A Place I've Never Been

by David Leavitt

  Contents

  A Place I’ve Never Been

  Spouse Night

  My Marriage to Vengeance

  Ayor

  Gravity

  Houses

  When You Grow to Adultery

  I See London, I See France

  Chips Is Here

  Roads to Rome

  By the Same Author

  A Place I’ve Never Been

  I had known Nathan for years—too many years, since we were in college—so when he went to Europe I wasn’t sure how I’d survive it; he was my best friend, after all, my constant companion at Sunday afternoon double bills at the Thalia, my ever-present source of consolation and conversation. Still, such a turn can prove to be a blessing in disguise. It threw me off at first, his not being there—I had no one to watch Jeopardy! with, or talk to on the phone late at night—but then, gradually, I got over it, and I realized that maybe it was a good thing after all, that maybe now, with Nathan gone, I would be forced to go out into the world more, make new friends, maybe even find a boyfriend. And I had started: I lost weight, I went shopping. I was at Bloomingdale’s one day on my lunch hour when a very skinny black woman with a French accent asked me if I’d like to have a makeover. I had always run away from such things, but this time, before I had a chance, this woman put her long hands on my cheeks and looked into my face—not my eyes, my face—and said, “You’re really beautiful. You know that?” And I absolutely couldn’t answer. After she was through with me I didn’t even know what I looked like, but everyone at my office was amazed. “Celia,” they said, “you look great. What happened?” I smiled, wondering if I’d be allowed to go back every day for a makeover, if I offered to pay.

  There was even some interest from a man—a guy named Roy who works downstairs, in contracts—and I was feeling pretty good about myself again, when the phone rang, and it was Nathan. At first I thought he must have been calling me from some European capital, but he said no, he was back in New York. “Celia,” he said, “I have to see you. Something awful has happened.”

  Hearing those words, I pitched over—I assumed the worst. (And why not? He had been assuming the worst for over a year.) But he said, “No, no, I’m fine. I’m perfectly healthy. It’s my apartment. Oh, Celia, it’s awful. Could you come over?”

  “Were you broken into?” I asked.

  “I might as well have been!”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll come over after work.”

  “I just got back last night. This is too much.”

  “I’ll be there by six, Nathan.”

  “Thank you,” he said, a little breathlessly, and hung up.

  I drummed my nails—newly painted by another skinny woman at Bloomingdale’s—against the black Formica of my desk, mostly to try out the sound. In truth I was a little happy he was back—I had missed him—and not at all surprised that he’d cut his trip short. Rich people are like that, I’ve observed; because they don’t have to buy bargain-basement tickets on weird charter airlines, they feel free to change their minds. Probably he just got bored tooting around Europe, missed his old life, missed Jeopardy!, his friends. Oh, Nathan! How could I tell him the Thalia had closed?

  I had to take several buses to get from my office to his neighborhood—a route I had once traversed almost daily, but which, since Nathan’s departure, I hadn’t had much occasion to take. Sitting on the Madison Avenue bus, I looked out the window at the rows of unaffordable shops, some still exactly what they’d been before, others boarded up, or reopened under new auspices—such a familiar panorama, unfolding, block by block, like a Chinese scroll I’d once been shown on a museum trip in junior high school. It was raining a little, and in the warm bus the long, unvarying progress of my love for Nathan seemed to unscroll as well—all the dinners and lunches and arguments, and all the trips back alone to my apartment, feeling ugly and fat, because Nathan had once again confirmed he could never love me the way he assured me he would someday love a man. How many hundreds of times I received that confirmation! And yet, somehow, it never occurred to me to give up that love I had nurtured for him since our earliest time together, that love which belonged to those days just past the brink of childhood, before I understood about Nathan, or rather, before Nathan understood about himself. So I persisted, and Nathan, in spite of his embarrassment at my occasional outbursts, continued to depend on me. I think he hoped that my feeling for him would one day transform itself into a more maternal kind of affection, that I would one day become the sort of woman who could tend to him without expecting anything in return. And that was, perhaps, a reasonable hope on his part, given my behavior. But: “If only,” he said to me once, “you didn’t have to act so crazy, Celia—” And that was how I realized I had to get out.

  I got off the bus and walked the block and a half to his building—its façade, I noted, like almost every façade in the neighborhood, blemished by a bit of scaffolding—and, standing in that vestibule where I’d stood so often, waited for him to buzz me up. I read for diversion the now familiar list of tenants’ names. The only difference today was that there were ragged ends of Scotch tape stuck around Nathan’s name; probably his subletter had put his own name over Nathan’s, and Nathan, returning, had torn the piece of paper off and left the ends of the tape. This didn’t seem like him, and it made me suspicious. He was a scrupulous person about such things.

  In due time—though slowly, for him—he let me in, and I walked the three flights of stairs to find him standing in the doorway, unshaven, looking as if he’d just gotten out of bed. He wasn’t wearing any shoes, and he’d gained some weight. Almost immediately he fell into me—that is the only way to describe it, his big body limp in my arms. “Oh, God,” he murmured into my hair, “am I glad to see you.”

  “Nathan,” I said. “Nathan.” And held him there. Usually he wriggled out of physical affection; kisses from him were little nips; hugs were tight, jerky chokeholds. Now he lay absolutely still, his arms slung under mine, and I tried to keep from gasping from the weight of him. But finally—reluctantly—he let go, and putting his hand on his forehead, gestured toward the open door. “Prepare yourself,” he said. “It’s worse than you can imagine.”

  He led me into the apartment. I have to admit, I was shocked by what I saw. Nathan, unlike me, is a chronically neat person, everything in its place, all his perfect furniture glowing, polished, every state-of-the-art fountain pen and pencil tip-up in the blue glass jar on his desk. Today, however, the place was in havoc—newspapers and old Entenmann’s cookie boxes spread over the floor, records piled on top of each other, inner sleeves crumpled behind the radiator, the blue glass jar overturned. The carpet was covered with dark mottlings, and a stench of old cigarette smoke and sweat and urine inhabited the place. “It gets worse,” he said. “Look at the kitchen.” A thick, yellowing layer of grease encrusted the stovetop. The bathroom was beyond the pale of my descriptive capacity for filth.

  “Those bastards,” Nathan was saying, shaking his head.

  “Hold on to the security deposit,” I suggested. “Make them pay for it.”

  He sat down on the sofa, the arms of which appeared to have been ground with cigarette butts, and shook his head. “There is no security deposit,” he moaned. “I didn’t take one because supposedly Denny was my friend, and this other guy—Hoop, or whatever his name was—he was Denny’s friend. And look at this!” From the coffee table he handed me a thick stack of utility and phone bills, all unopened. “The phone’s disconnected,” he said. “Two of the rent checks have bounced. The landlord’s about to evict me. I’m sure my credit rating has gone to hell. Jesus, why’d I do it?” He stood, marched into the corner, then turned again to face me. “You know what? I’m
going to call my father. I’m going to have him sic every one of his bastard lawyers on those assholes until they pay.”

  “Nathan,” I reminded, “they’re unemployed actors. They’re poor.”

  “Then let them rot in jail!” Nathan screamed. His voice was loud and sharp in my ears. It had been a long time since I’d had to witness another person’s misery, a long time since anyone had asked of me what Nathan was now asking of me: to take care, to resolve, to smooth. Nonetheless I rallied my energies. I stood. “Look,” I said. “I’m going to go out and buy sponges, Comet, Spic and Span, Fantastik, Windex. Everything. We’re going to clean this place up. We’re going to wash the sheets and shampoo the rug, we’re going to scrub the toilet until it shines. I promise you, by the time you go to sleep tonight, it’ll be what it was.”

  He stood silent in the corner.

  “Okay?” I said.

  “Okay.”

  “So you wait here,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

  “Thank you.”

  I picked up my purse and closed the door, thus, once again, saving him from disaster.

  But there were certain things I could not save Nathan from. A year ago, his ex-lover Martin had called him up and told him he had tested positive. This was the secret fact he had to live with every day of his life, the secret fact that had brought him to Xanax and Halcion, Darvon and Valium—all crude efforts to cut the fear firing through his blood, exploding like the tiny viral time bombs he believed were lying in wait, expertly planted. It was the day after he found out that he started talking about clearing out. He had no obligations—he had quit his job a few months before and was just doing freelance work anyway—and so, he reasoned, what was keeping him in New York? “I need to get away from all this,” he said, gesturing frantically at the air. I believe he really thought back then that by running away to somewhere where it was less well known, he might be able to escape the disease. This is something I’ve noticed: The men act as if they think the power of infection exists in direct proportion to its publicity, that in places far from New York City it can, in effect, be outrun. And who’s to say they are wrong, with all this talk about stress and the immune system? In Italy, in the countryside, Nathan seemed to feel he’d feel safer. And probably he was right; he would feel safer. Over there, away from the American cityscape with its streets full of gaunt sufferers, you’re able to forget the last ten years, you can remember how old the world is and how there was a time when sex wasn’t something likely to kill you.

  It should be pointed out that Nathan had no symptoms; he hadn’t even had the test for the virus itself. He refused to have it, saying he could think of no reason to give up at least the hope of freedom. Not that this made any difference, of course. The fear itself is a brutal enough enemy.

  But he gave up sex. No sex, he said, was safe enough for him. He bought a VCR and began to hoard pornographic videotapes. And I think he was having phone sex too, because once I picked up the phone in his apartment and before I could say hello, a husky-voiced man said, “You stud,” and then, when I said “Excuse me?” got flustered-sounding and hung up. Some people would probably count that as sex, but I’m not sure I would.

  All the time, meanwhile, he was frenzied. I could never guess what time he’d call—six in the morning, sometimes, he’d drag me from sleep. “I figured you’d still be up,” he’d say, which gave me a clue to how he was living. It got so bad that by the time he actually left I felt as if a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders. Not that I didn’t miss him, but from that day on my time was, miraculously, my own. Nathan is a terrible correspondent—I don’t think he’s sent me one postcard or letter in all the time we’ve known each other—and so for months my only news of him came through the phone. Strangers would call me, Germans, Italians, nervous-sounding young men who spoke bad English, who were staying at the YMCA, who were in New York for the first time and to whom he had given my number. I don’t think any of them actually wanted to see me; I think they just wanted me to tell them which bars were good and which subway lines were safe—information I happily dispensed. Of course, there was a time when I would have taken them on the subways, shown them around the bars, but I have thankfully passed out of that phase.

  And of course, as sex became more and more a possibility, then a likelihood once again in my life, I began to worry myself about the very things that were torturing Nathan. What should I say, say, to Roy in contracts, when he asked me to sleep with him, which I was fairly sure he was going to do within a lunch or two? Certainly I wanted to sleep with him. But did I dare ask him to use a condom? Did I dare even broach the subject? I was frightened that he might get furious, that he might overreact, and I considered saying nothing, taking my chances. Then again, for me in particular, it was a very big chance to take; I have a pattern of falling in love with men who at some point or other have fallen in love with other men. All trivial, selfish, this line of worry, I recognize now, but at that point Nathan was gone, and I had no one around to remind me of how high the stakes were for other people. I slipped back into a kind of women’s-magazine attitude toward the whole thing: for the moment, at least, I was safe, and I cherished that safety without even knowing it, I gloried in it. All my speculations were merely matters of prevention; that place where Nathan had been exiled was a place I’d never been. I am ashamed to admit it, but there was even a moment when I took a kind of vengeful pleasure in the whole matter—the years I had hardly slept with anyone, for which I had been taught to feel ashamed and freakish, I now wanted to rub in someone’s face: I was right and you were wrong! I wanted to say. I’m not proud of having had such thoughts, and I can only say, in my defense, that they passed quickly—but a strict accounting of all feelings, at this point, seems to me necessary. We have to be rigorous with ourselves these days.

  In any case, Nathan was back, and I didn’t dare think about myself. I went to the grocery store, I bought every cleaner I could find. And when I got back to the apartment he was still standing where he’d been standing, in the corner. “Nate,” I said, “here’s everything. Let’s get to work.”

  “Okay,” he said glumly, even though he is an ace cleaner, and we began.

  As we cleaned, the truth came out. This Denny to whom he’d sublet the apartment, Nathan had had a crush on. “To the extent that a crush is a relevant thing in my life anymore,” he said, “since God knows, there’s nothing to be done about it. But there you are. The libido doesn’t stop, the heart doesn’t stop, no matter how hard you try to make them.”

  None of this—especially that last part—was news to me, though Nathan had managed to overlook that aspect of our relationship for years. I had understood from the beginning about the skipping-over of the security payment, the laxness of the setup, because these were the sorts of things I would have willingly done for Nathan at a different time. I think he was privately so excited at the prospect of this virile young man, Denny, sleeping, and perhaps having sex, between his sheets, that he would have taken any number of risks to assure it. Crush: what an oddly appropriate word, considering what it makes you do to yourself. His apartment was, in a sense, the most Nathan could offer, and probably the most Denny would accept. I understood: You want to get as close as you can, even if it’s only at arm’s length. And when you come back, maybe, you want to breathe in the smell of the person you love loving someone else.

  Europe, he said, had been a failure. He had wandered, having dinner with old friends of his parents, visiting college acquaintances who were busy with exotic lives. He’d gone to bars, which was merely frustrating; there was nothing to be done. “What about safe sex?” I asked, and he said, “Celia, please. There is no such thing, as far as I’m concerned.” Once again this started a panicked thumping in my chest as I thought about Roy, and Nathan said, “It’s really true. Suppose something lands on you—you know what I’m saying—and there’s a microscopic cut in your skin. Bingo.”

  “Nathan, come on,” I said. “That sounds
crazy to me.”

  “Yeah?” he said. “Just wait till some ex-lover of yours calls you up with a little piece of news. Then see how you feel.”

  He returned to his furious scrubbing of the bathroom sink. I returned to my furious scrubbing of the tub. Somehow, even now, I’m always stuck with the worst of it.

  Finally we were done. The place looked okay—it didn’t smell anymore—though it was hardly what it had been. Some long-preserved pristineness was gone from the apartment, and both of us knew without saying a word that it would never be restored. We breathed in exhausted—no, not exhausted triumph. It was more like relief. We had beaten something back, yet again.

  My hands were red from detergents, my stomach and forehead sweaty. I went into the now-bearable bathroom and washed up, and then Nathan said he would take me out to dinner—my choice. And so we ended up, as we had a thousand other nights, sitting by the window at the Empire Szechuan down the block from his apartment, eating cold noodles with sesame sauce, which, when we had finished them, Nathan ordered more of. “God, how I’ve missed these,” he said, as he scooped the brown slimy noodles into his mouth. “You don’t know.”

  In between slurps he looked at me and said, “You look good, Celia. Have you lost weight?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact,” I said.

  “I thought so.”

  I looked back at him, trying to re-create the expression on the French woman’s face, and didn’t say anything, but as it turned out I didn’t need to. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said, “and you’re right. Twelve pounds since you last saw me. But I don’t care. I mean, you lose weight when you’re sick. At least this way, gaining weight, I know I don’t have it.”

  He continued eating. I looked outside. Past the plate-glass window that separated us from the sidewalk, crowds of people walked, young and old, good-looking and bad-looking, healthy and sick, some of them staring in at our food and our eating. Suddenly—urgently—I wanted to be out among them, I wanted to be walking in that crowd, pushed along in it, and not sitting here, locked into this tiny two-person table with Nathan. And yet I knew that escape was probably impossible. I looked once again at Nathan, eating happily, resigned, perhaps, to the fate of his apartment, and the knowledge that everything would work out, that this had, in fact, been merely a run-of-the-mill crisis. For the moment he was appeased, his hungry anxiety sated; for the moment. But who could guess what would set him off next? I steadied my chin on my palm, drank some water, watched Nathan eat like a happy child.