A Place I've Never Been Page 4

  The next week Mr. Theodorus arrived with a rubber dog’s snout tied over his nose. That was the end of Mrs. Leon, Claire reported afterwards to Arthur, her eyes gleaming. He smiled. It seemed that Claire’s greatest ambition was to be fully accepted into that subgroup of the group which played charades until four in the morning, drank, and drove all night, one Thursday, to watch the sun rise over Echo Lake, where Kitty Mitsui had a cabin. Claire reported it all—the wind on her cheeks, the crispness of the air, the glory of the mountain sunrise. They built a fire and lay bundled together in sleeping bags, five of them, like Campfire Girls, she said.

  Claire believed until the end that she was peripheral, barely accepted. She believed that Spiro and Kitty and the others were going out together without her, excluding her from the best, the most intimate gatherings. This was ironic, for as Arthur learned after her death, Claire was, if anything, the group’s spiritual center; without her it fragmented. Mournful couples went home alone on spouse night, the healthy clinging testily to the sick. Then Mr. Theodorus died, and the group entered a period of adolescent turmoil. Furious explosions occurred; well-buried animosities were laid bare. For the first time the group included enemies, who sat as far across the table from each other as possible, avoiding each other’s glances.

  Arthur can’t help but wonder sometimes if any of it was sexual; if Claire might have slept with one of the men. It’s hard for him to imagine. Usually, when he tries to envision those post-group revels, or when he dreams about them, he sees only five bodies huddled in sleeping bags by a lake as dawn breaks. Sometimes he wakes up with itchy hands, and bursts into tears because he wasn’t there.

  When spouse night ends, Mrs. Theodorus says to Mrs. Jaroslavsky, “Doris, if you don’t need it—well, I could sure use that spice cake. I have this important show judge coming over tomorrow.”

  “Don’t do me any favors,” Mrs. Jaroslavsky says. She is grim-faced, puffy. Then, cautiously: “You really want it?”

  “If you don’t mind. This judge is very powerful, and God knows, I could never bake anything like that. All I have around are these horrible Black Forest things Spiro’s brother sends over, with ten pounds of synthetic whipped cream.”

  “Terrible, the things they call a cake,” Mrs. Jaroslavsky says, as, smiling, she hands Mrs. Theodorus an aluminum-wrapped package.

  They walk out to the parking lot together. “I know when I’ve outstayed my welcome,” Mrs. Jaroslavsky explains to Mrs. Theodorus and Arthur. “I know it’s been too long. I feel I can talk about that with you two, since we’re all in the same position. The rest of them, they’re fickle. When Morry died, they couldn’t have been nicer, they kept saying, ‘Doris, anything you want, anything you want.’ Now they’d like to slap my face. And that Olivia. She gets my goat. Every day it’s, ‘Stay as long as you need, Doris, anything you need, Doris,’ but I know the score. She’d like to get rid of me too.” She blows out breath, resigned. “So this is it, Mrs. Jaroslavsky,” she says. “No more spouse night. The rest of the way you have to go it alone.”

  “I know how you feel, Doris,” Arthur says. “The group’s my last link to Claire. How can I leave them? Toward the end, sometimes I think, they knew her better than I did.”

  “Oh, but they don’t, don’t you see?” Mrs. Jaroslavsky says. “That’s just their illusion. They have each other for a year, maybe a little more. But what I have to remember, what I must remember, is I had Morry a lifetime.” She smiles, breathes deeply. “The wind feels wonderful, doesn’t it?” she says, and turning from Arthur, opens her face to the sky, as if to absorb the starlight.

  Across the parking lot Kitty Mitsui calls, “Hey, you guys want to come for a nightcap? Come on! It’ll be fun!” She smiles too widely at them, as if she imagines that by sheer force of will she can muster the energy to bring the dead back to life.

  Arthur smiles back. “No thanks,” he says. “You go ahead.”

  “Suit yourself,” Kitty Mitsui says, “but you’re missing a big blow-out.” She has four with her, including Christa and Chuck. Clearly she is destined to become the group’s perpetual cheerleader, unflagging in her determination to bring back the glory of the past with a few loudly-called-out cries. Poor Kitty Mitsui. The rest of them had lives, but she’s thirty-two and unmarried. The group is her life, and it will be her doomed nostalgia.

  Mrs. Jaroslavsky winces as Kitty’s car roars off. “That smell,” she says. “That particular smell of burnt rubber. I remember it from Morry’s room when he was dying. It must have been something in one of the machines. Now I smell it—and I can hardly keep myself standing up.” She looks at the ground, clearly cried out for an entire lifetime, and Arthur is suddenly grateful to have Mrs. Theodorus, grateful for the nights they may spend together in her dog-hair-covered bed. He will lie awake, listening for occasional yelps from the kennel.

  “What you need,” Mrs. Theodorus says, “is a puppy,” and Mrs. Jaroslavsky’s mouth opens into a wide smile. “My dear girl,” she says, “I’m allergic.” Her face, against the dark sky, expands into a comic vision of the moon, eager-eyed and white-faced.

  When Claire died, Arthur arranged for her ashes to be scattered at sea. It was what she had wanted. Everyone in the group had decided what they wanted, “B vs. C,” or burial versus cremation, being one of the most popular discussion topics at the post-group gatherings. He and the children took the plastic vial of ashes out on a boat, which they had to share with another family—a staunch couple named MacGiver who had lost their son, and who resembled the protagonists of American Gothic. Arthur felt faintly embarrassed as the two families engaged in nervous small talk. The wind was too strong to go out to sea that day, the young captain informed them: the scattering would have to take place in the bay. Arthur, as he figures it now, went crazy. “She said the ocean,” he kept repeating to the captain, who in turn kept explaining, calmly and compassionately, that the wind situation simply made it impossible for them to go to the ocean. “It’s okay, Dad,” Arthur’s daughters told him. “The bay’s almost the ocean anyway.” But he was adamant. “I told her the ocean,” he kept saying. “I told her she’d be scattered over the ocean.” He clutched the vial to his chest, while the MacGivers discreetly did their own dumping, shaking the little plastic bag over the water as if it were a sand-filled towel. “Mister,” the captain said, “we’re going to have to turn back soon.” It was getting to be dusk. Finally, miserably, Arthur said, “Oh, the hell with it,” and without even warning his children (Jane was in the bathroom at the time) dumped the vial over the side of the boat in a rage. The ashes swirled into the water like foam; the big chunks plopped and sank instantly. Nothing was left but a fine powder of ash, coating the inside of the bag, and in a moment of turmoil and indecision Arthur bent over and touched his tongue to the white crust, lapped it up. He was crying wildly. Dismayed, the MacGivers pretended to look the other way, pointing out to one another the Golden Gate Bridge, Angel Island, Alcatraz.

  At Mrs. Theodorus’s house, the puppy writhes on the floor, urinates, rolls onto her back. Her mother ignores her. “It’s the hormonal change,” Mrs. Theodorus explains blithely. “After a few months, the mothers don’t recognize their offspring anymore.”

  “I think that’s sad,” Arthur says, even though he doesn’t quite believe it, and Mrs. Theodorus shrugs and pours out coffee. “In a sense, it’s better,” she says. “They’re spared the sensation of loss.”

  She looks out at the grooming table, empty now, but still festooned with Alicia’s ribbons and silver cups and photographs of Mrs. Theodorus posed with her prize bitch. Across the room the remaining puppies lie with their mother in various states of repose. Only Arthur’s puppy wags her tail, and stretches her legs behind herself, barely holding herself back from her uninterested mother.

  “I think they slept together,” Mrs. Theodorus says.

  For a moment Arthur thinks she is talking about the dogs. “All of them,” Eva goes on, and her voice is low. “That night they
went to Echo Lake.”

  “Eva,” he says, “why are you saying this?”

  “Oh, I think it’s pretty obvious,” she says. “You see, there were things I overheard—on the phone.”

  Arthur is surprised at how panicked he feels, and tries to hide it. “What did you hear?” he asks finally—not wanting to sound too curious, though he is.

  “I heard Spiro talking to a woman. A woman he was clearly … intimate with. I think it was Kitty. But then again, now that I think about it, it might just as well have been Claire.” She is quiet a moment. “It wasn’t just the two of them, if you know what I mean. So I thought I would ask you if you knew anything—”

  “I don’t know anything,” Arthur says. He stares up at the ceiling. “And I don’t want to know anything. I don’t want to know another bloody thing about that group.”

  “Don’t sound so holier-than-thou, Arthur. The two of us aren’t exactly being saintly in our loyalty to the memory of our lost loved ones. So what if Claire was sleeping with Spiro? So what if they were all sleeping together? Look at us.”

  “Claire is in the water,” Arthur says. “Spiro is buried.”

  “He wouldn’t have had it any other way,” Mrs. Theodorus says.

  They are again quiet. In the bright light of the kennel Arthur can see the portrait of Alicia that hangs over the table. Mouth open, red tongue hanging, the dog stares. Does anyone know how long it takes? Did Claire guess, that morning she woke up and said, “My hands are itching, Arthur. Were we near any poison oak last night?” All it took was three short weeks, and she was fighting to live. What did the group matter then? He was an egotist, a child, to think that his losing Claire to the group was anything even close to tragedy, to think his suffering came anywhere close to hers.

  “Oh, Arthur,” Mrs. Theodorus says. “I shouldn’t impose my weird ideas on you. Since Spiro died, I just don’t know what I’m saying or thinking, or where I’m going. I could have read a lot into that conversation, I realize now. It was hard to make it all out. I just think that if I knew … maybe I wouldn’t feel so lost.”

  “Neither of us exactly feels found,” Arthur says. “Remember how that first night at group after Claire died, I almost hit Ronni Holtzman when she said she was sorry? What was I supposed to say to that? It’s okay? Claire’s not really dead? It wasn’t your fault?”

  “Oh, Arthur,” Mrs. Theodorus says. “I know how you feel.” But Arthur doesn’t answer. To know how Claire felt—that is the knowledge he longs for: lying in that bed, skin cracked and bleeding, tubes in his kidneys, his lungs, his arms. That is what he wants, craves, lusts to know—that harsh condition by which Claire was taken from him. Isn’t it the great lie of the living, after all, that grieving is worse, is anything near death?

  Distantly he feels hands, lips on him. It is Eva, wanting, he supposes, to make love, and he obeys, allowing her to walk him into her bedroom. But in his mind he is still on that boat, clinging to the vial of Claire’s ashes. “All right, already,” is what he thinks he shouted, when the captain said they would have to leave, and in fury he threw to the water those ashes he had cradled in his arms, those ashes he had loved and lived with. His daughters, he is sure, still murmur together about “Dad’s awful moment,” “Dad’s terrible behavior,” but in truth he is still angry at how grief carped around on that boat, pretending to dignity. “Why did you have to embarrass us like that?” his daughter Jane said to him in the car—it was she who had been in the bathroom—and yet he knows he would do it again; he would throw those ashes over in graceless fury, again and again.

  “Kiss me,” Eva says nervously. He takes her in his arms. Through the window, the moon illuminates Mr. Theodorus’s supply of after-shave lotion, hair tonic, shoe polish—a row of dark bottles lined up carefully, like sentries, guarding the way in.

  My Marriage to Vengeance

  When I got the invitation to Diana’s wedding—elegantly embossed, archaically formal (the ceremony, it stated, would take place at “twelve-thirty o’clock”)—the first thing I did was the TV Guide crossword puzzle. I was not so much surprised by Diana getting married as I was by her inviting me. What, I wondered, would motivate a person like Diana to ask her former lover, a woman she had lived with for a year and a month and whose heart she had suddenly and callously broken, to a celebration of her union with a man? It seems to me that that is asking for trouble.

  I decided to call Leonore, who had been a close friend of Diana’s and mine during the days when we were together, and who always seemed to have answers. “Leonore, Diana’s getting married,” I said when she picked up the phone.

  “If you ask me,” Leonore said, “she’s wanted a man since day one. Remember that gay guy she tried to make it with? He said he wanted to change, have kids and all?” She paused ominously. “It’s not him, is it?”

  I looked at the invitation. “Mark Charles Cadwallader,” I said.

  “Well, for his sake,” Leonore said, “I only hope he knows what he’s getting into. As for Miss Diana, her doings are of no interest to me.”

  “But, Leonore,” I said, “the question is: Should I go to the wedding?” imagining myself, suddenly, in my red T-shirt that said BABY BUTCH (a present from Diana), reintroducing myself to her thin, severe, long-necked mother, Marjorie Winters.

  “I think that would depend on the food,” Leonore said.

  After I hung up, I poured myself some coffee and propped the invitation in front of me to look at. For the first few seconds it hadn’t even clicked who was getting married. I had read: “Mr. and Mrs. Humphrey Winters cordially invite you to celebrate the wedding of their daughter, Diana Helaine,” and thought: Who is Diana Helaine? Then it hit me, because for the whole year and a month, Diana had refused to tell me what her middle initial stood for—positively refused, she said, out of embarrassment, while I tried to imagine what horrors could lie behind that “H”—Hildegarde? Hester? Hulga? She was coyly, irritatingly insistent about not letting the secret out, like certain girls who would have nothing to do with me in eighth grade. Now she was making public to the world what she insisted on hiding from me, and it made perfect sense. Diana Helaine, not a different person, is getting married, I thought, and it was true, the fact in and of itself didn’t surprise me. During the year and a month, combing the ghost of her once knee-length hair, I couldn’t count how many times she’d said, very off-the-cuff, “You know, Ellen, sometimes I think this lesbian life is for the birds. Maybe I should just give it up, get married, and have two point four babies.” I’d smile and say, “If you do that, Diana, you can count on my coming to the wedding with a shotgun and shooting myself there in front of everybody.” To which, still strumming her hair like a guitar and staring into the mirror, she would respond only with a faint smile, as if she could think of nothing in the world she would enjoy more.

  First things first: We were lovers, and I don’t mean schoolgirls touching each other in exploratory ways in dormitories after dark. I mean, we lived together, shared tampons and toothpaste, had one bed to sleep in, and for all the world (and ourselves) to see. Diana was in law school in San Francisco, and I had a job at Milpitas State Hospital (I still do). Each day I’d drive an hour and a half there and an hour and a half back, and when I got home Diana would be waiting for me in bed, a fat textbook propped on her lap. We had couple friends, Leonore and Callie, for instance, and were always invited to things together, and when she left me, we were even thinking about getting power of attorney over each other. I was Diana’s first woman lover, though she had had plenty of boyfriends. I had never slept with a boy, but had been making love with girls since early in high school. Which meant that for me, being a lesbian was just how things were. But for Diana—well, from day one it was adventure, event, and episode. For a while we just had long blushing talks over pizza, during which she confessed she was “curious.” It’s ridiculous how many supposedly straight girls come on to you that way—plopping themselves down on your lap and fully expecting you t
o go through all the hard work of initiating them into Sapphic love out of sheer lust for recruitment. No way, I said. The last thing I need is to play guinea pig, testing ground, only to be left when the fun’s over and a new boyfriend shows up on the horizon. But no, Diana said. I mean, yes. I think I do. I mean, I think I am. At which point she would always have just missed the last bus home and have to spend the night in my bed, where it was only a matter of time before I had no more defenses.

  After we became lovers, Diana cut her hair off, and bought me the BABY BUTCH T-shirt. She joined all sorts of groups and organizations, dragged me to unsavory bars, insisted, fiercely, on telling her parents everything. (They did not respond well.) Only in private did she muse over her other options. I think she thought she was rich enough not to have to take any vow or promise all that seriously. Rich people are like that, I have noticed. They think a love affair is like a shared real estate venture they can just buy out of when they get tired of it.

  Diana had always said the one reason she definitely wanted to get married was for the presents, so the day before the wedding I took my credit card and went to Nordstrom’s, where I found her name in the bridal registry and was handed a computer printout with her china pattern, silver, stainless, and other assorted requirements. I was already over my spending limit, so I bought her the ultimate—a Cuisinart—which I had wrapped to carry in white crêpe paper with a huge yellow bow. Next came the equally important matter of buying myself a dress for the wedding. It had been maybe five, six years since I’d owned a dress. But buying clothes is like riding a bicycle—it comes back—and soon, remembering age-old advice from my mother on hems and necklines, I had picked out a pretty yellow sundress with a spattering of daisies, and a big, wide-brimmed hat.

  The invitation had been addressed to Miss Ellen Britchkey and guest, and afterwards, in the parking lot, that made me think about my life—how there was no one in it. And then, as I was driving home from Nordstrom’s, for the first time in years I had a seizure of accident panic. I couldn’t believe I was traveling sixty miles an hour, part of a herd of speeding cars which passed and raced each other, coming within five or six inches of collision and death every ten seconds. It astonished me to realize that I drove every day of my life, that every day of my life I risked ending my life, that all I had to do was swerve the wrong way, or look only in the front and not the side mirror, and I might hit another car, or hit a child on the way to a wedding, and have to live for the rest of my life with the guilt, or die. Horrified, I headed right, into the slow lane. The slow lane was full of scared women, crawling home alone. It was no surprise to me. I was one with the scared women crawling home alone. After Diana left me, I moved down the peninsula to a miniature house—that is the only way to describe it—two rooms with a roof, and shingles, and big pretty windows. It was my solitude house, my self-indulgence house, my remorse-and-secret-pleasure house. There I ate take-out Chinese food, read and reread Little House on the Prairie, stayed up late watching reruns of Star Trek and The Honeymooners. I lived by my wits, by survival measures. The television was one of those tiny ones, the screen smaller than a human face.