A Place I've Never Been Read Online Free Page B

fingers were white. I was remembering how Nathan looked the first time I saw him, in line at a college dining hall, his hands on his hips, his head erect, staring worriedly at the old lady dishing out food, as if he feared she might run out, or not give him enough. I have always loved the boyish hungers—for food, for sex—because they are so perpetual, so faithful in their daily revival, and even though I hadn’t met Nathan yet, I think, in my mind, I already understood: I wanted to feed him, to fill him up; I wanted to give him everything.
    Across from us, now, two girls were smoking cigarettes and talking about what art was. A man and a woman, in love, intertwined their fingers. Nathan’s hand was getting warm and damp in mine, so I let it go, and eventually he blew his nose and lit a cigarette.
    â€œYou know,” he said after a while, “it’s not the sex, really. That’s not what I regret missing. It’s just that—Do you realize, Celia, I’ve never been in love? Never once in my life have I actually been in love?” And he looked at me very earnestly, not knowing, not having the slightest idea, that once again he was counting me for nothing.
    â€œNathan,” I said. “Oh, my Nathan.” Still, he didn’t seem satisfied, and I knew he had been hoping for something better than my limp consolation. He looked away from me, across the café, listening, I suppose, for that wind-chime peal as all the world’s pennies flew his way.

Spouse Night
    During the day, when Arthur is at work, the puppy listens to the radio—“Anything with voices,” Mrs. Theodorus advised when Arthur went to pick up the puppy; “it calms them.” And so, sitting in her pen in Arthur’s decaying kitchen, while she chews on thenewspaper that is meant to be her toilet, or urinates on the towel that is meant to be her bed, the puppy is surrounded by a comforting haze of half-human noise. For a while Arthur tried KQRT, the leftist station, and the puppy heard interviews with experts on Central American insurgency and radical women of color. Then he tuned in to a station that broadcast exclusively for the Polish community. “Mrs. Byziewicz, who has requested this polka, is eighty-five, the mother of three, and the grandmother of eleven,” the puppy heard as she pounced on her rubber newspaper, or tried to scale the chicken-wire walls of her pen. Now Arthur’s settled on KSXT, a peculiar station which claims to feature “lite” programming, and which Arthur thinks is ideally suited to the listening needs of a dog, so the puppy is hearing a ten-minute-long radio play about Edgar Allan Poe when Arthur rushes in the door with Mrs. Theodorus, both breathing hard.
    â€œEdgar, why are your poems so strange and weird?” Mrs. Poe is asking her husband on the radio, and the puppy looks at the woman who midwifed her birth ten weeks earlier. Mrs. Theodorus’s blouse is partially undone, and the drawstring on her purple sweatpants is loosened, but all the puppy notices is the faint, half-familiar smell of her mother, and smelling it, she cries, barks, and, for the first time in her short life, leaps over the edge of her pen. No one is there to congratulate her. Sniffing, the puppy makes her way into the bedroom, where Arthur and Mrs. Theodorus are in the midst of a sweaty half-naked tumble. The puppy jumps into the fray, barking, and Mrs. Theodorus screams.
    â€œArthur, you have got to teach her who’s boss,” she says, and climbs off him. “Remember—you must be in control at all times.” She looks down at the puppy, who sits on the floor now, humbled before the sight of Mrs. Theodorus, naked except for her black bra, disapproval shining in her eyes. A small trickle of moisture snakes through the thick-pile carpet, darkening its yellow whorls, and quickly, quicker than Arthur can believe, Mrs. Theodorus has the puppy in hand and is