Arkansas (2 page)

“And you make a living at it?”

“Usually.”

“What did you major in?”

“English.”

“Great. Where'd you go to school?”

“Yale.”

“Cool. My teacher—I'm taking this English lit class? My teacher went to Yale. Her name's Mary Yearwood. She's probably about your age.”

“I don't know her.”

“She's an expert on Henry James. Did you go to grad school?”

“No. I pretty much started publishing out of college.”

“I'd really like to read some of your books. Maybe you could tell me the titles.”

“Well, we'd better be going,” Mrs. Steinberg said, rising very suddenly from the sofa. “We've kept you folks long enough.”

“No, no.” My father did not sound very convincing, however, and soon the Steinbergs were moving toward the door, where farewells were exchanged. Meanwhile I hurried into the kitchen and wrote the titles of my books on a memo pad advertising Librax.

“Thanks,” Eric said, as I handed him the list. “I'll definitely pick one up.” And he held out his hand.

We shook. His handshake was—everything about Eric was—long, loose, generous.

They left.

“A nice kid,” my father said.

“Very nice,” Jean agreed. “Still, Cynthia's worried. Apparently he's a whiz with computers—but not exactly verbal.”

“C's in English won't get him into Stanford,” my father said. (We had all strolled into the kitchen.)

“What does English matter if you want to go to business school?” I asked.

“It didn't used to. But then there were always too many technicians, and so what we're looking for now are all-around students with a good background in the humanities. You, for instance, my boy”—he put a hand on my shoulder—“would probably have had an easier time getting into Stanford than Eric Steinberg will.”

“But I didn't want to.”

“I still wish you'd applied. You could have been the first student in the school's history to get a simultaneous MFA and MBA—”

“Yes, I know, Dad.”

Jean went up to her study while my father took some yellow beets from the freezer and put them in a microwavable dish.

“By the way, do you still have that stink in your room?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “It's the strangest thing. I started noticing it after the tremor.”

“Tremor! What tremor?” He walked over to the intercom. “Jean, did you feel a tremor?” he shouted.

“No, I didn't!” she shouted back. For some reason they always yelled at each other through the intercom, as if they didn't quite trust it to carry their voices.

 

After that I changed my routine. Instead of wasting my mornings on the road, I went directly from Starbucks to the library, and stayed there until lunch.

I wish I could say I got a little more work done over the course of those days than I might have otherwise, but I didn't. Instead I spent most of my time looking up various literary acquaintances in the periodicals index to see how much more work they had published in the previous year than I had; or chasing down those bad reviews of
While England Sleeps
that my publisher had had the good sense not to forward to me (the worst of these, in
The Partisan Review,
was by one Pearl K. Bell, whose son had been my classmate); or reading and rereading the terrible press I'd gotten during the lawsuit. Also, I looked every day to see if anyone (Eric?) might have checked out any of my books. (No one had; I took the occasion to autograph them.) After which I'd lunch, drive around, and end up more often than not (no, I am lying: every day) at the Circus of Books.

Coming home one evening, I walked through my father's door only to hear Jean shouting through the intercom that I had a phone call.

“It's Eric,” Eric said when I picked up. Not “Eric Steinberg,” just “Eric”—as if he took it for granted that I'd remember him.

“Eric, how're you doing?”

“All right, yourself?”

“Great.”

“Cool.”

There was a silence. Naturally I presumed that since Eric had called me, he would also shoulder the responsibility for keeping the conversation going. He didn't.

It soon became apparent that if I didn't say something, no one would.

“So what are you up to?”

“Oh, you know, the usual. Studying. Partying.” Another silence. “So I bought one of your books.”

“Really. Which one?”

“
The Secret Language of the Cranes.
”

“Oh, right.”

“Yeah.”

Long pause.

“And did you like it?”

“Yeah, I thought it was pretty cool. I mean, to write all that! It takes me an hour to write a sentence.”

“It's just a matter of practice,” I said. “Like sports. Are you an athlete?”

“Not really.”

“I was just asking because you looked to be in pretty good shape.”

“I swim three times a week.”

“At UCLA?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Is there a good pool?”

“Pretty good. Olympic size.”

More silence.

“Well, I appreciate your calling, Eric,” I said. “And buying the book. Most people who say they're going to never bother.”

“That's okay. I don't read much generally, but I thought your book was pretty interesting. I mean, it showed me a lot of things I didn't know, not being gay myself.”

“I'm glad to hear you say that,” I said in one breath, “because sometimes I think gay writers only write for a gay audience, which is a mistake. The point is, human experience is universal, and there's no reason why straight people can't get as much out of a gay novel as gay people get out of a straight novel, don't you think?” (I grimaced: I sounded as if I were giving an interview.)

“Yeah” was Eric's reply.

A fifth, nearly unbearable silence.

“Well, it's been great talking to you, Eric.”

“My pleasure.”

“Okay, so long.”

“Later.”

And he hung up with amazing swiftness.

The next morning I was at the library when it opened.

I stayed all day. Did you know that Lord Henry Somerset's father, the Duke of Beaufort, invented the game of badminton, which was named for his estate? Well, he did. Also, Osbert Sitwell once wrote a poem about Lord Henry, in which he lampooned the notorious expatriate as “Lord Richard Vermont,” whom “some nebulous but familiar scandal / Had lightly blown ... over the Channel, / Which he never crossed again.”

 

Thus at the age of twenty-seven
A promising career was over,
And the thirty or forty years that had elapsed
Had been spent in killing time
   —or so Lord Richard thought,
Though in reality,
killing time
Is only the name for another of the multifarious ways
By which Time kills us.

 

When I got home that evening, there was a message in my room that Eric had called.

“Hey,” I said, calling him back, calmer now, as well as more curious.

“Hey,” Eric said.

Apparently it was not his conversational style to phone for any particular reason.

“So what's up?”

“Not much, man. Just kicking back.”

“Sounds good. You live in a dorm?”

“No, I'm off campus.”

“Oh, cool.” (Lying down, I shoved a pillow behind my head, as I imagined Eric had.) “And do you live alone?”

“I share a house with two other guys, but I've got my own room.” He yawned.

“And are your roommates home?”

“Nope. They're at the library.”

“Studying?”

“You got it.”

“And don't you have studying to do?”

“Yeah, but I bagged it around seven. Actually, I was feeling kind of bored, so I started reading another one of your books.”

“Oh really? Which one?” (How I longed to ask what he was wearing!)

“Family Dancing.
And you know what's weird? It really reminds me of my family—especially the one called ‘Danny in Transit.' I'm from New Jersey,” he added.

“Wow,” I said.
Family Dancing
was the last thing I wanted to talk about it. “So what do you do with your spare time, Eric? Besides swim three days a week.”

“You've got a good memory, Dave.”

“Thanks. It goes with the territory.”

“Like that story of yours! So let's see, what do I do with my spare time.” (I heard him thinking.) “You mean besides jack off?"

“Well—”

Eric laughed. “Let's see. Well, I like to party sometimes—”

“I'm sorry to interrupt, but I have to ask—when you say party, do you mean literally party, or get high?”

“Can be both, can be both.”

“You were stoned at my father's house the other day, weren't you?”

“Shit! How'd you know?”

“I could just tell.”

“Do you get high?”

“Sometimes.”

“Man, I am so into pot! Ever since I was thirteen. Listen, do you want to come over and get stoned?”

I sat up. “Sure,” I said.

“Cool.”

Long pause.

“Wait—you mean tonight?”

“Yeah, why not?”

“No problem, tonight's fine. I just don't want to keep you from your studying.”

“I told you, I bagged it.”

“Okay. Where do you live?”

“Santa Monica. Have you got a pencil?”

I wrote down the directions.

Through the intercom, I told Jean I was going out to a movie with my friend Gary, after which I got into the car and headed for the freeway. The rush hour traffic had eased, which meant it took me only half an hour to arrive at the address Eric had given me, a dilapidated clapboard house. In the dark I couldn't make out the color.

From the salty flavor of the air, I could tell that the sea wasn't far off.

Dogs barked as I got out of my father's car and opened the peeling picket gate, over which unpruned hydrangea bushes crowded. The planks of the verandah creaked as I stepped across them. In the windows, a pale orange light quavered.

I knocked. Somewhere in the distance Tracy Chapman was singing “Fast Car.”

“Hey, sexy,” Eric said, pulling open the screen door.

I blinked. He was wearing sweatpants and a Rutgers Crew T-shirt.

“Glad you could make it.” He held the door open.

“My pleasure,” I said.

I stepped inside. The living room, with its orange carpet and beaten-up, homely furniture, reminded me of my own student days, when I'd shopped at the Salvation Army, or dragged armchairs in from the street.

“Nice place,” I said.

“It's home,” Eric said. “I mean, it's not like your dad's house. Now
that's
what I call a house. Say, you want a beer?”

“Sure.” I wasn't about to tell him I hated beer.

He brought two Coronas from the kitchen, one of which he handed me.

“
L'chaim
he toasted.

“Cheers,” I said.

Then Eric leapt up the staircase, and since he gave no indication whether or not I was supposed to follow him, I followed him. He took the stairs three at a time.

At the top, four doors opened off a narrow corridor. Only one was ajar.

“Step into my office,” he said, passing through. “And close the door behind you.”

I did. The room was shadowy. An architect's lamp with a long, folding arm illuminated a double mattress on the floor, the blue sheets clumped at the bottom. Against the far wall, under a window, stood a desk piled with textbooks. Clean white socks were heaped on a chair, beneath which lounged a pair of crumpled jockey shorts.

In the space where a side table might have been, a copy of
Family Dancing
lay splayed over the Vintage edition of
A Room with a View.

“Have a seat,” Eric said. Then he threw himself onto the mattress, where, cross-legged, he busied himself with a plastic bag of pot and some rolling papers.

“You can move all that,” he added, indicating the chair.

Gingerly I put the socks onto the desk, nudged the shorts with my left foot, and sat down.

Unspeaking, with fastidious concentration, Eric rolled the joint. Much about his room, from the guitar to the recharging laptop to the blue-lit CD player (the source of Tracy Chapman's voice), seemed to me typical UCLA. And yet there were incongruous touches. For one thing, the posters did not depict acid rock musicians or figures from the world of sports. Instead Eric had thumbtacked the Sistine Chapel ceiling onto his ceiling. Over his bed hung the
Last Judgment.
Caspar David Friedrich's
Wanderer in a Sea of Mist
stared into the back of the door.

“Have you spent much time in Europe?” I hazarded.

“Yeah, last summer. I went to Italy, France, Amsterdam.”

“You must have liked Amsterdam.”

“I basically don't remember Amsterdam.”

I laughed. “And Italy?”

“Man! Rome was amazing! Rome really blew me away!” Licking the joint, he sealed it, then picked up a lighter from the floor.

“The last time I went to Florence I tried to find the hotel where Forster stayed,” I said. “I only mention it because I see you're reading A
Room with a View.”

Eric lit the joint. “Come on down here,” he said, slapping the other side of the bed like someone's behind.

“I'd better take off my shoes.”

“Yeah, Dave, I'd have to agree that would be a good idea.”

He was mocking me, but agreeably, and, flushing, I did what I was told. Down among the sheets the world smelled both fruity and smoky.

Eric toked, passed me the joint. Lying back, he stretched his arms over his head.

“
Two weeks in a Virginia jail ”
Tracy Chapman sang,
“for my lover, for my lover.”
And on the next line, Eric joined in: “
Twenty-thousand-dollar bail, for my lover, for my lover...
”