That was a mistake. Emily looked at the windshield and said, “Then you’re stupid, because you like me, and that’s what I want to talk about.”
Peggy got out of the car and walked into the trees. She heard the car door slam and saw Emily pull away around the corner of the barn. The beeches were starting to turn yellow and the Virginia creeper was already fire-engine red. Peggy consoled herself with their appearance, as she thought a more sensitive person might.
The famous poet at the college was named Lee Fleming. He was a young local man who had given his family a lot of trouble growing up. After boarding school they sent him to college far away in New York City. When they heard of his doings up there, they gave him an ultimatum: stop dragging the family name in the dirt, or be cut off without a cent.
Lee hadn’t been conscious up until then that he had anything to gain by being a Fleming. That is, he hadn’t realized he didn’t have money of his own.
His parents were wealthy. But he had expectations and an allowance, not money. His father suggested he move to a secluded place. Queer as a three-dollar bill doesn’t matter on posted property. Lee’s father was a pessimist. He imagined muscle-bound teaboys doing bad things to Lee, and he didn’t want passersby to hear the screaming. He offered him the house on the opposite side of Stillwater Lake from the college.
It was a wood-frame Victorian Lee’s grandfather got for nothing during the Depression. It had been disassembled where it stood and rebuilt on a brick foundation facing the lake. It was supposed to be a summer place. But it was inconvenient to get to, far from any city, swarming with deerflies, and instead of a boathouse, it had a thicket of bamboo. So nobody ever used the house. It just stood there on Fleming land, taking up space. Still, when it came time to clear-cut the trees and sell them for the war effort, Mr. Fleming couldn’t bring himself to do it. The house looked so nice with big maples and tulip poplars around it. The trail to the water led through suggestive shoots of old bamboo big around as juice cans.
Lee was not the man his family took him for. As a lover he was a faithful romantic, always getting his feelings hurt. But he was a top. He never could get it right. He could put on a broadcloth shirt and gray slacks and wingtips and look as much a man as an Episcopalian ever does, but then he would place himself squarely in front of total strangers, maintaining eye contact as he spoke to them of poetry. So everybody in the county was calling him a fairy inside of a month. But he was a Fleming, and a top. He was untouchable. The local Klan wizard worked at his father’s sawmill. The Pentecostal preacher lived in his father’s trailer park. The worshipful master of the Prince Hall Masonic lodge drove one of his father’s garbage trucks. The county seat was in a crossing called Fleming Courthouse, and the Amoco station was Fleming’s American. No one openly begrudged him a house in the woods by a lake with no fishing.
Lee was serious about poetry. He thought America was where all the most important work of the 1960s was being done. He really meant it, and could explain it. John Ashbery, Howard Nemerov, and his favorite, Robert Penn Warren. Then the Beats. He had met them all in New York, and they all had a weakness for handsome Southerners who owned counties.
At first Lee had nothing to do with the college. But then a poet friend remarked that a girls’ college in the middle of nowhere sounds like something from Fellini, and he got an idea. He asked the English department to pay for a visit from Gregory Corso.
Poets came all the way from Richmond to hear him. But the girls stayed cool and distant, even through “Marriage.” Corso went back to New York and told people Lee lived in a time capsule where Southern womanhood was not dead. Two publishers and a novelist transferred their daughters to Stillwater.
In short, the college helped Lee and Lee helped the college, and they signed him up to teach a poetry course. He didn’t ask for a salary at first. Instead he asked the college to pay for his literary magazine, to be called Stillwater Review.
Three years later, the Stillwater Review was selling thousands of copies and keeping ten students busy reading submissions, and Lee was teaching three courses a semester: English poetry in the fall or American poetry in the spring, criticism, and a writing workshop.
He commuted to work in a canoe, rain or shine. When he pulled it up in front of his house, it plugged the gap in the bamboo like a garden gate. No student had ever been invited to the house. There were stories. John Ashbery shooting a sleeping whitetail fawn from a distance of three yards. Howard Nemerov on mescaline putting peppermint extract in spaghetti sauce. To hear one of the stories, you had to know someone from somewhere else who knew someone who had been invited—a cousin at Sarah Lawrence whose boyfriend’s brother was queer. Stillwater Lake might as well have been the Berlin Wall.
Freshmen were not eligible for Lee Fleming’s writing workshop. You had to take his other courses first.
Peggy thought this a ridiculous barrier. “How am I supposed to understand poetry if I’ve never written any myself?” she said to Lee in the third week of her first semester in his cozy office in a garret of the main building.
“How do you expect to get into my workshop if you’ve never written a poem?”
“Aren’t you supposed to teach us?”
“You’ve already missed the first two meetings.”
“Can I audit?”
“It’s impossible to audit a workshop. You have to do the work.”
“So can I enroll?”
“Name me one poet you admire.”
“Anne Sexton.”
Lee leaned back. “Anne Sexton? Why?”
“She doesn’t sound so good, but she’s got something to say. I read Hopkins or Dylan Thomas and I think, These cats sound cool all right, but do they have something to say?”
“Maybe they’re saying something you don’t understand.”
“Then make me understand it.”
“That’s like saying, ‘Make me live.’ ”
“Then make me take your workshop.”
“No. You think poetry is supposed to be about you, and you don’t know how to read. If you can’t read Milton, you can’t read Dylan Thomas. Take my course in English poetry.”
“And read Milton? No, thanks.”
“Then you’ll never be my student.”
“I’m changing my major to French.”
“Don’t be childish.”
“Is it childish to know what you want?”
“I want you to take my course,” Lee began, then stopped, realizing he had said something unusual and slightly embarrassing.
Peggy stood glaring at him, and he glared back.
She offered him a cigarillo. She sat down on the edge of his desk to light it for him, leaning over gracefully with her hands cupped around the match, a smiling seventeen-year-old girl with curly hair like springs, and he realized he had a hard-on.
“Forget the whole thing,” Peggy was saying. “I can write plays without your help. I don’t even need Anne Sexton’s help. Screw her and Milton and the horse they rode in on.”
“Sounds like a natural-born writer to me,” he said. “I would very much appreciate your taking my course in English poetry.”
“I was serious. I don’t want in your workshop, even if it means I never see you again.”
He looked around as if to indicate their surroundings—the Stillwater campus, all eight acres of it—and