Opening Act (28 page)

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?”

Loni was somehow able to string together enough words to suggest that she thought it was a good angle, but she actually didn't know much about David Bowie, only a smattering about Foucault, and nothing at all about old TV comedians. She wasn't entirely interested in learning, either. She was too caught up in a sudden vision of herself in a few years, in Kevin's position, coming up with some ridiculous premise on which to heap thousands and thousands of words and thus earn herself an extended stay in this idyllic little claustrophobic paradise.

She found herself missing Zee and the nights that had always kind of bored her before, when they'd sit on the couch sharing a bottle of wine. Zee would relate in brutal detail all the indignities she'd suffered that day and whether, and how, she'd managed to give back as good as she'd gotten. Afterward they would go out to a bar or a club and erase it all from their minds with more cocktails, a game of darts, flirting, music. Loni had always considered those nights to be the equivalent of slumming for her, an almost anthropological exercise in seeing how normal people lived before she headed off to her ivory tower and spent the rest of her days in exalted research and inquiry. What an asshat she'd been!

She felt such a pang of longing that she thought of texting Zee on the spot, but she could think of nothing to say.

Byron had promised to bring dinner home, but then he called and said he'd be late. There was a thing with the provost that would be politically advantageous for him to be seen at, blah, blah, blah. Loni found herself not even listening. It was fine that he wasn't coming straight home. She sensed she was in the kind of mood that would only annoy him, and she didn't feel sufficient desire to modify anything about her current state of mind just to avert his anger.

It had been nice in the beginning. He'd been so sweet, a kind of dutiful puppy dog who couldn't wait to see her at the end of every day. But as the term went on, he became distracted by his classes, his workload, and his own razor-sharp ambition—something about him that had surprised Loni—and he'd begun to take her rather for granted. It was as though he had a checklist of things he wanted to accomplish at St. Nazarius. A regular sex partner was one of them, and having ticked that off, he'd now turned his attention to the other line items.

After the first delirious couplings, sex had proven to be a kind of methodical thing, like their meals. No matter what she tried to whip up in the kitchen, and she'd taken on some serious challenges, he devoured it all as though it were a task to be gotten through, then thanked her and spent the rest of the night in front of his laptop. He seemed to be a man almost without a voluptuous impulse of any kind, an anti-sensualist. Food and sex were just there to propel him forward, but he never enjoyed them for their own sakes.

This at least made it easier for Loni, because she never really had to pretend any emotional investment once the lights went out. She told herself she was glad of it. She told herself that quite often, actually. Like she was trying to convince herself it was true.

Always, just off at the perimeter of her mind when she entered this particular realm of thought, were Shay Dayton's steely limbs, his damp hair hanging in her face, his urgent breath, his marble butt cheeks, his narrow hips working like pistons…

…but she'd retreat, force herself to back quietly away if she ever got too close to confronting those memories head-on.

She was itchy and edgy and distracted now. She sat down before her own laptop and checked to see what was new on Facebook. Just the usual stream of cat photos, vacation pics, political slogans. Nothing that could hold her interest. Feeling utterly daring, she checked the Overlords of Loneliness fan page. It wasn't the first time she'd done this since coming to St. Nazarius, but it was the first time she'd done it when she hadn't had a few drinks first.