by Lucy Ives
“I don’t know!”
“I like you, Loudermilk.” Hillary is doing something with a container of bread crumbs.
“But, I mean, what’s really tragic is we can’t repeat—” Loudermilk is beginning to say.
Harry is edging toward the door.
“No, I’m saying, for lying to me, right here”—Hillary snorts—“in my own house! You fit right in!”
Harry steps out into the hall.
Harry is in the downstairs hall of Don and Marta Hillary’s residence.
He thinks, I really need to figure out what to do.
Harry wishes he were not thinking this or anything else, for that matter. Often he wishes that he did not have to think, but now his prayer is somewhat more fervent. He has no idea where to go. He feels hot and unclean. He thinks that a logical impulse would be to go find Lizzie and say something to her about something and then leave or just leave without saying anything to anyone, but instead he goes down the hall in the direction opposite from the one they originally came. It’s like his body belongs to someone else. His legs move stiffly, automatically. He sees to his right a staircase, carpeted in white. He sees that it leads up, and Harry for some reason makes the decision to climb this stair.
On his way Harry convinces himself that he is looking for a bathroom, and he tells himself that if anyone sees him he or she will surely infer that he is simply in search of a bathroom. He’s looking for a bathroom, and this, then, is the reason for his presence on the second floor of the Hillarys’ home. Harry tries to make a face that could conceivably be worn by a person headed in search of a bathroom. It’s a face of innocence, a quiet and modest, small face. The effort required for the formulation of this face gives Harry a modicum of confidence, even if he has no idea why he does not, at the moment, feel particularly innocent. It’s as if there’s something he wants to find.
The stairway leads to a hall, also carpeted in white, with white walls. Harry goes down this hall. Here, photos of the Hillary family are in evidence. Marta, topless in the ocean (presumably the beginning of the relationship), waves joyfully. There’s a garish Polaroid of a grinning, plastered Don. He’s in a tie and shirtsleeves at a Christmas party bearing toddler Lizzie. A later iteration of Lizzie Hillary, age eleven or so, in a Bulls cap, slouches beside a tractor. Marta and Don on horseback. Marta reading at a podium with what looks like a presidential seal affixed to it. A black-and-white shot of Don as a ravishing teen in dungarees with movie-star smile, squatting in the Y of a birch tree.
There are no pictures from the earlier marriage.
Harry recalls his narrative about a search for the bathroom and begins trying doors. He gets a linen closet with a sweet, soapy odor. He tries another, which is locked. He tries another door.
This door is locked, too.
Harry feels an eerie, unwonted boldness. He doesn’t really know where he is. And here, in this quiet, dim hallway, in this big, clean, expensive house, no one knows him. Nobody knows him in this whole town, except for Loudermilk, and, maybe, in some sense, the girl Lizzie. Lizzie, at least, has seen him—which is possibly more than Harry can say for Loudermilk. Harry wants to laugh. He feels suddenly so alert, awake; the air is spiced by cooking.
Harry stalks the white carpet of the second-floor hall admiring Marta Hillary’s framing and arrangement of her own memories. He laughs, lightly, dryly. Who is it who does these things so carelessly—even with a sense of entitlement? It’s “Troy.” Not Loudermilk, but Troy. Troy does this. T. A. Loudermilk, even. And it is for this reason that it is Troy, aka T. A. Loudermilk, who comes to a door that sits just slightly ajar, and Troy who lingers, listening to the voice on the other side.
Troy lingers near the door. There’s no Harry.
Troy hears someone say, “It’s none of your business!” This is Marta Hillary. Troy waits. Marta Hillary exclaims, “Well, but what if I still think it isn’t?” Marta Hillary is speaking to someone over the phone. “Yes, I know,” Marta says conspiratorially. There is a pause. “Well, I don’t care. At any rate,” Marta is saying, “I’m going to have a new student soon. A good one. I know! Yes. No, he’s already here. Yes, yes, I know. Yes, next week is still good. It’s all I can think about. Well, we wouldn’t have to. As you know.”
Troy can hear Marta moving around the room.
“I’m getting changed. Yes, obviously we’re having people over. The masses. You know us. Oh? Well, now that you remind me of it! No, he’s been entirely acceptable.” Hangers squeal. Marta seems to be struggling to extract a garment. “Yes, Dieter, darling,” she tells her interlocutor, somewhat breathlessly, “I got them. I love them.” Here she adds a phrase or two in what Troy determines is lilting German.
“Hey!” Someone pokes Troy in the back.
Troy half jumps and turns and is nonplussed to discover Lizzie Hillary shaking her head in insouciant censure. “Harry, Harry, Harry,” she is saying. “Way to be way lewd, dude.”
Troy/Harry blinks.
Lizzie tugs at his sleeve. “Hello?” she whispers with a certain amount of force. She drags Troy/Harry away from the doorway. “They barely know you and you’re going to act like a total freaking perv? Do you just love to hate your boy Loudie so much? Because I feel like you don’t want him to get any money next year?” Lizzie wears a pale pink cardigan and her cheeks shimmer with copper pigment. Her hair is ironed and she’s edgy and clean. “Like my outfit?” she wants to know.
Harry nods.
“Thanks, man.” She is pulling him down the hall. Words tumble out of her. “I mean, you shouldn’t have been looking at my mom like that, but everybody has, you know, their days? I know I totally do. Anyways, I want to show you my room? I think I might feel like that’s a good idea. I do really like you, Harry, did you know that?”
Lizzie opens another door. “Ta da!” Lizzie is saying.
The room Harry is now looking into is an unremarkable girl’s room, the room of a normal, if privileged, teenager. The walls are white, the carpet pink. The bed is white, the comforter a white-and-pink trellis. Embellishments born of more mature tastes hang on the walls. There are images of early R.E.M. and Smashing Pumpkins and Charles Bukowski and a poster version of Odilon Redon’s dancing spider, a Jenny Holzer truism, Tyra Banks in profile. Near a mirrored closet, clothing sits in a heap.
“Here is my desk!” Lizzie trills, hopping over to another white item with intricate legs. “My workspace, I mean. I have some mock-ups for my newest art project, if you want to see?”
Harry, silent, hovers near the door.
Lizzie seems disappointed. “I have this whole concept. It’s about copying. But whatever, I get it, time is money and so forth. Want to smoke?” She is smiling hard in Harry’s general direction.
Harry does not know what to do. He feels worse about himself than he has in a long time, and this is genuinely saying something. He can perceive something, an idea, a plan that has formed in Lizzie’s mind, and now he can’t seem to keep it out of his own mind. Lizzie thinks that she caught Harry peeping at her mom. She thinks that she has seen something about Harry, who he is. Lizzie thinks that he, Harry, wants something. That he has an agenda, is concerned with her mom’s extracurricular activities. Lizzie—Lizzie wants to let Harry know—has an agenda, too.
Harry would like to say something now about how really it was “Troy” who’d been eavesdropping on Lizzie’s mom, not spying, but the way Lizzie is looking at him makes it impossible for Harry to conceive of his ever having been anybody but Harry. Maybe it actually was Harry who was eavesdropping on Lizzie’s mom, Marta Hillary, and maybe he did do more than eavesdrop. But suddenly Lizzie is standing only about a foot away from him, and Harry doesn’t know how she got so close.
“Hi, Harry,” says Lizzie in a weird, deep voice.
Harry almost manages to say hi in reply.
“I’m really glad you’re here.” Lizzie continues with the intent gazing. “I have a joke for you.”
“OK.”
&nb
sp; “Why should the Pilgrims have killed cats instead of turkeys?”
“I don’t know.”
Lizzie smiles. “Because then every Thanksgiving we could eat pussy!”
Harry begins analyzing the carpet.
“It’s a joke! It’s kind of feminist, or whatever?”
The carpet in here is the color of ham.
“Harry, I just meant to, like, break the ice? See, thing is, I kind of really need, like, some feedback. Maybe you can help me.”
Lizzie smells like summer.
Lizzie says, “Anyway.” She takes a deep breath. “I also need to ask you something about your friend Loudermilk.”
Harry does not say anything. He looks up at Lizzie, whose eyes are closed. Her lashes twitch. “I might be in love, Harry.” Lizzie’s eyes are still closed. “How does that sound?”
Harry takes advantage of Lizzie’s self-inflicted blindness to back quietly from the room and hustle down the hall. Harry descends the soft stairs. In the hall below he encounters Marta Hillary.
“Oh!” is what Marta, like an echo, exclaims. She is standing just outside the door to her own kitchen. She wears black pants and a loose black blouse, pearls.
It is apparent, to Harry at least, that he has interrupted Marta while she was attempting to listen, unnoticed, to a conversation transpiring in her kitchen. She has abruptly made her face delightful and fascinated in Harry’s general direction. Now she blinks at him as if he is a unicorn come to offer fealty. Her face offers a mixture of mild awe and gentle enthusiasm. She is quick to say, “There you are.”
Harry nods.
The forced expression on Marta Hillary’s face begins to fade. It is replaced by a wistful smile. “We were just about to ask where you were,” she is saying, as if this makes any sense.
The doorbell rings.
“I hear you study psychology.”
Harry nods again.
Marta is gazing intently at Harry. “It’s so interesting.”
Harry thinks he can feel a weird, persistent pressure at the rear of his skull, as if a thin, sharp instrument were slowly, dreamily poking around in the back of his brain.
“How interesting,” Marta Hillary repeats.
The doorbell reiterates its call.
Now Marta Hillary does as her dual role as wife and professional intellectual ordains, which is to say she floats away.
More and more people begin to enter the house. Harry can hear them and he moves to where they are because this is what is appropriate, and when Harry next notices where he is, he is beside the refrigerator nursing a beer. He nurses several beers. It isn’t a dinner so much as it is a long party, an eventually very drunken party. Harry doesn’t talk to anyone and remains in the kitchen. Occasionally, as the night scrolls by, he catches the eye of Lizzie Hillary, who always somehow seems to be looking right at him.
Twenty-Nine
Parity
Clare has been to the party. She has done what she believes is expected. Appear. She sat in the living room. Here are her peers: The novelists look like money and even the poets seem canny, mathematical. Or maybe no one looks like money, because no one looks at ease. Almost everyone is white. No one, as far as Clare knows, is not straight. Clare does not know much. She pushed herself to attend. She read the listserv invite with a moan. It is precisely the sort of thing she does not care to do but the doing of which convinces her of her sanity. Anyway, all this makes sense, fossil fuels, gynecology, a giant bird on a plate.
She watched the winey beauty of the Midwest. She was in the living room of the poet couple and their roster of amanuenses. All are tantalizing because drunk. Everything is sex. The poet Loudermilk is propped against the mantelpiece. Clare might like to die for him, or, she thinks, perhaps she will kill him. Thank god she does not write poetry. He and his “cool, dim Easter / Basket” are so beloved. He’s rewriting the rules of the poetry game with his fresh prosody, his striking neologisms. Or is it the prosody that is striking, the neologisms fresh? “These are the poems of our time,” Clare overhears one besotted second-year say.
Meanwhile, there doesn’t seem to be anyone resembling Halloween’s Troy.
Just before midnight there is an exodus.
Clare stumbles out into the frigid grid. Lawns are spiked with frost and with detritus. The building Clare lives in has an enormous mansard roof. The whole thing is a rectangular mushroom, a brutalist mausoleum.
When Clare was in college, there had been a very few people for her, people she had known. She does not understand why now, but these people did not touch her. Or, they may have touched her in a physical sense but in no other. They were like her, even sometimes a lot. It felt like looking through a glass partition into a room in which there was a mirror. Clare danced behind the glass partition and was reflected. A friend was on the other side of the partition and danced, too. Their reflections looked similar. So they danced—together.
Clare could not tell if she was alone. Of course Clare was not alone! Just look at this dancing. But her confessions were muffled, especially if she tried to shout them through the glass. The friend gyrating in the other room, visible through the partition, leaned down and helpfully turned the music up.
“This is life,” Clare told herself, and went for a walk with her notebook. Her mother called and reminded Clare that she, Clare, was definitely not having any issues. Clare was well! If Clare happened not to be well, then Clare should consider disappearing from the face of the earth, because if Clare was not well then she would be dead to her mother, who had long since had enough.
Clare pondered these entailments.
She went for another walk. She wandered for hours and did not do the assigned reading for her courses. People in the wealthy suburb raked their lawns and clambered, complaining about life’s dullness or its complexity, into SUVs. Astonished, Clare watched them. Their faces coordinated perfectly with the landscape. They knew just where they were. Meanwhile, the United States wrung its hands about its war. Astonished, Clare stood in the sale section at Urban Outfitters and watched a celebrated visiting professor, a writer, shop. The visitor, caressing a cardigan with studied nonchalance, seemed to wish that Clare was not observing her.
The boyfriend at the literary magazine had determined that he preferred men. He told Clare a story about a day when, walking through a glass revolving door, he had accidentally tried to get out of the way of his own reflection.
They had almost the same problem, she and this ex-boyfriend.
But Clare was confused, because in fact the campus was all brick.
“I need to be by myself for a while,” the ex-boyfriend told her, through the phone.
Clare walked calmly to the library and did not cry.
She tried to pick out a poem.
Clare was well!
Clare wrote her prize-winning story and the ex was jealous, then relieved.
Clare had a close female friend with whom she slept. The female friend liked to play a game in which she and Clare would, on separate occasions of course, sleep with the same man. They never discussed the nature of the game but played it often and maybe furiously. Perhaps it made them feel better. It was, as everyone was saying, fairly painful to be alive these days. As the news got worse, fashion’s call for whittled hip bones intensified.
Clare was reading all the essays of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Clare knew that, in doing so, she flirted with hackneyed undergraduate predilection, but Lacan liked shiny things, and Clare did, too. Lacan enjoyed cybernetic suspicion. Something glinted along the horizon and you thought it was alive; you felt yourself recognized and therefore had faith in your existence.
Clare understood that according to this theory of mind she did not, strictly speaking, exist. It was just a trick done with light and air.
Clare read Lacan’s early essay “Logical Time,” in which three prisoners are called before a warden who must liberate one. The boon will not be given outright; instead, the warden arranges for a test in which
five disks differing only in color, three white and two black, are to be handed out. Each prisoner will receive a disk, black or white, and must divine its color. Any conclusion as to the color of one’s disk must be arrived at by logic. Random guessing is not permitted.
The three prisoners are each outfitted with a white disk, and, having hesitated together for a certain time, exit the room in unison.
Lacan says that he knows why.
A prisoner who looks and sees two white disks knows that he can be either a black or a white disk. This prisoner then imagines the points of view of the two others: If he were a black disk, he thinks, the others might be able to think, If I were a black disk, too, then the third person would leave immediately, because he would know, seeing two black disks, that he is a white disk. But this third person hesitates, and, indeed, we all hesitate, and, therefore, we are white.
This was neat enough, but the thing that bothered Clare, the thing that interested her, was that each prisoner must use his own allotted time only to interpret the contest as it occurs to others. If a prisoner misunderstands another’s hesitation, if he allows himself to be preceded, time will lose its meaning.
Thirty
Fortune
But, truly, it’s amazing! It’s fully a miracle! Does Loudermilk not realize what a powerful enemy he has cultivated for himself in Anton Beans? Can this reality truly not have sifted down into the dim sedimentary stream of this individual’s so-called thought? Does Loudermilk not have the faintest clue as to Anton Beans’s formidable and copious resources? Either Loudermilk has a death wish, which, given his obvious taste for embodied life Anton Beans feels safe in ruling out as a factor, or, what is worse, he simply does not know. Loudermilk is, possibly, for some unfathomable reason, unable to sense, and therefore ignorant of, Anton Beans’s abilities. That this second option is so evidently the case is beyond maddening to Anton Beans. Loudermilk fucking underestimates him! There is the rub.