Arkansas

by David Leavitt

  You’d think I had gone to business school.)

  All told, I wrote papers for seven boys—seven boys toward most of whom I felt something partway between the affection that ennobled my friendship with Eric and the contempt that characterized my dealings with Hunter. The topics ranged from “The Image of the Wanderer in English Romantic Poetry” to “The Fall of the Paris Commune” to “Child Abandonment in Medieval Italy” to “Flight in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon” to “Bronzino and the Traditions of Italian Renaissance Portraiture.”

  Of these boys, and papers, the only other one I need to tell you about is Ben.

  Ben got in touch with me around midterm of the spring quarter. “Mr. Leavitt?” he said on the phone. “My name’s Ben Hollingsworth. I got your number from Tony Younger.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. He told me to call you. He said you might ... that we could—”

  “Relax. There’s no need to be nervous.”

  “Thanks. I’m really ... I don’t know where to start.”

  “Why don’t we meet?” I offered, my voice as honeyed and professional as any prostitute’s. “It’s always easier to talk in person.”

  “Where?”

  I suggested the Ivy, only Ben didn’t want to meet at the Ivy—or any other public place, for that matter. Instead he asked if he could pick me up on the third floor of the Beverly Center parking lot, near the elevators. Then we could discuss things in his car.

  I said that was fine by me.

  We rendezvoused at ten-thirty the next morning. It was unusually chilly out. Ben drove a metallic blue Honda, the passenger door to which was dented. “Mr. Leavitt?” he asked as he threw it open.

  “In the flesh.”

  I climbed in. Altogether, with his carefully combed black hair and short-sleeve button-down shirt (pen in breast pocket), he reminded me of those Mormon missionary boys you sometimes run into in the European capitals, with badges on their lapels that say “Elder Anderson” or “Elder Carpenter.” And as it turned out, the association was prophetic. Ben was a Mormon, as I soon learned, albeit from Fremont, California, not Utah. No doubt in earlier years he’d done the very same European “service,” handing out pamphlets to confused homosexual tourists who’d thought he might be cruising them.

  “I really appreciate your taking the time to see me, Mr. Leavitt,” he began as I put on my seat belt.

  “Call me David.”

  “I’d feel more comfortable calling you Mr. Leavitt.”

  “Okay, whatever. And what should I call you?”

  “Ben.”

  “Ben. Fine. Anyway, it’s no problem.”

  We headed out of the parking lot. “I just want to make one thing clear,” he said. “I want you to know that I’ve never cheated on anything in my life. Not a test, not a paper. And I’ve never stolen anything either. I don’t drink, I’ve never used drugs. I’m a clean liver, Mr. Leavitt. I’ve had the same girlfriend since I was fifteen. And now here I am driving with you, and we’re about to enter into an unholy alliance—at least I hope we are, because if we don’t, my GPA will go below 3.5 and I need higher than that to get into a good law school. I’m so desperate that I’m willing to do things I’ll be ashamed of for the rest of my life. You, I don’t know if you/e ashamed. It’s none of my business.”

  We turned left onto San Vicente. “Probably not,” I said.

  “No. And it must sound terrible to you, what I’m suggesting. Still, the way I see it, there’s no alternative because one day I’m going to have a family to support, and I’ve got to be ready. Most of these other guys, they’ve got rich parents to fall back on. I don’t. And since I’m also not black or in a wheelchair or anything, it’s that much more difficult. Do you hear what I’m saying? I don’t really have any choice in the matter.”

  “You always have a choice, Ben.”

  Opening the window, he puffed out a visible sigh. Something in his square, scrubbed, slightly acned face, I must admit, excited me. His cock, I imagined, would taste like Dial soap. And yet even as Ben’s aura of clean living excited me, his shame shamed me. After all, none of the other boys for whom I’d written papers had ever expressed the slightest scruple about passing off my work as their own; if anything, it was the sex part, the prostitutional part, that made them flinch. Which, when you came to think about it, was astounding: as if the brutal exigencies of the marketplace had ingested whole, in each of them, all shopworn, kindergarten notions of right and wrong.

  In Ben, on the other hand, those same kindergarten notions seemed to exert just enough pressure to make him worry, though not quite enough to make him change his mind.

  “So what’s the class?” I asked.

  “Victorian History.”

  “And the assignment?”

  “Are you saying you’ll do it?”

  “You’ll have to tell me what the assignment is first.”

  “Jack the Ripper,” Ben said.

  “Really? How funny. I was just reading about him.”

  “You were?”

  “Yes. Apparently a lot of people thought he was Prince Eddy, Queen Victoria’s grandson and the heir to the throne. Since then that’s pretty much been disproven, though.”

  “Wow,” Ben said. “That might be an interesting angle to take ... if you’re interested. Are you interested? I hope you are, because if you’re not I’ll have to figure out something else, and buying a term paper with cash is something I just can’t afford right now.”

  “Ben, slow down for a second. I have to say, this whole situation worries me. Are you sure you know what you’re getting yourself into?”

  “Do you mean do I understand what I’ll have to do in exchange? Of course! Tony told me, I’ll have to let you—you know—perform oral sex on me. And no, I can’t pretend I’m comfortable with it. But I’m willing. Like I said, I have this girlfriend, Jessica. I’ve never cheated on her, either.”

  We stopped at a red light, where Ben opened his wallet. From between fragile sheets of plastic, a freckled girl with red hair smiled out at us.

  “Very pretty,” I said.

  “She will be the mother of my children,” Ben said reverently.

  Then he put the picture away, as if continued exposure to my gaze might blight it.

  The light changed.

  “Of course, if you say no because I’m not so good-looking as Tony, well, there’s nothing I can do about that. Still, I do have rather a large penis. I understand homosexuals like large penises. Is that true?”

  “Sometimes.” Laughing, I patted his knee. “Look, you know what I think? I think you should write your paper. And I’ll read it over for you, how does that sound? Free of charge, as it were. And if you do get a C in history, well, so what? It won’t matter in the long run. And meanwhile you won’t have cheated on Jessica, or compromised your ethics.”

  “But I’m fully prepared to compromise my ethics.” Ben’s voice grew panicked. “Also the security deposit. Tony told me about that too, and I’ve already taken care of it. Look.”

  Reaching across my lap, he opened the glove compartment. A bleachy odor of semen wafted from the opening.

  Pulling out a pair of rumpled boxer shorts, Ben tossed them into my lap.

  “When did you do this?” I asked, caressing slick cotton.

  “Just now. Just before I picked you up.” He grinned. “So what do you say, Mr. Leavitt? Will you do it?”

  “All right.” My mouth was dry.

  “That’s great. That’s terrific.”

  He turned onto Saturn Street.

  I wiped my fingertips on my jeans.

  As I’d told Ben, I already knew a little about Jack the Ripper. This was because Prince Eddy, whose candidature for the post “Ripperologists” were forever bandying about, stood also at the center of the Cleveland Street scandal. Indeed, several historians believed that Lord Arthur Somerset had fled England primarily to take the heat off Eddy (also a regular client at the brothel) as a favor to his old fri
end and protector the prince of Wales.

  It would have been interesting, I thought, to write a paper linking Prince Eddy’s homosexuality with the hatred of the female body that seemed to have been such a motivating element in the Ripper crimes. Unfortunately, fairly hard proof existed that Eddy had been off shooting in Scotland on the date of two of the murders, and since Ben’s assignment was to make a strong case for one suspect or another, I decided I’d better look elsewhere. M. J. Druitt, a doctor whose body was found floating in the Thames about seven weeks after the last murder, was certainly the candidate toward whom most of the evidence pointed. Yet for this reason, it seemed likely that many of Ben’s classmates would argue for Druitt.

  Who else then? Among the names that came up most frequently were those of Frank Miles, with whom Oscar Wilde had once shared a house; Virginia Woolf’s cousin James Stephen, who had been Eddy’s tutor; the painter Walter Sickert; and Queen Victoria’s private physician, Sir William Gull. Indeed, a large percentage of the suspects seemed to have been physicians, which is no surprise: to disembowel a woman’s body as precisely as the Ripper did that of Mary Kelly, you would have to possess a detailed knowledge of human anatomy. And if Donald Rumbelow is correct in proposing that the Ripper’s weapon was a postmortem knife “with a thumb-grip on the blade which is specifically designed for ‘ripping’ upwards,” the evidence that he was a medical man appears even stronger.

  So: the Ripper as doctor, or anti-doctor. As far as this “angle” went, the argument that intrigued me the most came from someone called Leonard Matters, who in 1929 had published a book claiming that the Ripper was in fact a “Dr. Stanley.” His brilliant young son having died of a venereal infection after traveling to Paris with a prostitute named Mary Kelly, this good doctor (according to Matters’s theory) had gone mad and started scouring the alleys of Whitechapel, bent on revenging himself not only against Mary Kelly, but prostitutes in general.

  A second possibility was to talk about class. This struck me as an interesting if somewhat experimental approach because regardless of who actually committed the crimes, the Victonan imagination—of which gossip is the strongest echo—associated Jack almost obsessively with Buckingham Palace. If he was not a member of the royal family, then he was someone close to the royal family, some mad failure of stately blood who would periodically troll the streets of East London in search of whores to murder and eviscerate. And couldn’t that be looked upon as an allegory for the exploitation of the working classes by the upper classes through history? A Marxist argument proposed itself. After all, as victims Jack chose exclusively prostitutes of an extremely degraded type: older women, alcoholic, with too many children and no qualms about lifting their petticoats in a squalid alley to pay for a drink. To write about the Ripper as a personification of the bourgeoisie’s contempt for the workers would certainly provide a provocative twist on the assignment. Or perhaps such a twist would be too provocative, especially coming from a boy like Ben.

  A third possibility was to talk about xenophobia: for if the Ripper suspects could be categorized, then the last rough category (after doctors and aristocrats) was immigrants.

  And as I mulled over each of these angles, the one thing I could not get out of my mind was a police photograph I’d seen of the corpse of Mary Kelly, the last of Jack’s victims and the only one to be killed in her room. Her body had been found on the bed, quite literally split down the middle. The nose had been cut off, the liver sliced out and placed between the feet. The kidneys, breasts, and the flesh from the thighs had been dumped on the bedside table, and the hand inserted into the stomach.

  Even in my own epoch of serial killers and snuff films, of Charles Manson and Jeffrey Dahmer, I’d never seen anything quite like that.

  Three days passed in research. Each morning I’d wake vowing to conclude the afternoon with a decision, and each afternoon I’d go home having failed. Then only a week remained before Ben’s paper was due, and I hadn’t even started writing. It felt as if something had seized up in me, the way the screen of a computer will sometimes freeze into immobility. Nor did it help when Ben stopped by my carrel one afternoon to give me a book I’d already read and returned. “It’s called The Identity of Jack the Ripper,” he said. “And according to this guy, at first they thought the Ripper was a Polish barber who went by the name of George Chapman, but then they found out that he had a double, a Russian barber, and that this double—”

  “Also sometimes used the name Chapman. I know.”

  “Oh, you’ve already read it? Well, never mind, then. I just thought in case you hadn’t—”

  “Thanks.”

  “Say, you want a Seven-Up or something?”

  I said why not.

  We repaired to the vending machines, then taking our drinks outside, sat on a bench in the library courtyard. It was a warm spring day, better than most only in that the air was unusually clear. A breeze even seemed to carry the scent of mountains.

  For a time the only noise in that courtyard, aside from the buzz of yellow jackets, was the pop of our drink cans opening. Then Ben said, “Strange, all this.”

  “What?”

  “Just ... our sitting together.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m not sure quite how to explain. You see, in the church—did I tell you I’m a Mormon?”

  “No.”

  “Well, in the church we have this very clear-cut conception of sin. And so I always assumed that if I ever committed a really big sin, like we’re doing now ... I don’t know, that there’d be a clap of thunder and God would strike me dead or something. Instead of which we’re sitting here in this courtyard and the sun’s shining. The grass is green.”

  “But what’s the sin?”

  “You know. Cheating.”

  “Is cheating really a sin?”

  “Of course. It’s part of lying.”

  “Well,” I said, “then maybe the fact that the sun’s shining and the grass is green means God doesn’t really care that much. Or maybe God doesn’t exist.”

  Ben’s face convulsed in horror.

  “Just a possibility,” I added.

  Ben leaned back in disillusion. “So you’re an atheist,” he said. “I suppose I should have expected it. I suppose I should have guessed most homosexuals would be atheists.”

  “Oh, some homosexuals are very religious. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me to find out one or two were actually Mormons.”

  “Ex-Mormons.”

  “A lot more than two of those. But to get back to what you were saying, I wouldn’t call myself an atheist. Instead I’d say I’m a skeptical lapsed Jew, distrustful of dogma.”

  “Tony’s Jewish too. Last night he was telling me about his circumcision—”

  “His bris.”

  “—and how in Israel they use the foreskins to make fertility drugs.” He shook his head in wonder.

  “Are you circumcised, Ben?”

  “No, actually.” Blushing, he checked his watch.

  We got up and walked toward the library. “Well, back to the salt mines,” Ben said at the main doors. “By the way, I hope you realize I’m working my butt off too. I really bit off more than I could chew this quarter.”

  “Oh, I’ll bet you can chew more than you think.”

  “Probably. Still, I wanted to make sure you knew. I mean, I wouldn’t want you thinking that the whole time you were sweating out this paper, I was playing pinball or something.” He wiped his nose. “By the way, have you decided who did it yet?”

  “Not yet. The problem is, everyone has a different theory about the Ripper, and every theory has a hole in it.” Which was true. Indeed, looked at collectively, the theories ramified so far afield that the actual murders began to seem beside the point. For if you believed them all, then the Ripper was Prince Eddy and Walter Sickert. The Ripper was Frank Miles and M. J. Druitt and Sir William Gull. The Ripper was an agent provocateur sent by the Russian secret police to undermine the reputation of their London
brethren. The Ripper was a Jewish shochet, or ritual slaughterer, suffering from a religious mania. The Ripper was a high-level conspiracy to squelch a secret marriage between Prince Eddy and a poor Catholic girl. The Ripper was Jill the Ripper, an abortionist betrayed by a guilt-ridden client and sent to prison, and therefore bent on avenging herself on her own sex.

  Not to mention the black magician and the clique of Freemasons and (how could I forget him?) Virginia Woolf’s cousin (and possibly Prince Eddy’s lover), the handsome, demented James Stephen.

  But which one? Or all of them?

  Saying goodbye to Ben, I returned to my carrel. As it happened I’d left the photograph of Mary Kelly’s corpse lying open on the desk. And how curious! As I sat down, that “butcher’s shambles” no longer made me nauseated. Perhaps one really can get used to anything.

  And upon this degraded body of the late nineteenth century, I thought, some real demon swooped, ransacking its cavities like a thief in search of hidden jewels, and finding instead only a panic, an emptiness, a vacancy.

  But what demon? Who?

  I looked up.

  Modernism and espionage, Diaspora and homosexuality, religious mania and anti-Semitism and most vividly — to me most vividly — desire and disease, gruesomely coupled.

  “Fantastic,” I said. For all at once—sometimes inspiration really is all at once—I saw who Ben’s Ripper had to be.

  The Ripper was the spirit of the twentieth century itself.

  I worked fast those next days, faster than I’d ever worked on anything else. Looking back, I see that the pleasure I experienced as I wrote that paper lay in its contemplation as a completed object, like the Bailey bridge novel I was sure I would never begin. Or a Bailey bridge, for that matter. Bank to bank I built, and as I did a destination, a connection, neared. It was the same end I’d hoped to reach in my Somerset book: a sort of poeticization of that moment when the soul of my own century, the soul of vacancy itself, devoured the last faithful remnants of an age that had believed, almost without question, in presences.

  After that, from the unholy loins of Jack the Ripper, whole traditions of alienation had been spilled, of which I was merely one exemplary homunculus. Eric was another: Eric with his cheerful, well-intentioned immorality. And Hunter. Even Ben. We were the nightmare Mary Kelly had dreamed the night she was murdered.