by Lucy Ives
Grief
In the recordings, Loudermilk experiments with various styles of self-presentation. For the third session, he’s a provocateur, which is to say, an ass. Admittedly, he is abetted in this project by his instructor, Professor Hillary. In a repeat performance of the affective stylings of class number one, Hillary makes no attempt to conceal his rage. If anyone asks Harry, which no one does, Hillary’s ire is caused not by anything in particular Loudermilk happens to do or say. And not even Loudermilk’s loudness, which may be a contributing factor, is sufficient as irritant, as it were. Nor can Hillary’s explosion be entirely explained by his combination of possible hangover plus definite renewed drunkenness, the slur under half of what he says, the growl of dehydration. No, there is something more. Hillary is imagining Loudermilk having sex with his wife, Harry is sure of it. It’s the first thing on Hillary’s mind the minute Loudermilk walks through the door and it remains Hillary’s primary thought until the last second of the day’s lesson, such as this lesson is.
Hillary, on this day, eclipses everyone else. The chemistry between him and Loudermilk is classic; they are a Western with slapstick overtones and a real possibility for serious gore, ketchup splashing, a violent situation tragedy. It’s a weird example of straight men in love and gives Harry a shot of vicarious joy: the passion, the histrionics. But Harry is simultaneously glad he didn’t have to be in the actual room for it, that he, personally, is protected by media.
“You think I’m scared of a preppy shit like you?” Hillary wails. “I’m the guy who spent the last decade and a half interpreting crayon cave paintings someone thinks is poetry! You think I haven’t been here twenty times before? You’re a goddamn cliché and your daddy paid for your last lap dance.”
Loudermilk opts for cruel whimsy. “I’ll have to go back and check my credit-card bill to see if that’s true. Like”—Loudermilk stage-whispers—“because I’m pretty sure I’m not the one who has to pay for ass.”
In the fourth session, Loudermilk is a bit slyer, biding his time. He’s silent, which means he essentially cedes Anton Beans the floor. He gives Beans just enough rope to hang himself with, in other words. Beans struts; he preens. He has a few notes to disseminate regarding the production of poetry in America today, its tired norms, its naïve credence in the transparent referential capacity of language. Up for workshop is a sentimental piece about someone’s grandmother’s attic. It’s a vision of middle-class nostalgia for the postwar era, when continuity and unionized employment were assured, and all of life could be reliably archived in one’s home. The attic is a place in which the smell and feel of the grandmother’s body, her crepey limbs, is transferred, in what even Harry comprehends is a poorly scaled metaphor, onto the storage space. Chelsea, the poet, reads out loud.
When Chelsea’s performance is complete, Beans thanks her for sharing her middlebrow creation. He remarks on how interesting it is that we think of certain topics as being best suited to poems. So, for example, Chelsea has elected to write about matrilineal matters of the heart, plus the twentieth century. It’s not, Beans observes, a poem about romantic love. Rather, it’s a poem about memory loss, decay, the vagaries of intergenerational succession. It’s also a poem, Beans maintains, about how bodies and objects signify, about how and where language exists, outside/beyond language, as such. This said, Beans continues, even if the poem (as if the poem might be somehow alive or sentient in itself) gestures or nods at enlivening possibilities for its own meaning, it is not in itself fully inhabiting these gestures. The poem does not appear to fully know what it is doing, and in conclusion—Beans sighs and there is a popping sound as of knuckles cracking (these may well be Beansian knuckles)—this effort at walking amnesia fails to make good on its own possibility and lands as a debased platitude.
Beans’s disquisition is greeted with what to Harry sounds like shock. But maybe it’s silence of another type. Harry is not sure if Beans is psychotically convinced that everyone around him is in awe of his skills of literary observation or if he is convinced that he is altruistically disrupting everyone’s tacit misting-over of their true identities as mediocrities, hacks. There are, one must admit—and see Don Hillary’s own class-time speeches—way, way too many individuals accepted into the Seminars, selective as it is, for even a small majority to become acknowledged, award-winning writers. Beans is, however, not about to let even small offenses slide, not when they have broader implications, and moreover he seems to have some sort of crypto-critical agenda. Beans, for all his pessimism, really seems to believe in the process! Of course, perhaps this is just a way of delaying his own realization that he is among the ranks of the talent-free . . .
Others weigh in. A few are, like, “This poem feels so utterly familiar. I like it for that. It reminds me of home.” Hooray, they say.
Harry ponders this notion: it is not beyond the realm of possibility that a poem—or any other piece of writing, for that matter—could have value because it reminds a reader of home.
This tame rejoinder sets Anton Beans off. Now Beans is well-nigh unstoppable; he is locked into a track and can no longer be reached for negotiation.
“Home”—Anton Beans pronounces the word as if it is coated in multiple layers of aspic, bile, and perhaps petroleum jelly—“is a construct. It has also, if we recall anything of history, been used to justify so many atrocities across the regrettable creep of the last hundred years, not to mention the current colonial escapade being waged in ‘our’ name. I would be surprised if any one among us even knows what that really is, what home really means. I’m sorry but of course Chelsea loves her grandmother. ‘Cry me a river,’ as Justin Timberlake says. However, Chelsea’s grandmother—fortunately, for so many reasons—is not equivalent, even metaphorically, to the house she lives in! She’s a person who had a life, who was a subject of American sovereignty and capitalism, and this poem wants to reduce her to a piece of ideology, a symptom of the Cold War, now reheating in the era of peak oil in the Middle East. I doubt that I need to remind everyone that we are currently living in a surveillance state, a homeland, not a home, and to me it matters, deeply, whether or not the poems I read seem aware of that. I’d like to add that I don’t think we’ve survived the poetics of modernism for nothing and I would like it very much if this poem reflected the history of its own form just a smidgen.”
Stillness.
Now the question is, Harry thinks, who’s the most dangerous man in the room: Loudermilk or Anton Beans? Are the two of them in competition for this title? And has this contest already gone beyond being an event Harry can participate in? Maybe Harry’s locked out and he’ll observe their emotional affair from afar, Beans + Loudermilk 4EVA. Harry feels slightly ill.
But on the tape Loudermilk does not respond, does not make a play for the limelight. And it’s as if this reticence on his part is a message to Harry, as if he’s speaking to Harry through the recording, telling Harry: “Just listen in. It’s all here for you, man. I wanna make sure you’re intuiting the ripeness of these whimpering IQ voids.” And as Harry listens on, he hears the message all the more strongly: It is here for him.
The fifth session begins in the midst of the fourth. Harry is not sure what Loudermilk did with the recorder, whether the cut is intentional. Where the fourth leaves off, you can tell Hillary is about to take the floor. Harry wonders if Loudermilk interrupts Hillary on purpose, if he stops the tape because he does not want Harry to know what Hillary is about to say. Or maybe it’s that Hillary is so predictable: You have to assume he’s about to defend Chelsea’s exploration of her grandma’s crawl space, even if he’ll do so through semi-gritted teeth. He has to do this, because this is the basis of Hillary’s “poetics,” if Harry has that term right. Hillary has certain values, has shown himself over time to be an adherent of certain schools (Harry is aware, due to his poetic research), and now Hillary is obliged to set the table such that only those who can eat of the particular meat on special shall be served, recognized. It is a competition—the th
ing of poetry—if not an all-out war. If Hillary has an actual job—other than continuing to breathe and sit upright in his chair and utter whatever unfiltered industry juice courses into his cranium—it is to continue to purvey and promote a brand of sentimentality, a sentimentality branded and also promoted by certain institutional-poet ancestors of Hillary’s, like the renowned regionalist Timothy Flower and, previous to Flower, the celebrated formalist Jan Batman. Hillary is a straw man, a vacant effigy, not just because he is an alcoholic whose second marriage is about to dehisce, but because it is his job, quite literally, to be an alcoholic whose second marriage is about to dehisce, because he is exactly—and not one iota more or one iota less than—who he is paid to be. If he were a better teacher, or even a slightly better human being, he would surely have been fired from this position long ago.
Never let it be said, Harry should tell someone, that he, Harry Rego, pulls any punches. He may be trapped inside this pathetic physique, gagged by his own ungainly voice, but never let it be said that Harry Rego ignores the world around him. Harry’s eye is limpid, unimpeded by the distorting influence of a viable body or social life. Harry’s mind can, to some extent, be thrown from the corpse it inhabits, and this is why he is of such extraordinary use to Loudermilk, who is, in truth, disadvantaged since sapped by the presence of his own magnificent frame in the world. Anyone who really knows Loudermilk, as Harry knows him, has to feel a certain pity for the guy. It’s a mystery how Loudermilk finds the necessary blood and/or synapses to think at all, given the other needs of his physical form.
But the fifth session: Here Loudermilk returns, and it’s a new Loudermilk, a more refined and sportive Loudermilk, a Loudermilk who arrives at the seminar table with his recorder switched gamely on, who wants to glad-hand and crack jokes, who manifests an appropriately robust sympathy for Hillary when Hillary arrives, Hillary who—judging from the slurring of his monosyllables and reluctance to even attempt sentences—is not merely nursing a hangover or even tipsy, but in the midst of a full-on bender.
So easy, Harry thinks, to get caught up in the bacchic aspect of the creation of poetry, whatever poetry is. It likely takes a strong person not to get carried away, not to rage or swoon or ride off on the proverbial cawing dolphin. Harry, at any rate, can understand people wanting to escape. He gets the thing of wanting to be overtaken by an aspect of yourself that seems larger and stranger than the everyday, with its petty harms and disappointments. If Hillary weren’t so privileged within the bizarre milieu in which he practices his lifestyle, Harry might have it in him to feel sorry for the guy. But that’s difficult given the fact that Hillary is, by Harry’s standards, rich, and his wife looks a lot like an aging model.
Session five does not really take off. In fact, “does not really take off” is a dramatic understatement. A better description might be founders, implodes. Hillary can’t seem to begin, in spite of Loudermilk’s hearty maieutic gestures toward collective bro psyche. The class is obviously supposed to start, and it’s gotten to the point where by all rights Hillary should be inaugurating things, but no one is talking and everyone’s waiting and even Loudermilk, stalwart that he is, newly minted Hillary adherent, can’t seem to find a thing to kid about.
There is a muffled sound, then a couple of gasps, and Harry recognizes that this new repetitive noise he’s picking up, this pattern of breaths and sighs, must be weeping, Don Hillary’s real, live, late-middle-aged weeping.
Harry shuts off the tape. He has to write a poem.
Twenty-Two
A Portrait
Strictly speaking, Lizzie Hillary does not read the poetry packets. She does not concern herself much with those she thinks of as her parents’ “other,” optative children. Or, at least, she used not to, before she met Troy Loudermilk. Something is going to happen this year with the poets, Lizzie can tell. It’s standing right there, in the person of this exquisite criminal, who isn’t actually a poet at all, though it’s possible he brought someone who is a real poet with him, just to liven things up, as it were.
Lizzie doubts that her parents are going to crack the code. They’re too excited about having some sort of superstar on their hands. It’s even possible they’ll delay their divorce another few years.
The difference between Lizzie and all the Seminars people—the male students who are keeping score, the female students in various accoutrements bespeaking liberal-arts educations in the time of free trade: vintage T-shirts promoting now-inoperative airlines, ethical sandals, MP3 players loaded with Rufus Wainwright and Manu Chao—aside from the fact that Lizzie is biologically related to her parents, the fully mature adult poets, is that Lizzie knows that her parents, the adult poets, are just human beings, mere mortals. They don’t have supernatural capabilities, nor do they have some sort of grand scheme they’re slowly and deliberately unfurling. They’re living day to day. They’re not even all that great at writing.
What no one knows is that the only person with any sort of a grand scheme and/or supernatural flair is Lizzie. And part of the reason they do not get this about her is they do not realize that Lizzie is an artist.
Of course, as her mother constantly reminds Lizzie, it’s going to be a lot better in the long run if Lizzie understands that making art is something you do on the weekends, in your barricaded sound-proof garage with painted windows, while during the week you pursue a real job, raking in a respectable salary. Sure, Marta may have lucked into something in her day, but that’s also because Marta has a calling and once looked like a young Aphrodite minus half shell and Reagan had only just been elected, and, oh, by the way, does Lizzie understand that she is definitely not going to art school?
Even her mother’s latest “friend,” a cozy Swiss-American neurologist with whom Marta has allegedly been conducting some cutting-edge interdisciplinary research into facial mimicry and poetic address, toes the line. He insists on calling Lizzie by her full name, with pretentious inflection, “Eh-LEEZ-a.” He brings her tins of aquarelle pencils, with which Eh-LEEZ-a is evidently meant to generate neoclassical studies of birds’ heads, fallen leaves, and cornfields—and which her mother will quietly consign to the recycling bin once Lizzie reaches the age of majority.
This is why Lizzie has needed to have a plan. Because she needs to make some really big art now, so that she can use it to get some really big scholarship, so that she can get the right education, so that she can get, she doesn’t know exactly what, but so she can get out there and out of here and start becoming a visual artist pronto, at which point she will be living in New York.
Lizzie likes to go over to Building 109 late on Fridays. She has her father’s keycard, which, to be honest, he wouldn’t notice was missing even if he noticed it. He’d just convince himself that it had basically always been lost, that he’d never actually had access to the place where he teaches. This fatalism would earn him a drink, which is, of course, why he’d engage in it in the first place.
Lizzie swipes herself in after hours and lounges. She pages through any remaining packets, hunts for inspiration and gossip. She sprawls on the floor in the front room and glares up at that hideous painting, with its fart browns and fart greens. The land smiles obediently as two dildos in suits commend each other on some precious shit related to new civilization.
Someday, Lizzie will create her own foundational masterpiece. Until that time, she needs to scheme. And that’s what she’s working on right now, sitting here in this evacuated institution. If she’s feeling particularly bitchy, she’ll go around and pee in a few of the office plants, though so far they seem immortal or possibly plastic.
More recently, prowling the premises, specifically the mailbox area, Lizzie came across a copy of Playboy. It was shoved into some second-year dude’s slot, presumably by some other overwhelmingly gifted and subtle second-year, and Lizzie fished it out, thinking it might make an accessory for a genius prank. On the cover were a blonde and a brunette, crotch deep in swirling greenish waters, their undergarments fa
shioned from cargo-shorts scraps and athletic mesh. Both appeared to have been shaved and starved within an inch of their lives, though they still had the hair on their heads plus breast fat. They were former Survivor contestants and, as the cover maintained, with vaguely genocidal wit, “Their Clothes Got Voted Off!” Also available: “CASUAL SEX 2003,” “COP TEASE,” “THE AMAZING TOBEY MAGUIRE.” Lizzie wasn’t that interested in the reality stars, and most of the interior was stale and heavy on the lip liner. Carnie Wilson made a cameo, post weight loss, in a dour corset.
Everything here is like looking into a ghost’s flaccid face, Lizzie thought, flipping to the centerfold. This model, with apple tits and tiny features, did not do much for Lizzie, except that there was one shot where all her crotch was visible, demurely shut like a walnut, with a decorative sprig of fur. Lizzie didn’t know why, but it moved her, this mound.
She ripped out the page and rammed the artifact back into so-and-so’s cubby, rumpling a Xerox. Let them wonder, Lizzie thought.
She went home, thinking of Loudermilk’s no-doubt ropy arms, gilded with an appropriate amount of hair.
I so love him, she mused, even as she hurried indoors and upstairs to gaze again at the walnut, which she would, for reasons still unclear to her, frame in an elaborate craft-paper theater/altarpiece, placing it in the farthest regions of her desk drawer.
Twenty-Three
Veils
In 2003 Halloween in the U.S. of A. falls on a Friday. Which means that all of Crete is giddy with notionally sublimated homicidal lust.
The most popular costume is the university mascot—in various iterations. A few feckless dweebs have on full-fur suits, but the ideal ensemble has to be: 1. freshly shaved pecs, preferably greased or dusted in some sort of glitter; 2. loincloth; 3. lace-up gladiator sandals; 4. bull’s head, or just the horns if you really have a great face; 5. short, thick sword.