Arkansas Read Online Free PDF Page A

heart.
Oh, Eric!
I wanted to sing.
Last night I was happy. I’d forgotten what it was like to be happy. Because for years, it has just been anxiety and antidotes to anxiety, numbing consolations that look like happiness but exist only to bandage, to assuage; whereas happiness is never merely a bandage; happiness is newborn every time, impulsive and fledgling every time. Happiness, yes! As if a shoot, newly uncurled, were moving in growth toward the light of your pale eyes!
    I got up from where I was sitting. I walked to the nearest pay phone and called him.
    â€œHello?” he said groggily.
    â€œDid I wake you?”
    â€œNo problem.” A loud yawn. “What time is it anyway? Shit, eleven.” A sound of nose-blowing. “So what’s the word, Dave?”
    â€œI’ve decided to do it.”
    â€œGreat.”
    â€œYou need the paper Tuesday, right? Well, what say I come by your place Monday night?”
    â€œNot here. My roommate’s sister’s visiting.”
    â€œOkay. Then how about we meet somewhere else?”
    â€œAs long as it’s off campus.”
    I suggested the Ivy, a gay coffee bar in West Hollywood that Eric had never heard of, and he agreed.
    â€œTill Monday, then.”
    â€œLater.”
    He hung up.
    I went back to my carrel. I gathered up all the 1890s research books I’d kept on hold and dumped them in the return bin. (They fell to the bottom with a gratifying thunk.) Then I went into the literature stacks and pulled out some appealingly threadbare editions of
A Room with a View
and
Daisy Miller,
which I spent the afternoon rereading. Believe me or not as you choose: only four times did I get up: once for a candy bar, once for lunch, twice to go to the bathroom. And what a surprise! These books, which I hadn’t looked at for years, steadied and deepened the happiness Eric had flamed in me. It had been too long, I realized, since I’d read a novel that wasn’t by one of my contemporaries, a novel that smelled old. Now, sitting in that library near a window through which the fall sun occasionally winked, a naive pleasure in reading reawoke in me. I smiled when Miss Bartlett was unequal to the bath. I smiled when the Reverend Beebe threw off his clothes and dived into the sacred lake. And when Randolph Miller said, “You bet,” and the knowing Winterboume “reflected on that depth of Italian subtlety, so strangely opposed to Anglo-Saxon simplicity, which enables people to show a smoother surface in proportion as they’re more acutely displeased.” That was good. That was James at his best.
Oh, literature, literature!
—I was singing again—
it was toward your pantheon that fifteen years ago, for the first time, I inclined my reading eyes: hot the world of lawsuits and paperback floors, the buzz and the boom and the bomb; no, it was this joy I craved, potent as the fruity perfume of a twenty-year-old boys unwashed sheets.
    That afternoon—again, you can believe me or not, as you choose—I read until dinnertime.
    â€œDad, are you using your computer?” I asked when I got home.
    â€œNot tonight.”
    â€œMind if I do?”
    From his crossword puzzle he looked up at me, a bit surprised if truth be told, for it had been many weeks since I’d made such a request.
    â€œHelp yourself,” he said. “There should be paper in the printer.”
    â€œThanks.” And going into his study, I switched on the machine, so that within a few seconds that all too familiar simulacrum of the blank page was confronting me.
    Very swiftly—blankness can be frightening—I typed:
    Â 
“That Spark, That Darkness on the Walk”:
Responses to Italy in
Daisy Miller
and
A Room with a View

by Eric Steinberg
After which I leaned back and looked admiringly at my title.
Good, I thought, now to begin writing. And did.
    Â 
    I dressed up for my meeting with Eric at the Ivy that Monday. First I got a