Arkansas (9 page)

“So what are your plans?”

“Well, for now I'm studying social work at San Francisco State. My goal is to go for my master's, then work with PWAs.”

“That's great.”

“Oh, and also—this may surprise you—I've been trying my hand at fiction writing.”

“Really.”

“Well, I figured, why not? See, since I moved in with Keith, I've been reading every gay novel I can get my hands on. I even read two of yours. I liked
The Lost Language of Cranes
all right. I didn't much like
Equal Affections”

“I probably should have written it as a memoir. I still might.”

“Interesting. As for me, I was thinking our little adventure might make a terrific story.”

“That's a good idea,” I said. “Writers often disguise their lives as fiction. The thing they almost never do is disguise fiction as their lives.”

There wasn't really any way to answer this remark, and so for a few more moments we were both silent. Then Ben said, “And how about you, Mr. Leavitt? Do you feel comfortable with what you did?”

I spooned up the last remnants of my cappuccino foam. “Well, I'll never look at it as the proudest moment of my life, if that's what you're asking. Still, I'm not ashamed. I mean, is it wrong for the ghostwriter to say yes to the First Lady because she can't write? Was it wrong for Marni Nixon to dub Natalie Wood's voice in
West Side Story
because she couldn't sing?”

“You tell me. Was it?”

But I couldn't answer.

We got up shortly after that. It was nearing one, when Ben and Keith had a date to meet outside Café Rivoire. From the spot where Savonarola had burned the vanities, I watched them kiss each other on the cheek, two handsome, nicely dressed young men. Then, arms linked, they strolled together down Via Calzaiuoli.

And how did I feel? Ashamed, yes. Also happy. For the one thing I hadn't explained to Ben—the one thing I could never explain to Ben—was that those papers, taken together, constituted the best work I'd done in my life. And perhaps this was precisely
because
they were written to exchange for pleasure, as opposed to those tokens with which one can merely purchase pleasure. Thus the earliest troubadours sang, so that damsels might throw down ropes from virginal balconies.

Still, I couldn't have said any of this to Ben, because if I'd said any of this to Ben—if I'd told him it was the best work I'd done in my life—he would have thought it a tragedy, not a victory, and that I couldn't have borne.

From Savonarola's circle, I turned toward the Uffizi corridor, opening out like a pair of forceps. Pigeons, masses of them, circled in the sky, sometimes alighting on the heads of the statues: the imitation David, Neptune, Hercules, and Cacus, with their long fingers and outsize genitals.
And toward this nexus, great waves of men once moved,
I thought,
drawn by the David himself, by the dream of freedom itself
It would have made a wonderful paper.... Meanwhile bells rang. Ben and his companion had disappeared. “Time for lunch!” called an old man with bread, and the pigeons flocked and swooped to the earth.

I
HADN'T
SEEN
C
ELIA IN SIX YEARS
. None of her old friends had—not since she'd married Seth Rappaport and moved with him to Italy. So when I got off the train at Montesepolcro and looked around the platform for the Celia I remembered—the old Celia, fat and bewildered—the elegant woman who greeted me in her stead took me completely by surprise. And probably the expression of astonishment, even shock, in my eyes, pleased her: certainly it would have pleased me had the tables been turned; had it been Celia, fatter than ever, who'd stepped off the train, and a transformed, model-thin Lizzie waiting to greet her.

Arm in arm, we walked to her tiny, battered Fiat. It was mid-June. Above us, on its hill, Montesepolcro loomed and shimmered. Pale meadows leapt to greet it. The air had a buttery cast, as if the sun had melted and been absorbed into the fabric of the sky.

“Well, what do you think?” Celia asked, loading my bag into her trunk with a muscular arm.

“To me it looks like a vision of heaven in a painting of purgatory.” (It was my first trip to Italy, and I was inclined to tourist poetry.)

Instead of answering, Celia climbed into the Fiat, making room for me on the passenger seat, which was currently occupied by a large stack of pressed shirts. That we hadn't seen each other for so long, finally, seemed an accident: after all, she'd tendered any number of invitations over the years—first to Bill and me, then after the divorce just to me—all of them encouraging a visit to the famous Podere di Montesepolcro, where she lived and out of which she ran her cooking school. And I'd always wanted, always meant, to accept. So had our friend Nathan. We'd talked about it every time we'd seen each other in New York, at parties, or in line at movies. Only Nathan was working for his father, and I was getting married; then Nathan's friend Martin was sick, and Bill was leaving me; then I was finishing up my Ph.D. (Later I got the job I have now, teaching classics at a West Side prep school.) Soon we'd canceled on Celia so many times that I think she started to despair of our ever actually showing up. Martin died. My divorce came through. Suddenly there was time—too much time—and Nathan booked tickets.

“Is he here yet?” I asked Celia now, as switching on the cranky ignition, she spirited us uphill toward the heaped stone village.

She nodded. “He arrived yesterday, and—well, frankly, Lizzie, I'm worried.”

“Worried, why?” My heart clenched, remembering Martin.

But Celia waved my anxiety away. “No, no. Healthwise, he's fine. He looks fine. The trouble is that he seems—I'm not sure how to put it—desperate.”

“That's par for the course,” I said, relieved. “Nathan always seems desperate.”

“ World-weary and travel-worn.' That's what he told me when I picked him up. ‘Celia, I am world-weary and travel-worn.

“He's always saying things like that.”

“I know. Only this time—I'm not sure why—it sounded like he meant it.”

Having passed through the belt of ugly apartment buildings and shops that ringed the old center, we crossed a wooden bridge and entered Montesepolcro proper. The one street wound around and around and up and up, like a turban, then veered suddenly to the right and emerged into countryside. Cypresses lined a path that led up to Celia's farmhouse, which I recognized from photo spreads in
The New York Times, Gourmet, Travel and Leisure.

“Wow,” I said as we got out of the car. “It's even more beautiful than in the pictures.”

“Thanks. But to get back to Nathan”—it seemed she still needed, perpetually, to get back to Nathan—“there's something more. He told me something strange.”

“Strange in what sense?”

“It was when I picked him up at the station yesterday. He was waiting at the bar, and there was this woman at a table across the way—with a felt hat, in this heat! And when we got to the car, Nathan said, ‘Celia, she had donkey ears.' ‘I've heard of cauliflower ears, but never donkey ears!' I said. ‘No,' he said, ‘I mean literally. Brown and bristly and ... twitchy.'”

“Really?” I was fascinated. ‘Well, that
would
explain the hat.”

“Oh, Lizzie!” Celia's voice went raspy with disapproval. “Of course it
sounds
funny. Only he wasn't joking. ‘I saw what I saw,' he said. And afterwards, at dinner—so glassy-eyed.”

We had reached the old wall that surrounded the farmhouse. While Celia unlatched the gate, I ran my fingers over the mortar between the seams, and some of the mortar crumbled, coating them with chalk. I was taking things in: the arbor, enlaced with climbing roses, the mottles of shadow on the gravel ground, the profusion of flowers.

How had Celia managed it? I wondered, and felt, not for the first time, unequal to loveliness.

Across the courtyard, she fished in her pocket for keys. The house, which was very old, had over the years lost some of its shapeliness but none of its grace. Yes, perhaps its shoulders were a bit stooped, its rear end a bit saggy. Nonetheless it occupied its patch of earth with the confidence of one whose very presence has always silenced, encouraged, and redeemed. It had a roof of crumbling red and white slate, walls the color of milky coffee, many little odd-shaped windows. Its three wings, staggered and distinct, seemed not so much to be built as to recline along the slope of the garden, as if in another age a girl had lain down in a meadow, her head among violets, her feet pointed toward eternity.

“It's wonderful,” I said, as stepping inside, I took in the sweep of terra-cotta floor, the comfortable, unfashionable couches, the fireplace and the bookshelves and the little drinks tables piled with old magazines. “And what a view! Spectacular.”

“When you live here,” Celia said, “you get used to the food. You even get used to the men. But this”—and she gestured toward the window—“this you never get used to.”

I could see why. Texture, not color, defined this landscape: plowed fields might have been corduroy, green meadows moire silk, a mown pasture a patch of dull suede shot through with silver threads. Elsewhere sunflowers were a Liberty print of sunflowers. And above it all, immense rocks, as if a child god, eons ago, had made a dribble castle of wet sand.

“It's too much to absorb,” I said. “Too beautiful to believe in, or endure.”

“A doom with a view, Nathan calls it.”

“Where is he, by the way?”

“Still sleeping. And he went to bed at ten! That's nearly” —she checked her watch—“thirteen hours.”

“Just let him rest. He's had a rough year.”

“He also said, when he got here—he said, ‘You, my dear, are a
tour deforce.
Whereas I am forced to tour.'”

“Well, Celia, there I've got to agree with him. I mean, you put us all to shame, living in this gorgeous house, with all this success, on top of which—is it gauche of me to say anything about your weight?”

“Say it.”

“Not only are you not fat, you're thin! How much have you lost, fifty pounds?”

“Seventy-five. But a fat person,” she went on sternly, “in her mind at least, will always be fat. I look in the mirror even now and I see the old fat Celia, wearing bedspreads for skirts.”

“That's not what I see.”

“You're nice, Lizzie. You've always been nice. Nathan, on the other hand, just reminds me at every opportunity how fat I
used
to be. In so many ways, he hasn't changed!” With which remark she picked a dead bloom off an arrangement of marigolds. Obviously she and Nathan—attached, it sometimes seemed, since time immemorial—were not experiencing the easiest reentry into friendship.

Celia now led me into the kitchen, where we sat across from each other at an old refectory table. Braids of garlic and hot peppers garlanded the iron stove. Basil grew in a pot next to the sink, while in other pots, bunches of oregano, rosemary, and sage were drying. Perhaps it is always the habit of women to need to be in a kitchen in order to speak intimately. Certainly it was our habit. So we sat there, and talked about marriage. Marriage, after all, had brought Celia to Italy. But now Seth was nowhere to be seen. They had an arrangement, she said. “I live here, and he lives in Rome. That way we get along very nicely.”

“How long have you two been married now? I forget.”

“Five years next week. The wooden anniversary.”

“How funny! Next week would have been three years for Bill and me.” I watched the play of light on the little cup she handed me. “And now you don't live together, but you stay married. Why?”

“We need each other,” Celia said, pouring coffee. “There's this connection. It's hard to explain.”

“Oh, I understand about that connection.”

She leaned closer. “Listen, Lizzie, before we go on, there's something I've got to ask you about Nathan. I know he looks fine, but is he fine?”

My fingers closed around the handle of the cup. “I was going to ask
you
the same question.”

“But I don't know! He absolutely won't talk about Martin. Instead all he does is narrate his sex adventures on the Internet.”

“With me too! And it's so boring! Gay men always think—”

“Please don't talk about me when Tm gone,”
a baritone interrupted.

We turned. All at once the object of our speculation was standing before us, looking raffish and handsome in his halfbuttoned oxford shirt, his gray hair sleep-stiff.

“Good morning, Nathan.”

“Good morning, Celia. And Lizzie!”

“Hello, Nathan.”

We hugged discreetly, as I knew physical intimacy with women embarrassed him, then, letting go, both smiled at Celia. She was staring at us with eyes in which wariness, affection, and rebuke forged a kind of rough and refining fire.

“Up early as usual, I see.”

“It's been a long life.” Grinning, he reached out his arms.

To my mild surprise, she allowed him to hug her.

 

That afternoon we took a walk in the hills and tried to remember how Nathan and Celia had met. We knew it was freshman year in college, probably in a dining hall; but who had introduced them? What had they talked about? Neither one could recall.

What Celia did recall was that at first Nathan had had no particular interest in her per se; rather, he had hoped, through her, to get to her friend Andrew.

“That's absolutely not true!”

“Selective memory,” Celia said. In any case, seventeen years had now passed since that fateful, forgotten meeting, seventeen years over the course of which their shared lives had fragmented and become diffuse. They no longer talked to each other every day, or even every year. Still, each kept abreast of the other's doings, in no small part thanks to the efforts of their loyal friend Lizzie, always noted for her go-betweening, her faithful correspondence.