Arkansas

by David Leavitt

  He went into his bedroom; didn’t shut the door. Out of the comer of my eye I watched while he shed his polo shirt and cutoffs, threw off his flip-flops, stood naked before the dresser sorting through boxer shorts and T-shirts and wads of white socks. And I thought, Anyone else, anywhere else, this would have been exhibitionism; this would have been seduction. And yet with Phil you could never be sure. It was possible he was giving a show, but it was also possible that his willingness to undress in front of me sprung from an absolute unconsciousness of sexual effect: the nonerotic immodesty of locker rooms.

  I turned away, pretended I wasn’t looking as he pulled on faded blue boxers, a V-neck T-shirt, jeans and tennis shoes and a rayon shirt patterned with bougainvillea: a really ugly shirt, I thought at first, until I noticed that his chest hair spilled out the collar with the same exuberance as the bougainvillea. Phil had so much chest hair you’d have had to dig for his nipples.

  “Okay,” he said, coming into the living room. “I’m ready.”

  “Let's go.”

  We stepped outside. “Hot today.”

  “Did you put on sunblock?”

  “I forgot. Whoa, that’s bright!” Squinting into the light, he felt his pockets for dark glasses.

  I unlocked the passenger door.

  “This is a nice car,” he said, getting in. “What is it, a Pontiac?”

  “I think so.”

  “You think so?”

  “I’m not really a car person.”

  Phil laughed. “You’re one of a kind, Jerry. You’re the only person I’ve ever met who didn’t know what kind of car he drove.”

  “Hey, it’s a rental! Anyway, in New York no one has a car. A car is a liability.”

  I turned the key in the ignition. Immediately Dr. Delia’s loud voice boomed out the speakers. “And so we send our kids the message that it’s all right to behave in these inappropriate ways—”

  I shut her off as we pulled out onto Saturn Street.

  “I used to own a Jeep Cherokee like that one,” Phil mentioned. “Cobalt blue. I’d only had it six months when I got sick.”

  “You sold it?”

  He nodded.

  “Why?”

  “Why?” Phil looked at me incredulously. “Because I didn’t have any money, that’s why.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t ... of course that’s why you sold it. I have this bad habit. I talk before I think.”

  “You don’t need to apologize. But anyway, yes, I had to sell it, see, when I came down with PCP, I didn’t have health insurance, only life insurance. And suddenly I was looking at, like, fifty thousand bucks in medical expenses. So first I went to one of those, what do you call them, viatical brokerage services, you know, where you can cash in your life insurance if you’re terminally ill? But I only got half what the policy was worth. So I work out this payment plan with the hospital. Then just when everything looks like it’s going to be okay, like I’m going to be able to dig out after all, this queen in Pacific Palisades I’d done a kitchen for up and sues me. The sink sprung a leak or something. Well, I don’t know if you’ve had much experience with lawyers, but they’ll sic the Dobermans on you twice as quick as any car dealer. So it was ‘swing low, sweet Cherokee’...my beautiful car’s swan song.”

  His voice faded.

  “That’s lousy, Phil,” I said.

  “Oh, it’s not that bad. I can always take the bus if I need to.” He cranked open his window. “Still, there’s nothing quite like cruising down La Cienega on a hot day, is there, Jerry? Listening to talk radio. You get hungry, maybe you pull into the Beef Bowl, or have a hot dog at the Hot Dog. You ever been to the Hot Dog? ‘Where eight inches is only average.’ That’s their slogan.”

  “I’ll go this afternoon.”

  Phil grew quiet. It seemed we were lapsing into one of those easy silences of which in the past I’d been so distrusted. I looked at him: elbow bent in the open window, shirt collar billowing. And I thought, Movement really is his medium. Really, he belongs behind the wheel of a cobalt blue Cherokee, drinking Coke from a huge plastic go-cup as he heads up to—where? Ventura? Lompoc? Some on-the-way place that had never felt like a destination in its life.

  And now we were passing a coffee shop straight out of The Jetsons, a chunk of L.A. cold war architecture that startled by virtue of its very incongruity: the past’s fantasy of the future, grown old. This coffee shop had fins and upthrusts. It had an aerodynamic logo like the emblem on Captain Kirk’s chest. It was called Ships, naturally, below the name, the words

  NEVER

  CLOSED

  shrinking away to nothing.

  “Ever eaten there?”

  “Ships? Sure. I remember when I first came down from

  San Francisco—this was years ago—we passed it on the way from the airport, and I made George pull over. George was my lover then. Every table had its own toaster, which at the time I thought was pretty cool. I must have been twenty, twenty-two.”

  “We could go for lunch one day. Maybe on Sunday.” The Angels didn’t deliver on weekends.

  But Phil only shrugged. “The place is sort of sad now. Mostly old men eat there. The waitresses are old. There’s even this little disclaimer on the menu, for people who like their food spicy. It says, ‘We are salt and pepper cooks.’ That always broke my heart, ‘We are salt and pepper cooks.’”

  “Do you think it’s a coincidence, Ships being so close to Saturn Street?”

  “It’s a good question. To be honest, I never thought about it. But maybe. I mean, L.A. in the fifties was so hung up on this idea of itself as the future. Now all that tomorrow-land stuff's become nostalgia. You know what I’m talking about.” And he intoned, “The housewife of the future need never ruin her hands doing dishes! Robots will take care of all those everyday chores, leaving her plenty of time for leisure activities.”

  “Cars are a thing of the past. The businessman of the future flies to work in his personal shuttlecraft.”

  “Nuclear-powered monorails have done away with pollution.

  “Underground cities leave the surface of the earth an immense park for everyone’s enjoyment.”

  “Vacation time? ‘What’ll it be this year, honey? Venus?’ ‘But Jim, we did Venus last year!’ ‘I want to go to Mars!’ ‘Hush, Junior! You know we can’t afford Mars!’ ‘But, honey, I just read in the paper, United has a special family rate to Mars, only three thousand monetary units!’ ‘Hooray! Junior can have his vacation on Mars after all!’”

  Phil stopped. I looked at him, amazed.

  “Is that real?”

  “God knows where it came from. Something stuck in the memory banks. Another one I like is ‘Blastermen, activate your scopes.’ Have you ever seen—”

  The hospital’s monstrous facade interrupted him. It filled the viewscreen. Yanking us from space, it pinned our bodies to the earth; demanded obeisance, sacrifice.

  I parked in the immense garage. We undid our seat belts, stumbled out of the car into the cool shadowy air. Up we rode in the elevator, up floor after floor to the AIDS clinic, which turned out to be as aggressively cheerful a place as the Angels kitchen, its walls papered with safer sex posters and posters of bright-eyed men and women declaring their HIV positivity and signed headshots of minor celebrities who had once visited, leaving behind these relics so that no one would ever forget they had done a good deed.

  We sat down to wait. Across from us a man in a jogging suit was reading Highlights for Children. A woman next to him held Arizona Highways. Phil was thumbing through an old issue of Smithsonian.

  I remembered as a kid sitting in dentists’ waiting rooms, rifling through stacks of old Highlights for Children. I always looked for the “Goofus and Gallant” column, in which the behavior of a very good boy, Gallant, was contrasted with that of his less than polite cousin: “Gallant offers to help Mother with the dishes”; “Goofus leaves the table without saying thank you.”

  What would have been a modem equivalent? �
��Gallant asks, ‘Am I hurting you?’” “Goofus says, ‘Shut up and take every inch of it, faggot.’”

  Needless to say, I’d always had something of a crush on Goofus.

  A nurse in street clothes emerged from behind some swinging doors. “Hey, child,” the nurse said, rubbing Phil’s shoulder. “And where’s Mr. Justin today?”

  “He got sideswiped. This is Jerry, by the way. Jerry, Lamar.

  “Nice to meet you, Jerry.” Lamar offered me his long brown hand to shake. “It was very good of you to give Master Featherstone here a lift.”

  “My pleasure.”

  “Well, I hope you enjoy our fabulous selection of magazines. In the meantime, Phil, Paula’s ready for you.”

  “Okeydoke.” Standing, Phil followed Lamar toward those ominous swinging doors.

  “Bye-bye,” Lamar said.

  “Bye-bye,” I said.

  “Oh, and by the way, Phil, tell Justin if he still hasn’t sold that Soloflex, I might know someone who’s interested...”

  They disappeared. I fell back into my seat. I was thinking of all the waiting rooms I’d languished in during my childhood: most particularly the waiting room of Dr. Craig, our G.P., where I read “Goofus and Gallant” while my mother knit, and in the corner the fish in the fish tank swam from one end to the other; turned around with a single jerk; swam back. There was a diver in that tank, an open buried treasure from which bubbles rose. Probably because I feared needles, even the most mundane visit to Dr. Craig provoked in me that peculiar admixture of fear and boredom for which no quantity of fish tanks or “Goofus and Gallant” columns can serve as antidote. Fear and boredom: it is the odor of waiting rooms. Even now, the accompanying friend, I still smelled it.

  Of course, it was worse then. Nurses wore white. Come to think of it, nurses were white—and invariably women. In those early days of a stiffer medical establishment, the first sufferers had to endure much more than the disease: they had to endure panic, quarantine, never again seeing a human being who wasn’t swathed in masks and booties and rubber gloves. People a generation older than I was all remembered where they’d been when Kennedy was killed: me, I remembered the first time I heard about the disease. I was waiting for the bus that would take me to college. 1979. I bought a newspaper. “Mysterious Cancer Strikes Gay Men in NYC,” the headline read; a few nights after which there was a spot on the news. Only queens, it seemed, had this cancer. Flamers. “I don’t know how I got it,” a sister afflicted with purple lesions told the reporter. “I know I have it, but I don’t know how I got it.”

  Years had passed since then. Today the fear wasn’t so much of the unknown as of the overly known: the painful death witnessed a hundred, a thousand times, as if for purposes of preparation, like those puberty movies we’d been shown in junior high school. Of course every effort was made to blunt the edges. The doctors went by first names. Clinics, even hospices, had a tonic atmosphere: so different from that age when nurses wore caps, origami-like, almost mystified in their starched symbolism of folds.

  A commotion in the waiting room roused me from this meditation. “I can do it myself!” a familiar voice was declaring, to which the voice of patience responded patiently, “Now just let me help you sit down—”

  “I can do it myself, I tell you!”

  I looked up. Of course! It was Robert Franklin, clothed now, though still dragging the ornery IV, wearing the orange tennis shoes. The man in the jogging suit turned away. The woman reading Arizona Highways turned away. They couldn’t help it—and worse, Robert saw that they couldn’t help it.

  “All right, ladies and gentlemen, just put on your blindfolds. Put the bags over your heads. Forewarned is forearmed. I can do it myself, I tell you!”

  Well, in truth there may be no beauty, in truth we’re probably all blind telepaths, fooling the world into taking sightlessness for vision. I can’t say. I can say only that at that moment, my body felt too small for itself.

  I remembered the Medusan; wished, somehow, I could press his words directly into the functional regions of Robert’s sorrowing brain.

  How lonely we all were. How terribly lonely.

  The time line of Phil’s life began to ink in for me. He had grown up in a suburb of Boulder, I discovered. His father was in the air force. It was from him that Phil had inherited his fondness for science fiction. But Colonel Pete Featherstone died when his only boy was prepubescent, leaving behind an angry widow, a glut of daughters. Phil waited politely until he turned eighteen, then fled. He bought a bus ticket to every gay boy’s mecca, San Francisco. He met Stan. Stan was forty-seven and owned a farm near the Russian River. He invited Phil to live with him. But things didn’t work out, and after a few months Phil went back to San Francisco. He met George. George was in his late twenties. They moved together to L.A. Then they broke up. For a while he did “this and that,” Phil said; bartended and waitered, clerked in video shops, even got licensed as a masseur—“strictly legit,” he hastened to point out. More recently he’d been a personal trainer, and was just making a go of his carpentry business when he found himself dying.

  And that, basically, was it. No career, not even any “interests,” really, except going to the gym and watching the movies on which his father had raised him. He didn’t practice Tae Kwon Do. He didn’t make his own pasta. He didn’t read biographies of ex-presidents. (To judge from the paucity of books in his apartment, he didn’t read anything.) And yet if Phil wasn’t a “go-getter,” at least he also hadn’t wasted his adulthood (as it sometimes seemed to me I had) scrabbling on rat’s wheels of ambition and distraction. Instead he lived in the moment, by which I mean that he experienced the moment, he felt the moment on its own terms. Me, if I experienced the moment at all, it was as the anticipated nostalgia of its loss.

  Our friendship progressed incrementally. Sex was its asymptote, the arrival it perpetually neared but never reached. At least in my mind. How Phil felt about the matter I couldn’t have said for certain. No doubt he must have intuited something of my desire for him. But that desire was part and parcel of its own nullification, namely dread, the ultimate cold shower. It was one of those joke matchsticks that snuffs itself out every time it’s lit. It was a self-defeating prophecy. Pulling such mental Rosemarys, I couldn’t have seemed a very warm prospect to curl up against in the night. Still, even as I write that sentence, I realize that it presumes something of which I’m not sure: it presumes that Phil might have wanted me in the first place.

  Phil worked me up sub rosa. In his presence I never got a hard-on, or experienced a conscious sense of sexual arousal. And yet when I left his apartment I always drove to the Circus of Books with more impatience than usual; and when I went back to my hotel room afterward, I always found wet patches on the fly of my boxer shorts, as if lust could literally leak out of the body.

  I wish I could say I gave up all the bad stuff after I met him, stopped cruising the parking lot and working the phone sex lines and renting the videos. But in fact, in Phil’s company my appetite for fast-food sex only increased. I was more on the edge than ever, at the constant mercy of that horniness that crawls on the surface of the skin, never burrowing deep down: all itch.

  Julian would have understood this. Notgeil, he called what I was enduring: a German word. Notgeil was lust with insomnia. It was lust in a hurry. It was waiting room lust, born of anxiety and boredom. And Julian, even more than I, lived in its grip. I used to think he suffered from too many talents. As a teenager he’d played the viola well enough to have a shot at an orchestra post. He painted, oils and watercolors. He sang. He’d had a brief career as an actor, had written plays and newspaper articles. Somehow the very abundance of his gifts panicked him. One by one he unwrapped them, abandoned them. They became simply more toys in that already overcrowded attic where the air was so stuffy, where he found it so difficult to breathe. Soon, from that attic, the only fruition seemed to be Notgeil.

  I was luckier. I never had to make a choice. In retrospect it
occurs to me that Julian, had he decided to, could have out-written me in a second. But Julian didn’t decide to—and my will took me further than his talent. This caused screaming fights on several occasions.

  The attic kept getting more crowded. “Everything started never finished,” Julian sang from it. Still he wouldn’t throw things away. He was a mental pack rat. He lived in a swell of documents, ideas, possibilities; joked that like Leonard Bast, like Alkan, he’d end up being murdered by a bookshelf. Which, more or less, he was.

  Nothing started ever finished. But in the end Julian did finish something. The attic burned. Down fell his soul, the madwoman, with hair aflame.

  Phil’s blood work came back ambiguous. T-cell count down, but just a little. Antibodies up. Such waffly results sounded like good news, to the extent that with AIDS there is ever good news. To “celebrate,” I took him out for brunch that Sunday. I made a reservation at a little restaurant on Third Street that the Weekly recommended. Phil seemed dubious: egg and bacon places with bossy waitresses were more his speed. Still, he put on his bougainvillea shirt and met me on the curb at the appointed hour.

  The restaurant, when we got there, turned out to be a mob scene. There was a reservations desk and an executive chef. The customers were mostly hairless West Hollywood types in muscle shirts. In such a body-waxed atmosphere, hirsute Phil felt his bearishness as an onus, I could tell. Forgoing all the variously sauced complications on offer, he ordered a turkey burger.

  Despite the noisiness of the surroundings, I felt tranquil. Usually in restaurants I didn’t feel tranquil. I waited impatiently for the food, then when it arrived, ate it fast so I could start waiting impatiently for the bill. In restaurants I shook my leg. I glanced over my shoulder compulsively, as if I were expecting someone. But Phil calmed this frantic impulse. Unlike me, he was never in a hurry except when he needed to be.