A Place I've Never Been

by David Leavitt

  “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.”

  Meanwhile, Mr. Theodorus—jolly, warm, wonderful Mr. Theodorus, with his black suits, his little mustache, his slicked-back hair; Spiro Theodorus, brother of the maître d’ at the Greek Tycoon’s, mixer of the best daiquiris and joy of group night—was in a coma a few floors below. Arthur and Mrs. Theodorus met to drink coffee in the cafeteria with the tired-out residents. They shook their heads, and sometimes they wept, before returning to the ordeal, the vigil. Mrs. Theodorus told Arthur that her champion bitch Alicia was dying as well, of canine degenerative myelopathy; when she wasn’t with Spiro she was at the animal hospital, stroking Alicia and feeding her small pieces of boiled chicken through the slats in her cage. She talked often, while she drank her coffee, about Alicia’s coat. It was the best coat in the country, she said. Walking out of the cafeteria, Mrs. Theodorus said she honestly did not know which was going to hurt more: the death of her husband or that of her dog. They parted at the third floor. Riding back to the burn unit, Arthur rallied to face his own terrible dilemma of which-was-worse: the possibility that Claire had died without him versus the probability that she was still alive.

  Arthur and Mrs. Theodorus now return to the hospital only once a month, for spouse night. Olivia, the social worker, insists that they are welcome to continue coming to group as long as they want. And Arthur does want to come. He depends on the group not only for continuity but because toward the end it constituted the very center of Claire’s life; in some ways the members were more important to her than he was, or the children. Still, he is afraid of becoming like Mrs. Jaroslavsky, who attends spouse night faithfully even now, a year after Mr. Jaroslavsky’s passing. Because of Mrs. Jaroslavsky, the big conference table is covered each spouse night with a pink tablecloth and platters of poppy-seed cake, chocolate cake, pudding cake, blueberry pie. Each month there is an excuse, because each month brings dark news, death and sudden spasms of hope in equal quantity. This week, Mrs. Jaroslavsky explains, the cakes are because Christa is having her six-month interim X rays, and she wants to help. “Everyone does what they can,” she says to Christa.

  Across the room, Christa—freckled arms, a long sandy braid, and a spigot in her arm for the chemotherapy to be poured into—looks away from the food, biting the thumbnail of one of her hands, while Chuck, her husband, holds the other. They are both professional ski instructors but have been living in this snowless climate since the illness, hand-to-mouth. Kitty Mitsui got Chuck a job busing dishes at Beefsteak Hirosha’s, but that hardly scratches the surface of the bills.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Jaroslavsky,” Chuck says now, smiling faintly, then turning again to make sure Christa isn’t going to cry.

  “Well, you’re welcome,” Mrs. Jaroslavsky says. “You know I do what I can. And if you need anything else—anything cooked, anything cleaned—don’t hesitate to ask.”

  She sits back, satisfied, in her chair, and takes out her knitting. She is a large, amiable-looking woman with red cheeks and hair, and oddly, the odor that dominates the room tonight is not that of the food, but the faint, sickly-sweet, waxy perfume of her lips. Arthur and Mrs. Theodorus, taking off their coats, know, as some do not, that underneath the pink cloth is a table stained with cigarette burns, and pale, slightly swollen lesions where coffee cups have leaked, and chicken-scratched nicks in the wood where hands have idly ground pencils or scissor points or the ends of ballpoint pens. The carpet is pale yellow and worn in places, and above the table is a poster, its corners worn through with pinprickings, of a cat clinging to a chinning bar. “We all have days like this,” the poster says.

  It is a hard room for the healthy; it looks like death. But the members of the group don’t seem to notice, much less mind it. When she came home from group those first few Thursday nights, in fact, her tires skidding on the gravel, Arthur sometimes asked Claire what the room was like, and she said, “Oh, you know. Just a room.” This was before Arthur stopped repressing and started going to spouse night. After taking off her coat, Claire went straight out onto the porch and smoked a cigarette, and Arthur stood by the kitchen window, watching her as she blew rings into the night. She stared at the sky, at the stars, and that was how Arthur knew the group was changing her life. She looked exhilarated, like a girl dropped off from a date during which a boy she could not care less about has told her that he loves her.

  Arthur still cannot quite believe, looking at her this spouse night, that he and Mrs. Theodorus have become lovers. It seems a most unlikely thing for them to be doing, not three months after their loved ones’ deaths. Still, even now, staring at her across the room, he is filled with the panicked
desire for Eva that has characterized this affair since it began. For the first time in his life Arthur feels lust, insatiable lust, and apparently Eva feels it too. They make love wildly, whispering obscene phrases in each other’s ears, howling with pleasure. He has scratch marks on his back from Eva’s long nails. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, they get up and sit in her kitchen and eat giant pieces of the chocolate cream pie and Black Forest cake that Mr. Theodorus’s brother sends over from his restaurant. The whipped cream dots their noses and chins. Once they spread it on each other and licked it off, which Arthur had read about people doing in Penthouse; it was Eva’s idea, however.

  She is not the sort of woman Arthur ever imagined when he imagined lust. Tall, with big breasts, high hips, a heavy behind, she has steel-gray hair which she wears piled on her head, stuck randomly with bobby pins. Her face is rubbery and slightly squashed-looking. Her clothes are uniformly stretchy; they smell of dog. And still, Arthur feels for her an attraction stronger than any he has felt for any woman in his life, even Claire. He wonders if this is grief, insatiable grief, masquerading as lust to trick him, or spare him something. Sundays he lies all day in Eva’s bed, reading the copies of Dog World and Dog Fancy that cover the floor. He can identify any breed now, from Chinese crested to owczarek nizinny, from Jack Russell terrier to bichon frise. She has infected him with her expertise.

  And now Mrs. Theodorus gently nudges him, points to Mrs. Jaroslavsky, who sits across the table. She knits. He sees stitches being counted and measured in the raising of eyebrows, the slight parting of lips. He once read that all human gestures, if filmed in slow motion, can be shown to be coordinated with sounds, and he is trying to see if Mrs. Jaroslavsky’s eyes and lips are indeed pursing and opening to the calm voice of Olivia, the social worker. Olivia’s voice is like water, and so is her bluish hair, which falls down her back in an effortless ponytail.

  Christa, tears in her eyes, tells the group, “If he makes me wait three hours again tomorrow, I don’t know—I’ll just give up.” She shakes her head. “I’m ready to give up,” she says. “I stare at the stupid fish tank. I read Highlights for Children. Sometimes I just want to say to hell with it.”

  Collectively, the members of the group have spent close to three of the past ten years in doctors’ waiting rooms. Cheerily, Bud Israeloff reminds everyone of this statistic, and the group responds with a low murmur of laughter. Only the spouses are silent. They sit next to their sick beloved, clutching hands, looking worriedly across the table to see whose husbands and wives are worse off than theirs.

  “We all understand, Christa,” Kitty Mitsui says. “You know what happened to me once? I had to wait two hours in the waiting room, and then I had to wait an hour and a half in the examining room for the doctor, and then I had to wait another hour for them to take my blood. So when I heard the B.R. finally coming I pulled the sheet up over my face and pretended I was dead. It gave him a shock, I’ll tell you.”

  “What’s a B.R.?” a new wife asks sheepishly.

  “That’s just group talk, honey,” responds a more experienced spouse. “It means ‘bastard resident.’ ”

  Olivia does not like to encourage this particular subject. “Let’s talk about what to do, practically, to allay waiting anxiety,” she says. “How can we help Christa get through tomorrow?”

  “One of us could go with her,” Kitty Mitsui says. “Christa, do you play Scrabble?”

  “I don’t know,” Christa says.

  “I could do it,” Kitty says. “I’ve got the day off. I’ll sit with you. I’ll bring my portable Scrabble set. We’ll play Scrabble, and when we get bored with that, we’ll make origami animals. I know it’s not much, but it’s better than the fish tank.”

  “Waiting to hear if I’m going to live or not, if I can have a baby,” Christa says, “and they keep me in the waiting room. Christ, my life is on the line here and they make me wait.”

  Under the table, Eva’s hand takes Arthur’s. He folds the note she has given him into quarters, then furtively reads it.

  “Have you been putting the oil in her dinner?” Eva has written. “You need to for her coat.”

  It is decided. Kitty will go with Christa and Chuck to Christa’s doctor’s office tomorrow. She’ll bring her portable Scrabble set. And now, that matter concluded, Iris Pearlstein takes the floor and says, “If no one minds, I have something I’d like to address, and it’s this food. It’s hard enough for me to come here without it looking like I’m at a bar mitzvah.”

  For once Mrs. Jaroslavsky stares up from her knitting. “What?” she says.

  “This food, this food,” Iris says, and waves at it. “It makes me sick, having to stare at it all night.”

  “I just wanted to make things a little more cheerful,” Mrs. Jaroslavsky says, her mouth trembling. She puts down her knitting.

  “Oh, who’re you kidding, Doris? You want to make it more pleasant, but I’m sorry, there’s nothing nice about any of this.” She looks at her husband, Joe, broken by recent radiation, dozing next to her, and puts her hand on her forehead. “Christ,” she says, lighting a cigarette, “we don’t want to stare at fucking cake.”

  Arthur wonders if Mrs. Jaroslavsky is going to cry. But she holds her own. “Now just one minute, Iris,” she says. “Don’t think any of this is easy for me. When Morry was in the hospital, I was up every night, I was half crazy. What was I supposed to do? So I baked. That food was the fruit of suffering for my dying husband. You know how it was. I kept thinking that maybe if I just keep baking it’ll keep the clock ticking, thinking, God, for one more cake, give him six months.” She frowns. “Well, God defaulted. Now Morry’s gone, and my freezers are stuffed. The truth is I bake for all of you the way I baked for him. There’s nothing nice about it.”

  She resumes her knitting. Iris Pearlstein takes out a Kleenex to blow her nose. Once again Mrs. Theodorus takes Arthur’s hand under the table. Mrs. Jaroslavsky looks vibrant.

  “Ask if you can take home the poppy-seed,” Arthur reads when he unfolds Eva’s note.

  Arthur got the puppy when Mrs. Theodorus offered the group a discount on her new litter. “A pet can really cheer you up,” she explained at spouse night. “The human-animal bond is so important in this stressful world.”

  After that, Arthur approached Mrs. Theodorus and said, “I might be interested in a puppy. Since Claire passed on—”

  “I know, I know,” she said. “Come tomorrow, in the afternoon.”

  He drove through a rainstorm. Mrs. Theodorus lived in a small, sleek, cobalt-blue house in a neighborhood where the streets flounced into cul-de-sacs and children played capture the flag with unusual viciousness. The puppies stared up at him from their kitchen enclosure, mewing and rubbing against one another, vying for his attention. “This little girl is the one for you,” Mrs. Theodorus said, and he was amazed that she could tell them apart. “Look at this.” She pried the puppy’s mouth open, revealing young fangs.

  “Looks okay,” Arthur said.

  “Can’t you tell?” said Mrs. Theodorus. “Her bite’s off. She’ll never show. A pity, because her coat’s really good, almost as good as Alicia’s was, and she’s got the best bone structure of any of them.”

  “We had a dog once, a Yorkie,” Arthur said. “She died when my oldest daughter was twelve. Just went to sleep and never woke up.”

  “Oh, I can’t talk about the death of dogs right now,” Mrs. Theodorus said.

  He took the puppy home with him that day. Claire had been gone a week, and still he was finding things he could not bear—today it was a half-finished New York Times acrostic puzzle. It was three weeks old. Already her handwriting was shaky. Did she have any idea then, he wondered, that the rash creeping over her skin, that unbearable itchy rash, was going to kill her? He certainly didn’t. You don’t die from a rash. A rash would have been embarrassing to bring up in group, where hematomas and bone loss were the norm. Claire’s bane, her great guilt, in the group was that she was one o
f the healthier ones, but she hoped that meant she could help. “What the group does—what we mostly do—is figure out how to help each other,” Arthur remembered Claire saying, as the two of them sat at the kitchen table, drinking coffee. She had just come back from her second night at group. The third night she didn’t come back until four in the morning, and he went half mad with panic. “We went to the Greek Tycoon’s,” she explained blithely. “Mr. Theodorus bought us all drinks.”

  The fourth night was spouse night, and he went.

  He sat down at the kitchen table with the acrostic and tried to finish it; one of the clues Claire hadn’t been able to get was a river that ran through the Dolomites, and he became obsessed with figuring it out, but as soon as he saw how thick and strong his own handwriting looked in comparison with the jagged, frail letters of Claire’s decline, he laid his head down on the newsprint and wept. The puppy watched him from the corner. When he got up, he used Claire’s last puzzle to line her pen.

  Just before spouse night ends, Kitty Mitsui announces that she and Mike Watkins and Ronni Holtzman will be going to Poncho’s for margaritas and nachos. “It’ll be a good time,” she says halfheartedly. But everyone knows she is fighting a losing battle. Since Mr. Theodorus died the after-group outings have lost their momentum.

  Then, in the group’s golden age, its giddy second childhood, in the reign of Mr. Theodorus, there was wild revelry, screaming laughter in the hospital parking lot, until finally Mrs. Leon, a Mormon, brought up her moral objections at group.