A Place I've Never Been

by David Leavitt

  Gravity

  Theo had a choice between a drug that would save his sight and a drug that would keep him alive, so he chose not to go blind. He stopped the pills and started the injections—these required the implantation of an unpleasant and painful catheter just above his heart—and within a few days the clouds in his eyes started to clear up; he could see again. He remembered going into New York City to a show with his mother, when he was twelve and didn’t want to admit he needed glasses. “Can you read that?” she’d shouted, pointing to a Broadway marquee, and when he’d squinted, making out only one or two letters, she’d taken off her own glasses—harlequins with tiny rhinestones in the corners—and shoved them onto his face. The world came into focus, and he gasped, astonished at the precision around the edges of things, the legibility, the hard, sharp, colorful landscape. Sylvia had to squint through Fiddler on the Roof that day, but for Theo, his face masked by his mother’s huge glasses, everything was as bright and vivid as a comic book. Even though people stared at him, and muttered things, Sylvia didn’t care; he could see.

  Because he was dying again, Theo moved back to his mother’s house in New Jersey. The DHPG injections she took in stride—she’d seen her own mother through her dying, after all. Four times a day, with the equanimity of a nurse, she cleaned out the plastic tube implanted in his chest, inserted a sterilized hypodermic, and slowly dripped the bag of sight-giving liquid into his veins. They endured this procedure silently, Sylvia sitting on the side of the hospital bed she’d rented for the duration of Theo’s stay—his life, he sometimes thought—watching reruns of I Love Lucy or the news, while he tried not to think about the hard piece of pipe stuck into him, even though it was a constant reminder of how wide and unswimmable the gulf was becoming between him and the ever-receding shoreline of the well. And Sylvia was intricately cheerful. Each day she urged him to go out with her somewhere—to the library, or the little museum with the dinosaur replicas he’d been fond of as a child—and when his thinness and the cane drew stares, she’d maneuver him around the people who were staring, determined to shield him from whatever they might say or do. It had been the same that afternoon so many years ago, when she’d pushed him through a lobbyful of curious and laughing faces, determined that nothing should interfere with the spectacle of his seeing. What a pair they must have made, a boy in ugly glasses and a mother daring the world to say a word about it!

  This warm, breezy afternoon in May they were shopping for revenge. “Your cousin Howard’s engagement party is next month,” Sylvia explained in the car. “A very nice girl from Livingston. I met her a few weeks ago, and really, she’s a superior person.”

  “I’m glad,” Theo said. “Congratulate Howie for me.”

  “Do you think you’ll be up to going to the party?”

  “I’m not sure. Would it be O.K. for me just to give him a gift?”

  “You already have. A lovely silver tray, if I say so myself. The thank-you note’s in the living room.”

  “Mom,” Theo said, “why do you always have to—”

  Sylvia honked her horn at a truck making an illegal left turn.

  “Better they should get something than no present at all, is what I say,” she said. “But now, the problem is, I have to give Howie something, to be from me, and it better be good. It better be very, very good.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t you remember that cheap little nothing Bibi gave you for your graduation? It was disgusting.”

  “I can’t remember what she gave me.”

  “Of course you can’t. It was a tacky pen-and-pencil set. Not even a real leather box. So naturally, it stands to reason that I have to get something truly spectacular for Howard’s engagement. Something that will make Bibi blanch. Anyway, I think I’ve found just the thing, but I need your advice.”

  “Advice? Well, when my old roommate Nick got married, I gave him a garlic press. It cost five dollars and reflected exactly how much I felt, at that moment, our friendship was worth.”

  Sylvia laughed. “Clever. But my idea is much more brilliant, because it makes it possible for me to get back at Bibi and give Howard the nice gift he and his girl deserve.” She smiled, clearly pleased with herself. “Ah, you live and learn.”

  “You live,” Theo said.

  Sylvia blinked. “Well, look, here we are.” She pulled the car into a handicapped-parking place on Morris Avenue and got out to help Theo, but he was already hoisting himself up out of his seat, using the door handle for leverage. “I can manage myself,” he said with some irritation. Sylvia stepped back.

  “Clearly one advantage to all this for you,” Theo said, balancing on his cane, “is that it’s suddenly so much easier to get a parking place.”

  “Oh Theo, please,” Sylvia said. “Look, here’s where we’re going.”

  She led him into a gift shop filled with porcelain statuettes of Snow White and all seven of the dwarves, music boxes which, when you opened them, played “The Shadow of Your Smile,” complicated-smelling potpourris in purple wallpapered boxes, and stuffed snakes you were supposed to push up against drafty windows and doors.

  “Mrs. Greenman,” said an expansive, gray-haired man in a cream-colored cardigan sweater. “Look who’s here, Archie, it’s Mrs. Greenman.”

  Another man, this one thinner and balding, but dressed in an identical cardigan, peered out from the back of the shop. “Hello there!” he said, smiling. He looked at Theo, and his expression changed.

  “Mr. Sherman, Mr. Baker. This is my son, Theo.”

  “Hello,” Mr. Sherman and Mr. Baker said. They didn’t offer to shake hands.

  “Are you here for that item we discussed last week?” Mr. Sherman asked.

  “Yes,” Sylvia said. “I want advice from my son here.” She walked over to a large ridged crystal bowl, a very fifties sort of bowl, stalwart and square-jawed. “What do you think? Beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “Mom, to tell the truth, I think it’s kind of ugly.”

  “Four hundred and twenty-five dollars,” Sylvia said admiringly. “You have to feel it.”

  Then she picked up the big bowl and tossed it to Theo, like a football.

  The gentlemen in the cardigan sweaters gasped and did not exhale. When Theo caught it, it sank his hands. His cane rattled as it hit the floor.

  “That’s heavy,” Sylvia said, observing with satisfaction how the bowl had weighted Theo’s arms down. “And where crystal is concerned, heavy is impressive.”

  She took the bowl back from him and carried it to the counter. Mr. Sherman was mopping his brow. Theo looked at the floor, still surprised not to see shards of glass around his feet.

  Since no one else seemed to be volunteering, he bent over and picked up the cane.

  “Four hundred and fifty-nine, with tax,” Mr. Sherman said, his voice still a bit shaky, and a look of relish came over Sylvia’s face as she pulled out her checkbook to pay. Behind the counter, Theo could see Mr. Baker put his hand on his forehead and cast his eyes to the ceiling.

  It seemed Sylvia had been looking a long time for something like this, something heavy enough to leave an impression, yet so fragile it could make you sorry.

  They headed back out to the car.

  “Where can we go now?” Sylvia asked, as she got in. “There must be someplace else to go.”

  “Home,” Theo said. “It’s almost time for my medicine.”

  “Really? Oh. All right.” She pulled on her seat belt, inserted the car key in the ignition, and sat there.

  For just a moment, but perceptibly, her face broke. She squeezed her eyes shut so tight the blue shadow on the lids cracked.

  Almost as quickly she was back to normal again, and they were driving. “It’s getting hotter,” Sylvia said. “Shall I put on the air?”

  “Sure,” Theo said. He was thinking about the bowl, or more specifically, about how surprising its weight had been, pulling his hands down. For a while now he’d been worried about his mother, worried about
what damage his illness might secretly be doing to her that of course she would never admit. On the surface things seemed all right. She still broiled herself a skinned chicken breast for dinner every night, still swam a mile and a half a day, still kept used teabags wrapped in foil in the refrigerator. Yet she had also, at about three o’clock one morning, woken him up to tell him she was going to the twenty-four-hour supermarket, and was there anything he wanted. Then there was the gift shop: She had literally pitched that bowl toward him, pitched it like a ball, and as that great gleam of flight and potential regret came sailing his direction, it had occurred to him that she was trusting his two feeble hands, out of the whole world, to keep it from shattering. What was she trying to test? Was it his newly regained vision? Was it the assurance that he was there, alive, that he hadn’t yet slipped past all her caring, a little lost boy in rhinestone-studded glasses? There are certain things you’ve already done before you even think how to do them—a child pulled from in front of a car, for instance, or the bowl, which Theo was holding before he could even begin to calculate its brief trajectory. It had pulled his arms down, and from that apish posture he’d looked at his mother, who smiled broadly, as if, in the war between heaviness and shattering, he’d just helped her win some small but sustaining victory.

  Houses

  When I arrived at my office that morning—the morning after Susan took me back—an old man and woman wearing wide-brimmed hats and sweatpants were peering at the little snapshots of houses pinned up in the window, discussing their prices in loud voices. There was nothing surprising in this, except that it was still spring, and the costume and demeanor of the couple emphatically suggested summer vacations. It was very early in the day as well as the season—not yet eight and not yet April. They had the look of people who never slept, people who propelled themselves through life on sheer adrenaline, and they also had the look of kindness and good intention gone awry which so often seems to motivate people like that.

  I lingered for a few moments outside the office door before going in, so that I could hear their conversation. I had taken a lot of the snapshots myself, and written the descriptive tags underneath them, and I was curious which houses would pique their interest. At first, of course, they looked at the mansions—one of them, oceanfront with ten bathrooms and two pools, was listed for $10.5 million. “Can you imagine?” the wife said. “Mostly it’s corporations that buy those,” the husband answered. Then their attentions shifted to some more moderately priced, but still expensive, contemporaries. “I don’t know, it’s like living on the starship Enterprise, if you ask me,” the wife said. “Personally, I never would get used to a house like that.” The husband chuckled. Then the wife’s mouth opened and she said, “Will you look at this, Ed? Just look!” and pointed to a snapshot of a small, cedar-shingled house which I happened to know stood not five hundred feet from the office—$165,000, price negotiable. “It’s adorable!” the wife said. “It’s just like the house in my dream!”

  I wanted to tell her it was my dream house too, my dream house first, to beg her not to buy it. But I held back. I reminded myself I already had a house. I reminded myself I had a wife, a dog.

  Ed took off his glasses and peered skeptically at the picture. “It doesn’t look too bad,” he said. “Still, something must be wrong with it. The price is just too low.”

  “It’s the house in my dream, Ed! The one I dreamed about! I swear it is!”

  “I told you, Grace-Anne, the last thing I need is a handyman’s special. These are my retirement years.”

  “But how can you know it needs work? We haven’t even seen it! Can’t we just look at it? Please?”

  “Let’s have breakfast and talk it over.”

  “O.K., O.K. No point in getting overeager, right?” They headed toward the coffee shop across the street, and I leaned back against the window.

  It was just an ordinary house, the plainest of houses. And yet, as I unlocked the office door to let myself in, I found myself swearing I’d burn it down before I’d let that couple take possession of it. Love can push you to all sorts of unlikely threats.

  What had happened was this: The night before, I had gone back to my wife after three months of living with a man. I was thirty-two years old, and more than anything in the world, I wanted things to slow, slow down.

  It was a quiet morning. We live year-round in a resort town, and except for the summer months, not a whole lot goes on here. Next week things would start gearing up for the Memorial Day closings—my wife Susan’s law firm was already frantic with work—but for the moment I was in a lull. It was still early—not even the receptionist had come in yet—so I sat at my desk, and looked at the one picture I kept there, of Susan running on the beach with our golden retriever, Charlotte. Susan held out a tennis ball in the picture, toward which Charlotte, barely out of puppyhood, was inclining her head. And of course I remembered that even now Susan didn’t know the extent to which Charlotte was wound up in all of it.

  Around nine forty-five I called Ted at the Elegant Canine. I was halfway through dialing before I realized that it was probably improper for me to be doing this, now that I’d officially gone back to Susan, that Susan, if she knew I was calling him, would more than likely have sent me packing—our reconciliation was that fragile. One of her conditions for taking me back was that I not see, not even speak to, Ted, and in my shame I’d agreed. Nonetheless, here I was, listening as the phone rang. His boss, Patricia, answered. In the background was the usual cacophony of yelps and barks.

  “I don’t have much time,” Ted said, when he picked up a few seconds later. “I have Mrs. Morrison’s poodle to blow-dry.”

  “I didn’t mean to bother you,” I said. “I just wondered how you were doing.”

  “Fine,” Ted said. “How are you doing?”

  “Oh, O.K.”

  “How did things go with Susan last night?”

  “O.K.”

  “Just O.K.?”

  “Well—it felt so good to be home again—in my own bed, with Susan and Charlotte—” I closed my eyes and pressed the bridge of my nose with my fingers. “Anyway,” I said, “it’s not fair of me to impose all of this on you. Not fair at all. I mean, here I am, back with Susan, leaving you—”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “I do worry about it. I do.”

  There was a barely muffled canine scream in the background, and then I could hear Patricia calling for Ted.

  “I have to go, Paul—”

  “I guess I just wanted to say I miss you. There, I’ve said it. There’s nothing to do about it, but I wanted to say it, because it’s what I feel.”

  “I miss you too, Paul, but listen, I have to go—”

  “Wait, wait. There’s something I have to tell you.”

  “What?”

  “There was a couple today. Outside the office. They were looking at our house.”

  “Paul—”

  “I don’t know what I’d do if they bought it.”

  “Paul,” Ted said, “it’s not our house. It never was.”

  “No, I guess it wasn’t.” Again I squeezed the bridge of my nose. I could hear the barking in the background grow louder, but this time Ted didn’t tell me he had to go.

  “Ted?”

  “What?”

  “Would you mind if I called you tomorrow?”

  “You can call me whenever you want.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and then he said a quick good-bye, and all the dogs were gone.

  Three months before, things had been simpler. There was Susan, and me, and Charlotte. Charlotte was starting to smell, and the monthly ordeal of bathing her was getting to be too much for both of us, and anyway, Susan reasoned, now that she’d finally paid off the last of her law school loans, we really did have the right to hire someone to bathe our dog. (We were both raised in penny-pinching families; even in relative affluence, we had no cleaning woman, no gardener. I mowed our lawn.) And so, on a drab Wednesday morning befo
re work, I bundled Charlotte into the car and drove her over to the Elegant Canine. There, among the fake emerald collars, the squeaky toys in the shape of mice and hamburgers, the rawhide bones and shoes and pizzas, was Ted. He had wheat-colored hair and green eyes, and he smiled at me in a frank and unwavering way I found difficult to turn away from. I smiled back, left Charlotte in his capable-seeming hands and headed off to work. The morning proceeded lazily. At noon I drove back to fetch Charlotte, and found her looking golden and glorious, leashed to a small post in a waiting area just to the side of the main desk. Through the door behind the desk I saw a very wet Pekingese being shampooed in a tub and a West Highland white terrier sitting alertly on a metal table, a chain around its neck. I rang a bell, and Ted emerged, waving to me with an arm around which a large bloody bandage had been carefully wrapped.

  “My God,” I said. “Was it—”

  “I’m afraid so,” Ted said. “You say she’s never been to a groomer’s?”

  “I assure you, never in her entire life—we’ve left her alone with small children—our friends joke that she could be a babysitter—” I turned to Charlotte, who looked up at me, panting in that retriever way. “What got into you?” I said, rather hesitantly. And even more hesitantly: “Bad, bad dog—”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Ted said, laughing. “It’s happened before and it’ll happen again.”

  “I am so sorry. I am just so—sorry. I had no idea, really.”

  “Look, it’s an occupational hazard. Anyway we’re great at first aid around here.”

  He smiled again, and, calmed for the moment, I smiled back. “I just can’t imagine what got into her. She’s supposed to go to the vet next week, so I’ll ask him what he thinks.”