Arkansas

by David Leavitt

  Well, I don’t know what it was about that little sermon, but the next morning I drove straight to Angels headquarters. Wayne and the Keiths were delighted if somewhat surprised by my breathless entrance, my bumbling, “Hello, I want to deliver.” Within minutes I was bagging lunches, and within minutes after that winding my way up Beverly Glen Boulevard, to Robert Franklin’s house. Would Dr. Delia have been proud? Would Julian have been proud? I couldn’t say.

  But to get back to Phil: the next morning, I asked the second of the Keiths whether I might take on the Olympic South route on a semipermanent basis. He acceded willingly, glad to palm off a tough neighborhood. Then I went to bag. Something of a ruckus had started up in the kitchen. It seemed that a young actress, the star of a new sitcom about college roommates, had come to deliver that morning, bringing along an Entertainment Tonight reporter as if he were an afterthought. “I feel so good about what I’m doing!” this actress was now explaining to the reporter. “It makes me feel just great to help these people out.” After which a camera crew filmed her smiling as she sorted meals; smiling as she bagged; smiling as she chatted with Sunny Duvall, the Angels’ unofficial leader. (Some people called her the “archangel.”)

  All of this I tried to ignore. To me it was obvious that what motivated this young creature’s giggliness wasn’t the joy of doing good works so much as the knowledge that only through continuous exposure to the cameras could she make her fledgling fame stick. Not surprising: in Hollywood acts of generosity usually have profit margins. And yet if any of the other Angels felt the way I did, they didn’t show it. Indeed, not only didn’t they look disgusted when the camera crew jostled them out of the kitchen, or asked them to clear the table where the actress was bagging, they went along with these demands good-naturedly. The humming atmosphere of altruism became yet another soundstage. Mostly out-of-work actors themselves, the Angels gave wide berth to the orgy of mutual back-scratching that the actress’s agent had no doubt days ago proposed to Sunny, pointing out how much a spot on Entertainment Tonight would benefit them too. Even the clients, I later learned, got in on the act, vying for the opportunity to be part of the “representative” routes Sunny worked out every time a celebrity came to deliver.

  Needless to say, it was the rare celebrity who delivered when the cameras weren’t rolling.

  I was loading my lunches into the boxes I used to carry them out to the car when a little bell rang, indicating that the prayer circle was about to start. Usually I tried to be out of headquarters by the time the prayer circle started; today, however, the brouhaha surrounding the actress had slowed me down.

  Conversation quieted. Very efficiently all the Angels except me left off what they were doing and stepped to the center of the rectory. They joined hands. Next Sunny Duvall spoke an innocuous benediction: “Dear God, who is love, bless this food,” etc. The actress stood on one side of her, the Entertainment Tonight reporter on the other. Cameras swerved in to get a close-up of the girl’s face.

  “Does anyone have anything to share?” Sunny asked.

  “I’d like to request a moment of silence for Tommy on Normandie near Sixth, who passed away yesterday,” a woman with blue hair said.

  “Let us have a moment of silence for Tommy,” Sunny intoned.

  Silence.

  “Anything else?”

  “I’d like to offer a round of applause for Leah, who’s recently joined our kitchen staff,” the second of the Keiths said.

  “Applause for Leah!” Sunny said.

  Applause.

  “Anything else?”

  “I just want to say how great you guys are!” This was the actress.

  “Applause for us!”

  More applause. The prayer circle broke up. For about five minutes everybody kissed everybody else indiscriminately. Then we all went back to bagging.

  Just as I was getting ready to leave, Sunny sauntered over to me. We hadn’t been formally introduced. Sunny was also an actress. A decade earlier she’d made a fortune doing a series of commercials in which she played, of all things, Mother Nature; indeed, she had become so closely identified with that role that her career was largely ruined as a consequence. Now she lived off residuals, as well as occasional appearances in shopping malls.

  “Hello, Jerry, I’m Sunny,” she said to me now, offering her hand. “I just wanted to say thanks for all the help you’ve given us. Wayne tells me you’ve delivered every day for a month now. That’s fantastic.”

  “It’s been a pleasure,” I said.

  “The one thing I’ve noticed, though, is that you haven’t joined our prayer circle. Why is that? Do you have a problem with prayer?”

  I looked up. She was smiling. Her Mother Nature teeth gleamed, almost blinding.

  “It’s just not my thing,” I said, adding by way of explanation, “I’m from New York.”

  As if she were being held at gunpoint, Sunny put her hands in the air. “Oh, don’t think I’m trying to pressure you! I’m not. I just want to suggest you give it a try. Who knows? It might make you feel good. Well, thanks again.” And, kissing my forehead, she wandered off into the crowd.

  I got in my car and drove south, toward Olympic. Since I knew the territory now, my deliveries went more quickly than they had the day before. By one I was cruising down Saturn Street, listening as Dr. Delia chatted with Gwyn in Calabasas.

  “Hi, Doctor,” Gwyn said. “My problem is this. I’m a forty-nine-year-old divorcée and I’ve fallen in love with a younger guy.”

  “How young is younger?”

  “Twenty-three.”

  “Wow, that’s younger.”

  “Yes. And the problem is, I met him because, well, he was dating my daughter. Real casually. Then we fell in love, and now my daughter won’t speak to me.”

  “And you’re surprised?”

  “What?”

  “And you’re surprised she won’t speak to you?”

  “Well, yes, actually.”

  “Why?”

  “She’s my daughter. We’ve always been real close.”

  “Do you think you’ve been a good mother, Gwyn?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does a good mother humiliate her daughter by running off with a guy half her age who happens to be the daughter’s boyfriend?”

  “Well, I’m not sure.”

  “Think about it. And while you’re at it, look up slut in the dictionary.”

  Dr. Delia cut to a commercial.

  I parked my car outside Phil’s building. Once again I had an extra lunch. The same fellow who hadn’t been home yesterday still wasn’t home today. Worrying that he might be dead or in the hospital, I made a mental note to call headquarters so that Wayne or one of the Keiths could investigate. But to me—I must be frank—the fellow was only a name on a manifest, a buzzer that didn’t pick up. He didn’t signify. He wasn’t Phil.

  The gate was open this morning on account of some kids who were roller-blading around the pool, so I didn’t have to ring. Instead I just walked up the stairs and knocked on Phil’s door.

  “Surprise,” I said when he answered.

  “Hey.” Phil looked grumpier, more rumpled, than he had yesterday. Had I woken him?

  “So I’ve made your route my route,” I said, handing him the lunches.

  “That’s great.” Phil scratched his head. “Sorry if I seem spacey. I was just watching something. You want to come in?”

  “Oh, don’t worry, I—”

  “Come on.” And he led me into his apartment. Today the curtains were drawn, which made the living room seem stuffier than it had before. On the television the programming schedule for the afternoon scrolled down against a bright blue backdrop. Lights glowed on the VCR. Had I interrupted him in the middle of a porn video? I wondered, and flushed with worry: after all, the last thing I wanted to do was embarrass him. But Phil didn’t seem embarrassed, only tired.

  “Listen, can I get you something?” he asked, pulling open a window shade while simultaneous
ly shielding his eyes against the invasive sunlight. “Sorry about the dark. One of the drugs I’m on—I forget which—makes me photosensitive.”

  “No problem. But you don’t have to worry about me. Why not just go back to what you were doing and I’ll ... see you tomorrow, okay?”'

  “What? I wasn’t doing anything. Oh, you mean that.” He gestured vaguely toward the TV. “Just an old Star Trek episode I’ve already seen a thousand times.”

  “Which one?”

  “‘Is There in Truth No Beauty?’”

  “Oh, with Diana Muldaur. I used to watch Star Trek all the time when I was in high school.”

  “So did I. Now I’ve got the whole series on video. Not that I’m a Trekkie or anything. I mean, I don’t go to the conventions, or read those fanzines where Spock goes into Vulcan heat on a desert planet and Kirk has to offer up his butt so he won’t die. I just like the show.” He smiled a little shyly. “Listen, if it’s the end of your route again, you want to watch it with me? We could eat together. After all, there’s that extra lunch.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  Why not indeed? Certainly no rule in my driver’s guide prohibited me from eating with the clients. And yet in all the weeks I’d been delivering for the Angels, I’d never once done so, or been asked to do so. Nor had I ever tasted one of the lunches, even when I had extras left over. Other people did. At the rectory volunteers were forever sticking spoons in pots, licking beaters. Me, I held my nose when I did my bagging. I grafted onto those perfectly good meals the sour smell of hospital trays. I knew who they were being cooked for.

  Still, I didn’t dare explain any of this to Phil.

  “I’m not really hungry,” I said instead. “But I could sit with you while you eat.”

  “How’s about I just put the food on a plate and you do what you want with it?” He went into the kitchen to unbag. “So what have we got here?”

  “Roast chicken, sage stuffing, and Key lime pie,” I said, taking my place on the sofa.

  “Terrific.” Phil laid knives, forks, and napkins out on the coffee table, then returning to the kitchen, spooned the chicken and stuffing out of their plastic boxes and onto chipped white plates.

  “Well, here you go,” he said, sitting down next to me. “Eat hearty.”

  “Buon appetito.”

  He aimed the remote control at the television. I recalled only vaguely this Star Trek episode, which concerned a creature whose thoughts were among the most sublime in the universe, yet whose physical appearance was so hideous no human could look at him without going mad. Naturally this creature was called a Medusan.

  Neither of us was touching his food, I noticed: me for reasons already outlined; Phil, as I later learned, because the Bactrin made him nauseous. Instead we settled into the Star Trek episode, which was even stranger than I remembered. The Medusan turned out not merely to be hideous, but “hideously formless.” Intermittently he was “shown”—a clatter of staticky sparks, intermixed with psychedelic burblings of color. As for Diana Muldaur, she played a space-age telepathic psychologist who, because she actually could look at the Medusan without going insane, was assumed to be superevolved. But as it happened, the reason she could look at the Medusan wasn’t that she was so superevolved, it was that she was blind.

  Blind! That was the thing that had fascinated me about this episode: not the plot, which choked on its own tail; no, something about the idea of psychic sophistication serving as a front, a convenient ruse by which a person could both mask and profit from a handicap.... Julian would have found it interesting. He had this theory that for the vast majority of artists, style existed as a tactic to cover up or circumvent a limitation, an infelicity: to distract the reader’s eye from the awkward rhyme, the listener’s ear from the dropped note. A theory which, in my case, had great validity.

  The episode drew toward its not very surprising conclusion. In the last minutes Mr. Spock established a mind-meld with the Medusan during which the creature said something (through Spock, of course) that I never forgot. “But most of all, the aloneness!” the Medusan said. “You live out your lives in this shell of flesh, self-contained, separate. How lonely you are. How terribly lonely.”

  After the tape ended, Phil switched off the VCR. For a few minutes we just sat there, in that darkness to which my eyes were starting to become accustomed, staring at the gray glow of the cooling screen. Phil was wearing the same shorts and polo shirt he’d had on yesterday. There was a glitter in his beard. His cutoffs neatly outlined his bundled cock. And yet I couldn’t have said whether he was dressed that way to arouse, or for the same reason that sick children wear pajamas all day: because soft cotton soothes sore skin.

  It would have been different if I’d met him at the Circus of Books, I thought; if I’d met him anywhere; if I hadn’t known he was sick. And I wouldn’t have asked. I wasn’t one of those people, like Trent, who needed to ask. I’d have taken Phil on faith. Hell, I’d have taken Phil anyway he wanted.

  Finally I got up. “That was a good one,” I said.

  Phil disagreed. “Lots of holes in the plot. But I’ve always liked Diana Muldaur. She was in another episode—I forget the title—where she and Kirk become host bodies for some disembodied brains. And of course Dr. Pulaski on The Next Generation."

  “Didn’t she also step into an empty elevator shaft on L.A. Law?"

  “That’s right.” He smiled up at me. “Listen, I hope you understand if I don’t see you to the door. I’m not feeling too great at the moment.”

  “Can I do anything?”

  “I think I’ll just sleep. There are good days and bad days, you know?”

  “But do you need some milk? I could run out to the supermarket. Do you have any prescriptions to be filled? I could—”

  “I’m fine,” Phil repeated patiently. “Anyway, Justin—my buddy—he takes care of all that for me.”

  “Oh, your buddy.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Tuesdays and Thursdays.”

  “That’s right. Still, you’re nice to offer.”

  I shrugged. “Okay. Well, see you tomorrow.”

  “See you tomorrow.”

  He waved goodbye with the remote control.

  As I let myself out I heard the television switching back on.

  Now, about the buddy: I would be a liar if I didn’t admit that even at this early stage of my friendship with Phil, the knowledge of his presence made me jealous. This was an irrational reaction, of course. After all, I was in no position to make a claim on Phil, or deny him the right to all the help he could get. And yet something about the way the buddy’s name kept coming up made me nervous. For that matter, something about his name made me nervous: Justin. It sounded like granola and good teeth. Brown ankles. Penny loafers without socks.

  In my imagination the buddy blossomed into a nemesis: handsome, young, in better shape than I was; the sort of fellow who would never hang out at the Circus of Books, or talk on phone sex lines, or balk at eating an Angels’ lunch. If he were a writer, I decided, he would probably be the kind who worked diligently, getting up at seven every morning so he’d have time to make coffee and take the dog on its walk. Probably he flossed regularly. Probably he owned a Lexus, and listened to Scarlatti, not Dr. Delia, when he drove.

  In the world, meanwhile, I was starting to have lunch with Phil every day. Sometimes I even brought him extra goodies, fruit smoothies and whole-wheat fig bars, to supplement his regular meals. This went strictly against policy, as I later learned. In lawsuit-happy L.A., the last thing the Angels wanted was to be held responsible for food poisoning. And yet I knew Phil would never squeal on me. He liked organic fig bars too much—and he liked me. Soon we were openly colluding in defiance of our overseers, with the result that our friendship shed its volunteer-client protocol. Officiality faded into the background. It was understood that even if I quit delivering, I wouldn’t quit delivering to Phil.

  At that
time I didn’t have many friends in L.A. Oh, I had plenty of acquaintances—some cousins whose number my mother had given me, my bosses at the production company, men I’d arranged to meet after talking on the phone sex line. With none of these people, however, could I enjoy the easy, uninflected intimacy I shared with Phil. Not that we did much together. Usually we just watched videos; or we talked; or we sat next to each other on the sofa and didn’t talk, while outside the drawn shades kids splashed in the swimming pool. This not talking in particular was a new experience for me, since in the past I had always shrunk from silence; indeed, my relationship with Julian might best be described as a nine-and-a-half-year conversation driven by fear, as if to stop talking would be to stop living. But from Phil I was learning that those couples Julian and I had always pitied in restaurants, the ones who didn’t say a word to each other, might actually have been happier than we were, might have been not talking not because their marriages had collapsed into stagnation and aridity, but because they had reached that level of comfort and mutual ease that obviates the need for chatter. Or, to invert that famous act up slogan, SILENCE does not necessarily = DEATH; sometimes it = LIFE. Yet so few people seem to know that.

  One day when I arrived with lunch he asked me rather sheepishly if I might do him a favor. That afternoon he had his weekly checkup at a nearby AIDS clinic. Usually Justin drove him, but Justin’s car had gotten sideswiped on the 101.

  “So you want me to bring you?” I asked—a little startled, if truth be told.

  “Hey, if it’s a problem, don’t worry,” Phil said. “I can take the bus.”

  “No, no, of course it’s not a problem. I’d be delighted. I’d be—” I didn’t say thrilled, lest I sound too much like that actress, getting off on her own virtue. And yet my heart raced, my skin flushed. I cringe to admit it, but the prospect of driving Phil to his checkup excited me.