Arkansas by David Leavitt

Author:David Leavitt [Leavitt, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Gay
ISBN: 9780395901281
Publisher: Abacus
Published: 1997-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Later, of course, I would grow more articulate; I would have ideas of my own. That morning, however, as Nathan finished telling me his story, I found myself literally at a loss for words. What could I say to him, after all, when my own experience of the “supernatural” was limited to a single encounter with an apparent poltergeist that had once broken some of my mother’s best china? In that case, the poltergeist had turned out to be my brother Eddie, who had drug problems; nonetheless I hesitated to offer the example to Nathan, for fear that it would seem I was trying to rationalize away what had happened to him. Which I didn’t want to do. On the contrary, I felt that I owed it to him to accept his account at face value: in all its singularity and antique terror.

Nathan, on the other hand, appeared not to believe himself, or at least to be disappointed by my credulity.

“Well, who’s to say I wasn’t hallucinating?” he asked.

“Do you think you were hallucinating?”

He considered for a moment. “No. Then again if I really am psychotic, I’m hardly in a position to assess the parameters of my own psychosis, right?”

“Maybe. Or maybe something really did happen.”

“Is that supposed to comfort me?”

“Doesn’t it?”

“No! Decidedly not!”

“Why?”

“Because if it wasn’t real, I’m just another human being going mad. Whereas if it was real, then the world’s going mad. And something else may happen.”

“Yes, I see your point.” We were quiet for a moment. “Anyway,” he concluded, “at least now you know. So if I disappear tomorrow, don’t assume I’ve gone somewhere. Talk to trees.”

Since there didn’t seem much I could say to that, we went into the kitchen and drank some blood orange juice from a carton in the refrigerator. Celia came home. “Hi, guys,” she said, her arms full of onions. “Gosh, have you two been sitting here reminiscing this whole time?”

“Sort of.” Rather awkwardly, we smiled. Meanwhile, just outside the door, Mauro waited. I thought his eyes met Nathan’s uneasily before he crossed the threshold and, reaching out his hand, introduced himself.

Now: a word about Mauro. There was no denying that he was good-looking. Not that I would have likened Nathan’s rescuer, as he had, to a Bronzino knight; his self-presentation was entirely too modern for that. Still, the fact cannot be ignored that in certain Italian faces that aristocratic sullenness that animates Renaissance portraiture does linger. And in Mauro—how else to put it?—blood told. Yes, blood told, and it was in his ankles, brown and elegant in Top-Siders, that curiously enough, it told the most.

After we’d finished lunch, the four of us walked into Montesepolcro to have a coffee at the Bar Garibaldi. Tourism is correct in noting that in every little town in Tuscany there is a Bar Garibaldi, or a Bar Centrale, or a Bar Italia—to which observation I shall add only that in this particular Bar Garibaldi, a red-haired boy was arranging coconut wedges on a three-tiered

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