Arkansas by David Leavitt

am.” He smiled. “Okay, I’ll tell you. Healthwise, fine, so far as I know. Otherwise, how I am is pretty unreal.”
    â€œUnreal?”
    â€œLike when you’re a little kid, and you wonder if everything in a room disappears the instant you leave it. Did you ever wonder that?”
    â€œNo,” Celia said.
    â€œOh, I did. All the time. In those days I doubted every reality except my own. In fact it’s only lately, since Martin died, that I’ve felt the reverse.”
    We gazed at him in confusion.
    â€œI mean, that everything’s real
except
me.”
    â€œHow so?” I asked.
    â€œWell, to give you an example, a couple of weeks ago, in New York, I was leaving this bar. It was in a really seedy part of the East Village. And I noticed a woman walk by on the street, a young woman. Pretty. She was wearing a fuzzy pink bathrobe tied around her waist with one of those pink bathrobe belts, and fuzzy pink slippers, just like my mother used to have, and she was just walking, back and forth, back and forth, along this terrible street with piss on the walls and crack vials. And suddenly it occurred to me that maybe she wasn’t a crack addict or street person, but someone having a dream. You know, one of those nightmares where you find yourself somewhere unexpected—school, a strange city—in your bathrobe and pajamas. And I became so convinced this woman was someone having a dream that I began to wonder whether I was a person at all, or just a figure in this woman’s dream who’d disappear when she woke up. I thought it must be terrible for her, wondering where she was, why she wasn’t in her bed, and I wanted to run up to her and shake her awake, so that the dream would end. But then I thought, if I do that, I might disappear too, in a cloud of smoke, as it were. And I got really scared. Terrified.” He straightened his back.
    â€œIf you go, the cow stops," Celia said.
    We looked at her blankly.
    â€œThe Longest Journey.
Remember? All those Cambridge boys arguing about the reality of the cow. And I thought Forster was saying the cow only existed when we were there to perceive it, but then the professor—Crane, wasn’t it?—reminded us that in England, ‘stop’ means ‘to stay.’ And you said
    â€”I remember this distinctly—you said, maybe an English cow
stays
but an American cow
ceases.”
    â€œHmm,” Nathan said.
    â€œI thought you were very clever,” said Celia. “But that’s beside the point.”
    â€œSo what is the point?”
    â€œThe point is, in Montesepolcro the cow stays. The cow is real.”
    â€œCelia, you ran out on me. In my hour of need, when Martin had just tested positive. Why?”
    â€œI needed to be the center of someone’s life.”
    â€œYou were the center of my life.”
    â€œNoyow were the center of
my
life. It’s not the same thing.”
    â€œStill,” Nathan said, looking away, “I was your best friend.”
    â€œAnd I was in love with you. Yes. I can say it now. You didn’t want it to be true, you kept trying to pretend it wasn’t true, but it was. Our relationship existed in a different reality from the one you tried to put it in. The cow was real. I was the cow.”
    â€œYou were not a cow.”
    â€œOh, men used to call me a cow all the time. “You fat cow,’ they’d say. And you never get used to it. Being pretty seemed pointless, since you were indifferent to women, and I was indifferent to everyone but you, and all you did was stand me up every time some juicy little boy showed up on the horizon.”
    M-bM-^@M-^\I never stood you up!”
    â€œSelective memory!” Celia repeated. “You stood me up all the time. You just thought I didn’t care. But, Nathan, what did you think I did all those nights? Just sit at home watching David Letterman? No! I sat at home and seethed.” She