Arkansas

by David Leavitt

  “That’s okay. I don’t read much generally, but I thought your book was pretty interesting. I mean, it showed me a lot of things I didn’t know, not being gay myself.”

  “I’m glad to hear you say that,” I said in one breath, “because sometimes I think gay writers only write for a gay audience, which is a mistake. The point is, human experience is universal, and there’s no reason why straight people can’t get as much out of a gay novel as gay people get out of a straight novel, don’t you think?” (I grimaced: I sounded as if I were giving an interview.)

  “Yeah” was Eric’s reply.

  A fifth, nearly unbearable silence.

  “Well, it’s been great talking to you, Eric.”

  “My pleasure.”

  “Okay, so long.”

  “Later.”

  And he hung up with amazing swiftness.

  The next morning I was at the library when it opened.

  I stayed all day. Did you know that Lord Henry Somerset’s father, the Duke of Beaufort, invented the game of badminton, which was named for his estate? Well, he did. Also, Osbert Sitwell once wrote a poem about Lord Henry, in which he lampooned the notorious expatriate as “Lord Richard Vermont,” whom “some nebulous but familiar scandal / Had lightly blown ... over the Channel, / Which he never crossed again.”

  Thus at the age of twenty-seven

  A promising career was over,

  And the thirty or forty years that had elapsed

  Had been spent in killing time

  —or so Lord Richard thought,

  Though in reality, killing time

  Is only the name for another of the multifarious ways

  By which Time kills us.

  When I got home that evening, there was a message in my room that Eric had called.

  “Hey,” I said, calling him back, calmer now, as well as more curious.

  “Hey,” Eric said.

  Apparently it was not his conversational style to phone for any particular reason.

  “So what’s up?”

  “Not much, man. Just kicking back.”

  “Sounds good. You live in a dorm?”

  “No, I’m off campus.”

  “Oh, cool.” (Lying down, I shoved a pillow behind my head, as I imagined Eric had.) “And do you live alone?”

  “I share a house with two other guys, but I’ve got my own room.” He yawned.

  “And are your roommates home?”

  “Nope. They’re at the library.”

  “Studying?”

  “You got it.”

  “And don’t you have studying to do?”

  “Yeah, but I bagged it around seven. Actually, I was feeling kind of bored, so I started reading another one of your books.”

  “Oh really? Which one?” (How I longed to ask what he was wearing!)

  “Family Dancing. And you know what’s weird? It really reminds me of my family—especially the one called ‘Danny in Transit.’ I’m from New Jersey,” he added.

  “Wow,” I said. Family Dancing was the last thing I wanted to talk about it. “So what do you do with your spare time, Eric? Besides swim three days a week.”

  “You’ve got a good memory, Dave.”

  “Thanks. It goes with the territory.”

  “Like that story of yours! So let’s see, what do I do with my spare time.” (I heard him thinking.) “You mean besides jack off?"

  “Well—”

  Eric laughed. “Let’s see. Well, I like to party sometimes—”

  “I’m sorry to interrupt, but I have to ask—when you say party, do you mean literally party, or get high?”

  “Can be both, can be both.”

  “You were stoned at my father’s house the other day, weren’t you?”

  “Shit! How’d you know?”

  “I could just tell.”

  “Do you get high?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Man, I am so into pot! Ever since I was thirteen. Listen, do you want to come over and get stoned?”

  I sat up. “Sure,” I said.

  “Cool.”

  Long pause.

  “Wait—you mean tonight?”

  “Yeah, why not?”

  “No problem, tonight’s fine. I just don’t want to keep you from your studying.”

  “I told you, I bagged it.”

  “Okay. Where do you live?”

  “Santa Monica. Have you got a pencil?”

  I wrote down the directions.

  Through the intercom, I told Jean I was going out to a movie with my friend Gary, after which I got into the car and headed for the freeway. The rush hour traffic had eased, which meant it took me only half an hour to arrive at the address Eric had given me, a dilapidated clapboard house. In the dark I couldn’t make out the color.

  From the salty flavor of the air, I could tell that the sea wasn’t far off.

  Dogs barked as I got out of my father’s car and opened the peeling picket gate, over which unpruned hydrangea bushes crowded. The planks of the verandah creaked as I stepped across them. In the windows, a pale orange light quavered.

  I knocked. Somewhere in the distance Tracy Chapman was singing “Fast Car.”

  “Hey, sexy,” Eric said, pulling open the screen door.

  I blinked. He was wearing sweatpants and a Rutgers Crew T-shirt.

  “Glad you could make it.” He held the door open.

  “My pleasure,” I said.

  I stepped inside. The living room, with its orange carpet and beaten-up, homely furniture, reminded me of my own student days, when I’d shopped at the Salvation Army, or dragged armchairs in from the street.

  “Nice place,” I said.

  “It’s home,” Eric said. “I mean, it’s not like your dad’s house. Now that's what I call a house. Say, you want a beer?”

  “Sure.” I wasn’t about to tell him I hated beer.

  He brought two Coronas from the kitchen, one of which he handed me.

  “L'chaim he toasted.

  “Cheers,” I said.

  Then Eric leapt up the staircase, and since he gave no indication whether or not I was supposed to follow him, I followed him. He took the stairs three at a time.

  At the top, four doors opened off a narrow corridor. Only one was ajar.

  “Step into my office,” he said, passing through. “And close the door behind you.”

  I did. The room was shadowy. An architect’s lamp with a long, folding arm illuminated a double mattress on the floor, the blue sheets clumped at the bottom. Against the far wall, under a window, stood a desk piled with textbooks. Clean white socks were heaped on a chair, beneath which lounged a pair of crumpled jockey shorts.

  In the space where a side table might have been, a copy of Family Dancing lay splayed over the Vintage edition of A Room with a View.

  “Have a seat,” Eric said. Then he threw himself onto the mattress, where, cross-legged, he busied himself with a plastic bag of pot and some rolling papers.

  “You can move all that,” he added, indicating the chair.

  Gingerly I put the socks onto the desk, nudged the shorts with my left foot, and sat down.

  Unspeaking, with fastidious concentration, Eric rolled the joint. Much about his room, from the guitar to the recharging laptop to the blue-lit CD player (the source of Tracy Chapman’s voice), seemed to me typical UCLA. And yet there were incongruous touches. For one thing, the posters did not depict acid rock musicians or figures from the world of sports. Instead Eric had thumbtacked the Sistine Chapel ceiling onto his ceiling. Over his bed hung the Last Judgment. Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer in a Sea of Mist stared into the back of the door.

  “Have you spent much time in Europe?” I hazarded.

  “Yeah, last summer. I went to Italy, France, Amsterdam.”

  “You must have liked Amsterdam.”

  “I basically don’t remember Amsterdam.”

  I laughed. “And Italy?”

  “Man! Rome was amazing! Rome really blew m
e away!” Licking the joint, he sealed it, then picked up a lighter from the floor.

  “The last time I went to Florence I tried to find the hotel where Forster stayed,” I said. “I only mention it because I see you’re reading A Room with a View.”

  Eric lit the joint. “Come on down here,” he said, slapping the other side of the bed like someone’s behind.

  “I’d better take off my shoes.”

  “Yeah, Dave, I’d have to agree that would be a good idea.”

  He was mocking me, but agreeably, and, flushing, I did what I was told. Down among the sheets the world smelled both fruity and smoky.

  Eric toked, passed me the joint. Lying back, he stretched his arms over his head.

  “ Two weeks in a Virginia jail ” Tracy Chapman sang, “for my lover, for my lover.” And on the next line, Eric joined in: “Twenty-thousand-dollar bail, for my lover, for my lover...”

  “You’ve got a nice voice,” I said when he’d finished the song.

  “Thanks.”

  “Me, I’m tone-deaf. I get it from my dad.”

  “Your dad seems like a decent guy.”

  “He is. I liked your parents too. Have they left yet, by the way?”

  “Finally.” He breathed out bitter fumes. “I mean, my parents, they’re nice and all, but after a few days—you know what I mean?”

  “Sure.”

  Propping myself on one elbow, I looked at him. His eyes were getting red. In silence, I watched the way his swollen lips seemed to narrow around the joint, like some strange species of fish; the way his stomach distended and relaxed, distended and relaxed; the meshing of his lashes, when he closed his eyes.

  “This is good pot,” I said after a while.

  Eric had his feet crossed at the ankles. From beneath his T-shirt’s hem, the drawstring of his sweatpants peeked out like a little noose.

  I forget what we talked about next. Maybe Michelangelo. Conversation blurred and became inchoate, and only sharpened again when Eric looked at me, and said, “So do you want to give me a blow job?”

  I opened my eyes as wide as my stoned state permitted. “A blow job?”

  “Yeah. Like in your book. You know, when Eliot’s sitting at his desk and Philip sucks him off.”

  “Oh, you remember that scene.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And what makes you think I’d want to give you a blow job?”

  “Well, the way I see it, you’re gay and I’m sexy. So why not?”

  “But you have to want it, too. Do you?”

  “Sure.”

  “How much? A lot?”

  “Enough.”

  “Are you hard now?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  ‘You guess?”

  I reached over and grabbed his crotch. “Yeah, I guess so too.”

  “Well, go ahead.” Eric crossed his arms behind his head. Untying the little noose of the drawstring, I pulled back his sweatpants and underwear. Like his handshake, his cock was long and silky. It rested upon a pile of lustrous black pubic hair rather like a sausage on top of a plate of black beans: I apologize for this odd culinary metaphor, but it was what entered my mind at the time. And Eric was laughing.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing, it’s just that ... you’re really gay, aren’t you?”

  “Is that a surprise?”

  “No, no. I’m just ... I mean, you’re really into my dick, aren’t you? This is so wild!”

  “What’s wild about it?”

  “Because it’s like, here you are, really into my dick, whereas probably if you saw, you know, a vagina or something, you’d be sort of disgusted, or not interested. But if you showed me your dick, I’d be like, I could care less.”

  “You want me to show you my dick?”

  “Not really.”

  “You want me to give you a really great blow job, Eric?”

  “Actually, I had something else in mind.”

  All at once he leapt off the mattress. I sat up. Putting his cock away, he started rummaging through the mess on his desk.

  “Here it is,” he said after a minute, and threw a copy of Daisy Miller at me.

  “Daisy Miller?”

  “Have you read it?”

  “Of course.”

  “I have to do this paper on it. It’s due next Tuesday.” He read aloud from a photocopy on the desk: “‘Compare and contrast Lucy’s and Daisy’s responses to Italy in Forster’s A Room with a View and James’s Daisy Miller.' This is for Professor Yearwood,” he added.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And I’ve really got to ace this paper because I got a C on the midterm. It wasn’t that I didn’t do the reading. I’m not one of those guys who just reads the Cliffs Notes or anything. The problem was the essay questions. What can I tell you, Dave? I’ve got great ideas, but I can’t write to save my ass.”

  He lay down on the mattress again and started flipping through Daisy Miller. “So last year my friend bought a paper from this company, Intellectual Properties Inc. They sell papers for $79.95, and they’ve got, like, thousands on file. And my friend bought one and got caught. He ended up being expelled.” Eric rubbed his nose. “I can’t risk that. Still, I need to ace the paper. That’s where you come in.”

  “Where I come in?”

  “Exactly. You can write my paper for me. And if I get a good grade, you can give me a blowjob.” He winked.

  “Wait a minute,” I said.

  Eric reached for, and switched on, his laptop. “Actually I’ve already started taking notes. Maybe you can use them.”

  “Hold on! Stop.”

  He stopped.

  “You don’t honestly think I’m going to write your paper for you, do you?”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, I mean, Eric, I’m a famous writer. I have a novel under contract with Viking Penguin. You know, Viking Penguin, that gigantic publisher, the same one that published Daisy Miller? And they’re paying me a lot of money— a lot of money—to write this novel. On top of which what you’re proposing—it’s unethical. It goes against everything I believe in.”

  “Yeah, if I were asking you to make up the ideas! But I’m not. You can use my ideas. I’m just asking you to put the sentences together.” He stubbed out the joint. “Shit, you’re a really great writer, Dave. I’ll bet you never got less than an A on a paper in your life, did you? Did you?”

  “No.”

  “Exactly.” He brushed an eyelash off my cheek. “So the way I see it is this. I’ve got something you want. You’ve got something I need. We make a deal. I mean, your dad teaches at Stanford Business School. Hasn’t he taught you anything? Now here are my notes.”

  He thrust the laptop at me. Words congealed on the gray screen.

  I read.

  “Well?” Eric said after a few minutes.

  “First of all, you’re wrong about Daisy. She’s not nearly so knowing as you make out.”

  “How so?”

  “It’s the whole point. She’s actually very innocent, maybe the most innocent character in the story.”

  “Yeah, according to Winterbourne. I don’t buy it. I’ve known girls like that, they only act innocent when the shit hits the fan. Otherwise—”

  “But that’s a very narrow definition of innocence. Innocence can also mean unawareness that what other people think matters.”

  “I see your point.”

  “Oh, and I like what you say about George being part of the Italian landscape. That’s very astute.”

  “Really? See, I was thinking about that scene with the violets—how he’s, like, one with the violets.”

  “Which book did you enjoy more?”

  “A Room with a View, definitely.”

  “Me too. I don’t—what I should say is, I’ll always admire James. But I’ll never love him. He’s too—I don’t know. Fussy. Also, he never gets under Italy’s skin, which is odd, because Forster does, and he spent so much less time there.”

  “
The paper’s supposed to be ten to fifteen pages,” Eric said. “I need it Tuesday A.M.”

  “I haven’t said yes.”

  “Are you saying no?”

  “I’m saying I have to think about it.”

  “Well, think fast, because Professor Yearwood deducts half a grade for every day a paper’s overdue. She’s a ballbreaker.”

  “And what’ll you do if I do say no?”

  “You won’t say no, Dave. I know you won’t because I’m your friend, and you’re not the kind of guy who lets down a friend in need.”

  It seemed natural, at this point, to get up off the bed and head downstairs, where Eric put a paternal arm around my shoulder. “Dave,” he said. “Dave, Dave, Dave. Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave.”

  “By the way,” I said, “you do realize that both Forster and James were gay.”

  “No shit. Still, it makes sense. The way they seem to understand the girls’ point of view and all.” He opened the creaking screen door. “So when do I hear from you?”

  “Tomorrow.” I stepped out onto the verandah.

  “It’ll have to be tomorrow,” Eric said, “because if you don’t write this paper for me, I’ve got to figure out some alternative plan. And if you do—” Pulling down his sweatpants, he flashed his cock, which was hard again—if it had ever gotten soft.

  “How old are you, by the way?”

  “Twenty last month. Why?”

  “Just wondering.”

  He reached out a hand, but instead I shook his cock. “Whoa, no way!” Eric said, laughing as he backed off. “For that you have to wait till Tuesday.”

  “Only kidding,” I said.

  “Later,” Eric said, closing the door, after which I headed back out into the salty night.

  “Society garlic,” Jean said the next morning.

  “What?”

  “That smell in your bedroom. It was the flowers. They’re called society garlic because they’re pretty but they stink. And Guadalupe picked them and put them in your bedroom. You remember she took that ikebana course?” Jean sighed loudly. “Anyway, we’re airing the room out now.”

  “Guadalupe didn’t realize it at the time,” my father said. “She just thought they were normal flowers.”

  Jean poured some cold tea into a mug and put it in the microwave. In the wake of last night’s adventures, I’d completely forgotten about the odor in my bedroom, which had apparently troubled my father to a considerable degree. “Yesterday while you were at the library I must have spent an hour and a half going through your room,” he said. “Top to bottom, and I still couldn’t figure out where the smell was coming from. Toward the end I was worried something had crawled into the wall and died.”