Nell Zink - Mislaid

“All my life, this club’s had a no pimp rule.”

They watched the two couples for a bit. Cary said, “Well, your life is ended.”

They ate. Lee said, “Do you remember how we used to get up at night when it was too hot to sleep, and slip out and swim off the canoe?”

“I remember.”

“We never slept in summer.”

“We must have slept.”

“What for? Did we do anything during the day?”

“ Mais oui, mon frère! You haven’t had a day off since 1954. It’s just that your vocation isn’t always what you or anybody else would call work.”

Lee considered how much socializing he had managed to pass off either as poetry or cultivating Stillwater’s endowment and said, “True enough.”

“Now, here in climate control, we got a work ethic,” Cary said. “We don’t tolerate your kind of sinecure. We’re upwardly mobile social climbers with unequal unemployment lack of opportunity.”

“It pains me greatly that I never noted your poetic gifts. I would have solicited some pieces.”

“Let me explain. Say ten years ago, you go to rent a truck. You go into the rental place and how many guys work there?”

“As in work?”

“You know what I mean. There’s a guy behind the counter, and his dad in the garage, and four, five boys hanging in the parking lot. And you say ‘That’s the truck I want,’ and the boys get on it and his mom does the paperwork and five minutes later, you got your truck. So what do we got now? You got the white guy. He owns a franchise for three counties, because he’s the only one who can get credit. The truck is disgusting, you wouldn’t haul a hog in it to slaughter, there’s no gas in the tank and it won’t shift out of second, and he tells you to call the toll-free number for service. And nobody works there. Not one person. The poor capitalist fucker is there all on his lonesome, raking it in for some chain. That’s what I call unequal unemployment lack of opportunity. The South was built on the cheap labor of neighbors. No immigration, no out-migration, no upward mobility, no downward mobility. Land rich, dirt poor, don’t matter. Land and dirt are the same damn thing. The rich man charges rent to live on it, the poor man charges wages to work on it. It’s the circle of life. Now they’re making money off borrowed money from banks that cross state lines. That’s squeezing the life out of us.”

“So? Do we deserve better?”

“You’re the one who’s supposed to care that the world is going to hell. You have a son!”

“What’s he got to do with it?”

“Dammit, Lee. You bullshitted your way into the last of the bullshit jobs. What’s Byrdie going to do? Manage the sawmill?”

“Don’t knock my sawmill. He spent last summer working construction.” Cary laughed, and Lee added, “He’ll be off my hands soon. He’s at a big public university, mixing and mingling. That’s what they go to school for now. He wants to work. Nobody wants to be a white supremacist anymore.”

“Says you. Here.” Cary glanced around to indicate their surroundings, and an elderly black waiter stepped up. He shook his head and the waiter moved back to the wall.

“Listen. Byrdie is from the next world, the air-conditioned world to come. He doesn’t care where you’re from, who your daddy is, or anything about you except how you fit into his master plan. He treats me like a stranger. He engages me in conversation about public policy. I tell him he’s my son, not my congressman! But we talk on a level of intimacy I would expect from a casual fuck in an elevator. He worships me from afar. He’s just not sure how far is far enough. Did I tell you he wrote me an animal rights protest song?”

“He did what?”

“My son composed in my honor a folk song about a horse’s right to run on a banked track. It spares their fetlocks from strain.”

“You are shitting me.”

“Cross my heart. He wrote a traditional American ballad of mourning for a three-year-old that died of a broken ankle a very short time after it was shot.” While Cary wiped his eyes, Lee went on, lowering his voice. “He played it to me on the baritone ukulele, and he dedicates this song to me whenever he sings it in public. My son, Byrd Fleming, expressing his love for me in song. Now tell me chivalry ain’t dead.”

“Shit, man. What did you do?”

“Does it matter? I want to be like my wild, free young son, a handsome student with my whole life ahead of me, and do however I feel, and not give a shit what anybody thinks, and be high as a kite every damn day.”

Cary reached for Lee’s drink and said, “You’re too skinny to be ordering doubles.”

“You know what? It’s time I went for a swim.” Lee stood up. “I need to cool off.”

“With you all wet, they’re not going to let us in the club.”

“Fuck the club. I don’t need to rub shoulders with a bunch of no-name hard-bodies who think I’m death in Venice warmed over. It upsets me every time.”

“I can’t dance to their music,” Cary assented. “It leaves me deaf.”

“Jellyfish in the meat market,” Lee said. He took off his watch (it was waterproof to thirty meters, but attached to his wrist with orange-and-navy grosgrain ribbon) and laid the contents of his pockets on the table. He walked out the French doors to poolside, leaving them open. Wearing his sneakers, and rather hoping they would be ruined, he climbed the ladder to the low springboard, smoothing his hairdo with a rueful expression as though bidding it good-bye, and bounced into the backlit water.

Cary copied his cannonball, with better success.

After just a few minutes, the pool was full. The couples who had provoked their profound moral crisis sashayed to the pool giggling and pushed each other in. The women shrieked, lost their shoes, swam in their dresses, dye running, lace ripping, feigning modesty wet-sari style as they climbed the stairs with their wrists crossed between their boobs. The tidily shaved men swam a bit in shirts and slacks, then cavorted in patterned synthetic briefs and amulets on leather thongs.

The sun went down and the whole club drifted outside. A waiter served drinks and turned up the music. The younger people played in the pool, or sat on the edge dangling their feet in the water. Cary and Lee had about all the fun they could handle, which wasn’t much. Wriggling on a lounger in tight, wet denim will make you miss madras and khakis, and wet boxers: no. Then it was late, and they headed home to sleep while they were both still able to drive to their own satisfaction.

They couldn’t go to the Cockpit. It was closed. It had never been an underground club. It had a liquor license and a sprinkler system and clean sanitary facilities. The authorities tolerated it. Hardly anybody knew about it. Then it made the paper in a celebratory article by a well-meaning journalist. He thought hundreds of happy men dancing unmolested to a jukebox in a crowded bar was a sign of gay liberation, which he strongly supported. The name alone: Cockpit. Naval air station or no naval air station, it had to go. Public pressure shuttered it overnight for zoning violations. So many men, so little parking.

Karen Brown was a good year and a half older than Mireille Fleming, and she had skipped a grade. At fifteen and eight months, when it came time for her to get her learner’s permit and start driving the car, she had in reality just turned fourteen.

But what was Meg going to do? Confess? She recalled hearing somewhere that the legal age to drive in Texas was twelve. Besides, adulthood is never something girls grow into. It is something they have thrust upon them, menstruation being only the first of many two-edged swords subsumed under the rubric “becoming a woman,” all of them occasions to stay home from school and weep. Not so long ago, Karen’s pregnant schoolmates, who reliably came to Dee for help and were driven to a clinic in DC (it was called Sigma, but Dee called it Stigma or — if they came out crying — Smegma), would have been tied to their assailants for life. Amber Schmidt was already dead of a self-administered abortion (the time-honored handgun method, right on her grandmother’s grave at the memorial park). If these girls were “women,” with all the responsibility that entailed, why shouldn’t Karen drive a car?