Free A Place I've Never Been by David Leavitt Page A

lesbian,” I said, “and still am, and will be until the day I die.” I don’t know why I said that, but it shut her up.
    For about thirty seconds there was not a sound from the other side of the divider, and then I heard Diana sniffling. I didn’t know what to say.
    â€œChrist,” Diana said, after a few seconds, and blew her nose. “Christ. Why’d I get married?”
    I hesitated. “I’m not sure I’m the person to ask,” I said. “Did your mother have anything to do with it?”
    â€œOh, Ellen,” Diana said, “please!” I heard her spinning the toilet paper roll. “Look,” she said, “you probably resent me incredibly. You probably think I’m a sellout and a fool and that I was a royal bitch to you. You probably think when Charlie does it to me I lie there and pretend I’m feeling something when I’m not. Well, it’s not true. Not in theleast.” She paused. “I was just not prepared to go through my life as a social freak, Ellen. I want a normal life, just like everybody. I want to go to parties and not have to die inside trying to explain who it is I’m with. Charlie’s very good for me in that way, he’s very understanding and generous.” She blew her nose again. “I’m not denying you were part of my life, that our relationship was a big thing for me. I’m just saying it’s finished. That part’s finished.”
    Defiantly she flushed.
    We stood up, pulled up our underpants, and stepped out of the toilet booths to face each other. I looked Diana right in the eye, and I noticed her weaken. I saw it. I could have kissed her or something, I knew, and made her even more unhappy. But I didn’t really see the point.
    Afterwards, we walked together out of the ladies’ room, back into the ballroom, where we were accosted by huge crowds of elderly women with purses that looked to me like the shellacked sushi in certain Japanese restaurant windows.
    â€œWas it okay?” Walter asked me, taking my arm and leading me back to our table for cake.
    â€œYes,” I said. “Okay.” But he could see from my face how utterly miserable I was.
    â€œDon’t even try,” Juanita said, giggling hysterically to herself as we got back to the table. “You’re not getting a word out of me, so don’t even begin to ask me questions.”
    Once I knew a schizophrenic girl. Her name was Holly Reardon and she was my best friend from age five to eight. We played house a lot, and sometimes we played spaceship, crawling together into a cubbyhole behind my parents’ sofa bed, then turning off thelights and pretending the living room was some fantastic planet. We did well with our limited resources. But then money started disappearing, and my mother sat me down one day and asked me if I had noticed the money always disappeared when Holly came to visit. I shook my head vigorously no, refusing to believe her. And then one day my favorite stuffed animal, a dog called Rufus, disappeared, and I didn’t tell my mother, and didn’t tell my mother, until one day she said to me, “Ellen, what happened to Rufus?” and I started to cry. We never found Rufus. Holly had done something with him. And it wasn’t because of me that she went away, my parents assured me, it wasn’t because of me that her parents closed up the house and had to move into an apartment. Holly was not well. Years later, when I went to work at the state hospital, I think somewhere, secretly, I hoped Holly might be there, a patient there, that we might play house and spaceship in the linen closets. But of course she wasn’t. Who knows where she is now?
    After the wedding I felt so depressed I had ice cream for dinner. I did several acrostic puzzles. I watched
The Honeymooners
and I watched
Star Trek
. I watched Sally Jessy Raphael. I watched
The Twilight Zone
. Fortunately, it was not