Nell Zink - Mislaid

“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.

Heading to a Chrysler Museum board meeting in Norfolk, Lee stopped off at Doumar’s for ice cream. It was an old-fashioned drive-in with teenage waitresses on roller skates. He was trying to cut down on drinking during the day, especially before board meetings, and ice cream made a nice substitute. Doumar’s reminded him of New York. There were signs on the wall to prove the founder had invented the ice-cream cone. Something about claims of inventing the obvious — pizza by the slice, or reading poetry aloud over a recording of yourself reading poetry aloud — always reminded him of New York.