A Place I've Never Been (16 page)

In skeptical or self-critical moments, Andrew perceived his life as a series of abandonments. This is what he was thinking about as he rode the train from Hoboken out toward Allen's parents' house that afternoon: how he had abandoned his family, fleeing California for the East Coast, willfully severing his ties to his parents; then, one after another, how he had had best friends, and either fought with them or became disgusted with them, or they with him, or else just drifted off without writing or calling until the gap was too big to dare crossing. There were many people he had said he could spend his life with, yet he hadn't spent his life with any of them, he saw now. Nathan and Celia, for
instance, who it had seemed to him in college would be his best friends for all time—when was the last time he'd seen them? Five, six months now? Berkeley had severed Andrew from that ineradicable threesome of his youth, and now that he was in New York again it seemed too much had happened for them to fill each other in on, and in the course of it all happening their perceptions and opinions had changed, they were no longer in perfect sync, they weren't able to understand each other as gloriously as they once had because, of course, their lives had diverged, they did not have endless common experience to chew over, and on which to hone shared attitudes. After those first few disastrous dinners, in which arguments had punctuated the dull yawn of nothing to be said, he had given up calling them, except once he had seen Nathan at the museum, where they stood in front of a Tiepolo and Nathan challenged Andrew to explain why it was any good—a familiar, annoying, Nathan-ish challenge, a good try, but by then it was too late. All of this was guilt-inspiring enough, but what made Andrew feel even guiltier was that Nathan and Celia still saw each other, went to parties together, lived in the clutch of the same old dynamic, and presumably the same glorious synchronicity of opinion. They were going on ten years with each other even without him, and Andrew felt humbled, immature. Why couldn't he keep relationships up that long? As for leaving Allen for Jack—wouldn't it amount to the same thing? In three years, would he leave Jack as well?

Perhaps it was just his nature. After all, he had lived for the entire first twenty-two and most of the next six years of his life virtually alone, surviving by instinct, internal resources. This was not uncommon among gay men he knew; some reach out into the sexual world at the brink of puberty, like those babies who, tossed in a swimming pool,
gracefully stay afloat; but others—himself among them—become so transfixed by the preposterousness of their own bodies, and particularly the idea of their coming together with other bodies, that they end up trapped in a contemplation of sex that, as it grows more tortured and analytic, rules out action altogether. Such men must be coaxed by others into action, like the rusty Tin Man in Oz, but as Andrew knew, willing and desirable coaxers were few and far between. For him sexual awakening had come too late, too long after adolescence, when the habits of the adult body were no longer new but had become settled and hard to break out of. Chronically alone, Andrew had cultivated, in those years, a degree of self-containment which kept him alive, but was nonetheless not self-reliance, for it was based on weakness, and had at its heart the need and longing for another to take him in. He remembered, at sixteen, lying in his room, his hands exploring his own body, settling on his hip, just above the pelvis, and thinking, No other hand has touched me here, not since infancy, not since my mother. Not one hand. And this memory had gone on for six more years. Had that been the ruin of him? he wondered now. Doomed by necessity to become self-contained, was he also doomed never to be able to love someone else, always to retreat from intimacy into the cozy, familiar playroom of his old, lonely self?

Outside the train window, the mysterious transformations of late afternoon were beginning. It was as if the sun were backing off in horror at what it had seen, or given light to. The train Andrew was on had bench seats that reversed direction at a push, and remembering how impressed by that he had been the first time Allen had taken him on this train, he grew nervous: suddenly he remembered Allen, remembered he was on his way to a man who considered his life to be in Andrew's hands. Already he recognized the
litany of town names as the conductor announced them: one after another, and then they were there. By the crossing gate Allen sat in his father's BMW, waiting.

He smiled and waved as he stepped off the train. Allen didn't move. He waved again as he ran toward the car, waved through the window. “Hi,” he said cheerily, getting in and kissing Allen lightly on the mouth. Allen pulled the car out of the parking lot and onto the road.

“What's wrong?” (A foolish question, yet somehow the moment demanded it.)

“This is the very worst for me,” he said. “Your coming back. It's worse than your leaving.”

“Why?”

“Because you always look so happy. Then you fall into a stupor, you fall asleep, or you want to go to the movies and sleep there. Jack gets all the best of you, I get you lying next to me snoring.” He was on the verge, as he had been so many times in these last weeks, of saying inevitable things, and Andrew could sense him biting back, like someone fighting the impulse to vomit. Andrew cleared his throat. A familiar, dull ache somewhere in his bowels was starting up again, as if a well-trusted anesthesia were wearing off. It felt to him these days, being with Allen, as if a two-bladed knife lay gouged deep into both of them, welding them together, and reminded anew of its presence, Andrew turned futilely to the car window, the way you might turn from the obituary page to the comics upon recognizing an unexpected and familiar face among the portraits of the dead. Of course, soon enough, you have to turn back.

Andrew closed his eyes. Allen breathed. “Let's not have a fight,” Andrew said quietly, surprised to be on the verge of tears. But Allen was stony, and said nothing more.

As they pulled into the driveway the garage doors slowly opened, like primeval jaws or welcoming arms; Sophie, Allen's mother, must have heard the car pulling up, and pushed the little button in the kitchen. A chilly dusk light was descending on the driveway, calling up in Andrew some primeval nostalgia for suburban twilight, and all the thousands of days which had come to an end here, children surprised by the swift descent of night, their mothers' voices calling them home, the prickly coolness of their arms as they dropped their balls and ran back into the warm lights of houses. It had been that sort of childhood Allen had lived here, after all, a childhood of street games, Kickball and Capture the Flag, though Allen was always the one the others laughed at, picked last, kicked. A dog barked distantly, and in the bright kitchen window above the garage Andrew saw Sophie rubbing her hands with a white dish towel. She was not smiling, and seemed to be struggling to compose herself into whatever kind of studied normalness the imminent arrival of friends and relatives demanded. Clearly she did not know anyone could see her, for in a moment she turned slightly toward the window, and seeing the car idle in the driveway, its lights still on, started, then smiled and waved.

A festive, potent smell of roasting meats came out the porch door. “Hello, Andrew,” Sophie said as they walked into the kitchen, her voice somehow hearty yet tentative, and she kissed him jauntily on the cheek, bringing close for one unbearable second a smell of face powder, perfume, and chicken stock he almost could not resist falling into. For Jack's sake he held his own. Of all the things he feared losing along with Allen, this family was the one he thought about most. How he longed to steep forever in this brisket smell, this warmth of carpeting and mahogany and voices chattering in the hall! But Allen, glumly, said, “Let's go upstairs,” and gestured to the room they always shared, his
room. Even that a miracle, Andrew reflected, as they trundled up the stairs: that first time Andrew had visited and was worrying where he'd sleep, Sophie had declared, “I never ask what goes on upstairs. Everyone sleeps where they want; as far as I'm concerned, it's a mystery.” It seemed a different moral code applied where her homosexual son was concerned than the one that had been used routinely with Allen's brothers and sister; in their cases, the sleeping arrangements for visiting boyfriends or girlfriends had to be carefully orchestrated, the girls doubling up with Allen's sister, the boys with Allen himself—a situation Allen had always found both sexy and intolerable, he had told Andrew, the beautiful college boys lying next to him in his double bed for the requisite hour or so, then sneaking off to have sex with his sister, Barrie. Well, all that was long past—Barrie was now married and had two children of her own—and what both Allen and Andrew felt grateful for here was family: it was a rare thing for a gay man to have it, much less to be able to share it with his lover. Their parents had not yet met each other, but a visit was planned for May, and remembering this, Andrew gasped slightly as the prospect arose before him—yet another lazily arranged inevitability to be dealt with, and with it the little residual parcel of guilt and nostalgia and dread, packed up like the giblets of a supermarket chicken. His half of the knife twisted a little, causing Allen's to respond in kind, and Allen looked at Andrew suspiciously. “What is it?” he asked. Andrew shook his head. “Nothing, really.” He didn't want to talk about it. Allen shrugged regretfully; clearly he sensed that whatever was on Andrew's mind was bad enough not to be messed with.

“Well,” Allen said, as they walked into his room, “here we are,” and threw himself onto the bed. Andrew followed more cautiously. The room had changed hands and
functions many times over the years—first it had been Allen's sister's room, then his brother's, then his, then a guest room, then a computer room, then a room for visiting grandchildren. It had a peculiar, muddled feel to it, the accretions of each half-vain effort at redecoration only partially covering over the leavings of the last occupant. There was archaeology, a sense of layers upon layers. On the walnut dresser, which had belonged to Allen's grandmother, a baseball trophy shared space with a Strawberry Shortcake doll whose hair had been cut off, a two-headed troll, and a box of floppy disks. Odd-sized clothes suggesting the worst of several generations of children's fashions filled the drawers and the closets, and the walls were covered with portraits of distant aunts, framed awards Allen had won in high school and college, pictures of Barrie with her horse. The bed, retired here from the master bedroom downstairs, had been Sophie's and her husband Lou's for twenty years. The springs were shot; Allen lay in it more than on it, and after a few seconds of observation Andrew joined him. Immediately their hands found each other, they were embracing, kissing, Andrew was crying. “I love you,” he said quietly.

“Then come back to me,” Allen said.

“It's not that simple.”

“Why?”

Andrew pulled away. “You know all the reasons.”

“Tell me.”

The door opened with a tentative squeak. Some old instinctual fear made both of them jump to opposite sides of the bed. Melissa, Allen's five-year-old niece, stood in the doorway, her hand in her mouth, her knees twisted one around the other. She was
wearing a plaid party dress, white tights, and black patent-leather Mary Janes.

“Hello,” she said quietly.

“Melly! Hello, honey!” Allen said, bounding up from the bed and taking her in his arms. “What a pretty girl you are! Are you all dressed up for Rosh Hashanah?” He kissed her, and she nodded, opening her tiny mouth into a wide smile clearly not offered easily, a smile which seemed somehow precious, it was so carefully given. “Look at my earrings,” she said. “They're hearts.”

“They're beautiful,” Allen said. “Remember who bought them for you?”

“Uncle Andrew,” Melissa said, and looked at him, and Andrew remembered the earrings he had given her just six months before, for her birthday, as if she were his own niece.

“Look who's here, honey,” he said, putting Melissa down. “Uncle Andrew's here now!”

“I know,” Melissa said. “Grandma told me.”

“Hi, Melissa,” Andrew said, sitting up on the bed. “I'm so happy to see you! What a big girl you are! Come give me a hug!”

Immediately she landed on him, her arms circling as much of him as they could, her smiling mouth open over his face. This surprised Andrew; on previous visits Melissa had viewed him with a combination of disdain and the sort of amusement one feels at watching a trained animal perform; only the last time he'd been to the house, in August, for Sophie's birthday, had she shown him anything like affection. And it was true that she'd asked to speak to him on the phone every time she was visiting and Allen called. Still, nothing prepared Andrew for what he saw in her eyes just now, as she gazed down
at him with a loyalty so pure it was impossible to misinterpret.

“I love you,” she said, and instantly he knew it was true, and possibly true for the first time in her life.

“I love you too, honey,” he said. “I love you very much.”

She sighed, and her head sank into his chest, and she breathed softly, protected. What was love for a child, after all, if not protection? A quiet descended on the room as Andrew lay there, the little girl heavy in his arms, while Allen stood above them in the shrinking light, watching, it seemed, for any inkling of change in Andrew's face. Downstairs were dinner smells and dinner sounds, and Sophie's voice beckoning them to come, but somehow none of them could bring themselves to break the eggshell membrane that had formed over the moment. Then Melissa pulled herself up, and Andrew realized his leg was asleep, and Allen, shaken by whatever he had or hadn't seen, switched on the light. The new, artificial brightness was surprisingly unbearable to Andrew; he had to squint against it.

“We really ought to be going down now,” Allen said, holding his hand out to Andrew, who took it gratefully, surprised only by the force with which Allen hoisted him from the bed.