A Place I've Never Been (15 page)

“I'm neither of those things. Just tell me why you've changed your mind since last night.”

“You tell me you're in love with a man, you up and leave for three months, then out of the blue you come back. I just don't know what you expect—do you want me to jump for joy and welcome you back like nothing's happened?”

“Susan, yesterday you said—”

“Yesterday,” Susan said, “I hadn't thought about it enough. Yesterday I was confused, and grateful, and— God, I was so relieved. But now—now I just don't know. I mean, what the hell has this been for you, anyway?”

“Susan, honey,” I said, “I love you. I've loved you my whole life. Remember what your mother used to say, when we were kids, and we'd come back from playing on Saturdays? ‘You two are joined at the hip,' she'd say. And we still are.”

“Have you ever loved me sexually?” Susan asked, suddenly turning to face me.

“Susan,” I said.

“Have you?”

“Of course.”

“I don't believe you. I think it's all been cuddling and hugging. Kid stuff. I think the
sex only mattered to me. How do I know you weren't thinking about men all those times?”

“Susan, of course not—”

“What a mistake,” Susan said. “If only I'd known back then, when I was a kid—”

“Doesn't it matter to you that I'm back?”

“It's not like you never left, for Christ's sake!” She put her hands on my cheeks. “You
left
,” she said quietly. “For three months you
left
. And I don't know, maybe love
can
be killed.”

She let go. I didn't say anything.

“I think you should leave for a while,” Susan said. “I think I need some time alone—some time alone knowing you're alone too.”

I looked at the floor. “Okay,” I said. And I suppose I said it too eagerly, because Susan said, “If you go back to Ted, that's it. We're finished for good.”

“I won't go back to Ted,” I said.

We were both quiet for a few seconds.

“Should I go now?”

Susan nodded.

“Well, then, good-bye,” I said. And I went.

This brings me to where I am now, which is, precisely, nowhere. I waited three hours in front of Ted's house that night, but when, at twelve-thirty, his car finally pulled into the driveway, someone else got out with him. It has been two weeks since that night. Each day I sit at my desk, and wait for one of them, or a lawyer, to call. I suppose I am
homeless, although I think it is probably inaccurate to say that a man with fifty keys in his pocket is ever homeless. Say, then, that I am a man with no home, but many houses.

Of course I am careful. I never spend the night in the same house twice. I bring my own sheets, and in the morning I always remake the bed I've slept in as impeccably as I can. The fact that I'm an early riser helps as well—that way, if another broker arrives, or a cleaning woman, I can say I'm just checking the place out. And if the owners are coming back, I'm always the first one to be notified.

The other night I slept at the $10.5 million oceanfront. I used all the bathrooms; I swam in both the pools.

As for the Hilliards' house—well, so far I've allowed myself to stay there only once a week. Not because it's inconvenient—God knows, no one ever shows the place—but because to sleep there more frequently would bring me closer to a dream of unbearable pleasure than I feel I can safely go.

The Cavallaros, by the way, ended up buying a contemporary in the woods for a hundred and seventy-five, the superb kitchen of which turned out to be more persuasive than Grace-Anne's dream. The Hilliards' house remains empty, unsold. Their niece just lowered the price to one fifty—quilts included.

Funny: Even with all my other luxurious possibilities, I look forward to those nights I spend at the Hilliards' with greater anticipation than anything else in my life. When the key clicks, and the door opens onto that living room with its rows of Reader's Digest Condensed Books, a rare sense of relief runs through me. I feel as if I've come home.

One thing about the Hilliards' house is that the lighting is terrible. It seems there isn't a bulb in the house over twenty-five watts. And perhaps this isn't surprising—they were
old people, after all, by no means readers. They spent their lives in front of the television. So when I arrive at night, I have to go around the house, turning on light after light, like ancient oil lamps. Not much to read by, but dim light, I've noticed, has a kind of warmth which bright light lacks. It casts a glow against the woodwork which is exactly, just exactly, like the reflection of raging fire.

Andrew was in love with Jack Selden, so all Jack's little habits, his particular ways of doing things, seemed marvelous to him: the way Jack put his face under the shower, after shampooing his hair, and shook his head like a big dog escaped from a bath; the way he slept on his back, his arms crossed in the shape of a butterfly over his face, fists on his eyes; his fondness for muffins and Danish and sweet rolls—what he called, at first just out of habit and then
because
it made Andrew laugh, “baked goods.” Jack made love with efficient fervor, his face serious, almost businesslike. Not that he was without affection, but everything about him had an edge; his very touch had an edge, there was the possibility of pain lurking behind every caress. It seemed to Andrew that Jack's touches, more than any he'd known before, were full of meaning—they sought to express, not just to please or explore—and this gesturing made him want to gesture back, to enter into a kind of tactile dialogue. They'd known each other only a month, but already it felt to Andrew as if their fingers had told each other novels.

Andrew had gone through most of his life not being touched by anyone, never being touched at all. These days, his body under the almost constant scrutiny of two distinct pairs of hands, seemed to him perverse punishment, as if he had had a wish granted and was now suffering the consequences of having stated the wish too vaguely. He actually envisioned, sometimes, the fairy godmother shrugging her shoulders and saying, “You get what you ask for.” Whereas most of his life he had been alone, unloved, now he had two lovers—Jack for just over a month, and Allen for close to three years. There was no cause and effect, he insisted, but had to admit things with Allen had been getting ragged
around the edges for some time. Jack and Allen knew about each other and had agreed to endure, for the sake of the undecided Andrew, a tenuous and open-ended period of transition, during which Andrew himself spent so much of his time on the subway, riding between the two apartments of his two lovers, that it began to seem to him as if rapid transit were the true and final home of the desired. Sometimes he wanted nothing more than to crawl into the narrow bed of his childhood and revel in the glorious, sad solitude of no one—not even his mother—needing or loving him. Hadn't the hope of future great loves been enough to curl up against? It seemed so now. His skin felt soft, toneless, like the skin of a plum poked by too many housewifely hands, feeling for the proper ripeness; he was covered with fingerprints.

This morning he had woken up with Jack—a relief. One of the many small tensions of the situation was that each morning, when he woke up, there was a split second of panic as he sought to reorient himself and figure out where he was, who he was with. It was better with Jack, because Jack was new love and demanded little of him; with Allen, lately, there'd been thrashing, heavy breathing, a voice whispering in his ear, “Tell me one thing. Did you promise Jack we wouldn't have sex? I have to know.”

“No, I didn't.”

“Thank God, thank God. Maybe now I can go back to sleep.”

There was a smell of coffee. Already showered and dressed for work (he was an architect at a spiffy firm), Jack walked over to the bed, smiling, and kissed Andrew, who felt rumpled and sour and unhappy. Jack's mouth carried the sweet taste of coffee, his face was smooth and newly shaven and still slightly wet. “Good morning,” he said.

“Good morning.”

“I love you,” Jack Selden said.

Immediately Allen appeared, in a posture of crucifixion against the bedroom wall. “My God,” he said, “you're killing me, you know that? You're killing me.”

It was Rosh Hashanah, and Allen had taken the train out the night before to his parents' house in New Jersey. Andrew was supposed to join him that afternoon. He looked up now at Jack, smiled, then closed his eyes. His brow broke into wrinkles. “Oh God,” he said to Jack, putting his arms around his neck, pulling him closer, so that Jack almost spilled his coffee. “Now I have to face Allen's family.”

Jack kissed Andrew on the forehead before pulling gingerly from his embrace. “I still can't believe Allen told them,” he said, sipping more coffee from a mug that said WORLD's GREATEST ARCHITECT. Jack had a mostly perfunctory relationship with his own family—hence the mug, a gift from his mother.

“Yes,” Andrew said. “But Sophie's hard to keep secrets from. She sees him, and she knows something's wrong, and she doesn't give in until he's told her.”

“Listen, I'm sure if he told you she's not going to say anything, she's not going to say anything. Anyway, it'll be fun, Andrew. You've told me a million times how much you enjoy big family gatherings.”

“Easy for you to say. You get to go to your nice clean office and work all day and sleep late tomorrow and go out for brunch.” Suddenly Andrew sat up in bed. “I don't think I can take this anymore, this running back and forth between you and him.” He looked up at Jack shyly. “Can't I stay with you? In your pocket?”

Jack smiled. Whenever he and his last boyfriend, Ralph, had had something difficult to face—the licensing exam, or a doctor's appointment—they would say to each other,
“Don't worry, I'll be there with you. I'll be in your pocket.” Jack had told Andrew, who had in turn appropriated the metaphor, but Jack didn't seem to mind. He smiled down at Andrew—he was sitting on the edge of the bed now, smelling very clean, like hair tonic—and brushed his hand over Andrew's forehead. Then he reached down to the breast pocket of his own shirt, undid the little button there, pulled it open, made a plucking gesture over Andrew's face, as if he were pulling off a loose eyelash, and, bringing his hand back, rubbed his fingers together over the open pocket, dropping something in.

“You're there,” he said. “You're in my pocket.”

“All day?” Andrew asked.

“All day.” Jack smiled again. And Andrew, looking up at him, said, “I love you,” astonished even as he said the words at how dangerously he was teetering on the brink of villainy.

Unlike Jack, who had a job, Andrew was floating through a strange, shapeless period in his life. After several years at Berkeley, doing art history, he had transferred to Columbia, and was now confronting the last third of a dissertation on Tiepolo's ceilings. There was always for him a period before starting some enormous and absorbing project during which the avoidance of that project became his life's goal. He had a good grant and nowhere to go during the day except around the cluttered West Side apartment he shared with Allen, so he spent most of his time sweeping dust and paper scraps into little piles—anything to avoid the computer. Allen, whom he had met at Berkeley, had gotten an assistant professorship at Columbia the year before—hence Andrew's transfer, to be with
him. He was taking this, his third semester, off to write a book. Andrew had stupidly imagined such a semester of shared writing would be a gift, a time they could enjoy together, but instead their quiet afternoons were turning out one after the other to be cramped and full of annoyance, and fights too ugly and trivial for either of them to believe they'd happened afterwards—shoes left on the floor, phone messages forgotten, introductions not tendered at parties: these were the usual crimes. Allen told Andrew he was typing too fast, it was keeping him from writing; Andrew stormed out. Somewhere in the course of that hazy afternoon when he was never going back he met Jack, who was spending the day having a reunion with his old college roommate, another art-history graduate student named Tony Melendez. The three of them chatted on the steps of Butler, then went to Tom's Diner for coffee. A dirty booth, Andrew across from Jack, Tony next to Jack, doing most of the talking. Jack talking too, sometimes; he smiled a lot at Andrew.

When one person's body touches another person's body, chemicals under the skin break down and recombine, setting off an electric spark which leaps, neuron to neuron, to the brain. It was all a question of potassium and calcium when, that afternoon at Tom's, Jack's foot ended right up against Andrew's. Soon the accidental pressure became a matter of will, of choice. Chemistry, his mother had said, in a rare moment of advisory nostalgia. Oh, your father, that first date we didn't have a thing to talk about, but the chemistry!

At home that evening, puttering around while Allen agonized over his book, Andrew felt claustrophobic. He wanted to call Jack. Everything that had seemed wonderful about his relationship with Allen—shared knowledge, shared ideologies, shared loves—fell
away to nothing, desiccated by the forceful reactions of the afternoon. How could he have imagined this relationship would work for all his life? he wondered. Somehow they had forgotten, or pushed aside, the possibilities (the likelihoods) of competitiveness, disagreement, embarrassment, disapproval, not to mention just plain boredom. He called Jack; he told Allen he was going to the library. The affair caught, and as it got going Andrew's temper flared, he had at his fingertips numberless wrongs Allen had perpetrated which made his fucking Jack all right. He snapped at Allen, walked out of rooms at the slightest provocation, made several indiscreet phone calls, until Allen finally asked what was going on. Then came the long weekend of hair-tearing and threats and pleas, followed by the period of indecision they were now enduring, a period during which they didn't fight at all, because whenever Andrew felt a fight coming on he threatened to leave, and whenever Allen felt a fight coming on he backed off, became soothing and loving, to make sure Andrew wouldn't leave. Andrew didn't want to leave Allen, he said, but he also didn't want to give up Jack. Such a period of transition suited him shamefully; finally, after all those years, he was drowning in it.