Arkansas

by David Leavitt

  “Stop!”

  She threw another plate. “You moron! You prick!”

  “Don’t throw things!”

  “You don’t care about anything except your goddamn dick, do you? You’d sell your sister to a bunch of rapists if you thought one of them would let you suck his cock—”

  “Celia—”

  “You’d betray anyone, you’d sell your mother into white slavery—”

  “Shut up about my mother!”

  “I hate you! I despise you! Get out of my house!”

  Once again she stormed away, out into the garden.

  “Then at least tell me why you despise me,” Nathan said, giving chase under the stars. (And me giving chase to Nathan.) “I mean, what’s happened between Mauro and me—I’m sorry, but it’s none of your business. Maybe Angela’s—”

  “You idiot! There is no Angela! I’m Angela!”

  He stopped. “Oh, Jesus...”

  “I'm Angela. Me. I'm the girlfriend.” She was crying now. “Lizzie, didn’t you see it?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Are you blind? Are you both blind? I love him more than—”

  “Oh shit,” Nathan said. “But I didn’t know! He just said, he kept repeating, ‘She’s gone back to him,’ and so I assumed—”

  “It’s too late.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Celia!” Seth’s voice this time.

  “I can’t face him,” she said, then started away, out into the fields. In the distance, I could hear the echo-music of cowbells. “Celia!”

  “Don’t,” I said, and held out my arm to block Nathan.

  “But—”

  “Let her go.”

  “What on earth is going on?” Seth asked, bursting into the garden.

  “She needs time alone. She’s upset.”

  “Why?”

  “Can’t you guess?”

  Seth stepped back, taking it for granted in his egotism (and perhaps even gratified) that he himself had caused the rupture. Then he went into the house.

  “As if it isn’t enough—” Nathan said.

  “Oh, it’s not enough,” I said. “For her it’s never been enough.” And returning to the kitchen, I started sweeping up the broken plates.

  All that night I swept. First the kitchen floor, then the living room. Then I cleaned out the refrigerator. Then I wiped off all the kitchen counters, my eyes perpetually watching for some movement of the doorknob that never occurred. And though I can’t pretend my suspicions about what had happened to Celia forged themselves over the course of that single long night, nor even over the course of the long days that followed—days during which Nathan and I guarded the fort and cooked and made coffee while Mauro and Seth, thrown into uneasy allegiance by disaster, scoured the countryside for their disappeared lover and bride—nonetheless it was that night that the questions started to accrete. Why had Celia, from the very beginning, not only not discouraged Nathan’s friendship with Mauro, but actively thrown them at each other? Put Nathan in the room next to Mauro’s, when she could have put him in my room? Urged them to drive to that enoteca in Siena, and smiled blithely as they played soccer together, and at that last dinner allowed Seth, literally, to eclipse Mauro’s place so that when Nathan prepared for him that bower wherein the waters of comfort coax carnality into bud, his resistance level was low? Too low.

  We talked about it. Nathan suggested that perhaps Celia was a masochist, attending with loving concentration to the decoration of that coffin in which her own short-lived happiness would be interred. As for me, I remembered something I’d forgotten, a last snippet of one of our conversations. (Or did Celia tell me this in a dream, waving a flashlight onto the past, onto the one bit of broken china I hadn’t swept away?) As you recall I’d suggested that Nathan’s treatment of her over the years might have resulted from her wearing the psychological equivalent of a kick-me sign. What I’d forgotten was this response: “Well, what of it, Lizzie? I mean, isn’t that the proof of love, when in spite of the kick-me sign, someone doesn’t kick you?”

  About eight o’clock on the morning of our departure, grimy from days of panic, Nathan and I walked into Montesepolcro to get some coffee. Mauro had driven off already on his morning sweep of the countryside, while Seth, having taken three Valium, was still in bed.

  We only stopped when just outside the village wall a cow walked into the road and blocked our path.

  Nathan moved to the right. The cow followed.

  He moved to the left. The cow followed.

  “What?”

  The cow looked at him.

  Suddenly a cluster of flies maddened the sky.

  “Not ... possible,” Nathan said, driving his hands through his hair. And the cow moved her hard, implacable jaw.

  Saturn Street

  IN LOS ANGELES, IN THE EARLY 1990s, I spent a couple of months delivering lunches to homebound people with AIDS under the auspices of a group of men and women who called themselves the Angels. I did this neither to make myself look virtuous, nor to alleviate some deep-seated guilt: the usual motives for volunteerism. Instead I viewed the matter pragmatically. I had a car, and nowhere to go in the mornings. So I brought food.

  The Angels operated out of a Methodist rectory on Formosa Avenue. A mood of unrelenting cheerfulness always prevailed in that place. In the kitchen women whose sons had died or were dying stirred sauces and baked pies under the supervision of fussy West Hollywood chefs, while near the door three ex-actors—two Keiths and a Wayne—handed out client manifests and route maps to the drivers. Having been assigned a route, I’d pack the meals I was to deliver that morning in brown paper bags, like school lunches, then haul them out to the car. Some of the clients got soft meals, some liquid meals. For those who needed it, food was supplemented by a canned drink called Sustical, a sort of calorie-packed milk shake (the client’s preferred flavor, strawberry or chocolate, was always specified on the manifest); or by a clear emulsion, mostly rice syrup solids, that promised quick rehydration after diarrhea. As for the regular lunches, they were by design very fattening, since the best way to keep the body from consuming itself is to lard it with rich foods. At a moment in our history notorious for its devotion to dishes described as “light,” “low-fat” or “nonfat,” the Angels drenched their vegetables in butter, dolloped slices of pecan pie with whipped cream, sopped chicken thighs in yolky batters.

  The routes I followed varied. Some days I’d travel east, to Normandie Avenue and Western Avenue, where most of the clients were drug users living in squalid residential hotels. Or I’d drive up into the Hollywood Hills to bring lunches to movie producers and soap opera actors. Or I’d deliver along that flat net of geometric streets that stretches southwest from Santa Monica toward Olympic Boulevard, streets in which one block of cheap apartments blurs randomly into another. (Only a few stand out in memory: the Killarney, painted a lurid shade of Irish green; the Mikado, with its dilapidated pagoda turrets, its windows à la japonaise.)

  Most of my clients didn’t talk to me. They were embarrassed faces, mouths muttering “thank you” even as the deadbolt turned. But a few invited me in. A woman called Wilma Rodriguez always had a glass of iced papaya tea waiting when I arrived. She lived in one room in a building called the Caribou Arms on San Marino Street. “I don’t know how I got it,” she told me once. “Maybe it was from shooting heroin. Or maybe it was my gay ex-husband. Or maybe it was the blood transfusions after the car accident.” She had that kind of gallant gallows humor—what I can only call AIDS humor—that the healthy find so astounding. A few weeks after I met her, Wilma came down with a brain fever and died in a matter of hours.

  No doubt the strangest of my clients was a young man called Robert Franklin. He lived on Beverly Glen Boulevard, that tortured helix of a road that twists upward from Pico in Rancho Park, crosses Mulholland Drive, then winds down into the oppressive flatness of Sherman Oaks. A phrase from a book I had just read about Italy during the Second W
orld War—“cloud-cuckoo land”—sticks in my mind whenever I remember the series of staggered, rickety wooden staircases I had to climb to get to Robert’s little house, which sat perched on stilts at the top of a weed-choked incline, and on the splintery porch of which he always waited for me, naked except for orange tennis shoes and an IV that he dragged around like some ill-behaved terrier.

  “You’re late,” he snapped the first time I delivered to him. “You were supposed to be here an hour ago.”

  “I got held up. Also, you were at the end of my route.”

  “Excuses, excuses.” Robert peered suspiciously into the bag I had just handed him. “And what have we here, pray tell?”

  “Shepherd’s pie—”

  “Shepherd’s pie! Didn’t they tell you I absolutely loathe shepherd’s pie?”

  “It doesn’t say on the manifest—”

  “Plus it’s almost two. I told you people distinctly, my doctor says I’m supposed to eat lunch before one. Otherwise the medicine won’t absorb.”

  “I’ll make a note—”

  “Whatever happened to service? The tightest ship in the shipping business, my ass.” (He fiddled with his IV.)

  “Well, goodbye,” I said.

  “If this goes on, I tell you, I’m switching back to the good old P.O.”

  “Is there anything else you need?”

  “Only to have my packages delivered on time. I mean,” he shouted as I descended the staircase, “this is supposed to be America. Is it too much to ask to have your packages delivered on time?”

  At the time I hadn’t been living in Los Angeles very long. By breeding and disposition, I’m a New Yorker; indeed, I had come to California only for the most banal and cliched of reasons: I had fallen for an actor and, needing an excuse to follow him west, taken on a commission to do a television screenplay about growing up in the sixties, a sort of spin-off from an essay I’d written a decade earlier. But the actor dumped me a few days after I arrived, at which point I developed a case of writer’s block so severe that until I started delivering for the Angels, I was spending most of my days talking dirty on phone sex lines, or cruising the parking lot next to the Circus of Books, or wandering through the Glendale Galleria, occasionally buying something overpriced and useless: a bottle of Swiss skin moisturizer, or a foot massager, or a “Sony Dinner Classics” CD complete with recipes. I drove a rented car and lived in a West Hollywood hotel room, both paid for by the development company that had commissioned the screenplay. My employers never called me to ask how my work was going; indeed, never called me, period. It was my impression that they had writers cubbyholed all over town, far too many to keep track of, and none lower priority than myself. As for the car and the hotel room, these represented for the company the most trivial of tax deductions, the equivalent of what writing off thirty-seven cents’ worth of stamps, or the cost of a Bic pen, would have been for me.

  Sometimes I thought of phoning Dr. Delia. Dr. Delia was a radio psychotherapist whose live call-in program (1-800- DR-DELIA) aired every weekday from eleven to one, exactly the hours I spent in my car delivering for the Angels. Dr. Delia had a demented cackle and a savage sense of rectitude. She was deaf to pleas for pity, felt no qualms in telling her callers (mostly young women) just how stupid or selfish or irresponsible they'd been in getting pregnant, or marrying drunks, or going to bed with strangers. Indeed, so insistent a companion was Dr. Delia on my rounds that now it is her voice, as crisp as newly ironed sheets, that narrates my memory of these events, reading the words back to me even as I look them over on the computer screen.

  I used to make a game of planning what I’d say if I ever called Dr. Delia myself. For instance: Dr. Delia, I’m a thirty-five-year-old writer who can’t write. The person I loved most killed himself a few months back. Now I watch porn videos and call phone sex lines obsessively.

  All right. What’s your question?

  How do I get back to who I was, or who I used to think I was? That boy—productive, energetic, unburdened?

  But in this fantasy, just as Dr. Delia is about to answer me, the same thing happens that happened whenever I drove under a bridge, or into a garage, or by a police station: her voice disappears into leaps and squeals of static.

  After I dropped off my last meal, I made it my habit to drive over to the Circus of Books on Santa Monica Boulevard and return the videos I had rented the night before. I always rented my videos at the Circus of Books, not only because the store had such a big selection, but because as I lingered behind the frosted Plexiglas door that said “Over Eighteen Only,” picking among the films like an Italian housewife choosing vegetables for her minestrone, invariably I would encounter three or four other men doing the same thing, and some of them would be dressed in cutoff sweatpants with no underwear. I had a thing about cutoff sweatpants with no underwear.

  Today I chose Barracks Detention, which was new, as well as Pump It Up, which I remembered having watched with Julian in the late eighties. It’s funny the things that become enmeshed in that web of tenderness that underlies every marriage, even the worst one: not just flowers and fields and halfmoons of heart-stopping luminosity, but also squeezing the pimples on a loved one’s back, or sitting on the toilet while he brushes his teeth, or watching pornography together: something Julian and I did, like everything else we did, compulsively. A little less than nine months had passed since his suicide. Now I found that rewatching the porn videos we’d looked at side by side in our New York bed eased the ache of his swollen and enflamed nonpresence. The porn videos were psychic Shiatsu, fingers rubbing the sorest kink I’d ever known. They made me want to scream, but somehow I knew that only by suffering them might I unknot the ligaments of grief.

  Two was always the formula. The future and the past. Adventure and nostalgia. Memory and desire. Having made my selections, I’d then head back to the hotel, check my voicemail messages (there were usually none), switch the air conditioner on high, and take the first of the videos—this time Barracks Detention —out of the box. All as I undressed: I was a master at pushing buttons with my toes while switching on lamps with my fingers, pulling off socks with one hand while inserting cassettes with the other. “Always doing two things at once,” Julian used to say. He called it the “Rosemary Woods Dance,” after Nixon’s secretary, who’d revealed the latent skills of a contortionist upon being asked to explain “accidentally” erasing the tapes; which, over the course of years, got abbreviated to “doing a Rosemary.” Perhaps marital conversation always evolves into such shorthand.

  In any event, having put on Barracks Detention, I propped myself up in the bed. With my right hand I dialed the phone sex number. With my left I fast-forwarded through the assurances that all the models were over eighteen (“proof of age on file”), the admonishments not to try this at home, the credit sequence.

  The world of the porn videos intrigued me. About their making I knew very little, though I did have a German friend in New York who told me that sometimes he made extra cash working as a “stunt dick.” A stunt dick, as he explained it, was a kind of sexual understudy who waited in the wings only to be brought in if one of the models in the video couldn’t get it up, or couldn’t ejaculate, or proved to have a smaller penis than anticipated; in such circumstances, close-ups of the stunt dick’s dick were spliced into the footage in the hope that the viewer wouldn’t notice the substitution. “And it happens more than you think,” my German friend added. “Next time you watch, keep an eye on the editing.”

  I took my finger off the fast-forward button. On the screen two lanky young men, one with bad teeth, lay on cots. They were wearing khaki-colored boxer shorts and dog tags, conversing about ... something; though I’d switched off the volume, I knew from experience that the dialogue was probably running something along these lines:

  Luke: Scott! How’s it hanging, dude?

  Scott: Not bad, Luke. Yourself?

  Luke: Can’t complain. Found some dirty pictures in the Sarge’s desk Ha
ve a look?

  Scott: Sounds like a winner. (Pause.)

  Luke: Gee, that thing’s getting pretty hard. Want me to suck it?

  Scott: Sounds like a winner. (Pause.)

  Luke: Hey, Scott, ever fucked another guy?

  Scott: No.

  Luke: Bet my asshole’ll feel better, than your girlfriend’s cunt.

  Scott: Sounds like a winner.

  And so on. The phone sex line picked up, interrupting this little reverie. Following the prompts, I punched in my access code. “Are you ready?” said that breathy recorded voice on the other end with which I had become, over the weeks, at least as familiar as I was with Dr. Delia’s. “Do you know what you want? Do it ... now.” (Music.) “Press one if you want to talk to one other guy at a time; press two for the group; press three for the audio bulletin board—”

  I pressed one.

  “And remember, if you finish with one conversation, just press the pound sign—that’s the button under the number nine—and you’ll be automatically reconnected with somebody else. Oh, and of course, zero always returns you to the main menu. Your connection is being made.” Click.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, who’s this?”

  “Jerry, who’s this?”

  “Steve. Where’re you calling from, bud?”

  “West Hollywood.”

  “Shit, I’m in Long Beach. Good luck, man.” Click.

  Again, that breathy voice. (Who did it belong to?)

  “Please hold on just a second while your connection is being made." A running loop of music.

  I turned my attention back to the video, in the utopia of which the boxer shorts had come off; the sucking had commenced.

  I didn’t have a hard-on. The truth was, I didn’t feel horny at all. “Failure is forming habits”—wasn’t it Pater who said that? And certainly anyone who might have seen me at that moment, naked on a hotel bed with a phone cradled against my neck, not really watching the video I had rented, my pathetic posture not even dignified by an erection, for God’s sake—well, that person would have deemed me the most dismal of failures. Dr. Delia would have deemed me the most dismal of failures, and in no uncertain terms.