Opening Act Page 18

  But now that the first half of the tour was winding down, Shay felt a sense of anticlimax, almost of guilt. All this time he’d been free of Pernita, and he hadn’t made even a token attempt to reach out to Loni. Possibly he wouldn’t have been able to; he still had no contact info for her, nothing. But in fact, he hadn’t even tried.

  He supposed he’d expected that the tour and hanging out with Strafer Nation would all be so new and so novel and so fulfilling that it would drive Loni right out of his thoughts. He had certainly given it plenty of opportunity. But it never really kicked in. Probably because touring involved—much more so than he had ever dreamed—just freaking endless hours of transit. Sitting on that bus for hours on end, with nothing going on except fidgety Pernita beside him complaining and always having to pee, or alone with the two bands who seemed only interested in sleeping or smoking or playing cards or occasionally daring Trina to do something stupid (like moon a squad car from one of the windows), Shay had had acres of time in which his mind was unoccupied and restless—a free agent.

  He’d tried to use that time constructively. He’d picked up a copy of The Complete Poems of William Blake while he was in New York and had tried to make his way through it on the long rides. Occasionally he did hook on to some passages that made the rest of the world disappear for a while, but most of the time he was too distracted by hunger or movement or weariness or passivity. He came almost to resent having committed himself to the book. It was just so goddamn massive. Like, more than a thousand pages. Before they reached Chicago it might just pull his arm out of its socket.

  Despite his not-quite-ringing success with William Blake, Shay felt a modicum of hope. After Chicago, the band was returning to Haver City for sixteen days, just for a stopover, no gigs. He could rest up, check in with some OGs, and maybe get some news on what Loni was up to now. He knew Lockwood was still in contact with Zee, and even though Zee hated him, he might be able to use Lockwood to pry some intel from her.

  And then there was the second leg of the tour, when Overlords would be accompanying Strafer Nation west, playing every burg from Boulder to Vegas and ending up—where else?—in Los Angeles.

  Shay wasn’t sure where Loni lived. He only knew it was in California. But if it was anywhere within driving distance of LA…and hell, even if it wasn’t…

  Well.

  He’d see what he’d see. That’s all he could project, from this far out. Play it by ear. Take it as it came.

  The bourbon began to claim his consciousness. He shimmied out of his clothes and fell asleep as soon as his T-shirt cleared his head, even though the overhead light still shone brightly into his face.

  CHAPTER 14

  There was one in every classroom. Loni knew that. Of course she knew it. It’s just that now, she couldn’t sit back and wait for the drama to resolve. Now, it was her problem.

  She stood before the class—composed almost entirely of women, with a few stray men who looked like they hadn’t quite settled on planet Earth as a permanent residence yet—and tried to look authoritative and calm. She was neither.

  “All I’m saying,” said the student—one Ferry Shagall, an extremely tall, angular, and imposing-looking girl with ebony skin and copper-colored hair, “is that if somebody on campus found a poem like this on my website or something, they’d haul me in for a psych evaluation and probably hook me up with some kind of therapist. And charge my parents.”

  Loni sighed. “I still don’t entirely see your point.”

  The work under discussion was a poem by Charlotte Dacre that read:

  So full my thoughts are of thee, that I swear

  All else is hateful to my troubl’d soul;

  How thou hast o’er me gain’d such vast control,

  How charm’d my stubborn spirit is most rare.

  Sure thou hast mingl’d philtres in my bowl!

  Or what thine high enchanted arts declare

  Fearless of blame—for truth I will not care,

  So charms the witchery, whether fair or foul.

  Yet well my love-sick mind thine arts can tell;

  No magic potions gav’st though, save what I

  Drank from those lustrous eyes when they did dwell

  With dying fondess on me—or thy sigh,

  Which sent its perfum’d poison to my brain.

  Thus known thy spells, thou bland seducer, see—

  Come practice them again, and oh! again;

  Spell-bound I am—and spell-bound wish to be.

  “My point,” said Ferry, as the other students in the class took advantage of the interruption to check their cell phones and send God-I’m-bored texts, “is that this woman is calling her lover a seducer and liking the idea that he may have drugged her. Am I right?”

  Loni felt as though the girl was laying a trap for her. “Let’s say you are.”

  Ferry shook her head. “I don’t want your condescension. Just tell me: am I right?”

  Loni felt a thin film of sweat form over her brow. “That…that would be my interpretation as well. Yes.”

  “Fine.” Ferry sat back and extended her arms wide. “Why are we studying this poem, Ms. Merrick? What’s our takeaway supposed to be? Everywhere I go on this campus I’m being exhorted to be rational, to take control, to be empowered, and yadda yadda yadda. Then I get to classes like this one, and I’m served up works like this—reveling in subjugation, powerlessness, abandonment of personal authority. Talking about ‘perfum’d poison,’ for God’s sake.”

  “This is poetry,” Loni said, “not rules for living. That’s not the way we use poetry.”

  “Then how do we use it?”

  Loni felt her face flush. “There’s…there’s no single use for poetry. It’s a whole palette of responses, of ways that it…that it impacts our lives…” Oh, my God, Loni thought. I just used “impact” as a verb. This girl is really rattling me.

  “And it’s not just poetry,” Ferry said. “In my Women’s Studies class, we’ve been reading Simone de Beauvoir. You’re familiar with her, I take it?”

  “Yes, of course,” said Loni, though her familiarity was only slight.

  “Well, all right, then. The way that woman tore through life. Rebellion, abortion, female lovers, constantly hurling herself against the authorities of the day. If I lived life the way she did, I’d be booted from this campus in a New York minute, and my parents would disown me into the bargain. But here we are in our safe little classrooms, having her parceled out to us in antiseptic one-hour segments and being quizzed on it later.” She shook her head. “Maybe I’m not cut out for university life. Maybe university life isn’t life.” She looked up at Loni. “Do you see what I’m getting at here?”

  “No,” said Loni, having to hold on to the desk to keep from falling over.

  “There’s no risk here,” she said. “This is, like, the place risk comes to die. People like de Beauvoir roared across the world stage. They took chances, they defied convention, they lived. And we here—here on this campus, in this classroom—we run along after them, collecting the rubble they left behind and fetishizing it. Why? What is the purpose of that, if it’s not to inspire us to do the same goddamn thing, throw out the rule books and light out for parts unknown?” She gestured widely, taking in the whole of her surroundings. “Where is poetry on this campus, Ms. Merrick? Where?”

  Loni’s throat had gone dry. She tried clearing it, but only succeeded in closing it tight.

  The trouble was, she agreed with Ferry. She’d just never allowed herself to confront the issue before. She’d been smart enough to steer clear of it, for her own sake. She’d always worshiped the great visionaries and nonconformists—Blake, for Christ’s sake!—but she herself had always kept to the safest, most brightly lit, most well-trodden path. She’d never taken a risk in her life.

  Well…only once. When she’d thrown everything away because of Shay Dayton. And then, at the first sign that that might have been more dangerous than she’d thought, she’d come sca
mpering back to the herd, to the security of the pack. And to the protection of her mentor. She felt a sudden welling up of shame.

  But she had a job to do. So she summoned up all her resources and said, “Literature isn’t supposed to be useful, Ferry. It can be, but ultimately its only real purpose is to illuminate shades of the human experience, to show us ways of being we otherwise might not have known or even suspected.”

  “As a substitute for actually experiencing them, or being them?” she asked. “Because, let me tell you, there’s not a whole lot of love for varieties of human experience around this place. It’s pretty much lockstep or locked-out, as far as I can tell. Which makes this worship of historic and literary rebels flat-out hypocrisy.”

  “We don’t worship them,” Loni said, trying not to let anger edge into her voice. “We listen to them. It’s all a conversation. They speak directly to us, right off the page. They always will.”

  Ferry slouched in her chair and crossed her arms over her chest. “Well, if they speak directly to us, then why do we need you?”

  Loni felt almost faint. She’d gotten some flak from this girl before, but never on this level. Possibly there was some atmospheric thing going on that was making her more contentious today than usual. “We’re here as your guides,” Loni said, in the most evenly measured tones as she could manage. “We’re here to help you navigate…well, for instance, Charlotte Dacre’s vocabulary and imagery. To clarify what it is she’s done, what’s behind what she’s done.”

  Ferry narrowed her eyes. “You’re priests, is the point. Right? Because, if you really meant what you said—that literature is a conversation, and poets speak directly to us—then there’s no need for any intermediaries. You’re here because…well, basically, you do worship these people. You do fetishize them. Because of some lack in your own confidence or abilities or whatever, you put yourselves between us and them—you insert yourselves into the conversation as intermediaries, and from that you draw some kind of sad, reflected glory.”

  Loni rubbed the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger. “Oh, for God’s sake. You’re asking me now to justify the whole existence of academia.”

  “Can you? At least, with respect to the arts? Because if poets speak directly do us, why do we need you? Listen, do you think Charlotte Dacre, when she wrote this poem, was like, ‘Okay, it’s finished, now I’ll turn it over to my vestal virgins so that they can spoon-feed it line by line to the rest of humanity and tell them exactly how it ought to go down’? Because frankly, I have to doubt it.”

  Loni shook her head. “You can’t know what Charlotte Dacre meant.”

  “And you can?” She sat up and put her hands on the desk and laughed. “How can you possibly? How can you tell me you can understand a woman who lived her life like a lit match and I can’t? What gives you insight into that kind of mind and not me?”

  “You’re confusing passion with poetry. That’s only part of it. Poetry is also a discipline; it’s work. It’s hard work. It’s not just fire, it’s…” She searched for an appropriate analogy. “It’s nailing fire to a page. So that it burns forever.” Oh, hell. That wasn’t right. It was a mixed metaphor, for one thing. Loni cringed at her own ineptitude.

  But it seemed to quell Ferry’s contrariness for the moment. She heaved a large sigh and said, “All right. Well. I’ll consider that.” She sat back in her chair. “Though I have to tell you, I hear poetry everywhere around me. You ever been to a hip-hop concert, Ms. Merrick? There’s a conversation. No need for an intermediary, either. People hear it, they get it, they respond. And it’s useful to them. It does give them ideas on how to live their lives. I’m sure someday there’ll be a hip-hop unit in this department with someone like you standing up in front of a classroom deconstructing every phrase. And that’s when we’ll all know hip-hop is dead.”

  Loni felt something inside her snap, some essential support on which the entirety of her persona had been resting. She had just enough presence of mind to say, “Would you excuse me for a moment?” then get out the door and down the hallway to the women’s room, where she stumbled into a stall and burst into bitter, angry tears.

  “I swear,” she said at lunch later, over a crab salad and a Diet Coke, “that heinous girl actually made me cry. And I mean, I’m not some goddamn shrinking violet. I don’t just fall to pieces like that. I still can’t get over it.”

  Her lunch companion, a sandy-haired, rather gaminelooking TA named Kevin Morski, eyed her sympathetically as he chewed a mouthful of his grilled cheese sandwich. He swallowed and said, “It’s not you. It’s just the pressure of this place. I mean, you’ve not only got these classes to teach, you’ve got your other work for Byron and your own course load.”

  It was true. Loni’s position as a TA was only part of her duties as a graduate student. She’d always just presumed that somehow, somewhere, she’d pursue a graduate degree, and Byron’s offer of a job had made that possibility a reality. It was only now that she was actually living that dream that it began to seem like something she hadn’t thought through very thoroughly. She wasn’t certain she’d made a mistake, but she wasn’t certain she hadn’t, either.

  The other TAs all seemed completely fine with the road they were on. Kevin, for instance, seemed never to question it at all. He was in fact much further along than Loni—only about a year from earning his degree, and was well into his thesis.

  Loni liked him well enough. He was easygoing and generous with his time and advice, and he had a very dry wit. And yet he seemed to her to be…well, there was no way to disguise it, not quite a full human being. How could he be? He’d spent his entire adult life on college campuses, first as a student, now as a graduate student and TA, and soon he’d be on the faculty somewhere as a teacher and presumably hang on to that until he achieved tenure and lived out the rest of his days there. He had no experience of urban life—or of rural life for that matter—or of any life in which a man had to forge a place for himself in a community where not everyone was exactly like him. He’d curled up in his nice academic cocoon, and he would stay here till he died.

  That had been Loni’s plan once, too. It had seemed faintly romantic—and yes, a bit monastic—retiring from a vulgar, fractious, avaricious world to tend the fires of knowledge and the altar of culture so it could burn bright the day the lesser world finally consumed itself and would once again need the wisdom of the ages to rebuild. It had happened before; it seemed certain to happen again.

  But she now knew the residents of this academic world well enough to have trouble aligning them with so heroic a mission. They were, if anything, more vicious and ambitious and double-dealing than the people she’d known in the outer world. There, the simple matter of having to coexist with other people very different from you demanded a code of behavior, of civility, that—while not universally embraced—was universally acknowledged. Not here. Here, it was flat-out cutthroat.

  “Hey, hey,” Kevin said, snapping his fingers in her face. “You still in there?”

  “Sorry,” she said, picking up her fork again. “Just thinking.”

  “Really lost you there for a sec. Where’d you go?”

  Someplace you wouldn’t understand, she thought, but she said, “No place in particular.”

  “Listen, you can’t let this student of yours upset you,” he said, before slurping up some iced tea through a straw. “I mean, when you think about it, her arguments aren’t even internally consistent. She says academia is a ‘priesthood’ that has inserted itself unnecessarily between the poet and his readers. But later she says she’ll know hip-hop is dead once it becomes fodder for academic study. So which is it? Are poets still vital, and we just block readers’ way to them? Or do they only come under our watch when they’ve already lost their vitality, when they’re museum pieces?”

  “Either way,” said Loni glumly, “it’s not very flattering to us.”

  “She was trying to offend us. Or you, anyway.” He patted her hand. “
Oh, hon. Trust me. There are always going to be students who feel compelled to challenge you just because you’re in a position of authority over them. They’ll throw everything they’ve got at you, and it doesn’t even matter if it’s contradictory. On the other hand,” he said with a sly grin, “there are students who’ll want to give themselves to you—be ravished by you—for the same reason. Power can be an aphrodisiac.” He winked. “That’s where you can make up for the other kind.”

  Loni felt slightly ill. She thought of the gay men she knew in Haver City, men who had to navigate the difficult waters of competing with one another for one another, and the ferociously Darwinian arenas in which they did this—the pulsing dance clubs, darkened bars, and catalog-like hookup websites. Kevin had never had to subject himself to anything like that. He’d been brought to St. Nazarius by Leopold Kanak, the distinguished scholar who’d almost single-handedly built the university’s Queer Studies department. Kevin had always been under Professor Kanak’s protection—his intimate protection—but had also had a steady diet of other carnal experiences virtually delivered to his door in the form of young students eager to attract his notice.

  That must be how she herself appeared—and not just to Kevin, to everyone. It was an open secret that she and Byron were now lovers. No one spoke of it, but not because it was scandalous; quite the contrary: because it was too commonplace to warrant comment. But it wasn’t how she liked to think of herself, and she liked it less when someone like Kevin held up a kind of mirror to show her a reflection that was preening and self-satisfied.

  “I wanted to run an idea by you,” he said, having finished his lunch and shoved the plastic tray aside. “An expansion of my thesis. It’s a sort of refutation of Foucault’s idea that transvestism can function as either a sexual expression or merely as a gender identity. I think transvestism is always sexual. I mean, think about it. The ‘trouser roles’ in baroque opera were meant to show off the figures of the mezzo-sopranos who filled them—it was risqué. They were designed to arouse. Cherubino would’ve made all those old Viennese burghers in the dress circle pop a woody. And then there were the TV comedians in the sixties and seventies—Milton Berle, Flip Wilson—who dressed up like women, ostensibly for laughs. I say ostensibly, because I think it was actually an attempt—conscious or otherwise, but I think the former—to diminish the cultural power of transvestism by making it ridiculous. It was a political act meant to take that weapon out the quill of the gay arsenal. Ooh,” he said, furrowing his brow. “I like that phrasing. Have to remember it. Anyway, I see the rise of explicitly sexual glam rockers—David Bowie, Marc Bolan—as a direct response to those comedians. A rebuke, and a poke in the eye.” He gave her a sly look. “What they’re poking with shall remain open to conjecture. Hah!” He gave her arm a nudge. “So…what do you think?”