gave her five hundred dollars and sighed.

Lee consulted his old friend Cary. They had grown up as neighbors. Cary was older and richer and fey, with a hobby of arranging flowers and a habit of getting into difficult situations with straight men. They made a date at a gay bar under a hardware store in Portsmouth.

“Urbanna is the place for a wedding,” Cary said. “Rent the beach and I’ll organize us some swan boats. They’ve got the whitest sand beach in Tidewater, and we’ll jam Christ Church full of magnolias until it goes pop.”

“Swan boats? What are you, drunk?”

Cary folded his arms and said, “Then get married in Battle Abbey with a reception in the yard. See if I care.”

“Swan boats would drift out to the river. They have wings like sails, and no keel.”

“You want the swan boats.” Cary pointed at him and announced the news to the empty bar. “Fleming wants the swan boats!”

“I want an honor guard from VMI, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to get it. What I need is for three hundred people to know my beautiful bride is with child, and then clear out while we go on our honeymoon, and for that I need—what do I need, man? I’m asking you. You think I do this all the time?”

“Bruton Parish Church. Then those of us of the non-marrying persuasion retire to the Williamsburg Inn for mint ‘giblets,’ and you drive down to Hatteras with what’s-her-name.”

“Peggy.”

“Then you take the Peglet down to Nags Head and get her pregnant again.”

“She’s pregnant now. There’s no double pregnant.”

“Then you lay back and watch her get fatter.”

“It’s not fat. It’s a Fleming. And we’re going to Charleston.”

“In January?”

“Spring break.”

“She’s going to be fat as a tick by March. Big old body, little arms and legs.”

The door of the Cockpit flew open and four sailors came in, pushing and shoving their way down the narrow stairway. Lee immediately turned to face them and Cary tugged on his arm. “Whoa, Nelly. You’re a married man.”

“I got a right to a bachelor party, ain’t I?”

Lee wrote a poem with swan boats in it to get them out of his system, and addressed himself to the fact that he had gotten Peggy out of his system. The easy joy and the joyful ease of sex with men, their easy-access genitalia, their uncomplicated inner lives . . . He knew there were women who lived like that, even beautiful and very interesting women, but they didn’t appeal to him at all. He wanted the needy staring beforehand and the tears of worshipful gratitude afterward, as though every orgasm were a reprieve from a death sentence. He just didn’t want it all the time.

He had had as much sex with Peggy as a person can have, and that was enough. She was hanging around his house doing her best to keep out of his way, like she was afraid of him. She felt nauseated, existentially and otherwise. She didn’t want to get on his nerves. She felt dependent. And she was. She was depending on him to do an awful lot of things, like marry her, raise her child, send her to school in New York, and finance the rest of her existence until the day she died. She had a suspicion it might not work out that way.

He, too, knew he wouldn’t be sending her away to finish school. But he knew the real reason: The college paid him two thousand dollars a year, and that was the extent of his income. He didn’t have a trust fund, just the prospect of inheriting from a happy-go-lucky fifty-four-year-old father who was more likely to die skiing than get sick before he turned eighty. It was no coincidence that famous authors came to visit him and not the other way around, or that he served his guests spaghetti. But quand même. The best things in life are free. A round of billiards with sailors is more beautiful than Charleston in springtime, if they’re the right sailors.