A Place I've Never Been

by David Leavitt

  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.

  In skeptical or self-critical moments, Andrew perceived his life as a series of abandonments. This is what he was thinking about as he rode the train from Hoboken out toward Allen’s parents’ house that afternoon: how he had abandoned his family, fleeing California for the East Coast, willfully severing his ties to his parents; then, one after another, how he had had best friends, and either fought with them or became disgusted with them, or they with him, or else just drifted off without writing or calling until the gap was too big to dare crossing. There were many people he had said he could spend his life with, yet he hadn’t spent his life with any of them, he saw now. Nathan and Celia, for instance, who it had seemed to him in college would be his best friends for all time—when was the last time he’d seen them? Five, six months now? Berkeley had severed Andrew from that ineradicable threesome of his youth, and now that he was in New York again it seemed too much had happened for them to fill each other in on, and in the course of it all happening their perceptions and opinions had changed, they were no longer in perfect sync, they weren’t able to understand each other as gloriously as they once had because, of course, their lives had diverged, they did not have endless common experience to chew over, and on which to hone shared attitudes. After those first few disastrous dinners, in which arguments had punctuated the dull yawn of nothing to be said, he had given up calling them, except once he had seen Nathan at the museum, where they stood in front of a Tiepolo and Nathan challenged Andrew to explain why it was any good—a familiar, annoying, Nathan-ish challenge, a good try, but by then it was too late. All of this was guilt-inspiring enough, but what made Andrew feel even guiltier was that Nathan and Celia still saw each other, went to parties together, lived in the clutch of the same old dynamic, and presumably the same glorious synchronicity of opinion. They were going on ten years with each other even without him, and Andrew felt humbled, immature. Why couldn’t he keep relationships up that long? As for leaving Allen for Jack—wouldn’t it amount to the same thing? In three years, would he leave Jack as well?

  Perhaps it was just his nature. After all, he had lived for the entire first twenty-two and most of the next six years of his life virtually alone, surviving by instinct, internal resources. This was not uncommon among gay men he knew; some reach out into the sexual world at the brink of puberty, like those babies who, tossed in a swimming pool, gracefully stay afloat; but others—himself among them—become so transfixed by the preposterousness of their own bodies, and particularly the idea of their coming together with other bodies, that they end up trapped in a contemplation of sex that, as it grows more tortured and analytic, rules out action altogether. Such men must be coaxed by others into action, like the rusty Tin Man in Oz, but as Andrew knew, willing and desirable coaxers were few and far between. For him sexual awakening had come too late, too long after adolescence, when the habits of the adult body were no longer new but had become settled and hard to break out of. Chronically alone, Andrew had cultivated, in those years, a degree of self-containment which kept him alive, but was nonetheless not self-reliance, for it was based on weakness, and had at its heart the need and longing for another to take him in. He remembered, at sixteen, lying in his room, his hands exploring his own body, settling on his hip, just above the pelvis, and thinking, No other hand has touched me here, not since infancy, not since my mother. Not one hand. And this memory had gone on for six more years. Had that been the ruin of him? he wondered now. Doomed by necessity to become self-contained, was he also doomed never to be able to love someone else, always to retreat from intimacy into the cozy, familiar playroom of his old, lonely self?

  Outside the train window, the mysterious transformations of late afternoon were beginning. It was as if the sun were backing off in horror at what it had seen, or given light to. The train Andrew was on had bench seats that reversed direction at a push, and remembering how impressed by that he had been the first time Allen had taken him on this train, he grew nervous: suddenly he remembered Allen, remembered he was on his way to a man who considered his life to be in Andrew’s hands. Already he recognized the litany of town names as the conductor announced them: one after another, and then they were there. By the crossing gate Allen sat in his father’s BMW, waiting.

  He smiled and waved as he stepped off the train. Allen didn’t move. He waved again as he ran toward the car, waved through the window. “Hi,” he said cheerily, getting in and kissing Allen lightly on the mouth. Allen pulled the car out of the parking lot and onto the road.

  “What’s wrong?” (A foolish question, yet somehow the moment demanded it.)

  “This is the very worst for me,” he said. “Your coming back. It’s worse than your leaving.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you always look so happy. Then you fall into a stupor, you fall asleep, or you want to go to the movies and sleep there. Jack gets all the best of you, I get you lying next to me snoring.” He was on the verge, as he had been so many times in these last weeks, of saying inevitable things, and Andrew could sense him biting back, like someone fighting the impulse to vomit. Andrew cleared his throat. A familiar, dull ache somewhere in his bowels was starting up again, as if a well-trusted anesthesia were wearing off. It felt to him these days, being with Allen, as if a two-bladed knife lay gouged deep into both of them, welding them together, and reminded anew of its presence, Andrew turned futilely to the car window, the way you might turn from the obituary page to the comics upon recognizing an unexpected and familiar face among the portraits of the dead. Of course, soon enough, you have to turn back.

  Andrew closed his eyes. Allen breathed. “Let’s not have a fight,” Andrew said quietly, surprised to be on the verge of tears. But Allen was stony, and said nothing more.

  As they pulled into the driveway the garage doors slowly opened, like primeval jaws or welcoming arms; Sophie, Allen’s mother, must have heard the car pulling up, and pushed the little button in the kitchen. A chilly dusk light was descending on the driveway, calling up in Andrew some primeval nostalgia for suburban twilight, and all the thousands of days which had come to an end here, children surprised by the swift descent of night, their mothers’ voices calling them home, the prickly coolness of their arms as they dropped their balls and ran back into the warm lights of houses. It had been that sort of childhood Allen had lived here, after all, a childhood of street games, Kickball and Capture the Flag, though Allen was always the one the others laughed at, picked last, kicked. A dog barked distantly, and in the bright kitchen window above the garage Andrew saw Sophie rubbing her hands with a white dish towel. She was not smiling, and seemed to be struggling to compose herself into whatever kind of studied normalness the imminent arrival of friends and relatives demanded. Clearly she did not know anyone could see her, for in a moment she turned slightly toward the window, and seeing the car idle in the driveway, its lights still on, started, then smiled and waved.

  A festive, potent smell of roasting meats came out the porch door. “Hello, Andrew,” Sophie said as they walked into the kitchen, her voice somehow hearty yet tentative, and she kissed him jauntily on the cheek, bringing close for one unbearable second a smell of face powder, perfume, and chicken stock he almost could not resist falling into. For Jack’s sake he held his own. Of all the things he feared losing along with Allen, this family was the one he thought about most. How he longed to steep forever in this brisket smell, this warmth of carpeting and mahogany and voices chattering in the hall! But Allen, glumly, said, “Let’s go upstairs,” and gestured to the room they always share
d, his room. Even that a miracle, Andrew reflected, as they trundled up the stairs: that first time Andrew had visited and was worrying where he’d sleep, Sophie had declared, “I never ask what goes on upstairs. Everyone sleeps where they want; as far as I’m concerned, it’s a mystery.” It seemed a different moral code applied where her homosexual son was concerned than the one that had been used routinely with Allen’s brothers and sister; in their cases, the sleeping arrangements for visiting boyfriends or girlfriends had to be carefully orchestrated, the girls doubling up with Allen’s sister, the boys with Allen himself—a situation Allen had always found both sexy and intolerable, he had told Andrew, the beautiful college boys lying next to him in his double bed for the requisite hour or so, then sneaking off to have sex with his sister, Barrie. Well, all that was long past—Barrie was now married and had two children of her own—and what both Allen and Andrew felt grateful for here was family: it was a rare thing for a gay man to have it, much less to be able to share it with his lover. Their parents had not yet met each other, but a visit was planned for May, and remembering this, Andrew gasped slightly as the prospect arose before him—yet another lazily arranged inevitability to be dealt with, and with it the little residual parcel of guilt and nostalgia and dread, packed up like the giblets of a supermarket chicken. His half of the knife twisted a little, causing Allen’s to respond in kind, and Allen looked at Andrew suspiciously. “What is it?” he asked. Andrew shook his head. “Nothing, really.” He didn’t want to talk about it. Allen shrugged regretfully; clearly he sensed that whatever was on Andrew’s mind was bad enough not to be messed with.