Family Dancing

by David Leavitt

“Oh, don’t start on that,” Celia says. “Andrew, I just wonder why you and Nathan feel you have to keep this thing up. I mean, sure, it was nice once, but it always turns out like it did today. You two know too well how to hurt each other. The memory’s precious, but look what it’s given rise to, look at yourselves now.”

  They are walking again, away from the beach, back toward Nathan’s parents’ house. Andrew has his hands in his pockets, and keeps his eyes on the ground in front of him. “Celia,” he says, “there’s something you’ve got to understand about me and Nathan. He taught me things.”

  “Taught you what?”

  “Growing up a fag is a strange thing. You never learn about boys’ bodies because you’re afraid of what you will feel and you never learn about girls’ bodies because you’re afraid of what you won’t feel. And so the first time you sleep with someone, it’s like the first time you’ve ever noticed a body. I watched everything. I remember I was amazed to see the way his diaphragm moved up and down when he slept because I’d never watched anyone sleep before. And for showing me that, because of that, I’ll always love him, even if he acts the way he does. I’ll never forget the way he looked, sleeping.”

  They keep walking. Celia doesn’t say anything.

  “It’s because of that,” Andrew says, after a few seconds, “that he’ll always have an advantage on me. You know what I was just remembering? How that whole summer we stayed in pensiones, and usually there were two single beds in the rooms we were given. And in the morning, Nathan always insisted we unmake the bed we hadn’t slept in. And I always assumed, and he always assumed, that the unslept-in bed was mine.”

  They are in the garden now. Celia looks at the tilled earth beneath her feet, raw end-of-season, everything picked. No sign of Nathan.

  “Oh, Celia,” Andrew says, “this is mean of me.”

  “What?”

  “It’s cruel of me. It must make you feel like you aren’t a part of it. But you are. You’re very dear to us both.”

  “You sound like I’m your adopted child,” Celia says.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to. It’s just—well, I think you should know. Nathan’s always thought you were in love with him on some level, and that’s why you’ve stuck around with us.”

  Celia looks up at him, startled, and her eyes narrow. She tells herself that she knows what he is doing. He is trying to get her on his side. Nothing unusual. Even so, the revelation, which is no revelation at all, hits her hard, in the stomach.

  She looks away from him. “Why I’ve stuck around with you?” she says. “I’ve stuck around with you because I love you both. I’m devoted to you both. But if Nathan thinks I’ve just been panting after him all these years, he’s flattering himself.”

  Andrew laughs, and she curses the slight timbre of resentment in her voice. She does not want to satisfy him by seeming recriminating. Yet she is thinking, why, after all? And she thinks, has it finally arrived, the day when she must confront herself? It has almost arrived many times, and there has always been a reprieve.

  “He’s just an egotist, I guess,” Andrew says. “I mean, he thinks of himself as being like those thousand-dollar speakers of his parents. You have to be so careful around him, though God knows he’s willing to hurt everyone else.” He smiles affectionately. “Poor Nathan,” he says. “You know where he is now? He’s in his parents’ bedroom, all curled up like a little kid, and he’s just lying there, on that huge bed. That’s where he goes when he feels small; somewhere where he is small.”

  They are at the front door now. Andrew turns and looks down at Celia, and suddenly he seems much taller than he did an hour ago. “Would you mind terribly if I went in to him for a little while?” he asks. “Just lie there with him? You can wait in the library, or by the pool. We’ll all be ready to leave on the six forty-five.”

  Celia wraps her arms around her chest “Sure,” she says. “Fine.” She does not look at Andrew, but at the maple trees, the vines twining up the sides of the house, the fragrant bunches of wisteria.

  “I’ll see you soon, then,” Andrew says. Then there is the sound of his footsteps, the sound of the screen door as it slaps the house.

  It is, Celia realizes, a kind of reprieve to be forgotten.

  One night, late in the spring of senior year when they were both drunk on big, deceptive rum-and-fruit concoctions, Nathan told Celia the story of the first time he and Andrew slept together. He told it more cheerfully, and he did not mention the unused bed, though he dwelled with loving attention on the painful conversations they had had that night at dinner. “Our feet touched once,” Nathan said, “and we both sort of jumped, as if we had given each other an electric shock. The second time our feet touched we just sort of left them there. I kept thinking, If he says anything, I could just say I thought I was resting my foot against a part of the table.” And of course, Nathan wasn’t asleep either. He remembered the boys next door singing “Superfreak,” and the exact words with which the one comforted the other: “Hey, man, chill out, don’t freak.”

  “The thing was,” Nathan said, “I had Andrew convinced that I was Mr. Suave, very experienced. And it’s true, I was more experienced than he was, but I was a nervous wreck anyway. I mean, being the seducer is a very different thing from knowing how to be seduced. Anyway, when we were alone in the room, I just decided to be brave. So I walked over to Andrew—he was unbuttoning his shirt—and I said, ‘Why don’t you let me do that?’ He just froze. And then I kissed him.”

  He smiled. Celia knew better than to believe his version, recognizing even then that there were situations in which Nathan had to change the truth, to fit an image of himself which was just a bit wrong, a size too small or too large. After all, Andrew’s affair with Joel Miller was at its apex. Nathan was terribly jealous, and it was important to him to prove himself to Celia, since she provided the only link between them. All that year Celia had been insisting that she wanted time to herself, time to pursue her own social life, but almost from the first day Andrew and Nathan wouldn’t leave her alone. They wanted her to take sides in the fight they were having. The argument she had witnessed at the Villa d’Este, it seemed, had continued and festered after she left them. They bickered and lashed out at each other until finally, in Paris, Andrew packed his backpack in a fury and, in the middle of the night, stormed out of their little room in the Latin Quarter and boarded a train for Salzburg. By the time he arrived his anger had cooled, and he got on another train back to Paris, but when he got back to their auberge, Nathan had checked out and left no forwarding address.

  Andrew was seized with panic, for now he was alone, absolutely alone, and there was no way he could find Nathan unless they happened upon each other by chance. Their itinerary was vague, but they had more or less planned to go to Cannes, so Andrew went there, and for two days walked the town tirelessly, scanning the streets and beaches for Nathan, planning what he’d say when he saw him, how aloof and distant he’d be and how he’d draw forgiveness from him. He found it hard to sleep alone again, and he couldn’t get out of his nostrils that clean smell of soap and cologne and Nathan. But he never found Nathan in Cannes, or anywhere else in Europe. He continued travelling. By the time he got back to the States, his longing had hardened into something like hatred. And Nathan was angry, too. It was hard to say, after all, who had abandoned whom first, who was to blame for what had happened.

  At school they could hardly talk to each other, and so they talked to Celia instead, each giving her his version of what happened in Paris, and trying to win her over to his side. It was the only time, Celia reflected, that two men were rivals for her affections.

  She told herself that her position was difficult. At first she had to make sure that Nathan never saw her with Andrew, or vice versa; they insisted on pumping her for information about one another. Then she began to arrange accidental meetings between them; they couldn’t help but talk to each other—silence would have seemed too stilted a response, and they both prided
themselves on their originality. Finally Andrew called Celia at three o’clock one morning, in tears; she couldn’t understand what he was saying, but she managed to get him to tell her where he was, and she put on her coat and trudged out after him. It was just beginning to feel wintry out, and the sky was fringed with blue, as if it were dawn or dusk, and not the middle of the night; and since it was Sunday morning, and just after midterms, there were a few drunk football players still out, tromping around and causing trouble. Celia found Andrew sitting on the post of an old fence, wrapped in a coat he had bought at the Salvation Army, inert. She walked him back to her room, brewed some tea, and sat down in front of him, settling her still-gloved hands comfortably on his knees.

  “Now,” she said, “what’s wrong?”

  He started crying almost immediately; she let him cry, hugging him, until his body shivered and his teeth chattered, and, stuttering, he said exactly what she expected him to say: “He doesn’t want me. And I love him.”

  Celia tracked Nathan down the next day, in the library. As soon as she mentioned Andrew’s name, he shushed her, and pointed to his roommate—a tall young man smoking a pipe a few feet away—and hurried her off to a nearby cubicle. There he explained that he had had absolutely enough of Andrew’s impulsiveness and silliness. To first simply run away in the middle of the night, stranding Nathan in Paris, and now, after two months, to show up suddenly in his room—thank God his roommate hadn’t been home!—and start blubbering about not wanting to keep up the charade, about wanting to talk, about feeling hurt and intimidated by Nathan’s behavior toward him in Paris. All of this, naturally, was too much, considering it was Andrew who had all but abandoned Nathan, and to cap it off, he had to be loud about it. So Nathan told him to get out, it was over, he was making a mountain out of a molehill. Of course, even then, sitting in the library cubicle, Celia knew better than to take Nathan’s version of things at face value. She realized Nathan was angry, but also, that he was frightened by Andrew’s willingness to make a passionate display over matters Nathan felt best left in the bedroom. Where Nathan’s skill lay in small, private insults, Andrew’s great tactic was, and would always be, display. Probably Nathan realized that his friend was, as Celia would put it, about to shoot out of the closet like a cannonball, and this was more than his ingrained sense of propriety would allow him to accept. Fear lay behind that sense of propriety. Little Andrew, for all his innocence, was turning out to be the one thing Nathan never could be: He was turning out to be brave. So Nathan chose not to forgive Andrew his actions in Paris, and dropped him.

  Shortly thereafter, people started seeing Andrew in the company of the famous activist, Joel Miller, and the rest was fairly predictable. Joel Miller had done it before, with other apparently uncorruptible young men, and they always emerged from the affairs card-carrying members of the lavender left. Ostensibly, Nathan shouldn’t have cared, but Celia could see what was in his eyes when he spied Andrew and Joel eating together in a dining hall. Nathan couldn’t stay silent very long about it. “What’s he doing spending so much time with that Joel Miller person?” he’d say to Celia, figuring she’d leak information, but Celia made it a new policy not to talk about Andrew with Nathan, or vice versa. Soon the affair became a public phenomenon, and Nathan’s discomfort increased. He slunk away whenever he saw them, and usually left the parties they attended together. (“They walk into the room like they’re the football captain and the homecoming queen,” he’d tell Celia.) As for Andrew, he was in bliss; Joel was a genius; he wanted to marry Joel. Celia could afford to be happy for him, because she had her hands full taking care of Nathan, who showed up at her door at all hours. She pitied Nathan; he could never admit that he was terribly intimidated by Joel Miller, or that he might have loved Andrew. Still, she had him. He was there all the time—at her door, waiting for her in the dining hall, in the library. She controlled what he and Andrew heard about one another, and she, of course, knew everything about both of them. One night she would listen to Nathan’s anxieties, his claims to misery and loneliness; the next night, to Andrew’s praises of the wonders of love, the transcendence of gender roles, and the lovely, dark hair which curled over Joel Miller’s shoulder blades.

  It did not occur to Celia until a long time later—when she was able to gain some perspective on that year, in which things had been the most intense between them—that her happiness with Nathan and Andrew depended on Nathan and Andrew being unhappy with each other.

  Around dusk, Nathan and Andrew emerge from the house. They are dressed in different clothes from the ones they were wearing earlier, and they are talking animatedly, eagerly, occasionally laughing. As soon as she sees them, Celia closes her eyes. She is lying by the pool, the copy of Army Slave open on her lap, and all around her fireflies are exploding with light, crickets screeching. “Come on, Celia, get ready to go,” Nathan says. She opens her eyes and he is leaning over her, smiling. “My parents may be back any second, and I don’t want to be here when they arrive.” He pats her knee, and heads back to the patio, where Andrew is waiting. “Oh,” he says, turning around, “and don’t forget to bring the magazine.” She lifts up her head, but in the dusk light, she can just barely make out their faces. “I guess you’re feeling better,” she says.

  “Yes,” Nathan says. “Much better.”

  She nods, and gets up to pack her things. It is about a ten-minute walk to the train station, and when they get there, the platform is already full of tired-looking people in shorts, all yawning and opening up their newspapers. When the train pulls in, it’s already crowded; there are no sets of three seats together. Andrew sits with Celia, and Nathan sits alone, two rows behind them, but the arrangement is entirely for her benefit. Something has happened between Nathan and Andrew this afternoon: They appear to have forgiven each other. Why else would they be thinking about her?

  She lies back, watches the pleasurable journey from the scum of Penn Station to the beautiful Hamptons run backward; now they are in the famous suburbs of the Guyland (as Nathan calls it), now in the nether regions of Queens. When they pass the exact border between New York City and the rest of the world, Nathan cannot resist walking up to point it out to them.

  Then they are in the tunnel under the East River, and under the famous city where they spend their lives.

  They get off the train. Penn Station has no air-conditioning, and is packed with people. Celia wipes the sweat off her brow, and rearranges her bags between her legs. She will take the Broadway local to the Upper West Side, while Nathan and Andrew must walk across town to catch the East Side subway, and ostensibly ride it in opposite directions. She has no doubt but that they will spend tonight, and perhaps tomorrow night, together; and she wonders if they will eat dinner out, see a movie, talk about her, and shake their heads. It will last a few days; then, she is confident, they will fight. One of them will call her, or both of them will call her. Or perhaps they will decide to move in together, and never call her again.

  “I’ve got to catch my train,” Celia says, when it becomes clear that they’re not going to invite her out with them. She offers them each her cheek to kiss as if to give her blessing. They look at her a little awkwardly, a little guiltily, and she can’t believe they’re acting guilty now, when it’s been like this for so many years between them. Besides, there really isn’t anything anyone can apologize for. Celia begins to walk away, and Nathan calls out her name. She turns, and he is next to her, a big smile plastered on his face. “You know,” he says, “you’re wonderful. When I write my book, I’m dedicating it to you.”

  She smiles back, and laughs. He said the same thing the day she left them at Termini station in Rome and boarded a train for Calais. All that night the couchette car in which she slept was added on and taken off of other strings of lit cars, passed among the major trains and in this way, like a changeling infant, carried singly to the coast. She shared a cabin with two Englishwomen on their way back from holiday and a Swiss man who was going to Liverpoo
l to buy a spare part for his car. Like college roommates, the four of them lay in their bunk beds and talked late into the night. The wheels rumbled against the tracks, the train moved on; every minute she was closer to England. Then she fell asleep, wondering to herself what kind of book Nathan could ever possibly write.

  A Note on the Author

  David Leavitt’s books include the novels The Lost Language of Cranes, While England Sleeps (finalist for the Los Angeles Times Fiction Award), The Body of Jonah Boyd, The Indian Clerk (finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and shortlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award) and The Two Hotel Francforts. He is also the author of two nonfiction works, The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer and Florence, A Delicate Case. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Harper’s, Vogue, and The Paris Review, among other publications. He lives in Gainesville, Florida, where he is professor of English at the University of Florida and edits the literary magazine Subtropics.

  MORE FROM DAVID LEAVITT

  “One of the major voices of contemporary fiction.” —The Guardian

  While England Sleeps

  “Extraordinary . . . Deeply moving.” —People

  “A sprawling novel of star-crossed lovers . . .

  [Leavitt is] an extremely graceful novelist.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-62040-708-0

  eISBN: 978-1-62040-701-1

  The Lost Language of Cranes

  “A tour de force.” —The New York Times

  “Brilliant, wise . . . It would be hard to overpraise this book.” —Vogue

  Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-62040-702-8