Mislaid & The Wallcreeper: The Nell Zink Collection. Nell Zink

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СКАЧАТЬ choosing to be a lesbian. But you are making the wrong choice, honey. I wanted you to get an education. Now you’re seventeen and there’s nothing I can do.”

      Her father said, “You’re saving me a bundle, you know that? You’re Lee Fleming’s problem now, and I wish him luck.”

      “How am I Lee’s problem? I’m going to transfer to another school! I applied to the New School for Social Research!”

      Her father rolled his eyes. To him it was a cruel joke being played on him by his supervisor God. A social superior with an intellectual bent and a fortune in land: he had prayed many times for a husband like that for Peggy.

      Peggy’s mother’s parting gift was a trip to the gynecologist. Peggy had never seen a gynecologist before and didn’t like it. He was supposed to fit her with a diaphragm. Instead he took one look at her cervix and said, “Miss Vaillaincourt, you are fixing to have a baby and I would say it’s not going to take so long that you shouldn’t get married at the earliest possible opportunity.” She said she didn’t want a baby, and he repeated the sentence word for word with the same exact identical intonation, like a machine.

      Lee saw it coming. She came back from Christmas vacation looking bloated. He reflected that he had fucked her nearly every day since September. He asked, “Punky, don’t you ever get the curse?” She broke down and begged him for a Mexican abortion. “Why would you do that?” he said. “I’d give my child a name.” She stared in horror like he was a giant spider, then clasped her fists against her abdomen and moaned like a cow. “Are you feeling sick? That’s all right, it’s normal.”

      He hadn’t anticipated having a wedding at all, ever, but he felt up to the task. Fatherhood surprised him pleasantly. As a male he assumed no unpleasant duties would accrue to him. He would be responsible for teaching the child conversational skills once it reached its teens.

      It was up to Peggy’s parents to pay for the wedding. Peggy got as far as asking them. Her mother called her Lee’s doxy and said the baby would be born deformed because Flemings marry their cousins. Her father gave her five hundred dollars and sighed.

      Lee consulted his old friend Cary. They had grown up as neighbors. Cary was older and richer and fey, with a hobby of arranging flowers and a habit of getting into difficult situations with straight men. They made a date at a gay bar under a hardware store in Portsmouth.

      “Urbanna is the place for a wedding,” Cary said. “Rent the beach and I’ll organize us some swan boats. They’ve got the whitest sand beach in Tidewater, and we’ll jam Christ Church full of magnolias until it goes pop.”

      “Swan boats? What are you, drunk?”

      Cary folded his arms and said, “Then get married in Battle Abbey with a reception in the yard. See if I care.”

      “Swan boats would drift out to the river. They have wings like sails, and no keel.”

      “You want the swan boats.” Cary pointed at him and announced the news to the empty bar. “Fleming wants the swan boats!”

      “I want an honor guard from VMI, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to get it. What I need is for three hundred people to know my beautiful bride is with child, and then clear out while we go on our honeymoon, and for that I need—what do I need, man? I’m asking you. You think I do this all the time?”

      “Bruton Parish Church. Then those of us of the non-marrying persuasion retire to the Williamsburg Inn for mint ‘giblets,’ and you drive down to Hatteras with what’s-her-name.”

      “Peggy.”

      “Then you take the Peglet down to Nags Head and get her pregnant again.”

      “She’s pregnant now. There’s no double pregnant.”

      “Then you lay back and watch her get fatter.”

      “It’s not fat. It’s a Fleming. And we’re going to Charleston.”

      “In January?”

      “Spring break.”

      “She’s going to be fat as a tick by March. Big old body, little arms and legs.”

      The 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. СКАЧАТЬ