Arkansas

by David Leavitt

  In the world of the phone line, of course, none of this signified. In that pocket of consciousness defined only by sound, the blind led the blind. Subjects became objects. The fat fifty-year-old man became the twenty-year-old football hero he’d adored when he was twenty. “How long have you been here?” people sometimes asked, presupposing that there was a “here,” that so many voices defined a physical space, a place. But they did. All those voices defined it, tendriling the complex weave of fiber-optic cables like some voracious species of vine.

  A beep sounded. “Your connection is being made,” the breathy voice said.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, what’s your name? I’m Doug.”

  “Hey, Doug, I’m Jerry. How you doing, buddy?”

  “Great, dude. You?”

  “Great, pal. Real horny.”

  “Yeah? So listen, sport, you looking to connect or just get off on the phone?”

  “I don’t know, guy, maybe connect.” (Only connect.) “Sounds hot, champ. What do you get into?”

  “Pretty versatile. Like jacking off a lot. More a bottom than a top.”

  “Cool. What’s your dick like?”

  “Seven and a half long, five around.”

  “Let me hear it.”

  “Hear it?”

  “Slap it against the phone.”

  Now this was something new.

  “Okay,” I said, then, putting the receiver under the covers, did what Doug had requested of me.

  After a few slaps I lifted the receiver to my ear again. “Hello?” I said.

  “Sounds big,” Doug said. “Thick.”

  “Can you really tell?”

  “Sure you can. A small dick makes a small noise. Now listen to mine.”

  I listened. In the distance I could hear the faintest tapping, a kind of castanet clack.

  “Like it?” Doug asked after a few seconds.

  What was there to say? “Yeah, I like it.”

  Click.

  “Please hold on just a second while your connection is being made—”

  I hung up.

  When I arrived at the rectory the next morning, the second of the Keiths smiled at me in a way that I knew meant he had a favor to ask. “Were changing your route,” he said. “Hope you don’t mind. Gin’s back from vacation, and she always does Beverly Glen.”

  “No problem.” It was my policy not to make problems. “Just warn her about Robert Franklin and the shepherd’s pie.”

  “Is he complaining again? It’s better to ignore him. Listen, if it’s okay, we wondered if we might give you Olympic South. That’s out toward the airport.”

  “Sounds like a winner.”

  We went over the manifest, after which I packed up my lunches and headed out. The route in question took me down La Cienega, past Olympic, and toward Venice Boulevard. Here some of the cross streets had extraordinary names: Cadillac Avenue, Airdrome Street, Saturn Street. And it was on Saturn Street, number 6517 to be precise, that my last delivery lived. Phil Featherstone. Apartment 25. No fish. “If not home, leave lunch with #24.”

  Dr. Delia was taking a call from Trish in West Covina. “So here’s my problem, Doctor,” Trish was saying. “The other day I caught my husband, Todd, like, flirting with my best girlfriend.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty.”

  “And how old is Todd?”

  “He’s twenty-two.”

  “Uh-huh. Any kids?”

  “Yes, two. Kirsty’s three and Tiffany’s six months.”

  “And how long did you and Todd date before you got married?”

  “I don’t see what that has to do with—”

  “Don’t talk back to me. How long did you and Todd date before you got married?”

  “Well, we dated about three weeks, then we lived together about six weeks, then—”

  “Wait a second. Am I hearing this right? You’re twenty years old, and you married a guy you only knew nine weeks? Don’t you think that’s kind of stupid?”

  On the other end of the line, an almost palpably stunned silence.

  “Well, no. We loved each other—”

  “You loved each other. Oh, isn’t that sweet—”

  A car honked, urging me through the stop sign. Number (6517 Saturn Street approached, a pleasant bottle-green building called The Rings. For a moment I considered not stopping, driving around the block to find out what further humiliations Dr. Delia would inflict upon Trish, but then I decided that driving around the block to hear Dr. Delia was too much like driving around the parking lot next to the Circus of Books, looking for sex—in addition to which “Phil Featherstone” was probably getting hungry. It was past one-thirty. So I pulled up to the curb and switched off the radio as well as the ignition.

  At the door to the building I rang the bell for number 25. “Yes?” a voice answered after a few seconds.

  “Angels.”

  An electrocuting buzz sounded, then the mechanical clank of the door unlocking itself. Not surprisingly, the apartments were ranged in rings (what else?) around a kidney-shaped swimming pool in which some desultory children floated bath toys. Number 25 was on the upper story. The door had been left open. For the sake of politeness I knocked anyway.

  “Come in!”

  I stepped inside. The apartment looked to me like what I imagined the hotel rooms of sequestered jurors must look like: drab furniture, dirty beige carpeting, walls stuccoed as if they’d been slathered with cake frosting. And yet accretions of the personal were making their claim: a poster depicting the crew of the Enterprise from Star Trek, framed snapshots of babies, some barbells in a corner.

  A handsome man stepped out from the kitchenette. In his late thirties, I guessed, with graying brown hair, green eyes, and a thick beard, closely cropped, in which red, gray, and brown combined to create almost pointillist scintillations.

  “Hey, I’m Phil,” he said, and offered me his hand.

  “I’m Jerry Roth,” I said. We shook. I gave him two bags. “I’ve got an extra today if you can use it. Someone earlier on the route wasn’t home, and we have a policy against leaving food on people’s doorsteps.”

  “Great,” Phil said. “Thanks.” Taking the bags from me, he carried them to his refrigerator. “Listen, would you like something to drink? I don’t know if you’re in a hurry—”

  “Actually I’m not. It’s the end of my route.”

  “Terrific. I’ve got Pepsi, Dr. Pepper, orange juice. No beer. The doctors nixed that.”

  “Water would be fine.”

  “One water coming up.” He took some glasses down from a cabinet. “Have a seat, by the way.”

  The brown vinyl of the sofa creaked as I eased into it.

  “This is a nice apartment,” I said. “Sunny.”

  “Thanks. You know, I’ve only been with the program a week now. And every day a different guy comes. Is that normal?”

  Suddenly he was leaning over me, handing me water. He had on a blue polo shirt and cutoff sweatpants, the polo shirt open at the throat, exposing a triangular patch of broad-beamed, hairy chest.

  “This route’s a tough one to assign,” I said. “The problem is, most of the volunteers live in West Hollywood or the Valley. They want to stay close to home. But my philosophy is, whatever no one else wants, give me. At the very least, it’s a great way to learn the city.”

  “Oh, it’s not a problem,” Phil said, sitting down in a floral armchair. “In fact, it’s something to look forward to. Every morning I think, Who’s it going to be this time? And always a surprise.”

  “I hope not a disappointment, in my case.”

  “No,” Phil said, laughing a little. “Not a disappointment.”

  A silence now descended, one that would have been awkward, had Phil’s grin not assured me, in its radiant ease, that silence was okay. I gulped my water, chewed ice.

  “I don’t know this neighborhood very well,” I said, to fill the air.

  “Not much to know.
Basically it’s pretty bland. I just like Saturn Street because of the name.”

  “The name?”

  “Yeah. It’s like something from an old science fiction movie. Also, it was one of the first street names I noticed when I moved to L.A. I didn’t start here right away, though. I’ve lived all over. Venice. Silver Lake. Out in the desert a couple of years. Then one day I’m looking to find a new place, and I see this ad in the paper for an apartment on Saturn Street. And I think, Who knows? Maybe it’s a sign. So I took it. That was a few months ago, just before I got sick.”

  I see.

  He leaned closer. “Listen,” he said, “I wondered if I could ask you something. Because this AIDS thing—it’s all kind of new for me. Before, I was always healthy as an ox. Then one day about six months ago I wake up with this cough and twelve hours later”—he snapped his fingers—“boom, I’m in the hospital. And what I’m wondering is, what are you supposed to think when a thing like that happens? How do you negotiate it? What do you do?”

  I choked. I felt like Miss America being asked to solve world hunger.

  “Well, here in L.A. there are a lot of services available. For instance, if you want, AIDS Project L.A. will find you a buddy—”

  “Oh, I know that. I’ve got a buddy. He comes Tuesdays and Thursdays.”

  “Okay, let’s see. Masseurs for Life gives free massages. Then there’s an organization of dentists that does teeth cleaning. Oh, have you got a pet?”

  “No.”

  “Because if you did, PAWS would walk it, or take care of it if you had to go into the hospital. I’m trying to think what else. Would you like to write a living will? There’s a group of lawyers that does them up free. I can get the number if you’re—”

  Phil shook his head. “To be honest, Jerry, I’m not looking for organizations. I’m looking for a philosophy. Which I guess really isn’t something someone else can give you, though with you people who maybe know the territory better than I do, I always like to inquire.” He leaned back in his chair. “It’s just that in my case it all happened so suddenly. Now, if I’d gotten tested—I mean, that’s the one advantage. You have time to prepare. But back then, I figured, why get tested when all it means is that you have to live with bad news? It was the devil you know versus the devil you don’t know, only I chose the one you don’t know. And of course no one ever could give me a decent reason to get tested. Oh sure, the papers were saying for a while that early AZT postponed the symptoms, but I never believed it, and now it turns out to be a crock. So I don’t regret it. I just...” He faltered. “I suppose I just assumed, in my heart of hearts, that I was negative. I felt sure of it. So the pneumonia, when it came, came as a shock.”

  He looked away, not toward the window but toward the television, the Star Trek poster.

  “And how are you feeling now?”

  “Worse than I look.”

  “You look good.”

  “That won’t last long, I’m told.”

  Certain truths you don’t argue with. You just accept them. For lack of anything better, I fell back on Angels P.R.- speak. “Well, a nutritious meal may help more than you realize,” I said. “Today there’s chicken-fried steak with applesauce, Cobb salad, chocolate cheesecake...”

  Phil laughed again. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll eat anything but fish.” He played with his beard. “And if you don’t mind my asking, what else do you do, Mr. Jerry Roth, besides deliver meals to pathetic guys like me?”

  “Oh, I guess I’m a writer.”

  “You guess?”

  “I’m not getting much done these days. I used to write ... I don’t know how to describe it. Personal nonfiction? But now I’m working, or I should be working, on a screenplay. I live in New York most of the time, by the way. I’m only here a couple of months.” Almost apologetically, I smiled. “How about you?”

  “Oh, me, I’ve done a bunch of stuff. The last couple of years I had my own business. Carpentry. I advertised in the gay papers. Now that’s gone to the dogs.” He reached over his shoulder to scratch his neck. “So these days I just sit around here waiting for cute guys like you to bring me lunch, Jerry.” And he grinned again: a grin so winning, so bright in its promises, I had to laugh, to turn away. A pleasant rush, almost erotic, blew through me; a sort of hot wind of gratification. Meanwhile Phil stretched his arms. For an instant his shirt rode up. I could see a stripe of hairy stomach, the navel shadowed. Why, even now a fusion of sensations seizes me as I remember the rising of his shirt, sensations so garbled that separating them out would be like trying to pull the primary colors from a swatch of gray: all those bright, basic emotions—eros and pity, affection and dread—muddying in the onrushing blur of a lived moment.

  I got up. I said I had to go. “The typewriter beckons,” I joked.

  “You still use a typewriter?”

  “No, no. I use a computer. Just a figure of speech.” I held out my hand. “Well, it’s been nice meeting you, Phil.”

  “It’s been nice meeting you, Jerry,” Phil said. And putting his hand against the small of my back, he walked me to the door.

  “Listen, will you be driving this route again?”

  “I can request it. I’m sure they won’t mind. Like I said, this one can be tough to assign. Who knows? Maybe I can make your route my route—on a permanent basis. Although that would mean losing the element of surprise.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t mind losing that,” Phil said, and from his tone of voice I sensed that he meant it: that mysteriously, I had started mattering to him.

  We shook hands. I left. I didn’t look back. Instead I listened for the door to close, which it didn’t. And how remarkable: even now I feel it, that sensation of burning, like a patch of fever, where Phil had rested his palm on the small of my back. I feel it in the very same spot.

  A confession now, before I continue: like Phil, I had never been tested. Indeed, my refusal to be tested had been the main reason my actor boyfriend had dumped me, or, to put it as he put it, “elected to terminate our relationship at an early stage.” In retrospect, I don’t blame Trent. After all, he had tested negative sixteen times. In me he was hoping to find a companion with whom he might migrate to the arcadia of the saved, a place I think he envisioned as being akin to one of those ritzy condominium complexes in North Hollywood, with electric fences and security guards and ID badges. So far as I could tell Trent negotiated his life according to two principles: a naive faith in documentation, and a terror of illness so stunning he would sometimes drive ten blocks out of his way not to pass a hospital. In other words, he couldn’t live not knowing he was negative. Whereas I couldn’t live knowing I was positive. Death was fear for me too, and in this regard, despite our skewed responses, Trent and I had something in common. As Phil had said, it was the devil you knew versus the devil you didn’t know, only in our fixation on choosing between devils, Trent and I forgot one thing: angels also walk among us.

  Julian had always linked my refusal to be tested with what he called my “time problem.” According to Julian, I lived too much in the future. I was forever second-guessing, speaking before I thought, looking forward so hard to the next event that I missed the lived moment even as it was happening. He liked to tease me about this. “Stop,” he’d say. “Don’t look. Who’s standing behind you?”

  “A woman?”

  “What color coat is she wearing?”

  “Red?”

  “Did you see that, or did you just guess?”

  Usually I just guessed. I didn’t absorb details well. After a dinner party, I couldn’t remember the furniture. Whereas Julian took in every flounce, every bit of detailing. He could recite back color schemes as if he were Architectural Digest. He noticed the world he lived in, perhaps too much. His mind was an attic stored with heirlooms, not one of which he could bear to toss away. The accumulated wreckage left less and less room for identity, and that threw him into a panic.

  Me, I was selectively blind. I took in only the thi
ngs that bore on what was coming next. I resisted like hell that examined life into which Julian tried to lead me—Julian, whose own life was, if this is possible, overexamined—because to examine my life would have been to examine the fearful inexorability of death. A truth that Julian, in his vicious final flameout, brought home harder than I ever imagined possible.

  The HIV test aggravated the problem. The trouble for me was the accordionlike nature of time perception. Happiness scrunched a month into a second. Dread stretched a week into a light year. I couldn’t bear the prospect of waiting for test results any more than I could bear the prospect of waiting for disease. Better the unknown devil, I figured, the unexamined life.

  Of course, Dr. Delia would have put a different spin on things. Dr. Delia would have said that I was resisting getting tested because underneath it all I didn’t want the thing with Trent to work out. To which theory I can only respond: well, maybe. It’s certainly possible that I harbored some masochistic yen to short-circuit my own erotic happiness, or deny the finality of Julian’s departure. And yet I can’t ignore the fact that it wasn’t merely the gesture of getting tested that Trent wanted me to make; if I’d tested positive, he’d have dumped me too.

  Actually, it was Dr. Delia who had directed me to the Angels in the first place. One afternoon, a few weeks after I’d arrived in L.A., I was driving around aimlessly, listening to her program, when with great whoops of self-congratulation she announced that she had recently spent a morning delivering meals. She went on to explain who the Angels were, how they worked, what a marvelous experience it had been to drive for them and meet their clients, who showed such stoicism in the face of adversity. “It makes me really wonder about you people,” she told her listeners. “You call me up, you whine like a bunch of babies, when all the time you’re blessed with the gift of life. Then I meet these folks who really have something on their plates, and do they gripe? Do they moan? Not one bit. Think about that the next time you feel like calling.”