Nell Zink - Mislaid

Byrdie got rushed to some degree by every white frat on campus, with bids from all but the one that said the Lost Cause would rise again. He made no effort to join any of them. He would drop by with drinking buddies on Friday or Saturday night for free beer. He did the shag to jangle pop with girls who were suitably prep. That was all. His buddies came from his courses — boys with shared interests who said clever things in class — and collectively they had no shared background or affiliation whatsoever, unless you counted the house where they gathered early in the evening, nearly every day, to smoke pot.

For reasons no one understands, otherwise intelligent young people are often drawn to illicit mind-altering drugs. A cross section of society would probably show comparable interest among the brightest and dullest young people, but at The University it was a matter of public record that the young men not drawn to drugs were less bright: Thetan House had the highest mean, median, and mode GPA on campus, and its students were concentrated in the most challenging majors. Possibly it takes a great deal of intelligence to ace school stoned. Byrdie liked their soundtrack, and if nothing else, he was going to need cheap rent after he’d sat out the first-year campus residency requirement.

So he joined.

The initiation was uncomplicated compared with other frats, since Thetan had lost its charter and was a locus of lackadaisical haphazardness for boys who worked hard in school. No one invested energy or creativity in scaring off potential pledges. There was no hazing involved, unless you counted being forced to do bong hits until you said “No, thanks, I’ll pass.” For plenty of boys, despite their pride in their intelligence, the challenge was too great. They would do thirty-five and lie there looking unhappy until morning. Prudent Byrdie did four. Then he got talking to some guy about Witness for Peace, maxed and chilled until maybe two, briefly fell asleep in a black-lit attic “meditation room” listening to Bach, and went home to bed. It wasn’t far to his dorm. The house was in an excellent location, between campus and the Confederate cemetery, a most awesome place to smoke a joint, as was revealed to him upon his accession to the frat.

Due to his relatively strong interests in arithmetic and cleanliness, Byrdie was named hegemon-elect before his freshman year was out. The drug frat had alternative druggy names for all its officers. Hegemon was more or less the CEO.

To Lee’s additional discomfort, Byrdie became strangely noncommittal about his major. He had started off talking of business administration. Then he began suggesting that many community organizing projects needed help with their business models. Then he proposed founding progressive urban communities on a sound financial footing. He wished to use his hereditary power and influence to help others help themselves. He was thinking of designing an interdisciplinary major that combined architecture, business administration, and social work, and then running for office. He wasn’t sure. He spent the next summer working for Habitat for Humanity in Richmond and still didn’t know. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” Lee said to him.

“My task is to discover and respond to community needs,” Byrdie replied, seeming to presume that he would never have needs of his own.

Lee met Cary for dinner at the yacht club in Norfolk. They sat opposite each other at a square table decked with several layers of linen and picked at soft-shell crabs. “Two points abaft the port beam,” Lee said.

Cary turned to the left and looked over his shoulder. “Swish!” he said. “Those slacks make her look like Quentin Crisp.”

The object of their attention was a well-built young man wearing a blue blazer and dove-gray pleated-front gabardine pants. He took no notice of Lee and Cary, but pulled out a chair for his dinner date, a man in a seersucker suit whose forelock had been bleached and cellophaned such a shiny peach shade that it put Cary in mind of daylilies, as he said immediately.

He and Lee were wearing the clone look (white oxford cloth button-downs with distressed jeans and white Reeboks) because they wanted to go dancing later on at one of those new non-underground — as in highly conspicuous, with neon and a line out the door — discotheques where they played sped-up music and featured drag queens so tall and square-jawed they couldn’t live as women and had to spend their lives on the run, a.k.a. on tour. Actually Cary was somewhat shy of the mark, with red-soled white bucks on his feet, but his jeans were more distressed than Lee’s.

Cary had read and reread the jeans-distressing tutorial in The Joy of Gay Sex, struggling to make sense of new tricks’ demands on old dogs (Lee’s line). His first pair was a total loss (too much bleach). The second pair came out soft and robin’s-egg blue, but he ruined them during the “lay them out in the driveway and run them over a couple of times” stage. Maybe the guys in the book had flat driveways made of concrete and not rippled heaps of oyster shells? The guys all looked kind of urban in the drawings. The third pair came out just right.

Cary himself wasn’t quite right — soft in the middle, with stubble hiding in folds in his face he was too lazy to shave — but you couldn’t really fault him for not trying. Lee had the look down cold, but he, too, was getting old for it. His hair was thinning on top and had to be fluffed with mousse. They stirred their drinks in silence, watching the younger men.

“Où sont les neiges d’antan?” Lee asked.

“They should build a monument,” Cary said. “All the times I got my ass beat to a pulp so the youth of today could get dolled up like faggots to go out in public.”

“They ought to come over here and kiss your hand.”

Suddenly, unexpectedly, two women in little black dresses and eye-catching funky accessories entered the room and approached the young men. The men jumped up and kissed them on alternate cheeks, European style. Their collective fluttering wafted odors of Antaeus and Eau Sauvage all the way to Lee and Cary’s table. After securing the attention of the entire room, the two couples sat down again. It was unmistakable. They were straight. All four of them.

And the misfits who had shown America the way to flamboyant self-promotion — originally a way of finding comfort in one another’s brashness as they cowered in basements, fearing for their lives — sat nipping Scotch in identical shirts and 501s, drilled to conformity and finding scant comfort in other people’s flouting it. Lee sighed and lowered his voice. “Cary, are you wearing eyeliner?”

“You are not getting a rise out of me. I cannot abide teasing.”

“God, I feel like a Romanov,” Lee said. “Deposed monarch of the ancien régime, awaiting execution.”

“Welcome to the No South.”

“You mean New South.”

“I mean No South. You can’t have ‘New’ and ‘South.’ It’s oxymoronic. I’m talking about the No South. The unstoppable force that’s putting in central air everywhere until you don’t know whether it’s day or night. Fat boys used to spend their lives in bed and only come out to fish and hunt. Now they go into politics and make our lives hell. One little thing, all by itself — AC — made the South go away overnight.”

“Very astute,” Lee said. “Claude Lévi-Strauss, Sad Subtropics .”

“Freaks everywhere,” Cary added, glancing at the two handsome young couples. “Look at those driving moccasins he’s got on, with nipples on the soles. Looks like a chew toy. And someone should tell his lady friend black is what a Moldavian fortune teller wears, and pink stilettos is twelve-year-old streetwalkers. Did you know they had to start up valet parking because of all the women who come in here literally unable to walk?”