A Place I've Never Been

by David Leavitt

  “But you can’t drive on an empty stomach,” Seth says. “And anyway, what’s the point of Italy if you don’t eat in every town you stop in? Who knows what you might miss?”

  It’s been only a few months since Celia found Seth, since he swept her off her feet and out of her life. Now, when people ask how they met, they say it was at a party—a lie mutually agreed upon, since both are too embarrassed to admit the truth: that they were introduced into each other’s lives through one of those phone lines that randomly connect women and men, men and men—in this case, a number, 970-RMNC, geared especially toward those seeking “romance.” Celia is convinced that her description of herself over the phone that evening—not false, exactly, but elusive, embellished—implanted in Seth’s mind an image of an object of desire which somehow, miraculously, the truth of her has failed to obliterate. When he looks at her, the urgency in his eyes can only mean that he still sees the fantasy she presented to him on the telephone, not who she really is. She wonders how long this can last.

  A mutual love of travel—in Italy especially—was something they started talking about even during that first conversation. Seth had lived in Rome for five years; Celia had gone three times, once for a month in college, twice for two weeks each during her working years—vacations long planned, long saved for, and terribly lonely, spent mostly in museums, or sitting in cafés, always waiting for love to spring out from behind a painting or across a piazza and claim her. It never did. She and Seth had their first date in an Italian restaurant on Bleecker Street—an extraordinary, expensive restaurant, Seth’s choice, where they ate imported tiny salad leaves with olive oil and lemon, roasted artichokes, whole garlic cloves baked to the point of sweetness. A week later Celia quit her job; they bought tickets.

  Now, only two months since they first happened upon each other over the telephone, they are driving together along a back road near Siena, on their way to the reconstructed fattoria of Alexander and Sylvie Foster, and Seth is filling Celia in. “They’ve had an amazing life,” he is saying, as he opens the window to let out his cigarette ash. “Both of them have very famous fathers—Alexander’s was Julian Foster, the painter, and Sylvie’s was Louis Roth, the conductor. And they’ve been married since they were sixteen. Sixteen! Can you imagine? They met on the southern coast of France, in Sanary, where their parents both had summer houses. A boy and a girl, just kids, with an enormous amount of wealth between them. They’d grown up in unreal places—Sylvie in East Hampton, Alex on the French coast. And they didn’t want to live in the world. So they bought this farm. They bought it twenty years ago, when they were maybe eighteen. And they’ve lived there ever since, raised their daughters there. When they need money, Alex sells one of his father’s paintings and that keeps them going maybe five, six years. And their house! You’ll be astonished. It’s the closest thing I’ve seen to paradise.”

  “How amazing,” Celia says. But what she means is, How amazing that other people can have had such extraordinary lives, when my life has been so—what is the word? So unextraordinary. And suddenly she envisions these people she has never met, sixteen years old, strolling along a French beach, in love. Whereas she, at sixteen … There are tears in her eyes, she is bottomed out with grief, scooped hollow, suddenly so light, so tightly filled with air, that like a balloon, she might lift from the seat of the car, float out the window and over the hills. Travel, she knows, heightens the emotions; tears and laughter and rage come upon her as easily as a blush.

  “It’s an odd part of Italy around here,” Seth says. “People call it ‘Chiantishire,’ because it’s so filled with English and Australians. And they’re all very tight with each other, they gossip all the time. For some reason there’s particularly a lot of gossip about Sylvie, maybe because her father’s so famous. For instance, once I met a Spanish woman who said, ‘Oh, Sylvie Foster, Louis Roth’s daughter. I heard she had a glass shower built in the middle of her living room and likes to shower in front of her guests.’ Such a strange idea, that one! But people imagine all sorts of outrageous things about each other which really say much more about themselves, don’t they? And Sylvie is brash. She’ll probably be checking you out, seeing if you fit her standards, if you’re good enough for me. But don’t be intimidated.”

  “I’ll try,” Celia says, even though Seth’s description has made her pale. These are not the sort of people she’s used to. (Well, for that matter, most of her life she’s been around people she wasn’t used to. Her mother used to call her “my scholarship girl” when she was in college, and even though it’s been ten years, and most of her student loans have finally been paid off, she still thinks of herself as a scholarship girl—fraudulent, somehow, not quite belonging, brought into the houses of these rich, sophisticated people more as a gesture of charity than a reflection of the value of her company. She has stayed in huge Southampton mansions, eaten dinner at the apartments of famous film stars, and still each time, she quakes with fear, convinced that this once they’ll see through to who she really is.)

  Soon they’re pulling up to the Fosters’ farmhouse. Three cars are parked in front. “The house is called ‘Il Mestolo,’ ” Seth says, getting out and stretching his legs. “That means ‘the ladle.’ Because of the way the hills slope down to this sort of plateau, and the house and barn and outbuildings are leveled on the plateau, like bits of vegetable and pasta in a soup being ladled into the bowl.” He smiles with appreciation. “It’s an old name. It predates the Fosters.”

  “Carino!” calls a rugged-looking woman with streaked gray hair, dressed in overalls, who is striding out of the farmhouse. She is clutching one breast rather oddly, and continues clutching it as she and Seth embrace, kiss each other on both cheeks, exchange a torrent of fast Italian which seems to Celia unnecessary, given that they’re both Americans. Awkwardly Celia stands, looks at the sky, waits for them to include her, prays Seth will save her before she has to introduce herself to the reedy, windblown-looking man, also in overalls, who is now coming out of the kitchen, reaching out a hand.

  “I’m Alex Foster,” he says.

  “Hello,” Celia says. “I’m Celia.” She doesn’t think to mention her last name. And like a man awakened from a trance, Seth jolts, mid-sentence, back into English, and slides out of Sylvie’s embrace.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “I was so happy to see Sylvie I forgot to introduce Celia.” He clears his throat. “So: Alex, Sylvie, this is Celia Hoberman, my fiancée.”

  It almost makes Celia not want to get married, she likes the sound of “fiancée” so much.

  “A pleasure, Celia, a pleasure,” says Sylvie, in a clipped British accent with just the slightest Tuscan undertone. “Come in, come in. Ginevra and Fabio and Ginevra’s mother have just arrived.”

  She leads them into a large farmhouse kitchen where wooden rocking chairs circle an enormous stone fireplace. Each of the chairs has a ladle painted on the back. A huge pot of water is boiling on an ornate antique stove with polished brass fixtures, above which hang maybe a dozen bronze and stainless-steel ladles. Two women and a man are sitting in the rocking chairs. The older woman has feathery blond hair and is waving a fan over her face. Although she is scrupulously powdered, her forehead shines in the heat. She is wearing a cream-colored silk blouse and skirt, stockings, and pointy-toed alligator shoes. Next to her, the younger woman and the man argue in muted, deep voices. The younger woman is boxy, with short-cropped brown hair, the man handsome and Nordic; both are wearing cotton turtlenecks and blue jeans.

  Sylvie, Celia notices, is still clutching her breast in that odd way. She notices Celia staring, laughs, says in a mock-Cockney accent, “I’m such a peasant I’ve got a chick on me tit!”

  “What do you mean, a chick, on your tit?” Seth says.

  “Just what I said.” And reaching into her blouse, she presents to them a small, yellow-feathered chick, which wobbles on her palm. The old woman by the fireplace fans her face even more furiously.

  “The
mother abandoned it, left it to die. So I’m keeping it warm. Such a farm woman I’ve become, after all these years!”

  “Let me introduce you,” Alex says to Celia. “Ginevra, Fabio, this is Celia.”

  The younger man and woman, abandoning their argument, stand up. Ginevra says “Ciao,” and shakes Celia’s hand briskly. Fabio’s handshake is like a glove being pulled off. “Scylla?” he says. “Like the monster?”

  “No, Celia. Ce-li-a.”

  “Ah, Celia! Certo.” He pronounces it “Chaylia.”

  “And this is Signora Dorati, Ginevra’s mother,” Alex says.

  The older lady stands and reaches out a hand gloved in lace and jewels.

  “Ciao,” Celia says.

  Signora Dorati looks alarmed at this overly familiar greeting, and withdraws her hand. “Piacere,” she murmurs, her voice faint, and returns to her chair.

  “And where are the girls?” Seth asks, breaking the silence of Celia’s mortification. “I must say hello to them!”

  “Out at the pool, swimming,” Sylvie calls, her head buried in a high cabinet from which she is pulling boxes of pasta. “You know Francesca leaves for school in England in a month. Can you believe it? She’s almost sixteen.”

  “Where’s she going?”

  “Cheltenham, of course,” says Alex.

  “Francesca! Sixteen! It’s hard to imagine!”

  “And Adriana’s almost thirteen, and looks twenty,” Sylvie says. “Boys come around all the time asking for her.”

  “It’s hard for her,” says Alex. “Francesca can’t wait to grow up, but Adriana clings to childhood. The last thing she wants to be is the woman her body makes her resemble. She’d like to stay a child forever.” He looks wistful, as if he sympathizes with that desire.

  “I must see them,” Seth says now. “Come on, Celia.” And grabbing her hand, he leads her out the back kitchen door, past an arbor covered with grapevines, a table set for lunch, the barn where Alex makes his sculptures, a chicken coop, an herb garden. Around a hedgerowed bend, the swimming pool sits on a ledge, littered with floating toys, the ladleful of soup itself.

  A girl is swimming in the pool, her red hair floating out around her head. Another girl, slightly older and also red-haired, stands over her on a diving board, positioning herself for the dive.

  “Adriana! Francesca!” Seth calls.

  “Seth? Seth, is that you?” the older girl says. And abandoning her dive, she runs across the grass, catching Seth in an embrace from which he lifts her, effortlessly, into the air.

  “My God, you’ve grown up!” he says.

  “You look the same,” Francesca says, laughing.

  “Seth!” calls Adriana, hoisting herself from the pool and running up to join her sister. She pulls on Seth’s hand, dances around him in a frenzy of appreciation. Sylvie was right: she does look twenty. She is tall, with olive-colored skin, a flat waist, large pretty breasts. The sort of body Celia’s always envied. A woman’s body. Yet there is an old doll lying on the grass, and the bathing suit Adriana wears—much too small and patterned with bears—is clearly that of a child.

  “Adriana, Francesca, this is Celia,” Seth says. “My fiancée.”

  “Hello,” they say, and shake her hand, but it’s only out of politeness. Celia is invisible to them. She listens, fascinated, as they barrage Seth with information about their lives—the dress Francesca wants to buy to take to England, but her mother won’t let her, the Nintendo video game their uncle Martin sent Adriana for her birthday from the States, the Bon Jovi concert next week in Florence. “You must play Nintendo with me!” Adriana cries. “You will, won’t you? Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  “And you’ll convince Mummy to let me go to the concert?” asks Francesca.

  “Of course.”

  What odd accents they have! Part British, part Italian. But unlike Sylvie’s accent, not acquired, not chosen—no, this is the voice of being raised at once in two worlds, the voice of placelessness.

  “You must swim with us, Seth!” Francesca says.

  “Yes, you must!”

  “But I don’t have my bathing suit!”

  “Then swim in your underwear!”

  “Well—” He looks pleadingly at Celia.

  “Go ahead,” she says. “I’ll play lifeguard.”

  “All right, then. Why not?”

  Instantly the girls are tearing at his clothes, one pulling a shoe off, the other unbuttoning his shirt, until he’s down to his underpants, at which point, of course, lunging and grasping, they drag him into the water with them. Celia steps back from the splash, watches, still as a statue, a thin smile frozen on her mouth, filled with—what can she call it? Well, it’s obvious. Grief.

  What is here—what the people here have—is beauty. Whereas what she has—what she’s always had, what is irrefutably hers in the world—is nothing anyone would ever call beautiful. Books: Nancy Drew and the Mystery of the Ivory Charm. Good Humor ice cream bars. Dry sidewalks, the gridded streets and avenues, playing jacks when it was cool enough at sunset.

  Suddenly she feels a cold, wet tentacle grasp her ankle. She jumps back, nearly screams. But it’s only Seth, reaching his arm from the swimming pool.

  “Let me guess what you’re thinking,” Seth says.

  “All right.”

  “You’re thinking that this is the most beautiful place in the world. So beautiful it makes you sad, it breaks your heart, because you can never have it. But you can have it. I’ll give it to you, Celia.”

  She turns away from him, toward the view of the walled city. “Only … It’s not that I want to live here now, it’s that I want to have lived here. To have grown up here. Or rather, to be the sort of person who grew up in this sort of place with that sort of parents, and feel the things that sort of person could feel which a different sort of person—the sort of person I am, for instance—could never feel. And not feel the sort of things the sort of person I am has to feel—does this make sense?”

  “You don’t have to be trapped anymore,” Seth says. “I’ve saved you from feeling trapped. I’ve taken you away from your dreary apartment and your dreary job. Look where we are now and be happy. You don’t have to go back.”

  It seems important to Seth that Celia understand that he has saved her, and for a moment she wonders how much this “saving” really was for her benefit, and how much for his, and if it really matters.

  “Well, of course,” she says finally, laughing, and mostly to please him. “It’s just that I can’t quite believe it.”

  “Believe it,” Seth says. And letting go of her leg he returns, splashing, to pool games.

  II

  Celia grew up in a few rooms on the fourth floor of a brick apartment building fringed with fire escapes. One of hundreds, thousands of identical buildings all over Queens, yet she never got lost, never mistook one for another, never had any trouble distinguishing where her friends lived. You noticed the differences when you actually lived among so much sameness: Her building, for instance, had the drugstore across the street. And another building, where her friend Janet Cohen lived, was covered with climbing vines. And Great-Aunt Leonie’s building had the lady who filled her balcony each year with expensive lawn furniture, and could be seen sunning herself in harlequin-shaped sunglasses and a white one-piece bathing suit as late as November and as early as March.

  Across the street, on the stoop next to the drugstore, Hasidic boys traded “Torah Personalities” the way most boys trade baseball cards. “I’ll give you a Rev Mordechai Hager for a Yehuda Zev Segal!” “You’ve really got Menachem Mendel Taub?” There was at dusk the thwack of the jump rope against the sidewalk, the elaborate reverberating chants of double-dutch.

  “I see London, I see France,

  I see Celia’s underpants!”

  Street games: Capture the Flag, Spud.

  “Eeny meeny miny mo,

  Catch a tiger by the toe,

  If he hollers let him go,


  My mother says that you are not It.”

  The Good Humor man, twice a day, ringing his bell. Chip Candy. Red, White and Blue. Nutty Buddy.

  Upstairs lived Celia’s mother, Rose, and her grandmother, Lena. There was no father; he had died before Celia ever had a chance to meet him, in a bus accident. Celia had rich uncles and aunts: in Westchester, in Great Neck, one in California. On holidays she’d visit them, watch her cousins as they played effortlessly in great pools, sleep in pull-out trundle beds in rooms that were impossibly big, impossibly good-smelling and filled with toys. Then she and Rose and Lena would head back to Queens, to the stuffy apartment house in the old neighborhood where the three of them had been left behind, presumably because her father, who was expected to get rich, died instead.

  What they did, Celia’s mother and grandmother, was watch television. Especially when Celia was a teenager and in college, when her mother had gotten so fat it was hard for her to move outside the apartment, and her grandmother was more or less bedridden. In that overheated, shag-carpeted room with its plastic-covered flowery sofas, and shelves full of tchotchkes, and old dinner dishes piled on breakfast trays, they’d eat Pepperidge Farm cookies and fight over the remote control. Rose got up from her armchair now and then to do a little dusting or clean a plate. Lena stayed mostly in bed. All over the room were elephants: glass elephants, china elephants, stuffed elephants. They were what Rose collected, what everyone gave her. Every birthday, every Mother’s Day, another elephant. The TV, in Celia’s memory, never goes off. It is on at dawn when she gets out of bed and goes into the kitchen for milk (later coffee): morning talk shows, exercise shows her mother observes with detached bemusement while eating crullers. It is on at midday when she comes home for lunch: soap operas. It is on all night: the evening news, and then situation comedies and cop shows, and more news. Celia usually fell asleep to the sound of Honeymooners reruns, old episodes of The Twilight Zone she knew by heart.