A Place I've Never Been (17 page)

Chairs and plastic glasses and Hugga Bunch plates had to be rearranged so Melissa could sit next to Andrew at dinner. This position, as it turned out, was not without its disadvantages; he was consistently occupied with cutting up carrots and meat. The conversation was familiar and soothing; someone had lost a lot of money in the stock market, someone else was building a garish house. Allen's sister sang the praises of a
new health club, and Allen's father defended a cousin's decision to open a crematorium for pets. All through dinner Melissa stared up at Andrew, her face lit from within with love, and Allen stared across at Andrew, his face twisted and furrowed with love, and somewhere miles away, presumably, Jack sat at his drafting table, breaking into a smile for the sake of love. So much love! It had to be a joke, a fraud! Someone—his mother—must have been paying them! Wait a minute, he wanted to say to all three of them, this is me, Andrew, this is me who has never been loved, who has always been too nervous and panicked and eager for love for anyone to want actually to love him! You are making a mistake! You are mixing me up with someone else! And if they did love him—well, wouldn't they all wake up soon, and recognize that they were under an enchantment? Knowledge kills infatuation, he knew, the same way the sudden, perplexing recognition that you are dreaming can wake you from a dream. He almost wanted that to happen. But sadly—or happily, or perhaps just frustratingly—there appeared to be no enchantment here, no bribery. These three loves were real and entrenched. His disappearance from any one of them was liable to cause pain.

Even with Melissa! Just an hour later—screaming as her mother carried her to the bathtub, screaming as her mother put her in her bed—no one could ignore who she was calling for, though the various aunts and cousins were clearly surprised. Finally Barrie emerged from the room Melissa shared with her on visits, shaking her head and lighting a cigarette. “She says she won't go to sleep unless you tuck her in,” Barrie told Andrew. “So would you mind? I'm sorry, but I've had a long day, I can't hack this crying shit anymore.”

“You don't have to, Andrew,” Sophie said. “She has to learn to go to sleep.”

“But I don't mind,” Andrew said. “Really, I don't.”

“Well, thanks then.”

Sophie led him into the darkened room where Melissa lay, rumpled-looking, in Cabbage Patch pajamas and sheets, her face puffy and her eyes red from crying, then backed out on tiptoe, closing the door three quarters. Immediately upon seeing him Melissa offered another of her rare and costly smiles.

“Hi,” Andrew said.

“Hi.”

“Are you all right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You want me to sing you a bedtime song?”

“Uh-huh.”

“O.K.” He brushed her hair away from her forehead, and began singing a version of a song his own father had sung to him:

Oh go to sleep my Melly-o

And you will grow and grow and grow

And grow and grow right up to be

A great big ugly man like me
…

Melissa laughed. “But I'm a girl,” she said.

“I told you, honey, this is a song my daddy sang to me.”

“Go on.”

And you will go to Timbuktu

And you'll see elephants in the zoo
.

And you will go to outer space

And you will go to many a place
.

Oh think of all the things you'll see

When you grow to adultery
.

This last line, of course, caught him. It had always been a family joke, a mock pun. Had his father known something he hadn't?

“That's a funny song,” said Melissa, who was, of course, too young to know what adultery meant anyway.

“I'm glad you liked it, but since I've sung it now, you have to go to sleep. Deal?”

She smiled again. Her hand, stretched out to her side, rested lightly now at that very point on his hip he had once imagined no one would ever touch. Now her tiny handprints joined the larger ones which seemed to him tonight to be permanently stamped there, like tattoos.

Though he'd left the light on, Allen was already tightly encased between the sheets by the time Andrew came to bed. He lay facing rigidly outward, and Andrew, climbing in next to him, observed the spray of nervous pimples fanning out over his shoulders. He brushed his fingers over the bumpy, reddened terrain, and Allen jumped spasmodically. Andrew took his hand away.

“Don't,” Allen said.

“All right, I won't, I'm sorry.”

“No, no. Don't
stop
, don't stop touching me. Please, I need you to touch me. You
never touch me anymore.”

Andrew put his hand back. “Don't,” he said. “Stop. Don't. Stop. Don't stop, don't stop, don't stop.”

“Thank you,” Allen said. “Thank you.”

“Switch off the light.”

“You don't know,” Allen said, “how much I've missed your hands.”

“Allen, I've been touching you plenty,” Andrew said.

“No, you haven't. You really haven't.”

“This really is a stupid topic for an argument,” Andrew said, not wanting to let on the sensation he was just now feeling, of a spear run through him, the whole length of his body. He reached over Allen's head and switched off the light. “Just relax,” he said, and settled himself into a more comfortable position against the pillow. “I won't stop touching you.”

“Thank you,” Allen whispered.

In the dark things broke apart, becoming more bearable. His hand traveled the mysterious widths of Allen's back, and as it did so its movements slowly began to seem as if they were being controlled by some force outside Andrew's body, like the pointer on a ouija board. He had the curious sensation of his hand detaching from his arm, first the whole hand, at the wrist, and then the fingers, which, as they started to run up and down Allen's back in a scratch, sparked a small moan; this too seemed disembodied, as if it were being issued not from Allen's mouth but from some impossible corner or depth of the room's darkened atmosphere. Allen's back relaxed somewhat, his breathing slowed, and Andrew, with his index finger, scratched out the initials “J.S.” My God, what was he doing? For a moment he lifted his hand, then thrust it back, ordering his fingers into a
frenzy of randomness, like someone covering up an incriminating word with a mass of scribbling. But Allen didn't seem to notice, and breathed even more slowly. Andrew held his breath. What was possessing him he couldn't name, but cautiously he wrote “Jack” on Allen's back, elongating the letters for the sake of disguise, and Allen sighed and shifted. “Jack Selden,” Andrew wrote next. “I love Jack Selden.” His heart was racing. What if those messages, like invisible ink, suddenly erupted in full daylight for Allen to read? Well, of course that wouldn't happen, and closing his eyes, Andrew gave himself up to this wild and villainous writing, the messages becoming longer and more incriminating even as Allen moved closer to sleep, letting out, in his stupor, only occasional noises of pleasure and gratitude.

Here is Celia, not so many years later, sitting on a bench in a park in a village in Chianti, staring at her hands. Beyond the trio of little girls playing jacks, beyond the edge of the park and the crumbling cobbled houses, beyond the
fattorie
and the villas and the half-collapsed town wall, a glorious vista of hills rises, hills Celia can still not quite believe she is sitting in the midst of, hills which belong in the backgrounds of fifteenth-century paintings—dry yet supple, their greenness occasionally broken by rock, just beginning to burn under the late-spring sun. Christ might be kneeling for baptism in those hills, his waist wrapped in a sodden cloth; or the Virgin, in an open stone house, might be poised over her spinning wheel, awaiting the angel's visitation.

Celia is looking at her hands. They are city hands, more used to typing or sealing envelopes than they are to pulling tiny clams from their shells, or picking sprigs of wild thyme from fields at the sides of roads, or raking the uneven landscape of Seth's chest—Seth, the man who has brought her here, the man who, she is tempted to say (though she resists saying it), has saved her from all that. What intrigues her is that her hands
look
the same, the fingers a little puffy, the meat of the palms pale and blotched with red. Only when her hands change, she believes, will she have changed, only then will this new life become something she can believe is going to last. But so far the signs are minimal. Her nails are no longer chewed to the quick; the hairs on her wrists are bleaching from the sun. And her lifeline—so mysterious, Seth had said the first night they spent together, as
he opened her palm and traced it—it's broken in the middle. Two distinct halves, and in the center a void, a gap. “They'll have grown together before I'm through with you,” he concluded, wrapping her hand back up into a fist, and she'd flinched at the notion that he'd
ever
be through with her, even though she knew it was just a figure of speech. Now she looks carefully and wonders if the two halves really have grown a fraction of an inch closer to one another, or if she's just imagining it.

Across the street from the park sits the rented Fiat Panda that has brought them here; next to it, Seth waits for a farmer in a wobbling
Ape
to pass by on the road. Seth's arms are full of sandwiches and pastries he's bought at a little bar across the street, but before he crosses, he stops to chat with the driver of the
Ape
, a three-wheeled vehicle which is halfway between a truck and a motorcycle. Seth is a translator and interpreter, and since they're on their way to an important literary conference—his first Italian interpreting job in two years—he's talking to everyone he can, determined to oil the rusty wheels of what is, unbelievably, his fifth language.

Celia watches him nod as the farmer, with great, sweeping gesticulations, tells a story. She is thinking that even though it has been only three weeks since they arrived in Italy, the job she quit in New York, the apartment she sublet, seem as mysterious to her now as winter coats happened upon when cleaning a closet in August. And just as for years after graduating from college she dreamed that she'd missed an exam and had to go back to retake it, each night this week the plane that carried her to Rome has pulled up outside of whatever
pensione
they were sleeping in, and the stewardess has come through the door to tell her it's time to go back—back to her black Formica desk on 55th Street, her bumpy-floored apartment on 107th Street, the overstuffed trio of rooms on Kissena
Boulevard in Queens where she was raised and where her mother still lives. Sometimes the New York dreams get mixed up with the college dreams—she sits down at the desk on 55th Street and instead of being handed a manuscript by her boss, Ruth Feldschmidt, she's handed a list of exam questions by her Italian Renaissance art professor, Lucy Cumberland, and then the paintings start flashing on the screen, and she has to identify them: artist, title, date, museum. It's a relief to wake up, after that, and see Seth's freckled back, and remember that yesterday she saw those paintings not flashed on a screen, but hanging in the museums the names of which Lucy Cumberland had made her memorize in the first place.

For Celia, Italy has always been a place recognized in the background of paintings. Behind the head of La Gioconda, or Isabella Sforza, or her husband, the Duca di Montefeltro, was a landscape of hills somersaulting down to dry, clay-colored valleys; overviews of cities burnished by the sun; and always, those strange, wonderful Italian trees: mysterious, noble cypresses lined along empty avenues like sentries; umbrella pines, with their green clouds of leaf; olives aligned in perfect orchard geometry. On her first trip to Florence, a college girl trying to make her way on almost no money, she stood in the big stone halls of the Uffizi, staring at those portraits, and hearing even there the din of the hot, crowded piazzas below. How she longed to carry herself through the frame, to enter, like the children in
The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader,”
the world of the picture, the better world behind the glass. But of course she could not.

She looks. Below the park where she sits a slope of yellowing grass rolls toward a tiny village where a waterwheel is turning. And of course, there are those mysterious trees, those very un-American trees. A flash, suddenly, of her childhood—the straight, heat-
baked blocks of Kissena Boulevard in Queens, oak and elm and ash. Not a pleasant flash—she pushes it aside. And straining to absorb every detail of the view, swears she can see, when she looks toward Florence, the gargantuan, braided back of a Tuscan lady's head as she poses for her portrait, glorying in the countryside of her domain.

“Celia?” Seth says, and she turns. He has finished his conversation with the man in the
Ape
and is sitting down next to her. “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” she says. “Fine.”

“Good. I had a funny conversation with that man. He was telling me a story about a knight who fought a battle here in the fourteenth century. And he was speaking real Tuscan dialect, the old kind that no one speaks anymore. It was fascinating.” He unwraps sandwiches. “
Bel Paese, prosciutto, salsiccia, tonno
—take your pick.” She does so silently, reverently. It is eleven o'clock in the morning, and they are on their way to lunch at the villa of some friends of Seth's from when he lived in Rome, ten years earlier.

“But you can't drive on an empty stomach,” Seth says. “And anyway, what's the point of Italy if you don't eat in every town you stop in? Who knows what you might miss?”

It's been only a few months since Celia found Seth, since he swept her off her feet and out of her life. Now, when people ask how they met, they say it was at a party—a lie mutually agreed upon, since both are too embarrassed to admit the truth: that they were introduced into each other's lives through one of those phone lines that randomly connect women and men, men and men—in this case, a number, 970-RMNC, geared especially toward those seeking “romance.” Celia is convinced that her description of herself over the phone that evening—not false, exactly, but elusive, embellished—implanted in Seth's
mind an image of an object of desire which somehow, miraculously, the truth of her has failed to obliterate. When he looks at her, the urgency in his eyes can only mean that he still sees the fantasy she presented to him on the telephone, not who she really is. She wonders how long this can last.