A Place I've Never Been (3 page)

“I guess I won,” Dorrie said rather softly. She had her pennies neatly piled in identically sized stacks.

I wondered if Lizzie was worried. I wondered if she was thinking about the disease, if
she was frightened, the way Nathan was, or if she just assumed death was coming anyway, the final blow in her life of unendurable misfortunes. She started to gather the pennies back into their bowl, and I glanced across the room at Nathan, to see if he was ready to go. All through the game, of course, he had been looking pretty miserable—he always looks miserable at parties. Worse, he has a way of turning his misery around, making me responsible for it. Across the circle of our nearest and dearest friends he glared at me angrily, and I knew that by the time we were back in his car and on our way home to Manhattan he would have contrived a way for the evening to be my fault. And yet tonight, his occasional knowing sneers, inviting my complicity in looking down on the party, only enraged me. I was angry at him, in advance, for what I was sure he was going to do in the car, and I was also angry at him for being such a snob, for having no sympathy toward this evening, which, in spite of all its displeasures, was nevertheless an event of some interest, perhaps the very last hurrah of our youth, our own little big chill. And that was something: Up until now I had always assumed Nathan's version of things to be the correct one, and cast my own into the background. Now his perception seemed meager, insufficient: Here was an historic night, after all, and all he seemed to want to think about was his own boredom, his own unhappiness.

Finally, reluctantly, Lizzie let us go, and relinquished from her grip, we got into Nathan's car and headed onto the Garden State Parkway. “Never again,” Nathan was saying, “will I allow you to convince me to attend one of Lizzie Fischman's awful parties. This is the last.” I didn't even bother answering, it all seemed so predictable. Instead I just settled back into the comfortable velour of the car seat and switched on the radio. Dionne Warwick and Elton John were singing “That's What Friends Are For,” and
Nathan said, “You know, of course, that that's the song they wrote to raise money for AIDS.”

“I'd heard,” I said.

“Have you seen the video? It makes me furious. All these famous singers up there, grinning these huge grins, rocking back and forth. Why the hell are they smiling, I'd like to ask?”

For a second, I considered answering that question, then decided I'd better not. We were slipping into the Holland Tunnel, and by the time we got through to Manhattan I was ready to call it a night. I wanted to get back to my apartment and see if Roy had left a message on my answering machine. But Nathan said, “It's Saturday night, Celia, it's still early. Won't you have a drink with me or something?”

“I don't want to go to any more gay bars, Nathan, I told you that.”

“So we'll go to a straight bar. I don't care. I just can't bear to go back to my apartment at eleven o'clock.” We stopped for a red light, and he leaned closer to me. “The truth is, I don't think I can bear to be alone. Please.”

“All right,” I said. What else could I say?

“Goody,” Nathan said.

We parked the car in a garage and walked to a darkish café on Greenwich Avenue, just a few doors down from the huge gay bar Nathan used to frequent, and which he jokingly referred to as “the airport.” No mention was made of that bar in the café, however, where he ordered latte macchiato for both of us. “Aren't you going to have some dessert?” he said. “I know I am. Baba au rhum, perhaps. Or tiramisu. You know
tirami su
means ‘pick me up,' but if you want to offend an Italian waiter, you say, ‘I'll
have the
tiramilo su
,' which means ‘pick up my dick.' ”

“I'm trying to lose weight, Nathan,” I said. “Please don't encourage me to eat desserts.”

“Sorry.” He coughed. Our latte machiatos came, and Nathan raised his cup and said, “Here's to us. Here's to Lizzie Fischman. Here's to never playing that dumb game again as long as we live.” These days, I noticed, Nathan used the phrase “as long as we live” a bit too frequently for comfort.

Reluctantly I touched my glass to his. “You know,” he said, “I think I've always hated that game. Even in college, when I won, it made me jealous. Everyone else had done so much more than me. Back then I figured I'd have time to explore the sexual world. Guess the joke's on me, huh?”

I shrugged. I wasn't sure.

“What's with you tonight, anyway?” he said. “You're so distant.”

“I just have things on my mind, Nathan, that's all.”

“You've been acting weird ever since I got back from Europe, Celia. Sometimes I think you don't even want to see me.”

Clearly he was expecting reassurances to the contrary. I didn't say anything.

“Well,” he said, “is that it? You don't want to see me?” I twisted my shoulders in confusion. “Nathan—”

“Great,” he said, and laughed so that I couldn't tell if he was kidding. “Your best friend for nearly ten years. Jesus.”

“Look, Nathan, don't melodramatize,” I said. “It's not that simple. It's just that I have to think a little about myself. My own life, my own needs. I mean, I'm going to be thirty
soon. You know how long it's been since I've had a boyfriend?”

“I'm not against your having a boyfriend,” Nathan said. “Have I ever tried to stop you from having a boyfriend?”

“But, Nathan,” I said, “I never get to meet anyone when I'm with you all the time. I love you and I want to be your friend, but you can't expect me to just keep giving and giving and giving my time to you without anything in return. It's not fair.”

I was looking away from him as I said this. From the corner of my vision I could see him glancing to the side, his mouth a small, tight line.

“You're all I have,” he said quietly.

“That's not true, Nathan,” I said.

“Yes, it is true, Celia.”

“Nathan, you have lots of other friends.”

“But none of them count. No one but you counts.”

The waitress arrived with his goblet of tiramisu, put it down in front of him. “Go on with your life, you say,” he was muttering. “Find a boyfriend. Don't you think I'd do the same thing if I could? But all those options are closed to me, Celia. There's nowhere for me to go, no route that isn't dangerous. I mean, getting on with my life—I just can't talk about that simply anymore, the way you can.” He leaned closer, over the table. “Do you want to know something?” he said. “Every time I see someone I'm attracted to I go into a cold sweat. And I imagine that they're dead, that if I touch them, the part of them I touch will die. Don't you see? It's bad enough to be afraid you might get it. But to be afraid you might give it—and to someone you loved—” He shook his head, put his hand to his forehead.

What could I say to that? What possibly was there to say? I took his hand, suddenly, I squeezed his hand until the edges of his fingers were white. I was remembering how Nathan looked the first time I saw him, in line at a college dining hall, his hands on his hips, his head erect, staring worriedly at the old lady dishing out food, as if he feared she might run out, or not give him enough. I have always loved the boyish hungers—for food, for sex—because they are so perpetual, so faithful in their daily revival, and even though I hadn't met Nathan yet, I think, in my mind, I already understood: I wanted to feed him, to fill him up; I wanted to give him everything.

Across from us, now, two girls were smoking cigarettes and talking about what art was. A man and a woman, in love, intertwined their fingers. Nathan's hand was getting warm and damp in mine, so I let it go, and eventually he blew his nose and lit a cigarette.

“You know,” he said after a while, “it's not the sex, really. That's not what I regret missing. It's just that—Do you realize, Celia, I've never been in love? Never once in my life have I actually been in love?” And he looked at me very earnestly, not knowing, not having the slightest idea, that once again he was counting me for nothing.

“Nathan,” I said. “Oh, my Nathan.” Still, he didn't seem satisfied, and I knew he had been hoping for something better than my limp consolation. He looked away from me, across the café, listening, I suppose, for that wind-chime peal as all the world's pennies flew his way.

During the day, when Arthur is at work, the puppy listens to the radio—“Anything with voices,” Mrs. Theodorus advised when Arthur went to pick up the puppy; “it calms them.” And so, sitting in her pen in Arthur's decaying kitchen, while she chews on the
newspaper that is meant to be her toilet, or urinates on the towel that is meant to be her bed, the puppy is surrounded by a comforting haze of half-human noise. For a while Arthur tried KQRT, the leftist station, and the puppy heard interviews with experts on Central American insurgency and radical women of color. Then he tuned in to a station that broadcast exclusively for the Polish community. “Mrs. Byziewicz, who has requested this polka, is eighty-five, the mother of three, and the grandmother of eleven,” the puppy heard as she pounced on her rubber newspaper, or tried to scale the chicken-wire walls of her pen. Now Arthur's settled on KSXT, a peculiar station which claims to feature “lite” programming, and which Arthur thinks is ideally suited to the listening needs of a dog, so the puppy is hearing a ten-minute-long radio play about Edgar Allan Poe when Arthur rushes in the door with Mrs. Theodorus, both breathing hard.

“Edgar, why are your poems so strange and weird?” Mrs. Poe is asking her husband on the radio, and the puppy looks at the woman who midwifed her birth ten weeks earlier. Mrs. Theodorus's blouse is partially undone, and the drawstring on her purple sweatpants is loosened, but all the puppy notices is the faint, half-familiar smell of her mother, and smelling it, she cries, barks, and, for the first time in her short life, leaps over the edge of her pen. No one is there to congratulate her. Sniffing, the puppy makes her way into the bedroom, where Arthur and Mrs. Theodorus are in the midst of a sweaty half-naked tumble. The puppy jumps into the fray, barking, and Mrs. Theodorus screams.

“Arthur, you have got to teach her who's boss,” she says, and climbs off him. “Remember—you must be in control at all times.” She looks down at the puppy, who sits on the floor now, humbled before the sight of Mrs. Theodorus, naked except for her black bra, disapproval shining in her eyes. A small trickle of moisture snakes through the thick-
pile carpet, darkening its yellow whorls, and quickly, quicker than Arthur can believe, Mrs. Theodorus has the puppy in hand and is carrying her back into the kitchen, shouting, “No! No!” She returns with a sponge and a bottle of urine-stain remover. “I'm a whiz at this,” she says.

“Eva,” Arthur says, rolling over and unbuttoning his pants, “you never fail to amaze me.”

Across the house the puppy wails for her mother.

In Arthur's bathroom one medicine cabinet is full, one empty, but still, for some reason, on the soap dish, one of Claire's earrings hangs haphazardly, as if she'd just pulled it out of the tiny hole in her earlobe. Next to it lies a fake gold tooth, from the days when crowns were removable, which Claire wore most of her life and only took out during her last stay in the hospital. Arthur saved the earring because he couldn't find its partner; for hours he searched the bedroom and the bathroom, desperate to complete his inventory of Claire's jewelry so that he could finally get rid of it all, but the second earring failed to materialize. Finally he gave up. After the rest of the jewelry was distributed among the children and Claire's sisters he could not bring himself to throw the one earring away—it would have killed him, he said in group. It is a gold earring, shaped like a dolphin; its tiny jade eye glints up at him from the syrupy moat of the soap dish.

“Have you been brushing her regularly?” Mrs. Theodorus asks, examining the puppy on the kitchen table. “Her furnishings look a little matted. Remember, Arthur, this is a high-maintenance dog you've got here, and you'd better get in the habit of taking care of her
now if you don't want her to scream when she goes to the groomer later on.”

“I'm sorry, Eva,” Arthur says.

Mrs. Theodorus smiles. “Well, I'll be happy to help you,” she says, as, yelping loudly, the puppy tries to bite the comb that is pulling the fur from her skin. “But you've got to remember,” Mrs. Theodorus adds, looking at Arthur sternly, “she's your puppy, and finally it's your responsibility to take care of her. You can't count on me being around all the time to do it.”

“We're going to be late, Eva,” Arthur says.

“I know. I'll be done in a minute.”

She finishes, and the puppy is returned to the dark, private world in which she spends most of her time. “What I'm interested in, Kathy,” a voice on the radio says, “is how
you
feel when your husband makes these suggestions. You have to think about your own desires, too.”

“That puppy is going to be ruined, listening to Dr. Pleasure,” Mrs. Theodorus says as she gets into her car. They still go in separate cars.

It is the third Thursday of the month—spouse night—and even though Arthur and Mrs. Theodorus are no longer technically spouses—both have recently lost their loved ones—they still attend with needful regularity. Claire, Arthur's wife, died two months ago of a sudden, searing chemical burn, a drug reaction, which over five days crisped and opened her skin until she lay in the burn unit, her face tomato-red, her body wrapped in mummylike bandages, and wrote to Arthur, her hand shaking, “I'm scared.”

“Scared of what?” Arthur asked, and she pointed a bloody finger, as best she could, to
the tubes thrust down her throat to keep her breathing; she had pneumonia. In the terrible humidity of the burn unit, surrounded by the screams of injured children, Arthur tried to reassure her. He had on three gowns, two masks, a flowered surgical cap, rubber gloves. His spectacled eyes stared out from all that fabric. A children's tape deck he had bought at Walgreen's played Hoagy Carmichael songs in the corner. Above it the nurse had written: “Hello, my name is Claire. Please turn over the tape in my tape deck. Thanx.”