Arkansas (6 page)

Anyway, what more should I have expected from a boy who buys a term paper, then tries to pass it off as his own?

In the end I had to track him down at the UCLA pool. Dripping chlorine, the golden hair on his chest made my mouth water. I wanted to drink him.

“Hey, I've been meaning to call you,” he said as he toweled himself.

“I've been trying to call you too. You're never home.”

“Sorry about that, dude. I've been busy. By the way, my professor really loved that paper! I appreciate it.”

“No problem.”

He dried under his arms.

“So anyway, the reason I'm here, Hunter, is that I'd like to know when you intend to fulfill your half of the bargain.”

“Softer, your voice carries!”

“What, you don't want any of your friends to know I wrote your paper for you?”

“Softer!” He pushed me into a corner. “Look,” he said, his whisper agitated, “it'll have to be after I'm back from break. Right now I'm too busy.”

“No, it'll have to be before you leave for break. Didn't your mother teach you it's never a good idea to put things off?” I patted him on the arm. “Tell you what, why don't you come over to my dad's place tomorrow around noon? He's away for the weekend. We can put the Jeep in the garage.”

“The Jeep!”

“You did get an A, Hunter.”

“But I—”

“What, you thought I was just going to write that paper for nothing? Uh-uh. You be there at noon.”

I gave him my address, after which he limped off toward the showers.

He was not a bad kid, really. It was just part of his affably corrupt nature to try to get away with things. Of such stuff as this are captains of industry made.

 

Probably the aspect of this story that puzzles me most, as I look back, is how word of my “availability” circulated so quickly through the halls and dormitories of UCLA those next months. I don't mean that it became common knowledge among the student body that David Leavitt, novelist, was available to write term papers for good-looking male undergraduates; no articles appeared in
The Daily Bruin,
or graffiti (so far as I am aware) on bathroom walls. Still, in a controlled way, news got out, and as the spring quarter opened, no less than five boys called me up with papers to be written. And how had they gotten my number in the first place? I tried to imagine the conversations that had taken place: “Shit, Eric, I don't know how I'm supposed to finish this paper on ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn' by Friday.” “Why don't you call up Dave Leavitt? He'll do it for you if you let him give you a blow job.” “A blow job, huh? Sounds great. What's his number?”

Or perhaps the suggestion was never so direct. Perhaps it was made in a more discreet language, or a more vulgar one. The latter, I suspect. In fact I'm sure that at some point all the boys, even Eric, made rude, humiliating remarks about me, called me “faggot” or “cocksucker,” then qualified those (to them) insults by adding that I was “still a basically decent guy.” Or some such proviso.

Business got so good, I started turning down offers, either because I was overworked, or because the boy in question, when I met him, simply didn't appeal to me physically, in which case I would apologize and say that I couldn't spare the time. (I hated this part of the job, but what could I do? Profit was my motive, not charity. I never gave anything for which I didn't get something back.

You'd think I
had
gone to business school.)

All told, I wrote papers for seven boys—seven boys toward most of whom I felt something partway between the affection that ennobled my friendship with Eric and the contempt that characterized my dealings with Hunter. The topics ranged from “The Image of the Wanderer in English Romantic Poetry” to “The Fall of the Paris Commune” to “Child Abandonment in Medieval Italy” to “Flight in Toni Morrison's
Song of Solomon”
to “Bronzino and the Traditions of Italian Renaissance Portraiture.”

Of these boys, and papers, the only other one I need to tell you about is Ben.

Ben got in touch with me around midterm of the spring quarter. “Mr. Leavitt?” he said on the phone. “My name's Ben Hollingsworth. I got your number from Tony Younger.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. He told me to call you. He said you might ... that we could—”

“Relax. There's no need to be nervous.”

“Thanks. I'm really ... I don't know where to start.”

“Why don't we meet?” I offered, my voice as honeyed and professional as any prostitute's. “It's always easier to talk in person.”

“Where?”

I suggested the Ivy, only Ben didn't want to meet at the Ivy—or any other public place, for that matter. Instead he asked if he could pick me up on the third floor of the Beverly Center parking lot, near the elevators. Then we could discuss things in his car.

I said that was fine by me.

We rendezvoused at ten-thirty the next morning. It was unusually chilly out. Ben drove a metallic blue Honda, the passenger door to which was dented. “Mr. Leavitt?” he asked as he threw it open.

“In the flesh.”

I climbed in. Altogether, with his carefully combed black hair and short-sleeve button-down shirt (pen in breast pocket), he reminded me of those Mormon missionary boys you sometimes run into in the European capitals, with badges on their lapels that say “Elder Anderson” or “Elder Carpenter.” And as it turned out, the association was prophetic. Ben
was
a Mormon, as I soon learned, albeit from Fremont, California, not Utah. No doubt in earlier years he'd done the very same European “service,” handing out pamphlets to confused homosexual tourists who'd thought he might be cruising them.

“I really appreciate your taking the time to see me, Mr. Leavitt,” he began as I put on my seat belt.

“Call me David.”

“I'd feel more comfortable calling you Mr. Leavitt.”

“Okay, whatever. And what should I call you?”

“Ben.”

“Ben. Fine. Anyway, it's no problem.”

We headed out of the parking lot. “I just want to make one thing clear,” he said. “I want you to know that I've never cheated on anything in my life. Not a test, not a paper. And I've never stolen anything either. I don't drink, I've never used drugs. I'm a clean liver, Mr. Leavitt. I've had the same girlfriend since I was fifteen. And now here I am driving with you, and we're about to enter into an unholy alliance—at least I hope we are, because if we don't, my GPA will go below 3.5 and I need higher than that to get into a good law school. I'm so desperate that I'm willing to do things I'll be ashamed of for the rest of my life. You, I don't know if you/e ashamed. It's none of my business.”

We turned left onto San Vicente. “Probably not,” I said.

“No. And it must sound terrible to you, what I'm suggesting. Still, the way I see it, there's no alternative because one day I'm going to have a family to support, and I've got to be ready. Most of these other guys, they've got rich parents to fall back on. I don't. And since I'm also not black or in a wheelchair or anything, it's that much more difficult. Do you hear what I'm saying? I don't really have any choice in the matter.”

“You always have a choice, Ben.”

Opening the window, he puffed out a visible sigh. Something in his square, scrubbed, slightly acned face, I must admit, excited me. His cock, I imagined, would taste like Dial soap. And yet even as Ben's aura of clean living excited me, his shame shamed me. After all, none of the other boys for whom I'd written papers had ever expressed the slightest scruple about passing off my work as their own; if anything, it was the sex part, the prostitutional part, that made them flinch. Which, when you came to think about it, was astounding: as if the brutal exigencies of the marketplace had ingested whole, in each of them, all shopworn, kindergarten notions of right and wrong.

In Ben, on the other hand, those same kindergarten notions seemed to exert just enough pressure to make him worry, though not quite enough to make him change his mind.

“So what's the class?” I asked.

“Victorian History.”

“And the assignment?”

“Are you saying you'll do it?”

“You'll have to tell me what the assignment is first.”

“Jack the Ripper,” Ben said.

“Really? How funny. I was just reading about him.”

“You were?”

“Yes. Apparently a lot of people thought he was Prince Eddy, Queen Victoria's grandson and the heir to the throne. Since then that's pretty much been disproven, though.”

“Wow,” Ben said. “That might be an interesting angle to take ... if you're interested. Are you interested? I hope you are, because if you're not I'll have to figure out something else, and buying a term paper with cash is something I just can't afford right now.”

“Ben, slow down for a second. I have to say, this whole situation worries me. Are you sure you know what you're getting yourself into?”

“Do you mean do I understand what I'll have to do in exchange? Of course! Tony told me, I'll have to let you—you know—perform oral sex on me. And no, I can't pretend I'm comfortable with it. But I'm willing. Like I said, I have this girlfriend, Jessica. I've never cheated on her, either.”

We stopped at a red light, where Ben opened his wallet. From between fragile sheets of plastic, a freckled girl with red hair smiled out at us.

“Very pretty,” I said.

“She will be the mother of my children,” Ben said reverently.

Then he put the picture away, as if continued exposure to my gaze might blight it.

The light changed.

“Of course, if you say no because I'm not so good-looking as Tony, well, there's nothing I can do about that. Still, I do have rather a large penis. I understand homosexuals like large penises. Is that true?”

“Sometimes.” Laughing, I patted his knee. “Look, you know what I think? I think
you
should write your paper. And I'll read it over for you, how does that sound? Free of charge, as it were. And if you do get a C in history, well, so what? It won't matter in the long run. And meanwhile you won't have cheated on Jessica, or compromised your ethics.”

“But I'm fully prepared to compromise my ethics.” Ben's voice grew panicked. “Also the security deposit. Tony told me about that too, and I've already taken care of it. Look.”

Reaching across my lap, he opened the glove compartment. A bleachy odor of semen wafted from the opening.

Pulling out a pair of rumpled boxer shorts, Ben tossed them into my lap.

“When did you do this?” I asked, caressing slick cotton.

“Just now. Just before I picked you up.” He grinned. “So what do you say, Mr. Leavitt? Will you do it?”

“All right.” My mouth was dry.

“That's great. That's terrific.”

He turned onto Saturn Street.

I wiped my fingertips on my jeans.

 

As I'd told Ben, I already knew a little about Jack the Ripper. This was because Prince Eddy, whose candidature for the post “Ripperologists” were forever bandying about, stood also at the center of the Cleveland Street scandal. Indeed, several historians believed that Lord Arthur Somerset had fled England primarily to take the heat off Eddy (also a regular client at the brothel) as a favor to his old friend and protector the prince of Wales.

It would have been interesting, I thought, to write a paper linking Prince Eddy's homosexuality with the hatred of the female body that seemed to have been such a motivating element in the Ripper crimes. Unfortunately, fairly hard proof existed that Eddy had been off shooting in Scotland on the date of two of the murders, and since Ben's assignment was to make a strong case for one suspect or another, I decided I'd better look elsewhere. M. J. Druitt, a doctor whose body was found floating in the Thames about seven weeks after the last murder, was certainly the candidate toward whom most of the evidence pointed. Yet for this reason, it seemed likely that many of Ben's classmates would argue for Druitt.

Who else then? Among the names that came up most frequently were those of Frank Miles, with whom Oscar Wilde had once shared a house; Virginia Woolf's cousin James Stephen, who had been Eddy's tutor; the painter Walter Sickert; and Queen Victoria's private physician, Sir William Gull. Indeed, a large percentage of the suspects seemed to have been physicians, which is no surprise: to disembowel a woman's body as precisely as the Ripper did that of Mary Kelly, you would have to possess a detailed knowledge of human anatomy. And if Donald Rumbelow is correct in proposing that the Ripper's weapon was a postmortem knife “with a thumb-grip on the blade which is specifically designed for ‘ripping' upwards,” the evidence that he was a medical man appears even stronger.

So: the Ripper as doctor, or anti-doctor. As far as this “angle” went, the argument that intrigued me the most came from someone called Leonard Matters, who in 1929 had published a book claiming that the Ripper was in fact a “Dr. Stanley.” His brilliant young son having died of a venereal infection after traveling to Paris with a prostitute named Mary Kelly, this good doctor (according to Matters's theory) had gone mad and started scouring the alleys of Whitechapel, bent on revenging himself not only against Mary Kelly, but prostitutes in general.

A second possibility was to talk about class. This struck me as an interesting if somewhat experimental approach because regardless of who actually committed the crimes, the Victonan imagination—of which gossip is the strongest echo—associated Jack almost obsessively with Buckingham Palace. If he was not a member of the royal family, then he was someone close to the royal family, some mad failure of stately blood who would periodically troll the streets of East London in search of whores to murder and eviscerate. And couldn't that be looked upon as an allegory for the exploitation of the working classes by the upper classes through history? A Marxist argument proposed itself. After all, as victims Jack chose exclusively prostitutes of an extremely degraded type: older women, alcoholic, with too many children and no qualms about lifting their petticoats in a squalid alley to pay for a drink. To write about the Ripper as a personification of the bourgeoisie's contempt for the workers would certainly provide a provocative twist on the assignment. Or perhaps such a twist would be
too
provocative, especially coming from a boy like Ben.