Arkansas

by David Leavitt

  “But if the physical is natural, and the natural is good,” a young woman was saying.

  “I don’t understand your point, Sarah.”

  “I’m talking about religion. I’m talking about faith. In the body.”

  “Why do you insist on using these relative terms? What does ‘natural’ mean? What does ‘good’ mean?”

  “Yes, I agree. I don’t know what they mean. And that’s why when they say, “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature,’ then what I want to ask is, If the physical is good, why can’t we just put two and two together? Love is nature and God is love. Death is nature and God is death. Why can’t we connect them?”

  I switched off the radio. Not surprisingly, I was back on Saturn Street.

  The Corolla was gone.

  I kept driving. At the Circus of Books, I rounded up three videos I’d never seen before and took them all back to the hotel. It was now two-fifteen in the morning. Speeded up, all that ordinary sexual gesturing looked Tourretic, spastic. The liquid flow of fucking became hummingbird flight. Cocks shot into mouths like pistons. Semen flew out in spores. Nonetheless I never took my finger off the fast-forward button. I wanted the world hurried up; a different scale of time.

  By three-thirty I was watching the third of the videos. Properly speaking it wasn’t a video at all, but rather four late-seventies super-eights strung together and transferred onto tape. A pair of cowboys stripped down, oiled up, on some idealized southern California beach. Handlebar mustaches, flannel shirts. I’d always liked that look.

  The movie reached its expected conclusion. A promo followed: highlights from other “videopacs” in the same series, each twenty-minute short reduced to a few seconds for purposes of allurement. The first to be advertised was Hit the Showers! Two naked boys, their skin pale because the film had aged, lathered up. The usual. Next came Working Stiff, which took place on a construction site. A brawny hand scooped Crisco out of a tub marked “Monkey Grease”...

  And all at once I lifted my finger from the fast-forward button. Sat up in the bed.

  Because in that imaginary construction site behind the screen, in hard hat and overalls, stood Phil: younger, yes; beardless; but Phil indisputably, Phil unquestionably, Phil unbuttoning first one and then another strap of his overalls; then Phil randy and naked, his hard, red-tipped cock pointing straight upward; then—so fast!—Phil fucking another fellow’s mouth; turning him over and taking him from behind; arcs of semen spraying, another and another, into the air.

  It ended in less than half a minute. Less than half a minute, and this revelation of all the erotic details about which I’d so long speculated—the shape of Phil’s erection, the way his face looked when he came—was over. Finished. No secrets left. And I flushed with shame, for I felt sure that from the cloud-cuckoo land of that stage-set construction site, young Phil was watching me as I watched him; me in my hotel bed, naked, the covers pulled up to my waist.

  I switched off the VCR. Got up, got dressed, drove to the Circus of Books—not the one in West Hollywood, but the Silver Lake branch, which, like Ships, never closed. Finding the tape in question was easy. No one rented these old films anymore. Phil’s picture on the back of the box identified him as Clay Skinner.

  Video in hand, I hurried back to the hotel. It was nearly dawn now. I put the cassette into the VCR, fast-forwarded through the shower room, until the construction site materialized. And once again, there he was, in his overalls, his lips moving while he hammered at a wall. No soundtrack: only piano music, like an old silent. But I knew what Phil was saying. He was saying, The housewife of the future. He was saying, Nuclear-powered monorails. He was saying, Blastermen, activate your scopes.

  This is not how the story ends, but almost. The next afternoon I found a message waiting for me from the producers of the screenplay I was supposed to be writing. They wanted pages. When I couldn’t give them pages, they wanted me. A meeting happened, at the end of which I found myself politely fired. Suddenly I had to pay for the car myself. I had to pay for the hotel room myself.

  Unable to afford Los Angeles on those terms, I no longer had a choice. I said goodbye to the Angels; I said goodbye to Phil; I went home.

  We kept in touch for a few months: letters, phone calls. Then a long silence, at the end of which a letter in hesitant handwriting arrived. It seemed Phil had suffered another bout of pneumonia; had spent three more weeks in the hospital; was home now, albeit the worse for wear.

  Our transcontinental conversation dropped off, as transcontinental conversations tend to do. Each of us had other things on his mind: Phil, the exigencies of an increasingly demanding illness; me, my determination to rebuild a New York life. It was all starting to seem part of a remote past, our friendship, which amazingly enough had lasted only three weeks. I felt my love for Phil ease, release. Not go away. Just become manageable. Something I could package, compartmentalize, store in my own attic, which unlike Julian I was good at keeping tidy.

  And then one day, about fifteen months after I’d left, I found myself back in Los Angeles for the most nonprofessional of reasons: one of my L.A. cousins was getting married. Since my father’s death, I’d tended to trade off with my sisters the task of escorting our mother to family events, few of which took us so far afield as this one.

  Mom and I stayed at a Ramada Inn near Valencia. For those of you who don’t know L.A. geography, Valencia is E. T. territory, miles from the Hollywood hub where I’d tarried the year before. But I had a rental car, and two afternoons at my disposal. So I called Phil. An answering machine picked up. I left a message that was answered, a few hours later, by another message—this one telling me to call not Phil, but Justin.

  Of course my heart clenched when the hotel operator told me that name. I went so pale my mother asked me if I was feeling all right.

  I excused myself. I went to my room, where I dialed Justin’s number. “Oh, hi,” Justin said when I introduced myself. “It’s great to hear your voice! Phil’s talked so much about you. Listen, thanks for your message. It was lucky I got it. I’d just gone over there to pick up some clothes. He’s in the hospital. The pneumonia again, but at least he got through it. In fact he’s due to be released this afternoon. And he was thrilled when I told him you were in town. Could you come by tomorrow, say, around lunchtime?”

  “Sure,” I said. Then, after a second, “Was it bad?”

  “It’s the third time. For a while it looked ... well, he made it.”

  “I can’t wait to see him,” I said.

  “Jerry, I ought to warn you. He doesn’t look the way he used to. ”

  “I’d expected that.”

  “No, but it’s really bad. I just want you to be prepared. When you see it happening gradually, you forget. But for people who’ve been gone...”

  “I won’t give anything away,” I said.

  “Good,” Justin said. “So, he’ll be expecting you around midday tomorrow.”

  “Great.”

  “Bye.”

  Simple as that.

  I wasn’t sure what to bring Phil. Flowers? Candy? Finally I decided to buy him a copy of Forbidden Planet, along with a package of the whole-wheat fig bars he’d liked so much.

  Around noon I pulled up to his building. Saturn Street hadn’t changed much in the intervening months. Oh, the grass was less parched, this being spring. No boys chased crows. Other than that, everything was more or less as it had always been in that sleepy pocket of the future because in my mind memory had not yet shrunken its scale, redrawn the borders. That would come with years.

  The gate hung open. As I’d done so many times in the past, I walked around the pool, climbed the cement staircase. The door hung open too.

  “Phil?” I called as I knocked.

  “Come in.”

  I went. Phil sat in his usual place on the sofa. Justin had been right to warn me: he was sallow now, so thin the wings of his shoulders protruded through the T-shirt he was wearing. Also, he’d had to shave off
his beard. A star map of pimples dotted his chin and cheeks.

  “Hello, Jerry,” he said, and waved me over to the sofa, where I sat, took his hand, held it to my chest.

  “I told you I’d look worse sooner than I’d look better.”

  “You look good to me.”

  “Don’t lie.”

  “I’m not lying.” I opened the bag I was carrying. “Look, I brought you some organic fig bars.”

  “Organic fig bars! You know I haven’t had those since you left?”

  “I figured.”

  “Thanks. So how’s New York treating you?”

  “Can’t complain.”

  “The Big Apple. You know I’ve never been there?”

  “You told me.”

  “Guess I won’t get there now.” He leaned away. “So did Justin tell you I’ve been in the hospital?”

  “Yup.”

  “It was a nightmare. I didn’t think I’d make it.”

  “You did, though. You’re strong, Phil.”

  “Maybe I used to be. But this is the last time. Remember you told me once about those lawyers that do living wills? Well, Justin called them up for me. They’re sending someone by tomorrow. I’m going to tell them. I don’t ever want to be hooked up to one of those respirators again.”

  I nodded.

  “I never got to say how much I enjoyed that time we spent together. I was sorry when you went home.”

  “I was sorry, too.”

  “It left a big hole in my day. Jerry, I need—”

  Then the bedroom door opened, and Justin walked out. He wore a bright pink and green shirt, white jeans, orange tennis shoes like Robert Franklin’s. “Hey, you must be Jerry,” he said, striding across the room. “Good to meet you.”

  “Good to meet you, too.”

  “You’re famous around here, you know that? How great.” He shook his head, as if in wonderment at greatness. “So, can I get you something to drink? Dr. Pepper? Pepsi?”

  “Just water.”

  “One water coming up.” And he headed for the kitchenette.

  Only then did I understand that the thing I’d always suspected was true. And how surprising! The corroboration of what I’d known all along—known, and tried to persuade myself not to believe—felt sadder than any surprise.

  “Here’s your water.”

  I looked up. Justin stood over me, just as more than a year ago Phil had stood over me, his shirt falling.

  “Thanks,” I answered, and took the glass. Drank. Next to me, Phil rubbed his hands together furiously.

  “Oh, before I forget, Phil, I brought you something else.”

  I handed him the videotape.

  “Another present! Whoa!” He took it, started to unwrap it.

  “Hey, a video! Justin, what is it?”

  “I didn’t know if you actually owned this one—”

  “Justin!”

  Justin took the video out of Phil’s hands, which were shaking. “Forbidden Planet. Great! That’s always been one of your favorites, hasn’t it?”

  “Blastermen, activate your scopes,” Phil said.

  Justin put the video on top of the television.

  “Phil’s blind, Jerry,” he said. “I’m so used to it I forgot to tell you on the phone.”

  “But I still watch movies!” Phil interjected. “I love the dialogue, the whacked-out music.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “If I’d known I would have—” I put down my water glass. I started to cry.

  There was another knock on the door.

  “Angels,” a bright voice called.

  “Come in!”

  A very young man walked in, fresh-faced, smelling of showers.

  “Hey, Dave, how you doing?” Phil said frantically.

  “Not too bad. Good to see you again, Phil. I missed you while you were in the hospital. Hello,” he added to me.

  “Hello,” I said, wiping my nose.

  “Just put that on the counter,” Justin said. “If you don’t mind. So what delicacies have you guys cooked up today?”

  “Let’s see: cream of mushroom soup, carrot juice, chocolate pudding.”

  “Sounds great.”

  “Well, since you’ve got company, I’ll leave you to it. Hasta mañana.”

  “Bye, Dave!”

  “Bye, Dave!”

  He let himself out.

  I looked at them, then, Phil and Justin. Whatever jealousy I’d felt was gone. It was as if, for the first time, I understood exactly how I’d failed Phil. I’d always been too much the visitor, the hotel dweller, my heart in some other life I refused to talk about. Whereas Justin had made himself resident: in Phil, in Saturn Street. Along with George and Roxy and Kein and all the other people for whom L.A. wasn’t some weird, grief-induced dream, but a place to live; a place they had chosen to live.

  I didn’t know how I’d missed it, Phil’s blindness. Perhaps because, like the telepath on Star Trek, he’d learned to cover up. Leaving Justin to the task of revelations—a task he dispatched with an almost frightening efficiency.

  “So what brings you to town this time?” he asked now. “Doing another screenplay?”

  I glanced up. Only then did I notice it, the detail that had clued me into the truth without my even being aware of it. It was his shirt. The bright pinks and greens. I should have recognized that bougainvillea anywhere.

  Half an hour later I stumbled back out into Saturn Street. Blinding sunlight. Across from Phil’s building, the boy from the Angels sat in his red truck, eating a sandwich and listening to the radio.

  “Hey,” I said, rapping on the glass.

  “Oh, hi!” He switched off Dr. Delia. “You were up at Phil’s place, right?”

  “Right.”

  “I’m Dave, by the way.”

  “Jerry.”

  Through the half-open window we shook hands. “I just wanted to tell you, you’re doing a great thing. I used to work with the Angels myself. That was how I met Phil. I delivered to him.”

  “Really? You drove this route?”

  “A year and a half ago.”

  “I’ve only been volunteering a few weeks myself,” Dave said. “You know, a lot’s changed since you were here. For instance, we’re not in that church anymore.”

  “No?”

  “Nope. Now we’ve got this great new headquarters on La Brea. Plus an executive chef, salaried. Two full-time dieticians. A new managing director from Boston. They did a nationwide search!”

  “Managing director! What happened to Sunny Duvall?”

  “Sunny who?”

  “Not important. And how about the prayer circle? Do you still have the prayer circle?”

  “Every morning, though I never join in. Not my scene.” He put down his go-cup. “Say, have you eaten? You can have half my sandwich if you want.”

  “Thanks, that would be nice.”

  “Hop in.”

  I did. The cab smelled of dog. Sunlight had warmed the vinyl seats. “I hope you like tuna,” Dave said. “I make it myself. My secret is yogurt instead of mayonnaise.” He handed me half the sandwich. “So tell me, Jerry, how’d you end up delivering for the Angels?”

  “A long story,” I admitted. “If I tell it right, which up until now I haven’t.”

  “Doesn’t bother me. I like long stories.”

  “You do?”

  He nodded.

  “Okay. But you’ll have to drive. For this one I need to be moving.”

  Without a word he turned the key in the ignition and pulled out onto Saturn Street.

  “Where to, my good man?”

  “Anywhere,” I said.

  “Sounds good to me,” Dave said. “I like anywhere. Anywhere’s always been my favorite place.”

 

 

 
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