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 laughed.
Peggy didn’t take his course. A week later she accepted his invitation to kneel in the front of his canoe while he pushed off from the marshy, leech-infested bank with a paddle. The first thing he said was “This is not a date.” Then he moved toward her in the darkness and pulled her hips toward his, sliding his hands down the sides of her butt, and kissed her, because to be honest with himself (as he became much later), he didn’t know any other mode of behavior in the canoe. The canoe tipped from side to side and Peggy was very still and solemn. It was so exciting he couldn’t figure it out. She was androgynous like the boys he liked, but she made him wonder if he liked boys or just had been meeting the wrong kind of girl. He thought about her genitalia and decided it didn’t make much difference. Her body was female, female, female. Everywhere he touched, it curved away from him, fleeing. He felt between her legs, and it vanished. The abyss.
Peggy felt she was being held in the palm of God’s hand. Not because he was a famous poet and the most respected teacher at her school, but because he was a man and powerful, physically. In all her fantasies she’d been the man, and had to please some pleading lover. But now a person had voluntarily dedicated himself to serving her desires. She had never expected that, ever. It violated her work ethic. She felt a wish to speak and opened her eyes, and the poet in the black mackintosh was staring down into them, rain beating down around them, and they were surrounded on every side by water. It was a good bit more sexy and romantic than she had dared to imagine anything.
Each was mystified, but for very different reasons. Peggy had thought she would die a virgin and had never given a moment’s thought to birth control. And now it looked as though she might be a virgin for maybe ten more minutes. “I’m a virgin,” she said.
“That can be taken care of,” Lee said.
“No, I mean it,” she said. “This is a big deal. You have to promise me.”
“I promise you everything.” He kissed her. “Everything.”
He was mystified that he would say something like that to anyone — male, female, eunuch, hermaphrodite, sheep, tree. He looked her in the eyes and decided she wasn’t paying attention.
He landed the canoe and carried her into the house.
Peggy was young and her patience for sexual activity was just about infinite. Her sex drive was strong, plus pent up, since she’d been looking at girls and thinking about fucking them for five solid years. And Lee was no slouch either. Between his teaching only three courses and her willingness to skip class, they found a lot of time to inhabit his conversation pit as well as the bed that hung on brass chains from the ceiling and the Bengal tiger skin. Sometimes they talked, and sometimes he just sat and typed while she went through the bookshelves, reading Genet and Huysmans but mostly thinking about what she thought about all the time now: sex with Lee. She was feeling new feelings, emotional and physical, new pains and longings, and she couldn’t make notes — there was no point; there was no way you could work them into a play, and somebody might find them and read them — but she kept careful track of them, mentally.
Being a lesbian had given her practice keeping secrets. She walked to his house through the woods even when it took her two hours. Or she waited by the road for his car. Moonless nights in Stillwater were dark as the inside of a cow. When he didn’t have time to see her, she would sit on a bench overlooking the lake and stare at his bamboo.
Lee had promised Peggy everything, but he hadn’t thought to include a promise that she wouldn’t be kicked out of school for fraternization. Lee sleeping with a student was a scandal, and it had to be stopped. Lee was in loco parentis, but he was also indispensable. Thus Peggy was deemed to have found her calling. Girls quit coed schools to get married all the time. That’s what they go there for — to get their MRS degree. Stillwater was supposed to be different, but any school could let in the wrong girl. They asked her not to come back after Christmas vacation.