A Place I've Never Been Read Free

at a different time. I think he was privately so excited at the prospect of this virile young man, Denny, sleeping, and perhaps having sex, between his sheets, that he would have taken any number of risks to assure it. Crush: what an oddly appropriate word, considering what it makes you do to yourself. His apartment was, in a sense, the most Nathan could offer, and probably the most Denny would accept. I understood: You want to get as close as you can, even if it’s only at arm’s length. And when you come back, maybe, you want to breathe in the smell of the person you love loving someone else.
    Europe, he said, had been a failure. He had wandered, having dinner with old friends of his parents, visiting college acquaintances who were busy with exotic lives. He’d gone to bars, which was merely frustrating; there was nothing to be done. “What about safe sex?” I asked, and he said, “Celia, please. There is no such thing, as far as I’m concerned.” Once again this started a panicked thumping in my chest as I thought aboutRoy, and Nathan said, “It’s really true. Suppose something lands on you—you know what I’m saying—and there’s a microscopic cut in your skin. Bingo.”
    â€œNathan, come on,” I said. “That sounds crazy to me.”
    â€œYeah?” he said. “Just wait till some ex-lover of yours calls you up with a little piece of news. Then see how you feel.”
    He returned to his furious scrubbing of the bathroom sink. I returned to my furious scrubbing of the tub. Somehow, even now, I’m always stuck with the worst of it.
    Finally we were done. The place looked okay—it didn’t smell anymore—though it was hardly what it had been. Some long-preserved pristineness was gone from the apartment, and both of us knew without saying a word that it would never be restored. We breathed in exhausted—no, not exhausted triumph. It was more like relief. We had beaten something back, yet again.
    My hands were red from detergents, my stomach and forehead sweaty. I went into the now-bearable bathroom and washed up, and then Nathan said he would take me out to dinner—my choice. And so we ended up, as we had a thousand other nights, sitting by the window at the Empire Szechuan down the block from his apartment, eating cold noodles with sesame sauce, which, when we had finished them, Nathan ordered more of. “God, how I’ve missed these,” he said, as he scooped the brown slimy noodles into his mouth. “You don’t know.”
    In between slurps he looked at me and said, “You look good, Celia. Have you lost weight?”
    â€œYes, as a matter of fact,” I said.
    â€œI thought so.”
    I looked back at him, trying to re-create the expression on the French woman’s face, and didn’t say anything, but as it turned out I didn’t need to. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said, “and you’re right. Twelve pounds since you last saw me. But I don’t care. I mean, you lose weight when you’re sick. At least this way, gaining weight, I know I don’t have it.”
    He continued eating. I looked outside. Past the plate-glass window that separated us from the sidewalk, crowds of people walked, young and old, good-looking and bad-looking, healthy and sick, some of them staring in at our food and our eating. Suddenly—urgently—I wanted to be out among them, I wanted to be walking in that crowd, pushed along in it, and not sitting here, locked into this tiny two-person table with Nathan. And yet I knew that escape was probably impossible. I looked once again at Nathan, eating happily, resigned, perhaps, to the fate of his apartment, and the knowledge that everything would work out, that this had, in fact, been merely a run-of-the-mill crisis. For the moment he was appeased, his hungry anxiety sated; for the moment. But who could guess what would set him off