Mislaid. Nell Zink
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door of the Cockpit flew open and four sailors came in, pushing and shoving their way down the narrow stairway. Lee immediately turned to face them and Cary tugged on his arm. “Whoa, Nelly. You’re a married man.”
“I got a right to a bachelor party, ain’t I?”
Lee wrote a poem with swan boats in it to get them out of his system, and addressed himself to the fact that he had gotten Peggy out of his system. The easy joy and the joyful ease of sex with men, their easy-access genitalia, their uncomplicated inner lives … He knew there were women who lived like that, even beautiful and very interesting women, but they didn’t appeal to him at all. He wanted the needy staring beforehand and the tears of worshipful gratitude afterward, as though every orgasm were a reprieve from a death sentence. He just didn’t want it all the time.
He had had as much sex with Peggy as a person can have, and that was enough. She was hanging around his house doing her best to keep out of his way, like she was afraid of him. She felt nauseated, existentially and otherwise. She didn’t want to get on his nerves. She felt dependent. And she was. She was depending on him to do an awful lot of things, like marry her, raise her child, send her to school in New York, and finance the rest of her existence until the day she died. She had a suspicion it might not work out that way.
He, too, knew he wouldn’t be sending her away to finish school. But he knew the real reason: The college paid him two thousand dollars a year, and that was the extent of his income. He didn’t have a trust fund, just the prospect of inheriting from a happy-go-lucky fifty-four-year-old father who was more likely to die skiing than get sick before he turned eighty. It was no coincidence that famous authors came to visit him and not the other way around, or that he served his guests spaghetti. But quand même. The best things in life are free. A round of billiards with sailors is more beautiful than Charleston in springtime, if they’re the right sailors.
Peggy began writing a play. She got as far as the names after “DRAMATIS PERSONAE.” She wanted to draw on Arthurian mythology, the Questing Beast and the Fisher King, and got stuck on Guinevere. She imagined Joan Baez, without the shrill voice and the guitar, arms out like the Virgin of Guadalupe, and there wasn’t much Arthurian about it. It was Mexican. She thought a lot about Mexico in those days. The freedom down there, the eternal springtime, women scampering across desert hillsides like roadrunners. February was so cold that Stillwater Lake froze solid and her former classmates began sliding over and peeking up at the house through the gap in the bamboo. Emily actually walked up on the back porch and opened the storm door and knocked hard, five times. But without taking off her skates, and she was gone like a shot. Then it thawed and Peggy was alone again.
For a lesbian, Lee’s house was cold turkey. You could go months without seeing a woman. Not that it mattered if your plan of being a pencil-thin seductress in black had unexpectedly given way to frying pancakes in a plaid bathrobe. She liked it best when there were visiting poets. They never minded if you sat near them and just listened to them talk. It was impossible to think of anything to say that might interest them, because they weren’t interested in conversations with topics. They went out of their way to generate non sequiturs, occasionally playing a game they called Exquisite Corpse where you string together stories not even knowing what they’re about. One of them brought along a Ouija board and let spirits write his poems. He would have let even Peggy write his poems if Lee hadn’t looked at her and frowned.
At first she wondered why they were all so rich. When one of them forgot his watch or left a cashmere sweater balled up in the corner of a sofa, he would never call to ask about it. Lee explained to her that art for art’s sake is an upper-class aesthetic. To create art divorced from any purpose, you can’t be living a life driven by need and desire. She wanted to write plays that would blow people’s minds, but he didn’t want anything. His poems just were, and that’s what made them so good and her plays bad.
Peggy thought about the poets’ ability to fund their own publications and wasn’t so sure. Lee had a friend with a printing press—not Linotype or the new offset kind, but movable type made of lead—and with it he could make anything Lee wrote look valuable. And the Stillwater Review could turn anything into poetry just by publishing it, even forty-one reiterations of “c*nt” arranged in the shape of the Empire State Building. “Poets were not put here to put labels on the world,” he explained to her. “If that poem is about anything, it’s about the act of reading. To cite it for obscenity, you’d have to say what it means, which is why I can publish it.”
“I don’t like it,” she said. “It turns cunts into a penis.”
“Cunts were made for penises. What you do with yours is your business, but those are the facts. Nothing else was ever made for penises. Never slowed me down. It’s a free country.” He lit up a Tareyton and blew a smoke ring that nearly crossed the room.
Peggy was inexperienced, but a feeling of unease told her things were not necessarily going to end well.
The spring was a little warmer than usual. By April you could drink and bullshit with poets around the fire all night. She had thought poets were different, but by then she knew they just bullshit like good old boys everywhere. You could take winos off the sidewalk in front of the drugstore and teach them to be poets in half an hour. They’d refuse, or maybe the ones who were closet homosexuals would say yes, but they all could have done it, and better than college girls, because college girls have inhibitions to get over. The people who talked revolution made out like if you just overcame whatever was holding you back inside, you’d be free. But you’d just be a wino in front of a drugstore, saying whatever came into your head in the most provocative way you could think of, repeating and refining it because how else were you going to kill a hundred and fifty thousand hours until your father died in a crash. The poets reminded her of barflies, in love with their own wisecracks, stiffing the bartender because they don’t know what work is. But freedom isn’t speaking your mind freely. Freedom is having the money to go to Mexico.
“Jesus, Peggy. You can’t abort a seven-month baby. That’s infanticide. You need to get your daddy down here with a shotgun, because I keep on forgetting to marry you. And I do want to marry you.”
“So marry me now.” Peggy had heard of alimony. She wasn’t sure how much you get and if it’s enough to live on, but it had to be better than being an unwed teenage mother. She was barely eighteen and wouldn’t be grown up for three more years. They could have put her in a home for wayward girls.
“Dare me,” Lee said.
“I double-dare you with whipped cream and a cherry on top.”
He called a magistrate and arranged to be married the next afternoon for fifteen dollars.
When she had the baby, she couldn’t believe how beautiful he was. Rhys! She picked the name out all by herself. Labor was easy, no worse than cramps, which always made her feel like she was giving birth to a calf, then five hours in the hospital and there he was. He lay on a little cart, wrapped up in blue blankets, while she drank juice. Lee’s mother picked him up and said, “Welcome to the world, little Harry!”
“What are you doing, Mrs. Fleming?” Peggy said. “Give me my baby.”
“You didn’t really want this baby, did you now. Not from what I hear.”
“Lee!” she yelled. “Lee!”
Lee came in from the hallway. “Yes, dear? Well, would you look at that. My lord. What a sweetheart. Just look at him. Aw. Cleans up real nice.”
“His name is Rhys,” Peggy said. “Rhys Byrd Fleming. Do you like it?”
“But we’re christening him Harry,” Lee’s mother said.
“Moms, drop it. This is my wife. I’m his father. This not y’all’s baby. This my baby! Yes, sir! Who’s my baby!” He took Rhys and kissed him on the cheek, then leaned down and kissed Peggy.
“Well, we’ll be happy