Arkansas

by David Leavitt

“Eric,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I want to ask you something. I know it wasn’t part of the bargain. Even so—”

  “You can’t fuck me,” he said.

  “No, not that. What I’d like to do—I’d like to kiss you.”

  “Kiss me!” He laughed. “Okay, sure. As your bonus for getting me out of the final.”

  I pulled myself up to shadow his face with my own; licked the acrid flavor of the pot from his tongue; sucked his soft, thick lips.

  “You’re a good kisser,” I said after a few minutes.

  “So they tell me.”

  “Who, girls?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And how do I kiss, compared to girls?”

  “Not bad, I guess.”

  “Afterwards, you’ll have to tell me if I do something else better than girls do.”

  “To tell the truth, I’m kind of curious to find out myself,” Eric said.

  Then for about half an hour, though he made other noises, he didn’t speak a word.

  II.

  THINGS STARTED LOOKING UP. My editor moved from Viking Penguin to Houghton Mifflin, which decided to bring out the paperback of While England Sleeps, as well as my new novel. “So it’s a done deal,” my agent said on the phone. “Oh, and by the way, I’m putting down a March of ninety-six delivery. Is that feasible?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Why not? I’m working harder than I have in years.” Which was true. The quarter was drawing to a close, and I had two term papers to finish: “Mirror Imagery in Virginia Woolf” for Maty Yearwood, plus “Changing Attitudes toward Sex and Sexuality in 1890s England” for European History. Also, the day before I’d come home from the library only to get a message that someone named Hunter had called. Needless to say, I’m not of the generation that knows many people named Hunter. Still, I called back. Hunter told me he was a sophomore, a buddy of one of Eric’s roommates. Could I meet him for lunch at the Fatburger on Santa Monica? he wanted to know. He had a business proposition to discuss.

  Of course I went. Hunter turned out to be one of those muscular blond California boys who drive Jeeps and really do call every male person they know except maybe their fathers “dude.”

  “I’m a friend of Eric’s,” he began.

  “Oh?”

  He nodded. “And we were partying the other night, and I was telling him I was up shit creek with my World War II history paper, so he goes, “Why don’t you call up this dude I know, Dave Leavitt?’”

  “He did.”

  “That’s right. He said, well, that you could help me out. I mean, how am I supposed to finish this history paper, and my comp sci project, and my poli sci project, in addition to which I’ve got this huge econ final? Huge.” Hunter took an enormous bite out of his Fatburger. “You understand my problem, dude?”

  “Sure,” I said. “As long as you understand my arrangement with Eric.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I mean, did he explain to you how he, well, pays me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And are you willing to pay the same way?”

  He crossed his arms. “Why not? I’m open-minded.”

  Mimicking his gesture, I sat back and looked him over. He didn’t seem to mind. He had dark skin, longish blond hair brushed back over his ears, abundant blond chest hair, tufts of which poked upward from the collar of his shirt. An unintelligent handsomeness, unlike Eric’s. Nor did he provoke in me anything like the ample sense of affection Eric had sparked from the first moment we’d met. Still, there is something to be said for the gutter lusts, and so far as these were concerned, Hunter possessed the necessary attributes—muscles, vulgarity, big hands—in abundance.

  “So what’s the assignment?” I asked.

  “That’s the trouble. I’ve got to find my own topic.”

  “History of the Second World War, right?” I thought. “Well, something that’s always interested me is the story of the troops of black American soldiers who built Bailey bridges in Florence after the armistice.”

  “Bailey what?”

  “Temporary bridges to replace the ones that were bombed.”

  “Cool. Professor Graham’s black. He’ll like that.”

  “Almost nothing’s been written about those soldiers. Still, I could do some research—”

  “It’s supposed to be a research paper,” Hunter added helpfully.

  “When’s it due?”

  “That’s the bitch. The twenty-first.”

  “The twenty-first!”

  “I know, but what can I do? I only found out about you yesterday.”

  “I’m not sure I can manage a research paper by the twenty-first.”

  “Dude, please!”

  He smiled, his mouth some orthodontist’s pride.

  I don’t know what came over me, then: a lustful malevolence, you might call it, that made me want to see just how far I could go with this stupid, sexy, immoral boy.

  “All right,” I said. “There’s just one condition. With this time constraint, the terms are going to have to be—how shall I put it?—more exacting than usual.”

  Hunter put his elbows on the table. “What did you have in mind?” he asked.

  “Okay, how does this sound? Just to be fair, if you get a C or lower on the paper, you don’t have to do anything. If you get a B, it’s the same as with Eric: I give you a blow job. But if you get an A—”

  “You can’t fuck me,” Hunter said.

  Why did these boys all assume I wanted to fuck them?

  “That wasn’t what I was going to propose,” I said. “What I was going to propose was ... the opposite.”

  “That I fuck you?”

  I nodded.

  “Sure,” Hunter said swiftly. “No problem.”

  “Have you ever fucked another guy?”

  “No, but I have, you know, fucked a girl ... back there.”

  “You have.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And did you like it?”

  “Well...” He grinned. “I mean, it felt good and all, but afterwards—it is kind of gross to think about. You know what I’m saying?”

  I coughed. “Well, I guess it’s a done deal, Hunter.”

  “Great.”

  We shook.

  “Oh, and Hunter,” I added (what possessed me?), “just one more thing. There is the matter of a security deposit.”

  “Security deposit?”

  “Didn’t Eric tell you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, naturally I require a security deposit. On my work. I’m sure you understand that.”

  “Sure, but what ... kind of security deposit?”

  I gestured for him to lean closer.

  “Do you wear boxers or briefs?” I whispered.

  “Depends. Today briefs.”

  “Good. All right, here’s what I want you to do. I want you to go into the bathroom, into the toilet stall, and take off your pants and underwear. Then I want you to jack off into your underwear. You know, use them to wipe up. Then I want you to put them in your coat pocket. You can give them to me when we get outside.”

  “But—”

  “You don’t have to worry, there are locks on the stalls.”

  “But Eric didn’t—”

  “Or we could just forget the whole thing...”

  He grimaced. Suddenly an expression of genuine disgust clouded his handsome face, so forcefully that for a moment I feared he might knock over the table, scream obscenities, hit or kill me.

  Then the expression changed. He stood up.

  “Back in a flash,” he said, and strode into the bathroom. Exactly five minutes later—I checked my watch—the bathroom door swung open.

  “Ready?”

  “Ready.”

  We headed out into the parking lot.

  “Here you go, dude.” Surreptitiously Hunter handed me a wad of white cotton.

  My fingers brushed sliminess as I stuffed it into my pocket. “And are you always th
at quick?”

  “Only when I need to be.”

  He climbed into his Jeep and switched the radio on loud. “So I’ll have the paper for you the afternoon of the twentieth,” I shouted over the noise.

  “Sounds like a winner.”

  “Oh, and incidentally, Hunter, if you don’t mind, maybe you could do it in the back of your Jeep.”

  “Do what?”

  “If you get an A.”

  “Oh, man!” Hunter laughed. “Shit, you have really got a filthy mind. I like it.” Then he nearly slammed the door on my fingers.

  Simple as that, I became an industry.

  Days passed more quickly. I got up early in the mornings, sometimes as early as my father, who was usually weeding in the garden by six. Then I went to the library. Did you know that at the end of World War Two, after the Germans bombed the bridge of Santa Trinità in Florence, all four statues of the seasons which graced its corners were recovered from the river? Everything except spring’s head. Posters went up, in which a photograph of the head appeared under the words, “Have You Seen This Woman? $3000.00 reward.” Rumor had it that a black American soldier had kidnapped the head. Only no one ever turned up to claim the ransom.

  Not until 1961—the year I was born—was the head finally found, buried in mud at the bottom of the Arno.

  Actually, I’d known this anecdote well before I started researching Hunter’s paper. I’d even seen a reproduction of the poster itself when I’d gone to Florence a year earlier with Andy: heading into the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi one morning to look at Benozzo Gozzoli’s frescoes of the Procession of the Magi, we’d stumbled on a photo exhibit commemorating the bombings that had nearly destroyed the city’s medieval center. And there, amid the rubble-strewn piazzas and the women cheering the American liberators and the children in bread lines, the poster had hung, boldly American in its idioms, like the Wanted posters I used to study anxiously while my mother waited in line at the post office. Around it, in photographs, young black enlisted men—one of whom had been suspected of the theft—built Bailey bridges. If they felt the sting of injustice that must have been their daily lot in the military, their faces didn’t show it. Instead, expressionless as ants, they heaved steel beams, and gradually restitched the severed city.

  As I recall, Andy didn’t take much notice of the soldiers. Good homosexual that he is, he was in a hurry to get over to the Accademia and see the David. And I should have been more interested in the David too; after all, he is my favorite sculpture, as well as the erotic ideal in pursuit of which Henry Somerset and his brethren had poured into Italy all those decades ago. And yet it was those soldiers—not the David —whose faces bloomed in my mind as we trudged up Via Ricasoli; to which I should add that I was in the middle of being sued then; in Italy, as it were, in flight from trouble; invention was almost painful to me. So why, at that particular moment, should a novel have started telling itself in my head? A novel I knew I could never write (and all the better)? A novel in which a young black soldier comes to Florence; from a distance, as he hammers planks, an Italian boy watches him, every morning, every afternoon...

  The thing I need to emphasize is this: I never wanted to write that novel. I wanted just to muse on it as a possibility, listen to the story unfurling; drift with it, the way as a boy I used to keep up a running soap opera in my head. Every day I’d walk in circles around the pool outside our house in Stanford, bouncing a red rubber ball and spinning out in my mind elaborate and unending variations: pure plot. Sometimes I’d look up and see my mother watching me from the kitchen window. And when my ball got a hole in it, my father was always ready with his little packet of patches to seal it up.

  A curious thing about my father: when, many years later, he moved down south, he gave away without compunction most of the sentimental objects of my childhood. Stuffed animals, Corgi cars, books. Yet he kept that ball. He still talks about it. “David’s ball,” he says, which I must have bounced a thousand miles in circles around that pool, in those days when invention was the simplest sort of pleasure or folly.

  I think that was what I was trying to recapture: all the gratitude of authorship, with none of the responsibility implicit in signing one’s name.

  And how hard I worked! Mornings in the library, afternoons at my father’s computer. For Eric’s history project, I was able to cannibalize a good deal of the research I’d already done for the Somerset novel—that novel which, like the Bailey bridge novel, I was now certain I would never write. An essay I’d done in college on Between the Acts formed the basis for “Mirror Imagery in Virginia Woolf.” And Hunter: well, thanks to that unwritten, even unwhispered bit of story, he ended up getting the best paper of all three.

  And why was that? This is the thing of which, I suspect, I’m going to have the hardest time convincing you. After all, a bond of genuine affection united Eric and me: it made sense that I should want to do well by him. Toward Hunter, my feelings could best be described as an admixture of contempt and lust. Nor did he like me any better than I liked him. Contempt and lust: how is it possible that from such a devalued marriage as this, art could have been conceived? Yet it was. Indeed, as I look back, I recognize that there was something startlingly clear, even serene, about my partnership with Hunter, which no yearnings for domesticity defiled. Eric, on the other hand, I was always calling up and asking if he wanted to have lunch. He’d meet me when he had time, which was rarely, since lately he’d gotten busy with his juggling lessons.

  Yes, juggling lessons.

  Sometimes I’d go over to his house and lie on his bed, stoned, while above his head he hurled three red pins, or three sticks, or three white balls. Only the occasional “shit” or “fuck” interrupted his quiet, huffing focus. A ball bounced toward the window, or the pins clattered. Then he picked up the pins and started fresh, as the dense odor of his sweat claimed the room.

  He said he was hoping to get good enough to juggle on weekends for extra cash. He said he was working up to fire.

  And need I mention that those evenings never evolved into the erotic? Of course one hoped. Yet Eric was scrupulous, and—more to the point—not that interested. Sex with me, to his view, was a reward for a job well done.

  With Hunter, by contrast, sex was payment for services rendered. I hope I’ve made the distinction clearly.

  And of course he got his A. I learned only from Eric, who’d gotten A’s too and called me up before Christmas break to whoop about it. “Hasn’t Hunter told you?” he asked when I inquired, and when I said no, went silent. Then I tried to phone Hunter, but he was never at home. This didn’t surprise me, betrayal being the usual result when one starts making gentleman’s agreements with people who are not gentlemen.

  Anyway, what more should I have expected from a boy who buys a term paper, then tries to pass it off as his own?

  In the end I had to track him down at the UCLA pool. Dripping chlorine, the golden hair on his chest made my mouth water. I wanted to drink him.

  “Hey, I’ve been meaning to call you,” he said as he toweled himself.

  “I’ve been trying to call you too. You’re never home.”

  “Sorry about that, dude. I’ve been busy. By the way, my professor really loved that paper! I appreciate it.”

  “No problem.”

  He dried under his arms.

  “So anyway, the reason I’m here, Hunter, is that I’d like to know when you intend to fulfill your half of the bargain.”

  “Softer, your voice carries!”

  “What, you don’t want any of your friends to know I wrote your paper for you?”

  “Softer!” He pushed me into a corner. “Look,” he said, his whisper agitated, “it’ll have to be after I’m back from break. Right now I’m too busy.”

  “No, it’ll have to be before you leave for break. Didn’t your mother teach you it’s never a good idea to put things off?” I patted him on the arm. “Tell you what, why don’t you come over to my dad’s place tomorrow around
noon? He’s away for the weekend. We can put the Jeep in the garage.”

  “The Jeep!”

  “You did get an A, Hunter.”

  “But I—”

  “What, you thought I was just going to write that paper for nothing? Uh-uh. You be there at noon.”

  I gave him my address, after which he limped off toward the showers.

  He was not a bad kid, really. It was just part of his affably corrupt nature to try to get away with things. Of such stuff as this are captains of industry made.

  Probably the aspect of this story that puzzles me most, as I look back, is how word of my “availability” circulated so quickly through the halls and dormitories of UCLA those next months. I don’t mean that it became common knowledge among the student body that David Leavitt, novelist, was available to write term papers for good-looking male undergraduates; no articles appeared in The Daily Bruin, or graffiti (so far as I am aware) on bathroom walls. Still, in a controlled way, news got out, and as the spring quarter opened, no less than five boys called me up with papers to be written. And how had they gotten my number in the first place? I tried to imagine the conversations that had taken place: “Shit, Eric, I don’t know how I’m supposed to finish this paper on ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’ by Friday.” “Why don’t you call up Dave Leavitt? He’ll do it for you if you let him give you a blow job.” “A blow job, huh? Sounds great. What’s his number?”

  Or perhaps the suggestion was never so direct. Perhaps it was made in a more discreet language, or a more vulgar one. The latter, I suspect. In fact I’m sure that at some point all the boys, even Eric, made rude, humiliating remarks about me, called me “faggot” or “cocksucker,” then qualified those (to them) insults by adding that I was “still a basically decent guy.” Or some such proviso.

  Business got so good, I started turning down offers, either because I was overworked, or because the boy in question, when I met him, simply didn’t appeal to me physically, in which case I would apologize and say that I couldn’t spare the time. (I hated this part of the job, but what could I do? Profit was my motive, not charity. I never gave anything for which I didn’t get something back.