Arkansas by David Leavitt Read Free Book Online

reproduction of the poster itself when I’d gone to Florence a year earlier with Andy: heading into the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi one morning to look at Benozzo Gozzoli’s frescoes of the
Procession of the Magi,
we’d stumbled on a photo exhibit commemorating the bombings that had nearly destroyed the city’s medieval center. And there, amid the rubble-strewn piazzas and the women cheering the American liberators and the children in bread lines, the poster had hung, boldly American in its idioms, like the Wanted posters I used to study anxiously while my mother waited in line at the post office. Around it, in photographs, young black enlisted men—one of whom had been suspected of the theft—built Bailey bridges. If they felt the sting of injustice that must have been their daily lot in the military, their faces didn’t show it. Instead, expressionless as ants, they heaved steel beams, and gradually restitched the severed city.
    As I recall, Andy didn’t take much notice of the soldiers. Good homosexual that he is, he was in a hurry to get over to the Accademia and see the David. And I should have been more interested in the David too; after all, he is my favorite sculpture, as well as the erotic ideal in pursuit of which Henry Somerset and his brethren had poured into Italy all those decades ago. And yet it was those soldiers—not the David —whose faces bloomed in my mind as we trudged up Via Ricasoli; to which I should add that I was in the middle of being sued then; in Italy, as it were, in flight from trouble; invention was almost painful to me. So why, at that particular moment, should a novel have started telling itself in my head? A novel I knew I could never write (and all the better)? A novel in which a young black soldier comes to Florence; from a distance, as he hammers planks, an Italian boy watches him, every morning, every afternoon...
    The thing I need to emphasize is this: I never wanted to write that novel. I wanted just to muse on it as a possibility, listen to the story unfurling; drift with it, the way as a boy I used to keep up a running soap opera in my head. Every day I’d walk in circles around the pool outside our house in Stanford, bouncing a red rubber ball and spinning out in my mind elaborate and unending variations: pure plot. Sometimes I’d look up and see my mother watching me from the kitchen window. And when my ball got a hole in it, my father was always ready with his little packet of patches to seal it up.
    A curious thing about my father: when, many years later, he moved down south, he gave away without compunction most of the sentimental objects of my childhood. Stuffed animals, Corgi cars, books. Yet he kept that ball. He still talks about it. “David’s ball,” he says, which I must have bounced a thousand miles in circles around that pool, in those days when invention was the simplest sort of pleasure or folly.
    I think that was what I was trying to recapture: all the gratitude of authorship, with none of the responsibility implicit in signing one’s name.
    And how hard I worked! Mornings in the library, afternoons at my father’s computer. For Eric’s history project, I was able to cannibalize a good deal of the research I’d already done for the Somerset novel—that novel which, like the Bailey bridge novel, I was now certain
I
would never write. An essay I’d done in college on
Between the Acts
formed the basis for “Mirror Imagery in Virginia Woolf.” And Hunter: well, thanks to that unwritten, even unwhispered bit of story, he ended up getting the best paper of all three.
    And why was that? This is the thing of which, I suspect, I’m going to have the hardest time convincing you. After all, a bond of genuine affection united Eric and me: it made sense that I should want to do well by him. Toward Hunter, my feelings could best be described as an admixture of contempt and lust. Nor did he