A Place I've Never Been

by David Leavitt

  The next few weeks were thorny with events. Nathan bought a new sofa, had his place recarpeted, threw several small dinners. Then it was time for Lizzie Fischman’s birthday party—one of the few annual events in our lives. We had known Lizzie since college—she was a tragic, trying sort of person, the sort who carries with her a constant aura of fatedness, of doom. So many bad things happen to Lizzie you can’t help but wonder, after a while, if she doesn’t hold out a beacon for disaster. This year alone, she was in a taxi that got hit by a bus; then she was mugged in the subway by a man who called her an “ugly dyke bitch”; then she started feeling sick all the time, and no one could figure out what was wrong, until it was revealed that her building’s heating system was leaking small quantities of carbon monoxide into her awful little apartment. The tenants sued, and in the course of the suit, Lizzie, exposed as an illegal subletter, was evicted. She now lived with her father in one half of a two-family house in Plainfield, New Jersey, because she couldn’t find another apartment she could afford. (Her job, incidentally, in addition to being wretchedly low-paying, is one of the dreariest I know of: proofreading accounting textbooks in an office on Forty-second Street.)

  Anyway, each year Lizzie threw a big birthday party for herself in her father’s house in Plainfield, and we all went, her friends, because of course we couldn’t bear to disappoint her and add ourselves to her roster of worldwide enemies. It was invariably a miserable party—everyone drunk on bourbon, and Lizzie, eager to re-create the slumber parties of her childhood, dancing around in pink pajamas with feet. We were making s’mores over the gas stove—shoving the chocolate bars and the graham crackers onto fondue forks rather than old sticks—and Beach Blanket Bingo was playing on the VCR and no one was having a good time, particularly Nathan, who was overdressed in a beige Giorgio Armani linen suit he’d bought in Italy, and was standing in the corner idly pressing his neck, feeling for swollen lymph nodes. Lizzie’s circle dwindled each year, as her friends moved on, or found ways to get out of it. This year eight of us had made it to the party, plus a newcomer from Lizzie’s office, a very fat girl with very red nails named Dorrie Friedman, who, in spite of her heaviness, was what my mother would have called dainty. She ate a lot, but unless you were observant, you’d never have noticed it. The image of the fat person stuffing food into her face is mythic: I know from experience, when fat you eat slowly, chew methodically, in order not to draw attention to your mouth. Over the course of an hour I watched Dorrie Friedman put away six of those s’mores with a tidiness worthy of Emily Post, I watched her dab her cheek with her napkin after each bite, and I understood: This was shame, but also, in some peculiar way, this was innocence. A state to envy.

  There is a point in Lizzie’s parties when she invariably suggests we play Deprivation, a game that had been terribly popular among our crowd in college. The way you play it is you sit in a big circle, and everyone is given ten pennies. (In this case the pennies were unceremoniously taken from a huge bowl that sat on top of Lizzie’s mother’s refrigerator, and that she had upended on the linoleum floor—no doubt a long-contemplated act of desecration.) You go around the circle, and each person announces something he or she has never done, or a place they’ve never been—“I’ve never been to Borneo” is a good example—and then everyone who has been to Borneo is obliged to throw you a penny. Needless to say, especially in college, the game degenerates rather quickly to matters of sex and drugs.

  I remembered the first time I ever played Deprivation, my sophomore year, I had been reading Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. Everything in our lives seemed a question of innocence and experience back then, so this seemed appropriate. There was a tacit assumption among my friends that “experience”—by that term we meant, I think, almost exclusively sex and drugs—was something you strove to get as much of as you could, that innocence, for all the praise it received in literature, was a state so essentially tedious that those of us still stuck in it deserved the childish recompense of shiny new pennies. (None of us, of course, imagining that five years from now the “experiences” we urged on one another might spread a murderous germ, that five years from now some of our friends, still in their youth, would be lost. Youth! You were supposed to sow your wild oats, weren’t you? Those of us who didn’t—we were the ones who failed, weren’t we?)

  One problem with Deprivation is that the older you get, the less interesting it becomes; every year, it seemed, my friends had fewer gaps in their lives to confess, and as our embarrassments began to stack up on the positive side, it was what we had done that was titillating. Indeed, Nick Walsh, who was to Lizzie what Nathan was to me, complained as the game began, “I can’t play this. There’s nothing I haven’t done.” But Lizzie, who has a naive faith in ritual, merely smiled and said, “Oh come on, Nick. No one’s done everything. For instance, you could say, ‘I’ve never been to Togo,’ or ‘I’ve never been made love to simultaneously by twelve Arab boys in a back alley on Mott Street.’ ”

  “Well, Lizzie,” Nick said, “it is true that I’ve never been to Togo.” His leering smile surveyed the circle, and of course, there was someone there—Gracie Wong, I think—who had, in fact, been to Togo.

  The next person in the circle was Nathan. He’s never liked this game, but he also plays it more cleverly than anyone. “Hmm,” he said, stroking his chin as if there were a beard there, “let’s see … Ah, I’ve got it. I’ve never had sex with anyone in this group.” He smiled boldly, and everyone laughed—everyone, that is, except for me and Bill Darlington, and Lizzie herself—all three of us now, for the wretched experiments of our early youth, obliged to throw Nathan a penny.

  Next was Dorrie Friedman’s turn, which I had been dreading. She sat on the floor, her legs crossed under her, her very fat fingers intertwined, and said, “Hmm … Something I’ve never done. Well—I’ve never ridden a bicycle.”

  An awful silence greeted this confession, and then a tinkling sound, like wind chimes, as the pennies flew. “Gee,” Dorrie Friedman said, “I won big that time.” I couldn’t tell if she was genuinely pleased.

  And as the game went on, we settled, all of us, into more or less parallel states of innocence and experience, except for Lizzie and Nick, whose piles had rapidly dwindled, and Dorrie Friedman, who, it seemed, by virtue of lifelong fatness, had done nearly nothing. She had never been to Europe; she had never swum; she had never played tennis; she had never skied; she had never been on a boat. Even someone else’s turn could be an awful moment for Dorrie, as when Nick said, “I’ve never had a vaginal orgasm.” But fortunately, there, she did throw in her penny. I was relieved; I don’t think I could have stood it if she hadn’t.

  After a while, in an effort not to look at Dorrie and her immense pile of pennies, we all started trying to trip up Lizzie and Nick, whose respective caches of sexual experience seemed limitless. “I’ve never had sex in my parents’ bed,” I offered. The pennies flew. “I’ve never had sex under a dry-docked boat.” “I’ve never had sex with more than one other person.” “Two other people.” “Three other people.” By then Lizzie was out of pennies, and declared the game over.

  “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 kno
wing 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.

  Spouse Night

  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 wo
men 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.