Loudermilk by Lucy Ives

Author:Lucy Ives
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781593763909
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Published: 2019-03-03T16:00:00+00:00

Twenty-Nine

Parity

Clare has been to the party. She has done what she believes is expected. Appear. She sat in the living room. Here are her peers: The novelists look like money and even the poets seem canny, mathematical. Or maybe no one looks like money, because no one looks at ease. Almost everyone is white. No one, as far as Clare knows, is not straight. Clare does not know much. She pushed herself to attend. She read the listserv invite with a moan. It is precisely the sort of thing she does not care to do but the doing of which convinces her of her sanity. Anyway, all this makes sense, fossil fuels, gynecology, a giant bird on a plate.

She watched the winey beauty of the Midwest. She was in the living room of the poet couple and their roster of amanuenses. All are tantalizing because drunk. Everything is sex. The poet Loudermilk is propped against the mantelpiece. Clare might like to die for him, or, she thinks, perhaps she will kill him. Thank god she does not write poetry. He and his “cool, dim Easter / Basket” are so beloved. He’s rewriting the rules of the poetry game with his fresh prosody, his striking neologisms. Or is it the prosody that is striking, the neologisms fresh? “These are the poems of our time,” Clare overhears one besotted second-year say.

Meanwhile, there doesn’t seem to be anyone resembling Halloween’s Troy.

Just before midnight there is an exodus.

Clare stumbles out into the frigid grid. Lawns are spiked with frost and with detritus. The building Clare lives in has an enormous mansard roof. The whole thing is a rectangular mushroom, a brutalist mausoleum.

When Clare was in college, there had been a very few people for her, people she had known. She does not understand why now, but these people did not touch her. Or, they may have touched her in a physical sense but in no other. They were like her, even sometimes a lot. It felt like looking through a glass partition into a room in which there was a mirror. Clare danced behind the glass partition and was reflected. A friend was on the other side of the partition and danced, too. Their reflections looked similar. So they danced—together.

Clare could not tell if she was alone. Of course Clare was not alone! Just look at this dancing. But her confessions were muffled, especially if she tried to shout them through the glass. The friend gyrating in the other room, visible through the partition, leaned down and helpfully turned the music up.

“This is life,” Clare told herself, and went for a walk with her notebook. Her mother called and reminded Clare that she, Clare, was definitely not having any issues. Clare was well! If Clare happened not to be well, then Clare should consider disappearing from the face of the earth, because if Clare was not well then she would be dead to her mother, who had long since had enough.

Clare pondered these entailments.

She went for another walk.

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