A Place I've Never Been (11 page)

He ate another spring roll, and called the waiter over to ask for chopsticks. There were no tears in his eyes; no change was visible in his face. A deep horror welled in me, stronger than anything I'd ever felt with Craig, so strong I just wanted to laugh, the same way I'd laughed that afternoon in Central Park when he showed me the secret places where men meet other men.

“Are you O.K.?” I asked instead, mustering a sudden, surprising self-control. “Do you need to see a doctor?”

He shrugged. “I'm just mad because he came in my ass even though I asked him not to. Who knows what he might have been carrying? Also, it hurt. But I didn't bleed or anything. I didn't come, of course, and he couldn't have cared less, which really pissed me off. He finished, told me to get dressed fast. I guess he was worried his wife would come home.”

I looked at the table, and Craig served himself more food.

“I think if that happened to me I'd have to kill myself,” I said quietly.

“I don't see why you're making such a big deal out of it,” Craig said. “I mean, it didn't hurt
that
much or anything. Anyway, it was just once.”

I pushed back my chair, stretched out my legs. I had no idea what to say next. “Aren't you going to eat any more?” Craig asked, and I nodded no, I had lost my appetite.

“Well, I'm going to finish these noodles,” he said, and scooped some onto his plate. I watched him eat. I wanted to know if he was really feeling nothing, as he claimed. But his face was impassive, unreadable. Clearly he was not going to let me know.

Afterwards, we walked along the mossy sidewalks of the Seine—“good cruising,” the
Spartacus Guide
had advised us, but “very AYOR”—and Craig told me about Nils, Rutger, Nino, etc. I, in turn, told him about Laurent. He was mostly interested in the matter of his foreskin. When I started discussing our problems—Laurent's depression, my fear that he was pulling away from me—Craig grew distant, hardly seemed to be listening to me. “Uh-huh,” he'd say, in response to every phrase I'd offer, and look away, or over his shoulder, until finally I gave up.

We crossed the Île de la Cité, and Craig asked about going to a bar, but I told him I was too tired, and he admitted he probably was as well. He hadn't gotten a
couchette
on the train up here, and the passport-control people had woken him up six or seven times during the night.

Back at my apartment, we undressed together. (Since Laurent, I had lost my modesty.) I watched as Craig, like any good first son, carefully folded his shirt and balled his socks before climbing into the makeshift bed I had created for him on my floor. These old habits, taught long ago by his mother, were second nature to him, which I found touching. I looked at him in the bed. He had lost weight, and a spray of fine red pimples
covered his back.

Raped, I can hardly say that word. Besides Craig, the only person I know who was raped was a friend in my dorm in college named Sandra. After it happened, I avoided her for weeks. I imagined, stupidly, that simply because I was male, I'd remind her of what she'd gone through, make her break down, melt, weep. But finally she cornered me one afternoon in the library. “Stop avoiding me,” she said. “Just because I was raped doesn't mean I'm made out of glass.” And it was true. It was always Sandra who brought up the fact of the rape—often in front of strangers. “I was raped,” she'd say, as if to get the facts out of the way, as if saying it like that—casually, without preparation—helped to alleviate the terror, gave her strength. Craig had told me with a similar studied casualness. And yet I suspect his motive was not so much to console himself as to do some sort of penance; I suspect he genuinely believed that he had been asking for it, and that he deserved it, deserved whatever he got.

Perhaps I am wrong to use the word “underside” when I describe the world Craig led me through that first summer in New York, perhaps wrong in assuming that for Craig, it has been a matter of surfaces and depths, hells and heavens. For me, yes. But for him, I think, there really wasn't much of a distance to travel between the Westport of his childhood and the dark places he seemed to end up in, guide or no guide, in whatever city he visited. Wallets, traveler's checks, your life: these were just the risks you took. I lived in two worlds; I went in and out of the underside as I pleased, with Craig to protect me. I could not say it was my fault that he was raped. But I realized, that night, that on some level I had been encouraging him to live in the world's danger zones, its ayor zones, for years now, to satisfy my own curiosity, my own lust. And I wondered: How much had I
contributed to Craig's apparent downfall? To what extent had I, in living through him, made him, molded him into some person I secretly, fearfully longed to be?

He lay on my floor, gently snoring. He always slept gently. But I had no desire to embrace him or to try to save him. He seemed, somehow, ruined to me, beyond hope. He had lost all allure. It is cruel to record now, but the truth was, I hoped he'd be gone by morning.

The next afternoon, we had lunch with Laurent. Because Craig spoke no French and Laurent spoke no English, there was not much conversation. I translated, remedially, between them. Craig did not seem very impressed by Laurent, which disappointed me, and Laurent did not seem very impressed by Craig, which pleased me.

Afterwards, Laurent and I drove Craig to the Gare du Nord, where he was catching a train to Munich. He had relatives there who he hoped would give him money to spend at least a few weeks in Germany. For a couple of minutes, through me, he and Laurent discussed whether or not he should go to see Dachau. Laurent had found it very moving, he said. But Craig's only response was, “Uh-huh.”

Then we were saying goodbye, and then he was gone, lost in the depths of the
gare
.

On the way back to my apartment I told Laurent about Craig's rape. His eyes bulged in surprise. “
Ton ami
,” he said, when I had finished the story, “
sa vie est tragique
.” I was glad, somehow, that the rape meant something to Laurent, and for a moment, in spite of all our problems, I wanted to embrace him, to celebrate the fact of all we had escaped, all we hadn't suffered. But my French wasn't good enough to convey what I wanted to convey. And Laurent was depressed.

He dropped me off at my apartment, continued on to work. I couldn't bear the thought of sitting alone indoors, so I took a walk over to the Rue St. Denis and Les Halles. The shops had just reopened for the afternoon, and the streets were full of people—giggly Americans and Germans, trios of teenaged boys.

I sat down in a café and tried to stare at the men in the streets. I wondered what it must have been like, that “
Hola
,” whispered on a busy Madrid sidewalk, that face turning toward him. Was the face clear, vivid in its intent? I think not. I think it was probably as vague and convex as the face of the Genie of the Crystal in Gatlinburg. Then, too, it was the surprise of recognition, the surprise of being noticed; it will do it every time. The Genie of the Crystal, she, too, had wanted Craig, and even then I had urged him on, thinking myself safe in his shadow.

I drank a cup of coffee, then another. I stared unceasingly at men in the street, men in the café, sometimes getting cracked smiles in response. But in truth, as Craig has endlessly told me, I simply do not have the patience for cruising. Finally I paid my bill, and then I heard the church bells of Notre Dame strike seven. Only five days left in July. Soon it would be time to head up to Montmartre, to the drugstore, where Laurent, like it or not, was going to get my company.

Theo had a choice between a drug that would save his sight and a drug that would keep him alive, so he chose not to go blind. He stopped the pills and started the injections—these required the implantation of an unpleasant and painful catheter just above his heart—and within a few days the clouds in his eyes started to clear up; he could see again. He remembered going into New York City to a show with his mother, when he was twelve and didn't want to admit he needed glasses. “Can you read that?” she'd shouted, pointing to a Broadway marquee, and when he'd squinted, making out only one or two letters, she'd taken off her own glasses—harlequins with tiny rhinestones in the corners—and shoved them onto his face. The world came into focus, and he gasped, astonished at the precision around the edges of things, the legibility, the hard, sharp, colorful landscape. Sylvia had to squint through
Fiddler on the Roof
that day, but for Theo, his face masked by his mother's huge glasses, everything was as bright and vivid as a comic book. Even though people stared at him, and muttered things, Sylvia didn't care; he could
see
.

Because he was dying again, Theo moved back to his mother's house in New Jersey. The DHPG injections she took in stride—she'd seen her own mother through
her
dying, after all. Four times a day, with the equanimity of a nurse, she cleaned out the plastic tube implanted in his chest, inserted a sterilized hypodermic, and slowly dripped the bag of sight-giving liquid into his veins. They endured this procedure silently, Sylvia sitting on the side of the hospital bed she'd rented for the duration of Theo's stay—his life, he sometimes thought—watching reruns of
I Love Lucy
or the news, while he tried not to
think about the hard piece of pipe stuck into him, even though it was a constant reminder of how wide and unswimmable the gulf was becoming between him and the ever-receding shoreline of the well. And Sylvia was intricately cheerful. Each day she urged him to go out with her somewhere—to the library, or the little museum with the dinosaur replicas he'd been fond of as a child—and when his thinness and the cane drew stares, she'd maneuver him around the people who were staring, determined to shield him from whatever they might say or do. It had been the same that afternoon so many years ago, when she'd pushed him through a lobbyful of curious and laughing faces, determined that nothing should interfere with the spectacle of his seeing. What a pair they must have made, a boy in ugly glasses and a mother daring the world to say a word about it!

This warm, breezy afternoon in May they were shopping for revenge. “Your cousin Howard's engagement party is next month,” Sylvia explained in the car. “A very nice girl from Livingston. I met her a few weeks ago, and really, she's a superior person.”

“I'm glad,” Theo said. “Congratulate Howie for me.”

“Do you think you'll be up to going to the party?”

“I'm not sure. Would it be O.K. for me just to give him a gift?”

“You already have. A lovely silver tray, if I say so myself. The thank-you note's in the living room.”

“Mom,” Theo said, “why do you always have to—”

Sylvia honked her horn at a truck making an illegal left turn.

“Better they should get something than no present at all, is what I say,” she said. “But now, the problem is,
I
have to give Howie something, to be from me, and it better be good. It better be very, very good.”

“Why?”

“Don't you remember that cheap little nothing Bibi gave you for your graduation? It was disgusting.”

“I can't remember what she gave me.”

“Of course you can't. It was a tacky pen-and-pencil set. Not even a real leather box. So naturally, it stands to reason that I have to get something truly spectacular for Howard's engagement. Something that will make Bibi blanch. Anyway, I think I've found just the thing, but I need your advice.”

“Advice? Well, when my old roommate Nick got married, I gave him a garlic press. It cost five dollars and reflected exactly how much I felt, at that moment, our friendship was worth.”

Sylvia laughed. “Clever. But my idea is much more brilliant, because it makes it possible for me to get back at Bibi
and
give Howard the nice gift he and his girl deserve.” She smiled, clearly pleased with herself. “Ah, you live and learn.”

“You live,” Theo said.

Sylvia blinked. “Well, look, here we are.” She pulled the car into a handicapped-parking place on Morris Avenue and got out to help Theo, but he was already hoisting himself up out of his seat, using the door handle for leverage. “I can manage myself,” he said with some irritation. Sylvia stepped back.

“Clearly one advantage to all this for you,” Theo said, balancing on his cane, “is that it's suddenly so much easier to get a parking place.”

“Oh Theo, please,” Sylvia said. “Look, here's where we're going.”

She led him into a gift shop filled with porcelain statuettes of Snow White and all
seven of the dwarves, music boxes which, when you opened them, played “The Shadow of Your Smile,” complicated-smelling potpourris in purple wallpapered boxes, and stuffed snakes you were supposed to push up against drafty windows and doors.

“Mrs. Greenman,” said an expansive, gray-haired man in a cream-colored cardigan sweater. “Look who's here, Archie, it's Mrs. Greenman.”

Another man, this one thinner and balding, but dressed in an identical cardigan, peered out from the back of the shop. “Hello there!” he said, smiling. He looked at Theo, and his expression changed.

“Mr. Sherman, Mr. Baker. This is my son, Theo.”

“Hello,” Mr. Sherman and Mr. Baker said. They didn't offer to shake hands.

“Are you here for that item we discussed last week?” Mr. Sherman asked.

“Yes,” Sylvia said. “I want advice from my son here.” She walked over to a large ridged crystal bowl, a very fifties sort of bowl, stalwart and square-jawed. “What do you think? Beautiful, isn't it?”

“Mom, to tell the truth, I think it's kind of ugly.”

“Four hundred and twenty-five dollars,” Sylvia said admiringly. “You have to feel it.”

Then she picked up the big bowl and tossed it to Theo, like a football.