Arkansas by David Leavitt Page A

brushed her hands on her dress. “The thing about men like you—Seth’s the same way—you’re terrified of mattering to people. And so when you think you’ve hurt someone, you bolt and run. You put the letters away unopened. You ignore the messages on the answering machine. But the fact is, I didn’t disappear when you left the room, no matter how much you might have liked me to. I stayed, and I hurt.”
    â€œAs I recall,” Nathan said, “it was you who never answered my messages.”
    â€œCall it a preemptive strike.”
    Silence followed this extraordinary burst of antipathy—silence, and poetically (perhaps too poetically), a loud moo from one of the cows.
    â€œStill, it
was
an abandonment,” Nathan observed after a while, his soft voice coming too late.
    â€œAn abandonment,” she answered, “for which you’re punishing me now?”
    He was silent. Meanwhile a breeze came up. The sun was falling like a gold coin into a child’s bank.
    â€œWe’d better get back,” Celia said, and turning, led us to the path, and the
podere.
    Â 
    Dinner that night was a rather sullen, if delicious, affair, at the end of which we all went to bed early. Both Nathan and I were, as I have noted, jet-lagged. As for Celia—I remember this about her—ill humor tended to put her to sleep.
    Before I continue, some information about the arrangement of the rooms in the farmhouse seems to me in order. On the second floor, Celia kept for herself a lavish suite consisting of a salon, a bedroom, a kitchenette, and an enormous bath. She escaped into this suite, she explained to me later, when she needed to get away from her students, or when Seth was in residence (which was rarely). Down the hall from the suite, in turn, came four largish bedrooms, each named for a different color. One of these (red, next to Celia) I occupied; the other three were uninhabitable at the moment, as their bathrooms were being renovated. Finally, on the lower level, there were three more bedrooms—two for guests and one for Mauro, which was nominal as he spent most nights with his girlfriend in Montesepolcro. Nathan’s bedroom, the blue room, which was located partly beneath mine and partly beneath Celia’s, shared a bathroom with Mauro’s, the other downstairs room being, like the ones upstairs, in the process of refurbishment.
    Of course, that first night, I knew none of this. I learned it all much later, when the sleeping arrangements started to have consequences. That first night, instead, I went to bed innocent and a little cross, only to find that in spite of being dog-tired I couldn’t sleep. So I read for a while, and did the Sunday
Times
crossword puzzle, and the acrostic. Then finally—it was now past midnight—worry about how tired I’d be in the morning impelled me out of bed entirely, and needing to do
something,
I went into the bathroom and moisturized my face with some very nice Clarins cream I’d bought at the duty-free at Kennedy. The rituals of the boudoir, like those of the tearoom, have always been a source of consolation to me, a reminder that beneath the flux and bumptiousness of daily life a steadier stream does run, albeit one the music of which most men don’t have the patience to listen for.
    In any event, I was three-quarters of the way through this ritual when I heard, or thought I heard, the sound of gravel scraping.
    I looked out the little bathroom window. A shadowy figure appeared to be pushing Celia’s car down the road toward Montesepolcro: yes, pushing it, with one hand on the steering wheel and the other on the door. And who was this figure? I wondered. Was it Celia? I couldn’t quite tell, though I stuck my head as far out the window as I could manage.
    Finally the car went around a bend and disappeared. From a distance I heard the engine cough into life.
    Well, that’s odd! I thought, closing the