Arkansas (3 page)

“You've got a nice voice,” I said when he'd finished the song.

“Thanks.”

“Me, I'm tone-deaf. I get it from my dad.”

“Your dad seems like a decent guy.”

“He is. I liked your parents too. Have they left yet, by the way?”

“Finally.” He breathed out bitter fumes. “I mean, my parents, they're nice and all, but after a few days—you know what I mean?”

“Sure.”

Propping myself on one elbow, I looked at him. His eyes were getting red. In silence, I watched the way his swollen lips seemed to narrow around the joint, like some strange species of fish; the way his stomach distended and relaxed, distended and relaxed; the meshing of his lashes, when he closed his eyes.

“This is good pot,” I said after a while.

Eric had his feet crossed at the ankles. From beneath his T-shirt's hem, the drawstring of his sweatpants peeked out like a little noose.

I forget what we talked about next. Maybe Michelangelo. Conversation blurred and became inchoate, and only sharpened again when Eric looked at me, and said, “So do you want to give me a blow job?”

I opened my eyes as wide as my stoned state permitted. “A blow job?”

“Yeah. Like in your book. You know, when Eliot's sitting at his desk and Philip sucks him off.”

“Oh, you remember that scene.”

“Yeah.”

“And what makes you think I'd want to give you a blow job?”

“Well, the way I see it, you're gay and I'm sexy. So why not?”

“But you have to want it, too. Do you?”

“Sure.”

“How much? A lot?”

“Enough.”

“Are you hard now?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

‘You guess?”

I reached over and grabbed his crotch. “Yeah, I guess so too.”

“Well, go ahead.” Eric crossed his arms behind his head. Untying the little noose of the drawstring, I pulled back his sweatpants and underwear. Like his handshake, his cock was long and silky. It rested upon a pile of lustrous black pubic hair rather like a sausage on top of a plate of black beans: I apologize for this odd culinary metaphor, but it was what entered my mind at the time. And Eric was laughing.

“What's so funny?”

“Nothing, it's just that ... you're really gay, aren't you?”

“Is that a surprise?”

“No, no. I'm just ... I mean, you're really into my dick, aren't you? This is so wild!”

“What's wild about it?”

“Because it's like, here you are, really into my dick, whereas probably if you saw, you know, a vagina or something, you'd be sort of disgusted, or not interested. But if you showed me your dick, I'd be like, I could care less.”

“You want me to show you my dick?”

“Not really.”

“You want me to give you a really great blow job, Eric?”

“Actually, I had something else in mind.”

All at once he leapt off the mattress. I sat up. Putting his cock away, he started rummaging through the mess on his desk.

“Here it is,” he said after a minute, and threw a copy of
Daisy Miller
at me.

“Daisy Miller
?”

“Have you read it?”

“Of course.”

“I have to do this paper on it. It's due next Tuesday.” He read aloud from a photocopy on the desk: “‘Compare and contrast Lucy's and Daisy's responses to Italy in Forster's
A Room with a View
and James's
Daisy Miller.'
This is for Professor Yearwood,” he added.

“Uh-huh.”

“And I've really got to ace this paper because I got a C on the midterm. It wasn't that I didn't do the reading. I'm not one of those guys who just reads the Cliffs Notes or anything. The problem was the essay questions. What can I tell you, Dave? I've got great ideas, but I can't write to save my ass.”

He lay down on the mattress again and started flipping through
Daisy Miller.
“So last year my friend bought a paper from this company, Intellectual Properties Inc. They sell papers for $79.95, and they've got, like, thousands on file. And my friend bought one and got caught. He ended up being expelled.” Eric rubbed his nose. “I can't risk that. Still, I need to ace the paper. That's where you come in.”

“Where I come in?”

“Exactly. You can write my paper for me. And if I get a good grade, you can give me a blowjob.” He winked.

“Wait a minute,” I said.

Eric reached for, and switched on, his laptop. “Actually I've already started taking notes. Maybe you can use them.”

“Hold on! Stop.”

He stopped.

“You don't honestly think I'm going to write your paper for you, do you?”

“Why not?”

“Well, I mean, Eric, I'm a famous writer. I have a novel under contract with Viking Penguin. You know, Viking Penguin, that gigantic publisher, the same one that published
Daisy Miller
? And they're paying me a lot of money—
a lot
of money—to write this novel. On top of which what you're proposing—it's unethical. It goes against everything I believe in.”

“Yeah, if I were asking you to make up the ideas! But I'm not. You can use
my
ideas. I'm just asking you to put the sentences together.” He stubbed out the joint. “Shit, you're a really great writer, Dave. I'll bet you never got less than an A on a paper in your life, did you? Did you?”

“No.”

“Exactly.” He brushed an eyelash off my cheek. “So the way I see it is this. I've got something you want. You've got something I need. We make a deal. I mean, your dad teaches at Stanford Business School. Hasn't he taught you anything? Now here are my notes.”

He thrust the laptop at me. Words congealed on the gray screen.

I read.

“Well?” Eric said after a few minutes.

“First of all, you're wrong about Daisy. She's not nearly so knowing as you make out.”

“How so?”

“It's the whole point. She's actually very innocent, maybe the most innocent character in the story.”

“Yeah, according to Winterbourne. I don't buy it. I've known girls like that, they only act innocent when the shit hits the fan. Otherwise—”

“But that's a very narrow definition of innocence. Innocence can also mean unawareness that what other people think matters.”

“I see your point.”

“Oh, and I like what you say about George being part of the Italian landscape. That's very astute.”

“Really? See, I was thinking about that scene with the violets—how he's, like, one with the violets.”

“Which book did you enjoy more?”

“A Room with a View,
definitely.”

“Me too. I don't—what I should say is, I'll always admire James. But I'll never love him. He's too—I don't know. Fussy. Also, he never gets under Italy's skin, which is odd, because Forster does, and he spent so much less time there.”

“The paper's supposed to be ten to fifteen pages,” Eric said. “I need it Tuesday
A.M
.”

“I haven't said yes.”

“Are you saying no?”

“I'm saying I have to think about it.”

“Well, think fast, because Professor Yearwood deducts half a grade for every day a paper's overdue. She's a ballbreaker.”

“And what'll you do if I do say no?”

“You won't say no, Dave. I know you won't because I'm your friend, and you're not the kind of guy who lets down a friend in need.”

It seemed natural, at this point, to get up off the bed and head downstairs, where Eric put a paternal arm around my shoulder. “Dave,” he said. “Dave, Dave, Dave. Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave.”

“By the way,” I said, “you do realize that both Forster and James were gay.”

“No shit. Still, it makes sense. The way they seem to understand the girls' point of view and all.” He opened the creaking screen door. “So when do I hear from you?”

“Tomorrow.” I stepped out onto the verandah.

“It'll have to be tomorrow,” Eric said, “because if you don't write this paper for me, I've got to figure out some alternative plan. And if you do—” Pulling down his sweatpants, he flashed his cock, which was hard again—if it had ever gotten soft.

“How old are you, by the way?”

“Twenty last month. Why?”

“Just wondering.”

He reached out a hand, but instead I shook his cock. “Whoa, no way!” Eric said, laughing as he backed off. “For that you have to wait till Tuesday.”

“Only kidding,” I said.

“Later,” Eric said, closing the door, after which I headed back out into the salty night.

 

“Society garlic,” Jean said the next morning.

“What?”

“That smell in your bedroom. It was the flowers. They're called society garlic because they're pretty but they stink. And Guadalupe picked them and put them in your bedroom. You remember she took that ikebana course?” Jean sighed loudly. “Anyway, we're airing the room out now.”

“Guadalupe didn't realize it at the time,” my father said. “She just thought they were normal flowers.”

Jean poured some cold tea into a mug and put it in the microwave. In the wake of last night's adventures, I'd completely forgotten about the odor in my bedroom, which had apparently troubled my father to a considerable degree. “Yesterday while you were at the library I must have spent an hour and a half going through your room,” he said. “Top to bottom, and I still couldn't figure out where the smell was coming from. Toward the end I was worried something had crawled into the wall and died.”

“What movie did you see last night?” Jean asked.

“Oh, we didn't end up going to a movie. We just had coffee.”

“Gary's a nice fellow.”

“I forgot to tell you,” my father said. “That other friend of yours phoned last night. Andy, is that his name? And he says he's in the Andes.” He laughed.

“I know. He's making a movie.”

“He left a number. I'm not sure what the time difference is, but I can check.”

“Don't worry. I can't call him back now anyway. I've got to get to the library.”

“You certainly seem to be working hard these days,” Jean said. Then she took her cup of tea up to her study. My father started the
Times
crossword puzzle. “Younger son of a Spanish monarch,” he read aloud. “Seven letters.”

“Infante,”
I said. Needless to say, it worried me to imagine him searching my room top to bottom: had he discovered the stash of pornography in the dresser drawer?

After that I left for the library. You will notice that in my account of these weeks I have not made a single reference to the act of writing, even though it is the ostensible source of my income and reputation. Well, the sad truth was, for close to a year, my entire literary output had consisted of one book review and two pages of a short story (abandoned). Research was my excuse, yet I wasn't really interested in my research either, and so when I got to the library that morning I bypassed the 1890s altogether, opting instead for a battered copy of Furbank's biography of Forster. According to Furbank, Forster met James only once, when he was in his late twenties. The master, “rather fat but fine, and effectively bald,” confused him with G. E. Moore, while “the beautiful Mrs. von Glehn” served tea. Yet even as Forster felt “all that the ordinary healthy man feels in the presence of a lord,” James moved him less than the young laborer he encountered on the way home from Lamb House, smoking and leaning against a wall. Of this laborer, he wrote in a poem,

 

No youthful flesh weighs down your youth.
You are eternal, infinite,
You are the unknown, and the truth.

 

And he also wrote,

 

For those within the room, high talk,
Subtle experience—for me
That spark, that darkness, on the walk.

 

Poor Forster! I thought. He'd never had an easy time of it; had passed his most virile years staring at handsome youths from a needful distance while his mother dragged him in the opposite direction. Rooms “where culture unto culture knelt” beckoned him, but something else beckoned him as well, and the call of that something—“that spark, that darkness, on the walk”—he hadn't been able to answer until late in his life. No, I decided, he wouldn't have warmed much to James, that conscientious objector in the wars of sexuality, exempted from battle by virtue of his “obscure hurt.” (How coy, how typically Jamesian, that phrase!) Whereas Forster, dear Forster, was in his own way the frankest of men. Midway through his life, in a New Year's assessment, he wrote, “The anus is clotted with hairs, and there is a great loss of sexual power—it was very violent 1920-22.” He gathered signatures in support of Radclyffe Hall when
The Well of Loneliness
was banned, while James distanced himself from Oscar Wilde during his trials, fearful lest the association should taint. And this seems natural: fear, in the Jamesian universe, seems natural. Whereas Forster would have betrayed his country before he betrayed his friend.

I closed the Furbank. I was trying to remember the last time a boy had inspired me to write a poem. Ages, I realized; a decade. And now, out of the blue, here was Eric, neither beautiful nor wise, physically indifferent to me, yet capable of a crude, affectionate sincerity that cut straight through reason to strum the very fibers of my poetry-making aeolian heart.
Oh, Eric!
I wanted to sing.
Last night I was happy. I'd forgotten what it was like to be happy. Because for years, it has just been anxiety and antidotes to anxiety, numbing consolations that look like happiness but exist only to bandage, to assuage; whereas happiness is never merely a bandage; happiness is newborn every time, impulsive and fledgling every time. Happiness, yes! As if a shoot, newly uncurled, were moving in growth toward the light of your pale eyes!