A Place I've Never Been (21 page)

He has led Celia over to the working space of his studio. Here the animals are smaller—the size of hands and fingers. She notices a brass elephant, like many of the other animals, so spindly she's afraid it will break in half when she picks it up. But it doesn't.

“My mother collects elephants,” she says.

“Then why don't you give her this one?”

“What?” Celia puts the elephant down. “No, no, I didn't mean that, really. Oh, you probably think I mentioned my mother just because I hoped you'd offer, when really—”

“Just give it to her,” Alex says, pressing the elephant into her palm. “After all, there's nothing else for me to do with them. If you don't take it, it'll just sit here getting dusty.”

Celia is flustered from too much speech. “Well, then, all right. Thank you.” She looks again at the tiny elephant.

“We were beastly this afternoon,” Alex is saying. “I hope you'll forgive us. My family has a tendency to behave rather animalistically, to just express ourselves all over the place, and sometimes that can be a bit of a strain for visitors. Signora Dorati, for instance. Somehow I don't suspect we're going to be receiving an invitation to lunch at
her
villa anytime soon.” He laughs halfheartedly. “Supposed to be quite a splendid villa, too. I would've liked to have seen it.”

“Well,
I
didn't mind,” Celia says. “It made me feel like one of the family.”

“You're kind,” Alex says.

The tiny elephant in Celia's palm looks up at her, its face inscrutable but knowing, as if it has a secret to tell but no mouth.

“You can't imagine how much my mother will appreciate this,” Celia says. “Why, she'll probably clear a whole shelf for it, a special shelf, and when her friends come in, Mrs. Segal or Mrs. Greenhut or the ladies from the block association, she'll gather them round and say, ‘Now look at this, Elaine, this elephant was made by a real artist in Italy. My daughter Celia got it for me. Isn't it gorgeous?' ‘Oh, gorgeous!' ‘Now don't touch, it's fragile!' ”

Alex laughs mildly. “I wish everyone I gave a sculpture to was so enthusiastic,” he says. “Most often they just sort of shrug. If I'm visiting the person, and I'm lucky, it'll turn up in the bathroom, and I'll look under the sink and see the bowl of flowers it's been brought out to replace for the afternoon.”

“Oh, I doubt that,” Celia says.

But Alex once again doesn't seem to have heard her. And once again, this strange afternoon, it seems to Celia as if a piece of fragile thread, spun like spider's web, has been cast out across the ocean, from this ancient Tuscan barn to her mother's apartment in Queens, pulling these two disparate places into a nearness so intimate she feels as if she could reach across the darkness and brush Rose's arm. She has known for some time now that Seth cannot save her, at least the way he says he wants to, that he can never “take her away from all that”; no one can ever take anyone else away from all that. There are always those threads, billions of them, crisscrossing and crossing again, wrapping the world in their soft, suffocating gauze.

The futility, the falseness of her romance with Seth—each of them playacting for the
other the role of something long sought, long needed—she sees clearly now, but at a remove: the sort of truth you can gaze at for years; ponder; affirm; ignore.

Yes, she sees it all now; sees that she will stay in Italy, no matter how ardently her better judgment tells her not to; sees that, to the extent that it's possible, she'll become a different person from the person she used to be. And then one day she'll be walking down the cobbled street of her own Tuscan village, thinking about something properly Italian—olive trees, maybe, or art—when suddenly that mysterious thread will start to tighten, and Queens and Tuscany will be pulled to somewhere in the middle of the ocean, and briefly, magically merged. She'll turn and see, sitting on a bench in her own piazza near where the old men smoke cigars and play dominos, two Hasidic boys trading rabbi cards. And two little girls playing jump rope. And hearing the thwack of the jump rope against the pavement, she'll feel her feet start to dance, and want to jump herself, jump until the rope slipping under her is no longer anything real, is just a blur of speed. “I see London, I see France …” (But of course they didn't see any of those places, didn't even imagine they'd ever see any of those places.) Who, after all, is speaking? And in what language? And how can those boys be here, and her mother's voice calling to her down this ancient cobbled street? “Celia, come home, dinner's ready! It's spaghetti and meatballs! Your favorite!”

Here is why I decided to kill my neighbor:

On a rainy morning in midsummer, after several failed efforts, my cat finally managed to scale the fence that separated my yard from Willoughby Wayne's. The cat landed on all four feet in the narrow space behind a privet hedge. At first he sat there for a moment, licking his paws and acquainting himself with his new situation. Then, quite cautiously, he began making his way through the brushy underside of the hedge toward Willoughby's lawn. Unfortunately for him, the five Kerry blue terriers with whom Willoughby lives were aware of the cat's presence well before he actually stepped out onto the grass, and like a posse, they were there to greet him. The cat reared, hissed, and batted a paw in the face of the largest of the Kerry blues, who in turn swiftly and noisily descended with the efficient engine of his teeth. “Johnny! Johnny!” I heard Willoughby call. “Bad dog, Johnny! Bad dog!” There was some barking, then things got quiet again.

A few hours later, after I'd searched the house and checked most of the cat's outdoor hiding places, I called Willoughby. “Oh, a young cat?” he said. “Orange and white? Yes, he was here. Needless to say I did my best to introduce him to my pack, but inexperience has resulted in their maintaining a very puppylike attitude toward cats; the introductions—shall we say—did not go well. I interceded delicately, breaking up the mêlée, then, for his own good, lifted the feline fellow over the fence and deposited him in the field adjacent to my property. I believe he was quite frightened by Johnny, and suspect he's probably hiding in the field even as we speak.”

I thanked Willoughby, hung up, and headed out into the field that adjoins both our
yards. It was a fairly wild field, unkempt, thick with waist-high weeds and snarls of roots in which my dog, accompanying me, kept getting trapped. I'd be thrashing along, breaking the weeds down with a stick and calling, “Kitty! Here, kitty!” when suddenly the dog would start barking, and turning around I'd see her tangled in an outrageous position, immobilized by the vines in much the same way she often became immobilized by her own leash. Each time I'd free her, and we'd continue combing the field, but the cat apparently chose not to answer my repeated calls. I went back three times that afternoon, and twice that night. In the morning I canvassed the neighbors, without success, before returning to comb the field a sixth time. “Still looking for your young feline?” Willoughby called to me over the fence. He was clipping his privet hedge. “I'm really terribly sorry. If I'd had any idea he was
your
cat I most certainly would have hand-delivered him to you on the spot.”

“Yes, well,” I said.

“For whatever it's worth, it was right here, right here where I'm standing, that I lifted him over.”

“Well, I've been meaning to ask you. He
was
all right when you handed him over, wasn't he? He wasn't hurt.”

“Oh, he was perfectly fine,” Willoughby said. “Why, I would never put an injured cat over a fence, never.”

“No, I'm sure he's just hiding somewhere. I'll let you know when I find him.”

“Do,” Willoughby said, and returned to his clipping. The thwack of the clippers as they came down on the hedge followed me through the field and out of the field.

I'm not sure what it was, but the next day something compelled me to search Willoughby's yard. I waited until he wasn't home, then, like my cat before me, crept stealthily through a side gate. From their outdoor pen the Kerry blues growled at me. I circled the lawn, until I was standing at the place where Willoughby was standing when he claimed to have put the cat over the fence. On the other side of the fence a thorny bush blocked my view of the field, and just to the left of it lay my cat, quite dead. I didn't make a sound. I went around the other way, into the field, and dug behind the bush, in the process cutting myself quite severely on the brambles. There was a gash running from the cat's chest to near his tail.

I picked up the carcass of my cat. His orange-and-white markings were still the same, but he was now just that—a carcass. I went to the house and got a garbage bag and shovel, and then I buried my cat in the overgrown field.

On the way home, climbing over my own fence, I decided to kill my neighbor.

At home I took a shower. The soap eased me. I considered methods. I felt no urge to confront Willoughby, to argue with him, to back him up against a wall and force him to confess his lie. I did not want to watch him writhe, or try to wriggle away from the forceful truth inhabiting my gaze. I simply wanted to kill him—cleanly, painlessly, with a minimum of fuss and absolutely no discussion. It was not a question of vengeance; it was a question of extermination.

Of course a shotgun would have been best. Then I could simply ring his doorbell, aim, and, when he answered, pull the trigger.

Unfortunately, I did not own a shotgun, and had no idea where to get one. Knives seemed messy. With strangulation and plastic bags, there was almost invariably a
struggle.

Then, drying myself after the shower, I noticed the andirons. They were Willoughby's andirons; nineteenth-century, in the shape of pug dogs. He had loaned them to me one night in the winter. I'd lived next door to him for three years by then, but for the first two years I was living with someone else, and he hadn't seemed very interested in us. We'd exchanged the merest pleasantries over the fence. All I knew of Willoughby at that point was that he was exceedingly red-cheeked, apparently wealthy, and a breeder of Kerry blue terriers. It was only when the person I was living with decided to live somewhere else, in fact, that suddenly—at the sight of moving vans, it seemed—Willoughby showed up at the fence. “Neigh-bor,” he called in a singsong. “Oh, neigh-bor.” I walked up to the fence and he told me that one of his dogs had escaped and asked if I'd seen it, and when I said no he asked me over for a drink. I didn't take him up on the offer. One day my dog managed to dig under the fence to play with his Kerry blues, and when she returned there was a small red Christmas-tree ornament in the shape of a heart fastened to her collar. It hadn't been there before.

A few nights later a smoldering log rolled out of my fireplace, setting off the smoke alarm but bringing no one but Willoughby to the rescue. He was wearing a red sweatsuit and a Vietnam jacket with his name printed over his heart. I thought, Rambo the Elf.

“I must loan you a pair of andirons,” he said happily as he looked down at the charred spot on my rug. “Firedogs, you know. I'll be right back.”

“Ah—no need. I'll buy a pair.”

“No, no, you must accept my gesture. It's only neighborly.”

“Thanks very much, then. I'll come by and pick them up in the morning.”

Willoughby beamed. “Oh, too eager, I am always too eager when smitten. Well, yes, then. Fine.” But in the morning, when I woke up, the andirons were waiting on my doorstep, along with a piece of notepaper illustrated with a picture of a Kerry blue terrier. On it, in red pen, was drawn a question mark.

From the fireplace, now, I picked one of the andirons up. It was cold and slightly sooty, yet it felt heavy enough to kill. “Blunt instrument,” I said aloud to myself, savoring the words.

My dog was sitting in the backseat of the car. Since the cat's disappearance, this had become her favorite resting place, as if she feared above all else being left behind, and was determined to make sure I didn't set foot out of the house without her being aware of it. Now, however, I was traveling on foot, and figuring that anywhere I could walk was close enough not to pose a threat to her, she remained ensconced. It was a bright, sunny day, not the sort of day on which you would think you would think of killing someone. As I passed each house and turned the bend toward Willoughby's, I wondered when my resolve was going to lessen, when, with a rocket crash, I'd suddenly come to my senses. The thing was, it was the decision to kill Willoughby that felt like coming to my senses to me.

Halfway to his house, a Jeep Wagoneer pulled up to the side of the road ahead of me. On the bumper was a sticker that read, THE BETTER I GET TO KNOW PEOPLE, THE MORE I LOVE MY DOGS, and leaning out the driver's window was Tina Milkowski, the proprietress of a small, makeshift, and highly successful canine-sitting service. She was a huge woman, three hundred pounds at least.

“How you doing, Jeffrey?” she called.

“Not bad,” I said. “How are you, Tina?”

“Can't complain.” She seemed, for a moment, to sniff the air. “Where's the Princess today?”

“Home. She's spending the afternoon in my car.”

“Hope you left the windows open. Say, what you got there? Fire-dogs?”

“They're Willoughby's.”

Tina shook her head and reached for something in her glove compartment. “He's a strange one, Willoughby. Never been very friendly. The dogs are nice, though. He give those firedogs to you?”

She pulled a stick of gum out of a pack and began chewing it ruthlessly. I nodded.

“I didn't know you two were friends,” Tina said in what seemed to me a suggestive manner.

“We're not friends. In fact, I'm on my way to kill him.”