A Place I've Never Been (7 page)

As soon as everyone was seated the string quartet in the corner began to play something sweet and Chopin-like, and then the procession started—first Diana's sister, who was matron of honor; then the bridesmaids, each arm in arm with an usher, each dressed in a different pastel dress which was coordinated perfectly with her bouquet; and then, finally, Diana herself, looking resplendent in her white dress. Everyone gave out little oohs and aahs as she entered, locked tight between her parents. It had been two years since we'd seen each other, and looking at her, I thought I'd cry. I felt like such a piece of nothing, such a worthless piece of garbage without her—she was really that beautiful. Her hair was growing back, which was the worst thing. She had it braided and piled on her head and woven with wildflowers. Her skin was flawless, smooth—skin I'd touched hundreds, thousands of times—and there was an astonishing brightness about her eyes, as if she could see right through everything to its very heart. From the altar, the groom looked on, grinning like an idiot, a proud possessor who seemed to be saying, with his teary grin, see, look what I've got, look what chose me. And Diana too, approaching him at the altar, was all bright smiles, no doubt, no regret or hesitation registering in her face, and I wondered what she was thinking now: if she was thinking about her other life, her long committed days and nights as a lesbian.

The music stopped. They stood, backs to us, the audience, before the reverent reverend. He began to lecture them solemnly. And then I saw it. I saw myself stand up, run to the front of the garden, and before anyone could say anything, do anything, pull out the gun and consummate, all over the grass, my own splendid marriage to vengeance.

But of course I didn't do anything like that. Instead I just sat there with Walter and
listened as Diana, love of my life, my lover, my life, repeated the marriage vows, her voice a little trembly, as if to suggest she was just barely holding in her tears. They said their “I do”s. They exchanged rings. They kissed, and everyone cheered.

At my table in the dining room were seated Walter; the Winterses' maid, Juanita; her son; the schizophrenic girl; and the schizophrenic girl's mother. It was in the darkest, most invisible corner of the room, and I could see it was no accident that Marjorie Winters had gathered us all here—all the misfits and minorities, the kooks and oddities of the wedding. For a minute, sitting down and gazing out at the other tables, which were full of beautiful women and men in tuxedos, I was so mad at Diana I wanted to run back to the presents table and reclaim my Cuisinart, which I really couldn't afford to be giving her anyway, and which she certainly didn't deserve. But then I realized that people would probably think I was a thief and call the hotel detective or the police, and I decided not to.

The food, Leonore would have been pleased to know, was mediocre. Next to me, the schizophrenic girl stabbed with her knife at a pathetic-looking little bowl of melon balls and greenish strawberries, while her mother looked out exhaustedly, impatiently, at the expanse of the hotel dining room. Seeing that the schizophrenic girl had started, Juanita's son, who must have been seven feet tall, began eating as well, but she slapped his hand. Not wanting to embarrass him by staring, I looked at the schizophrenic girl. I knew she was the schizophrenic girl by her glasses—big, ugly, red ones from the seventies, the kind where the temples start at the bottom of the frames—and the way she slumped over her fruit salad, as if she was afraid someone might steal it.

“Hello,” I said to her.

She didn't say anything. Her mother, dragged back into focus, looked down at her and said, “Oh now, Natalie.”

“Hello,” Natalie said.

The mother smiled. “Are you with the bride or the groom?” she asked.

“The bride.”

“Relation?”

“Friend from college.”

“How nice,” the mother said. “We're with the groom. Old neighbors. Natalie and Charlie were born the same day in the same hospital, isn't that right, Nat?”

“Yes,” Natalie said.

“She's very shy,” the mother said to me, and winked.

Across the table Walter was asking Juanita's son if he played basketball. Shyly, in a Jamaican accent, he admitted that he did. His face was as arch and stern as that of his mother, a fat brown woman with the eyes of a prison guard. She smelled very clean, almost antiseptic.

“Natalie, are you in school?” I asked.

She continued to stab at her fruit salad, not really eating it as much as trying to decimate the pieces of melon.

“Tell the lady, Natalie,” said her mother.

“Yes.”

“Natalie's in a very special school,” the mother said.

“I'm a social worker,” I said. “I understand about Natalie.”

“Oh really, you are?” the mother said, and relief flushed her face. “I'm so glad. It's so
painful, having to explain—you know—”

Walter was trying to get Juanita to reveal the secret location of the honeymoon. “I'm not saying,” Juanita said. “Not one word.”

“Come on,” said Walter. “I won't tell a soul, I swear.”

“I'm on TV,” Natalie said.

“Oh now,” said her mother.

“I am. I'm on
The Facts of Life
. I'm Tuti.”

“Now, Natalie, you know you're not.”

“And I'm also on
All My Children
during the day. It's a tough life, but I manage.”

“Natalie, you know you're not to tell these stories.”

“Did someone mention
All My Children
?” asked Juanita's son. Walter, too, looked interested.

“My lips are forever sealed,” Juanita said to no one in particular. “There's no chance no way no one's going to get me to say one word.”

Diana and Ellen. Ellen and Diana. When we were together, everything about us seethed. We lived from seizure to seizure. Our fights were glorious, manic, our need to fight like an allergy, something that reddens and irritates the edges of everything and demands release. Once Diana broke the air conditioner and I wouldn't forgive her. “Leave me alone,” I screamed.

“No,” she said. “I want to talk about it. Now.”

“Well, I don't.”

“Why are you punishing me?” Diana said. “It's not my fault.”

“I'm not punishing you.”

“You are. You're shutting me up when I have something I want to say.”

“Damn it, won't you just leave me alone? Can't you leave anything alone?”

“Let me say what I have to say, damn it!”

“What?”

“I didn't break it on purpose! I broke it by accident!”

“Damn it, Diana, leave me the fuck alone! Why don't you just go away?”

“You are so hard!” Diana said, tears in her eyes, and slammed out the door into the bedroom.

After we fought, consumed, crazed, we made love like animals, then crawled about the house for days, cats in a cage, lost in a torpor of lazy carnality. It helped that the air conditioner was broken. It kept us slick. There was always, between us, heat and itch.

Once, in those most desperate, most remorse-filled days after Diana left, before I moved down the peninsula to my escape-hatch dream house, I made a list which was titled “Reasons I love her.”

1. Her hair.

2. Her eyes.

3. Her skin. (Actually, most of her body except maybe her elbows.)

4. The way she does voices for the plants when she waters them, saying things like “Boy was I thirsty, thanks for the drink.” [This one was a lie. That habit actually infuriated me.]

5. Her advantages: smart and nice.

6. Her devotion to me, to us as a couple.

7. How much she loved me.

8. Her love for me.

9. How she loves me.

There was less to that list than met the eye. When Diana left me—and it must be stated, here and now, she did so cruelly, callously, and suddenly—she said that the one thing she wanted me to know was that she still considered herself a lesbian. It was only me she was leaving. “Don't think I'm just another straight girl who used you,” she insisted, as she gathered all her things into monogrammed suitcases. “I just don't feel we're right for each other. You're a social worker. I'm not good enough for you. Our lives, our ideas about the world—they're just never going to mesh.”

Outside, I knew, her mother's station wagon waited in ambush. Still I pleaded. “Diana,” I said, “you got me into this thing. You lured me in, pulled me in against my will. You can't leave just like that.”

But she was already at the door. “I want you to know,” she said, “because of you, I'll be able to say, loud and clear, for the rest of my life, I am a lesbian,” and kissed me on the cheek.

In tears I stared at her, astonished that this late in the game she still thought my misery at her departure might be quelled by abstract gestures to sisterhood. Also that she could think me that stupid. I saw through her quaking, frightened face, her little-boy locks.

“You're a liar,” I said, and, grateful for the anger, she crumpled up her face, screamed, “Damn you, Ellen,” and ran out the door.

As I said, our fights were glorious.

All she left behind were her braids.

Across the dining room, Diana stood with Charlie, holding a big knife over the wedding cake. Everyone was cheering. The knife sank into the soft white flesh of the cake, came out again clung with silken frosting and crumbs. Diana cut two pieces. Their arms intertwined, she and Charlie fed each other.

Then they danced. A high-hipped young woman in sequins got up on the bandstand and sang, “Graduation's almost here, my love, teach me tonight.”

After the bride and groom had been given their five minutes of single glory on the dance floor, and the parents and grandparents had joined them, I felt a tap on my shoulder. “Care to tango
avec moi
, my dear?” Walter said.

“Walter,” I said, “I'd be delighted.”

We got up from the table and moved out onto the floor. I was extremely nervous, sweating through my dress. I hadn't actually spoken to Diana yet, doubted she'd even seen me. Now, not three feet away, she stood, dancing and laughing, Mrs. Mark Charles Cadwallader.

I kept my eyes on Walter's lapel. The song ended. The couples broke up. And then, there she was, approaching me, all smiles, all bright eyes. “Ellen,” she said, embracing me, and her mother shot us a wrathful glance. “Ellen. Let me look at you.”

She looked at me. I looked at her. Close up, she looked slightly unraveled, her make-up smeared, her eyes red and a little tense. “Come with me to the ladies' room,” she said. “My contacts are killing me.”

She took my hand and swept me out of the ballroom into the main hotel lobby. Everyone in the lobby stared at us frankly, presuming, I suppose, that she was a runaway
bride, and I her maid. But we were only running away to the ladies' room.

“These contacts!” she said once we got there, and opening one eye wide peeled off a small sheath of plastic. “I'm glad you came,” she said, placing the lens on the end of her tongue and licking it. “I was worried that you wouldn't. I've felt so bad about you, Ellen, worried about you so much, since—well, since things ended between us. I was hoping this wedding could be a reconciliation for us. That now we could start again. As friends.”

She turned away from the lamplit mirror and flashed me a big smile. I just looked up at her.

“Yes,” I said. “I'd like that.”

Diana removed the other lens and licked it. It seemed to me a highly unorthodox method of cleaning. Then, nervously, she replaced the lens and looked at herself in the mirror. She had let down her guard. Her face looked haggard, and red blush was streaming off her cheeks.

“I didn't invite Leonore for a reason,” she said. “I knew she'd do something to embarrass me, come all dyked out or something. I'm not trying to deny my past, you know. Charlie knows everything. Have you met him?”

“Yes,” I said.

“And isn't he a wonderful guy?”

“Yes.”

“I have nothing against Leonore. I just believe in subtlety these days. You, I knew I could count on you for some subtlety, some class. Leonore definitely lacks class.”

It astonished me, all that wasn't being said. I wanted to mention it all—her promise on the doorstep, the gun, the schizophrenic girl. But there was so much. Too much. Nowhere
to begin.

When she'd finished with her ablutions, we sat down in parallel toilets. “It is nearly impossible to pee in this damned dress,” she said to me through the divider. “I can't wait to get out of it.”

“I can imagine,” I said.

Then there was a loud spilling noise, and Diana gave out a little sigh of relief. “I've got a terrible bladder infection,” she said. “Remember in college how it was such a big status symbol to have a bladder infection because it meant you were having sex? Girls used to come into the dining hall clutching big jars of cranberry juice and moaning, and the rest of us would look at them a little jealously.” She faltered. “Or some of us did,” she added. “I guess not you, huh, Ellen?”

“No, I was a lesbian,” I said, “and still am, and will be until the day I die.” I don't know why I said that, but it shut her up.

For about thirty seconds there was not a sound from the other side of the divider, and then I heard Diana sniffling. I didn't know what to say.

“Christ,” Diana said, after a few seconds, and blew her nose. “Christ. Why'd I get married?”

I hesitated. “I'm not sure I'm the person to ask,” I said. “Did your mother have anything to do with it?”

“Oh, Ellen,” Diana said, “please!” I heard her spinning the toilet paper roll. “Look,” she said, “you probably resent me incredibly. You probably think I'm a sellout and a fool and that I was a royal bitch to you. You probably think when Charlie does it to me I lie there and pretend I'm feeling something when I'm not. Well, it's not true. Not in the
least.” She paused. “I was just not prepared to go through my life as a social freak, Ellen. I want a normal life, just like everybody. I want to go to parties and not have to die inside trying to explain who it is I'm with. Charlie's very good for me in that way, he's very understanding and generous.” She blew her nose again. “I'm not denying you were part of my life, that our relationship was a big thing for me. I'm just saying it's finished. That part's finished.”