A Place I've Never Been (23 page)

“Nadine Todd called me this evening and she said the most horrid things. She called me a monster and a drunk and worse. She's going to have me thrown off the board of the Animal Protection Society.”

“I really didn't have anything to do with that, Willoughby—”

“The Animal Protection Society is one of my great loves. Disregarding the humiliation for the moment, you'll be taking away one of the few ways in the world in which I'm able to feel truly useful.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “Really, I have nothing to do with it. Mrs. Todd is acting on her own.”

He looked away. “I am lost and forlorn. I have nowhere to turn. I throw myself upon your mercy.”

“Good night, Willoughby,” I said, and went inside.

A few minutes later there was a knock on the door.

“Do with me what you will,” Willoughby said, and threw his arms out at his sides, like Christ.

“Willoughby, it's past midnight.”

“The Lord has directed me to you, Jeffrey. He has told me to throw myself upon your mercy. I must learn to be humble, to act humbly.”

“Is it humble to barge uninvited into someone's house in the middle of the night? Is that humble?”

“I am a pathetic and desperate man,” Willoughby said. He hung his head in shame.

“All right,” I said. “Come in.”

He smiled, then, came through the door gratefully, and sat down on the sofa. My dog ran up to him from where she was sleeping, barked, sniffed at his haunches. He reached down and stroked her neck. There was something incalculably gentle and expert about the way he stroked her neck, and I wondered, for a moment, if he suffered from a kind of autism; if, in lieu of his clumsy and imperfect relations with humans, he had developed an intricate knowledge of the languages and intimacies of dogs. There were people who, for all the affection they felt, hadn't the foggiest idea how to stroke a dog. They pushed the fur the wrong way, their hands came down rough and ungentle. I suspected Willoughby was like this with people, and always had been.

I brought him a cup of tea, which he thanked me for. The dog had crawled into his lap and gone to sleep. “This is not, of course, the first time that I've been the object of persecution and derision,” Willoughby was saying. “Even when I was a little boy it happened. My parents for some reason insisted I attend public school. Another child circulated a petition which read, ‘We, the undersigned, hate Willoughby Wayne.' I didn't understand why. I had tried to ingratiate myself with those children, in spite of the enormous gulf which separated us.” Tears welled in his eyes. “The ancient Hebrews were cursed with the vice of avarice, and often I have felt the modern Hebrews have inherited
that vice, yet in spite of this I feel deeply for the persecution they suffered at the hands of the Nazis, for I too have suffered such persecution.” And like a litany, he incanted: “I am a pathetic and desperate man.”

I sat down next to him. “You don't have to be that way,” I said.

“I am very set in my ways.” His hand, I noticed, was on my thigh, following, even at this dark moment, its sly and particular agenda. I moved it away. The dog lifted her head, sniffed, and jumped barking onto the floor.

“I'll call Mrs. Todd,” I said. “I'll try to persuade her not to throw you off the board. But I can't guarantee anything. Now I have to go to bed.”

Willoughby stood up. I handed him a Kleenex and he blew his nose. “I assure you,” he said at the door, “that when I threw your cat over the fence, he was unharmed,” and I realized that whether or not this was true, he believed it.

“Good night, Willoughby,” I said.

“Good night, Jeffrey.” And I watched him go out the door and head down the street. I was remembering how when I was digging the grave that afternoon, I'd kept repeating to myself over and over, “It's just a cat, just an animal, with a small brain, a tail, fur.” Then I started thinking about the night my dog—spooked by thunder—bolted out the front door and ran. For three hours I'd driven through the neighborhood, calling her name, knocking on doors. Various sightings were reported in a direct line from Mrs. Friedrich's house, to the Italian deli by the train station, to the laundromat; then the trail disappeared. Finally I went to bed, making sure her dog door was open for her, while outside the storm railed on, and my dog, lost somewhere in it, struggled to make her way home. And what a miracle it was when at four in the morning she jumped up onto my bed—filthy,
shivering, covered with leaves and brambles. Like the dogs of legends, she had found her way back.

I thought I'd
had
my brush with death then. I thought from then on I might be spared.

It must have been at that moment—when I was digging the grave, remembering how nearly I'd lost my dog—that the thought of murder came to me, growing more vivid with each thwack of the shovel against the stony earth. Really, I was no better than Willoughby; I just hadn't been alone so long.

“I am a pathetic and desperate man,” I said to myself—trying the words on for fit—and standing in the doorway, watched Willoughby stumble home, bereft in the starlight. All along the street, houses were dark, and inside each of those houses were people with cats and dogs, and stories to tell: the time Flossie fell four stories and broke a tooth; the time Rex disappeared for weeks, then showed up one afternoon on the back porch, licking his paw; the time Bubbles was mangled under the wheels of a car. They would tell you, if you asked them, how they had to put Darling to sleep; how Fifi went blind, then deaf, then one day just didn't wake up; how Bosco could jump through a hoop; how Kelly swam under water; how Jimbo begged, how Millie spoke, how Sophie ate nothing but tuna fish. The night was brisk, and somewhere distantly a dog barked. My dog growled, then barked in response. The distant dog barked back. Their conversation, like mine and Willoughby's, might, I knew, go on all night.

Here is my story: When I was young, my family lived in Cleveland, and we had a dog named Troubles. Next door was a dog named Chips, and sometimes in the afternoon, when Chips wandered into our yard, my sister would yell, “Troubles, Chips is here! Chips is here!” and Troubles would leap up from wherever she was sleeping and bound
into the yard to see her friend. Then we moved away to California, and Troubles got old and cranky and seemed no longer to like other dogs. Chips was still in Cleveland, or dead; we didn't know.

One day my sister had a friend over. They were going through the old photo albums from Cleveland, and my sister was telling stories. “All we had to do,” I heard her saying to her friend, “was yell, ‘Troubles, Chips is here! Chips is here!' and then—” And before she could even finish the story Troubles had leapt into the room once more, barking and jumping and sniffing the air. Something had lasted, in spite of all the time that had passed and the changes she had weathered, the trip cross-country, and the kennel, and the cats. My sister put her hand to her mouth, and tears sprang in her eyes, and like the young enchantress desperate to reverse the powerful incantation she has just naively uttered, she cried out, “Troubles, stop! Stop! Stop!” but it did no good. Nothing would calm Troubles, and nothing would dissuade her, as she barked and jumped and whined and nosed for that miraculous dog who had crossed the years and miles to find her.

Fulvia's house: old, swollen bricks, a buckling terra-cotta floor. A child could stand inside the fireplace. In the middle of the kitchen is an oval oak table, big enough to seat twenty, which Fulvia bought at an auction of retired theater-set furniture. For many years she'd noticed it on the stage of the Rome Opera, where perhaps the grandeur of the gestures put its massiveness in perspective; more than one of the guests has joked today that Fulvia's house may not be such a far cry from all of that. “Anyway, I feel like a minor character in Puccini,” Giuliana told Marco, laughing, out on the patio. Below them lush hills spread out, and in the distance, in the plain, they could see the spa—Terme di Saturnia—where until recently Fulvia spent most of her days, lazing in the hot sulfurous waters.

It is a lukewarm, drizzly afternoon, late in spring. Outside Fulvia's house rain beats at the metal roofs and hoods of the twenty or so cars parked in the moss-covered courtyard. “My family,” Fulvia jokes to the American from where she's lying, half covered in a blanket, on the worn velvet sofa by the fireplace. “Look around you, try to figure it all out.” The American turns. Giuliana, Fulvia's daughter, has just come in from the patio with Marco. He was her best friend when they were teenagers, and then when he was sixteen he and Fulvia became lovers and she swept him off to Paris. For possibly unrelated reasons Giuliana ran away to India, became a junkie, then settled in Singapore, where she is now married, the mother of three children Fulvia has never seen. Across the room is Rosa, Fulvia's closest friend and Marco's mother, and his sister, Alba. Grazia, Marco's wife, sits at the huge oval table with Alberto, the man she lives with. The man
Marco lives with is the American. His name is Nicholas. Laura has just emerged from the bathroom; she is the mother of a little boy, Daniele, whom Marco has raised as his own, even though, biologically, technically, he is not his son. Daniele is outside, playing with Alba's little girl, whose name is also Rosa.

“I think I've got it clear who everyone is,” Nicholas says.

“Not for long,” jokes Fulvia, and coughs violently. “More are coming. More come every day. Everyone wants to say good-bye because I am the queen and I'm dying. The queen! It's funny. It's amazing, really. Look at all these people, they are rich, well-educated, they are the best Italy has to offer. And they are ruined, every single one of them. You can't guess. If you knew the drugs they've put into their veins, the things they've seen and done—corrupt, utterly.” She smiles, as if this pleases her.

“What are you saying about me now,
cara
?” Marco asks, in English. “You think you can tell Nicky anything, no one will understand, but you forget that some of us have been living in New York a long time now.”

“Nothing you haven't already heard from me,” Fulvia says, laughing, then breaks into a rasping, huge, dangerous smoker's cough.

Fulvia seems determined to die the way she has lived all these years: with drama and pronouncements. Just this morning a famous movie star whose villa is down the road came to pay a visit. Much was made over the movie star, pasta with truffles was prepared for her, as well as a rabbit and a salad of wild greens. Afterwards, from her place on the couch, Fulvia told the movie star she ought really to take more care choosing her films.

“And wasn't that just like Fulvia,” Rosa says, after the movie star has left. She is
drying dishes and speaking—ostensibly—to her daughter Alba, though Fulvia is within full hearing range. “Does it matter that poor Marina couldn't get a part in a decent film if her life depended on it? Does it matter that she is about to be divorced and must take pills to sleep?” She shakes her head. “The creature deserves our pity, not Fulvia's meanness.”

“You're too sentimental, Rosa!” Fulvia calls from the living room. “The woman is richer than the pope. As for those American films she's been in lately, she'd be wiser to make nothing than that kind of
trippa
.”

“Fulvia, you haven't even seen Marina's latest films,” Rosa says. “Not that that ever stopped you from passing judgment.” (Fulvia, for most of her life, has been a kind of all-purpose cultural critic for a famous Communist newspaper.)

“
I
saw one of Marina's films,” says Giuliana. “She was a mafiosa whose daughter decided to leave the family. It was dubbed in Chinese, so it was hard for me to understand.”

“Probably better than the original. And you're telling me to waste my money on garbage like that?” Fulvia laughs hoarsely. “Bring me a cigarette,
carissimo
,” she calls to Nicholas, who waits for someone to object, then, when no one does, fetches the ever-present box of Rothmans from the table.

“You're jealous, that's all,” Rosa is saying. “You would have liked to be a movie star too.”

“Oh, Rosa, shut up! You're the one who's jealous. You always have been, since we were girls.”

“And why's that?”

“Because I'm prettier,” Fulvia says.

“Ah, I see.”

“Because people care about me so, and want to visit me, and no one likes you.”

“Yes, it's true,” Rosa says. “I'm an ugly duckling. What is her name, Cinderella? Every summer Fulvia invites half of Rome to this house, and who washes all the dishes? Who cooks the pasta?”

“You've always been the housewifely type,” Fulvia says. “Unlike you, I'm glamorous. Like that American soldier from the waterfall called me, during the war. La Glamorosa.”

“Marina told me something about that English lord down the road,” Giuliana says, coming into the room. “She says he likes to make love to women while wearing rubber boots inside of which he's put live canaries. He bounces on the balls of his feet and feels the crunch—”

“Giuliana, that is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard,” Rosa says.

“No, it's true,” Giuliana says. “Marina went there for lunch last week, and there'd been a party the night before. When she walked in, there were ten pairs of boots lined up and the floor was covered with feathers.”

“Bah!” Rosa says. “
Ridicolo.”

“I don't know why you can't believe it,” says Grazia. “Stranger things have happened, and within the walls of this house.”

“The only people more twisted than the rich Italians around here,” Fulvia says, “are the rich English.”

“Marina is a sick woman,” Rosa says.

“I wonder if that's where Dario got it from,” says Laura.