A Place I've Never Been by David Leavitt

SIDA”
hadn’t caught up with them yet. It was the first time in my life and the only place in the world where I have ever been able to imagine sex with a man without feeling fear or guilt. Instead, I imagined the prospect of adventure, celebration. I could taste it on my lips.
    I met Laurent the second night I went to that disco. A fight had broken out somewhere across the dance floor, and the ripples of movement threw us literally into each other’s arms. Laughing, we just stayed there. It was a glorious, easy meeting. Laurent was twenty, a literature student at Nanterre, son of an Italian mother and a French father, and the birthdate carved on the gold chain around his neck was a lie. “Why?” I asked him that night, while we lay naked and sweating in my big bed, in the heat of the night, and I, at least, in the heat of love. He explained that his mother was already two months pregnant when she married his father, and that they had had to lie to the Italian relatives about the birthday to avoid a
scandale
. He didn’t mind because it meant he had two birthdays a year—one in France and another, two months later, in Italy. Except that he rarely saw theItalian relatives. His father, whom he hated, who drove a silver “Bay-Em-Double-vay,” had left his mother for her cousin. His mother had not been the same since; he had had to move home with her, to take care of her. He also had to babysit his own
petite cousine
, Marianne, every morning at nine, and therefore couldn’t spend the night. (This seemed to be the ultimate, consequential point of the saga.) I said that was fine. I was ready to agree to just about anything.
    From the moment I let Laurent out the door, in the early hours of the morning, I was jubilant with love for him—for his long, dark eyelashes, his slightly contemptuous mouth, his odd insistence on wearing only white socks. (
“Non, ce n’est pas les Français,”
he explained when I asked him,
“c’est seulement moi.”
) Like most Europeans, he was uncircumcised—the only uncircumcised lover I have ever had. That small flap of skin, long removed from me in some deeply historical
bris
, was the embodiment of our difference. It fascinated me, and my fascination chafed poor Laurent, who couldn’t understand what the big deal was—I, the American, was the one who was altered,
pas normal
, after all. I pulled at it, played with it, curious and delighted, until he made me stop.
“Tu me fais mal,”
he protested. Craig’s eyes would have lit up.
    But Craig was nowhere near, and I was in a limited way happy. My love affair with Laurent was simple and regular, a series of afternoons, one blending into the other. Around eleven-thirty in the morning, after finishing with
la petite Marianne
, he would arrive at my apartment, and I would feed him lunch. Then we would make love, perfunctorily, for an hour or so. Then we would take a walk to his car, and he would drive me for a while through the suburbs of Paris—Choisy-le-Roi, Vincennes, Clamart, Pantin. He classified these suburbs as either
pas beau, beau
, or
joli
, adjectives whichseemed to have more to do with class than aesthetics. I was inept at understanding the distinctions.
“Neuilly est joli, n’est-ce pas?”
I’d ask him, as we drove down tree-lined avenues, past big, imposing houses.
“Non, c’est beau.” “Clamart, c’est aussi beau, n’estce pas?” “Non, c’est joli.”
Eventually I’d give up, and Laurent, frustrated by my intransigence, would drop me off at my apartment before going off to his job. All night he sold Walkmans in a Parisian “drugstore,” a giant, futuristic shopping mall of red Formica and chrome that featured at its heart a seventy-foot wall on which sixty-four televisions played rock videos simultaneously. This huge and garish place is the sentimental center of my memories of