Arkansas

by David Leavitt

  He turned off the Viale and entered a wooded enclave in which the tidiness of city planning—tree, bench, tree, bench—did not obviate a certain wildness. This was because of the bats. They were everywhere, swarming the riverbanks, swooping over the water that seemed itself filled with trees: a second park, subaqueous, through which, if he dove, Nathan might stroll upside down. Cicadas played themselves, and as his eyes adjusted, the shadows coagulated into men and boys, some sitting on benches, others chatting in gangs, or attached to trees. Finding a tree that was unoccupied, Nathan assumed his standard position for this sort of enterprise: legs parted, one hand hooked through the belt loop of his jeans, the other resting on his hip, which was thrust slightly forward.

  Thus he arranged himself, and opening his eyes wide, stared out into the involving dark.

  A boy leaning against a tree opposite stared back.

  Nathan spread his legs wider.

  What an extraordinarily comfortable tree! he found himself thinking. It seemed to have been constructed specifically to accommodate the contours of his body: a Birkenstock of trees. It seemed to hold him. He thought he could feel fingers of bark working the small of his back, and wondered at the mind’s capacity for tactile hallucination.

  The shadowy boy now departed from his own tree, cutting a path just south of Nathan. They stared at each other as he passed. Yet the dark was vexing; he could not get a good enough look at the boy to decide whether he was attractive.

  Next the boy turned around, retraced his steps, assumed, as if for no particular reason, his habitual stance—but this time next to Nathan.

  “Ciao,” he said.

  “Ciao Nathan answered.

  Silence. The boy had dark hair and fair skin. His thin white T-shirt delineated perfectly the hollows and hills of his chest.

  Nathan didn’t need to look at him: even from a distance he could feel the waves of anxiety that radiated from the boy’s body, he could feel, as if it were his own pulse, the thumping of the young heart.

  He untucked and reached under the boy’s T-shirt. The boy took in his breath; his abdomen heaved. Nathan pretended to pay no attention. With his eyes he scanned the other men in the area, while his hand, inevitable, continued its upward journey, resting finally on the boy’s chest and working, with the laconic ease of ownership, first one and then another small nipple. Then all at once Catholic oppression gave way, and the boy embraced Nathan, pawing his chest, planting his mouth on his cheek, reaching under his shirt and grabbing hold of muscle and fat and hair. But he had no delicacy, he was a sexual pantomime; he twisted Nathan’s nipples only because Nathan had twisted his. A neophyte, then. And how tired Nathan was of initiating neophytes! It seemed inevitably to be boys like this who gravitated toward him, never men his own size or age...

  At that moment the tree spoke.

  Nathan froze.

  It spoke. Its voice was river reeds in a breeze.

  “Cosa?” asked the boy.

  “Ssh,” Nathan said. “Listen...”

  “Poliziar?”

  “No, no ... a voice...”

  “Non capisco.”

  “Ssh.”

  They remained still. Once again the boy twisted Nathan’s nipples. Nathan shooed him away. Removing his hand, the boy retucked his T-shirt and, with an insolent “Ciao strode off. Nathan hardly noticed. For the voice had returned, vague, caressing.

  Then all at once two branches descended and twined around Nathan’s chest.

  Panic is instantaneous. It considers neither consequences nor impossibilities, only the quickest way to safety. And panic told Nathan to get the hell away from that tree. So he tried to step forward, but the branches tightened over him, blocking his way, and when he pushed, they tightened more, squeezing the air from his lungs. He would have screamed, but he had no breath, all he could do was push, with both fists, even as the tree struggled to keep hold of him.

  The tree seemed to him to be collapsing with effort, and yet taking him in. He could feel bark crawling over his skin, into his pants. He could taste bark in his mouth.

  He knew only to push blindly, mightily, to take advantage of what he perceived as the tree’s momentary exhaustion.

  Then he was away, torn branches in his hand.

  A howl filled the air, and subsided. Nathan turned. The tree was at a distance. An ordinary tree. He was on his knees, on the ground. He could not get enough air, he was gulping huge mouthfuls of air. Meanwhile all around him men were hurrying away, for he had made a commotion, and such a delicate atmosphere as that of the Cascine at two in the morning fractures easily.

  Still he could not catch his breath.

  A fan of bats swooped over the river. He wanted only to get out of there, so he stumbled back to the car, got the key into the ignition, and drove off. But his hands were shaking, and, fearful lest he might stray into the opposite lane, he pulled into a twenty-four-hour gas station. Parking the car, he sat back, closed his eyes, counted his breaths until they were once again steady, even. Next he went into the bathroom, and was standing in front of the sink, wetting his hands, when he looked in the mirror and saw that his shirt was streaked with blood.

  He pulled off the shirt, looked at himself once again in the mirror. Not a scratch.

  Not blood, then. Juice from some sort of berry. Something smeared against something ... tomatoes ... someone else’s blood...

  Thrusting his shirt under the tap he rinsed it furiously until the stains faded to a soft pink. Then he stuffed it into a garbage can, and, shirtless, got back into Celia’s car.

  All the way to the autostrada exit he wondered if he was going mad, and by the time he drove into Montesepolcro he was sure of it. Then, as he approached Celia’s house, he realized that he could not be mad because of the shirt.

  The shirt he had thrown away.

  Was he dreaming? He must be dreaming, he decided, and remembering how once, when he was a child, his mother had answered the question “How do I know when I’m dreaming?” by telling him to pinch himself, he pinched himself, and it hurt, so he supposed he must not be.

  At Celia’s, nothing seemed to have changed in his absence. The farmhouse breathed in sleep. Below him, in the darkened valley, a train glided by. It looked like a pale stream of moving light.

  Stepping quietly into the arbor, he checked his watch: three o’clock. He could still manage five or six hours sleep, though it would be thin, meager. Anyway, perhaps the morning would bring with it a sense of resolution.

  Then he reached for the kitchen door, and discovered that it was locked.

  In his pocket, only the one key, the car key—

  For a few seconds he rattled the handle, as if this would make any difference—then circled the house and tried the front door. It too was locked.

  He closed his eyes, leaned his forehead against the cool stone wall, tried to cry, and, failing in the effort, walked back to the arbor and lay down, in despair, on a chaise longue. Remember that he was shirtless, and that the night was full of mosquitoes. Recognizing his vulnerability, he reached for a towel that Celia had left out, covered his chest with it, and contemplated his options. He could wake Celia; to do so, however, would be to risk her finding out that he had taken her car, and he wasn’t a good liar. Alternately he might sleep in the chaise longue, and let her discover him in the morning. When she asked him what he was doing there, he could claim he’d gotten up early to take a walk and been locked out. But then how to explain the mosquito bites with which he would no doubt be covered, not to mention the absence of his shirt? And more fundamentally, how to persuade Celia, who knew him better than anyone in the world, that he—a notorious late riser—had done something so unlikely as get up at dawn to take a shirtless walk?

  No, he decided, better just to face the music, ring the bell, bow before his friend in her justifiable wrath, and hope, as he had hoped so many times before, that she might show some mercy on him. And yet, might he not stand a better chance with her in the morning? No doubt a
Celia refreshed from a night of sleep would be more compassionate than a Celia roused rudely from her slumber.

  Anyway, the borscht belt comedian in him observed, it could be worse. It could be raining.

  This was the cue for rain to begin, but it didn’t. Again, he closed his eyes. He didn’t want to worry about the morning, or think about the tree, or contemplate the not thrilling prospect of his own return, two weeks hence, to New York. Still, in his memory the taste of bark lingered.

  Eventually he dropped off. Yet the sleep into which he fell was too tenuous to keep out the sounds and changing light, nor was it sufficiently deep to muffle his consciousness of the passage of time, a consciousness in the shadow of which time progressed with agonizing slowness. Nor was this sleep uninterrupted; indeed, the slightest disturbance jolted him out of it, and into a grim awareness not only of his dilemma, but of the dilemma that was his entire life.

  Finally dawn broke. It seemed to wander up from the bottom of the world, and the light, which every day is reborn without memory, called in its nascent innocence to some nascent innocence in Nathan, making him believe that wounds could be forgiven, slates cleaned, time turned back. Possibilities danced before his eyes, possibilities that he knew, in a few hours, the grim brilliance of high noon would desiccate. Yet for the moment they were alive.

  And then, in an instant, two brindle-and-white-spotted dogs were licking his arms, compelling him to open his eyes, to sit up, to pat first one, then another soft, spotted head.

  “Nice doggie,” he murmured. “You’re a good doggie, aren’t you?” A hummingbird flew within inches of his face.

  He looked up and saw standing before him a tall young man, shirtless like himself, his mostly hairless chest gleaming in the early light, the pale skin flushed with vitality, as if it had been recently handled. This young man wore on his face an expression somewhere between guardedness and delight. There emanated from his body the smell of lemons. He smiled crookedly. Altogether he presented an impression of extraordinary but unlikely beauty which the fact that he was slightly cross-eyed only heightened. Indeed, he might have been one of Bronzino’s cavaliers, divested, for the moment, of his brocades and codpiece; a knight who had taken a bath in the woods, or spent an hour sporting with a maiden.

  “Luna, Venta, venite!” the young man called then, and the spaniels went to him. Awkwardly Nathan sat up. The towel fell from his chest, so that he wondered whether to pick it up again.

  The young man asked something complicated in Italian.

  “Scusa?”

  “Ah, you’re American”—this time in good English. “You must be one of Celia’s visitors.”

  “Yes, I’m Nathan.”

  “I’m Mauro.” The hand which he reached down yanked Nathan to his feet.

  “The chef!”

  "Chef! I hate these French words. Cook is quite fine. And you? Did Celia compel you for some reason to sleep outside?”

  “I got locked out,” Nathan said, and looked at his watch. “Six-thirty! Do you always get here so early?”

  “Not usually,” Mauro said. “Only I was sleeping last night at my girlfriend’s house in Montesepolcro ... Well, I suppose you would like to go back inside.”

  “You have a key?”

  “Of course!”

  With that Mauro strode over to the kitchen door, and taking a chainful of keys from his pocket, unlocked it.

  “I’ll make coffee,” he said, as they stepped through, then reaching into a high cabinet, chose some beans for grinding. He hadn’t bothered to put on his shirt again, and Nathan, admiring the corded muscles of Mauro’s back, lamented his own nakedness. After all, he had always been the sort who looks better in clothes.

  “I think I’ll take a shower,” he said next, and surreptitiously slipped the car key back onto Celia’s key ring.

  “Bene” Mauro said, pouring milk into a saucepan. “And when you get back, maybe you ought to tell me what happened—in case I have to lie for you.”

  He flashed Nathan a brilliant smile. There was no calculation in it, only good humor and a little shyness.

  “Yes, of course,” Nathan said, “of course I will,” and went off, amid the coffee smells, to take his shower.

  Later, of course, I would grow more articulate; I would have ideas of my own. That morning, however, as Nathan finished telling me his story, I found myself literally at a loss for words. What could I say to him, after all, when my own experience of the “supernatural” was limited to a single encounter with an apparent poltergeist that had once broken some of my mother’s best china? In that case, the poltergeist had turned out to be my brother Eddie, who had drug problems; nonetheless I hesitated to offer the example to Nathan, for fear that it would seem I was trying to rationalize away what had happened to him. Which I didn’t want to do. On the contrary, I felt that I owed it to him to accept his account at face value: in all its singularity and antique terror.

  Nathan, on the other hand, appeared not to believe himself, or at least to be disappointed by my credulity.

  “Well, who’s to say I wasn’t hallucinating?” he asked.

  “Do you think you were hallucinating?”

  He considered for a moment. “No. Then again if I really am psychotic, I’m hardly in a position to assess the parameters of my own psychosis, right?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe something really did happen.”

  “Is that supposed to comfort me?”

  “Doesn’t it?”

  “No! Decidedly not!”

  “Why?”

  “Because if it wasn’t real, I’m just another human being going mad. Whereas if it was real, then the world’s going mad. And something else may happen.”

  “Yes, I see your point.” We were quiet for a moment. “Anyway,” he concluded, “at least now you know. So if I disappear tomorrow, don’t assume I’ve gone somewhere. Talk to trees.”

  Since there didn’t seem much I could say to that, we went into the kitchen and drank some blood orange juice from a carton in the refrigerator. Celia came home. “Hi, guys,” she said, her arms full of onions. “Gosh, have you two been sitting here reminiscing this whole time?”

  “Sort of.” Rather awkwardly, we smiled. Meanwhile, just outside the door, Mauro waited. I thought his eyes met Nathan’s uneasily before he crossed the threshold and, reaching out his hand, introduced himself.

  Now: a word about Mauro. There was no denying that he was good-looking. Not that I would have likened Nathan’s rescuer, as he had, to a Bronzino knight; his self-presentation was entirely too modern for that. Still, the fact cannot be ignored that in certain Italian faces that aristocratic sullenness that animates Renaissance portraiture does linger. And in Mauro—how else to put it?—blood told. Yes, blood told, and it was in his ankles, brown and elegant in Top-Siders, that curiously enough, it told the most.

  After we’d finished lunch, the four of us walked into Montesepolcro to have a coffee at the Bar Garibaldi. Tourism is correct in noting that in every little town in Tuscany there is a Bar Garibaldi, or a Bar Centrale, or a Bar Italia—to which observation I shall add only that in this particular Bar Garibaldi, a red-haired boy was arranging coconut wedges on a three-tiered revolving tray, listlessly, the tray revolved; listlessly, listlessly trickles of water poured from a spout at its tip, ostensibly to moisten the coconut, but really, I think, in feeble imitation of those glorious fountains that in Renaissance water gardens jet upward before spilling over artful arrangements of carved stone. Or so mused my imagination that afternoon, an imagination still radiant with that amazement that so often marks the visitor’s first days in Italy. And you cannot feel it twice. It is like the pleasure that accompanies the first reading of a great novel, something that can afterward be approximated, but never replicated, so that no matter how many fond returns you make, no matter how many coconut trays you see, you must always envy the virgin eyes of the neophyte.

  But to get back to the story: as is the habit among Italians, we took our coffees
standing up. Mauro and Nathan, I noticed, were pretending they’d only just met each other, a somewhat theatrical bit of dissimulation in the enactment of which Nathan’s spirits seemed to rally considerably. I’d never deny that he’s the sort of person in whom deviousness always provokes a little thrill. As for Celia, I didn’t know if she had a clue as to what had taken place during the night; if so, she certainly didn’t let it on. Instead she drank her coffee placidly. Perhaps she too was dissimulating; especially now, I wonder. Or perhaps she simply hadn’t noticed the numbers on her odometer.

  So there we were at the Bar Garibaldi, and Mauro was telling Nathan the history of the dish he and Celia intended to prepare for supper that evening. “It is called La Genovese ,” he said, “even though it is Neapolitan, because the Genovese used to own a lot of trattorias in Naples—”

  “Basically it’s a pot roast made with about five kilos of onions,” Celia said. “And cooked for hours. First you eat the sugo—all melty onions and white wine and beef drippings—with the pasta—”

  “Pasta lisce, not pasta rigate.”

  “And then you have the meat as the secondo.”

  “It sounds delicious,” I said.

  “Your English is very good, Mauro,” Nathan said. “Where did you learn it?”

  “Mauro studied two years at the University of Minnesota.”

  “Also, my mother was half-American. I’ve spent several summers with my relatives in Milwaukee.”

  “Ah, that explains it. And does Roman cooking go down well in Milwaukee?”

  “As long as I don’t use too much peperoncino”

  “As far as I’m concerned,” Celia said, “there’s no such thing as too much peperoncino”

  “Yes, I remember that about you,” Nathan said. “At this Greek pizza place we used to go to,” he said to Mauro, “Celia liked to shake so much hot pepper onto her pizza that if she got some on her fingers and rubbed her eyes—and she was always rubbing her eyes—they’d swell up and tear.”

  “A Greek pizza place? How strange. To me Celia does not talk so much about her college days.”