Free Arkansas by David Leavitt Page B

high—‘“Miss Yearwood, Miss Yearwood, how can you think I’d
do
something like that!’ And cried or something. Whereas he just gave in. You can’t break down like that! The way I see it, they’re testing you twenty-four hours a day. They want to see if you can sweat it out. If Ben couldn’t take the pressure, it’s not your problem. Still, I’d say it’s probably better if you kept a low profile around campus for a while.” He patted my hand. “Me, I’m lucky. I’ve finished my humanities requirements. And if I win a prize for that paper, it’ll go a long way toward Stanford Biz School, provided I get a high enough score on my GMATs. Did I tell you I have GMATs coming up?”
    He hadn’t—a lapse he now corrected in lavish detail—after which we said goodbye in the parking lot, Eric cheerful as he drove off into his happy future, me wretched as I contemplated the ruin of Ben’s academic career, a ruin for which, no matter what Eric might say to assuage my guilt, I understood myself to be at least in part responsible. For suddenly it didn’t matter that I hadn’t gotten caught; it didn’t matter that no one knew what I had done except the boys themselves, none of whom would ever squeal on me. Because I had written my paper, and not Ben’s, he had suffered. Blame could not be averted. The best I could do was try to bear it with valor.
    I got into my father’s car. For some reason I was remembering a moment years before, in elementary school, when a girl called Michele Fox had put before me an ethical dilemma familiar to most American schoolchildren at that time: if a museum were burning down, she’d said, and you could save either the old lady or the priceless art treasure, which would you choose? Well, I’d answered, it depends. Who is the old lady? What is the art treasure? To which she responded—wisely, I’m sure—“You’re missing the point, David Leavitt.” No doubt I was missing the point—her point—since Michele had few doubts in life. (She grew up to be a 911 operator.) As for me, I tortured that little conundrum for years, substituting for the generic old lady first my aunt Ida, then Eudora Welty, for the priceless treasure first the Mona Lisa, then Picasso’s
Guernica.
Each time my answer was different. Sometimes I opted for life, sometimes for art. And how surprising! From this capriciousness a philosophy formed itself in me, according to which only particularities—not generalities—counted. For principles are rarely human things, and when museums burn—when any buildings burn—the truth is, most people save themselves.
    What I’m trying to say here is, I made no effort to get in touch with, or help, Ben. Instead, that afternoon, I booked a flight to New York, where by the end of the week I was once again installed in that real life from which the episode of the term papers now turns out to have been merely a long and peculiar divagation.

III.
    I RAN INTO B EN ABOUT A YEAR LATER . This was in the Uffizi Gallery, in Florence, where I’d gone to research (I am actually now writing it) my Bailey bridge novel. I was looking at Bronzino’s portrait of Eleonora di Toledo, and Ben was looking at Bronzino’s portrait of the baby Giovanni, fatcheeked and clutching his little sparrow, and then, quite suddenly, we were looking at each other.
    â€œBen?” I said, not sure at first that it was he.
    â€œMr. Leavitt!” To my relief, he smiled.
    We walked upstairs, where in the little coffee bar on the roof, I bought him a cappuccino. Ben looked better than he had when we’d first known each other. For one thing, his hair was both longer and messier, which suited him; also, he’d foregone his old Mormon uniform in favor of denim, down, hiking boots: ordinary clothes, boy clothes, in which his body, somehow ampler-seeming, rested with