Lust & Wonder (15 page)

If he was this smashed, I wondered what shape Christopher must be in. It's widely known that Little People can't hold their liquor, so he had probably passed out in a cab on the way home. I opened a new e-mail and sent him a quick message: “Hey, how was dinner?”

Mere moments later, I got his response. “It was great. Dennis is really sweet, and I see why you like him. He's stable and handsome and smart—and boy does he know his way around a bottle of wine. Or two.” He then launched into a work issue that had come up while he was at dinner, saying he'd handle it in the morning. It all seemed disturbingly sober, especially since Dennis was already splayed out next to me snoring while Christopher was planning my career. Seemingly nothing could penetrate his shield—not AIDS, not liquor, not even a demanding, crazy author.

As Dennis thrashed and turned on his side before he began snoring again, I reminded myself just how deficient my agent would be as a boyfriend.

*   *   *

Dennis rented a car so that we could take a road trip out to Pennsylvania to visit his father who lived in an ingenious on-demand assisted living condominium unit. If you were relatively healthy and didn't need any medical assistance, it was just a small efficiency apartment like any other. But if you suddenly developed a health issue, there was a white-clad medical staff on hand 24-7. You could go from living an independent, carefree lifestyle of board games and craft projects one day to being ventilated and on life support the next without ever having to leave your own unit. Dennis's dad was popular, and as we were leaving the building to go out for lunch, two other residents engaged him in a brief conversation.

I whispered to Dennis, “I wish we could live here.”

“I know,” he said. “This is great. You know what's best about it?”

At the same time, he said, “Laundry service,” I said, “IV morphine.”

We decided to take an alternate route back to New York, because the highway between Pennsylvania and Manhattan was such an endless stretch of tedium. We used the car's GPS, but rather than guiding us, it kidnapped us. After four hours, we realized we'd been heading south, not east. At first, Dennis was furious, but I held his hand and told him it was a good thing.

“We'll check into a Bates Motel and eat Kentucky Fried Chicken in bed.”

This pleased him enormously. Dennis loved eating messy food with his hands, but only when nobody else was around so that his face could be unapologetically covered with grease.

Later, we snuggled up together on the small, hard mattress with the bleach-scented sheets. We were somewhere in Virginia. My face was pressed against his neck.

“Don't move,” I told him. “This is perfect.”

“I won't,” he said, hugging me closer. “It is.”

“Do you think we should search the room for peepholes?” I asked.

He smiled. The room reeked of chicken. I was happy. Dennis was happy. I knew this, because I asked him, “Are you happy?”

“Yes, I'm happy.”

But I wondered. “Would you tell me if you weren't?”

“I would tell you if I wasn't happy,” he said.

I couldn't leave it alone. Was it
happy
that I felt? As I lay against him and aligned my breathing with his, I realized the thing I actually felt was
safe
. Normal people who weren't raised by mentally ill goats probably took the feeling of safety for granted. They only noticed when they suddenly felt
unsafe
. When the hands reach up from under the bed and grab their ankles, they scream, whereas I'm like “Wait, can you scratch my knee before you kill me?”

Expecting the mushroom cloud, I am stunned into blinking stupidity when I look at the sky and see only blue sky.

I realized I was thinking about all of this because feeling safe felt almost like drinking; something I could imagine myself becoming addicted to instantly. A feeling I would need to experience constantly, no matter what, from now on.

*   *   *

When Dennis had his first colonoscopy, I went with him to the appointment. When it was over, I joined him with the doctor for the results.

“Everything looks good,” he told us.

The doctor was about Dennis's age and actually resembled him with short, salt-and-pepper hair and coordinating closely cropped facial hair.

“That's a relief,” Dennis said.

The doctor then did something doctors don't usually do: he made small talk. It was doctorly small talk, but still. “Anything else on your mind? How are you feeling otherwise in your life?”

By the end of the appointment, we knew that the doctor enjoyed photography and also played guitar. He was like a friendly family doctor from a Country Crock margarine commercial, except his office was within gunshot distance of the E train.

After we left, Dennis raved about the man. “We should become friends with him. He was amazing.”

It's true
, I thought.
We should become friends with the man
. Because like a vampire, I wanted to suck the charisma from his veins.

Over the next several weeks, I increasingly felt that Dennis ought to be with a well-adjusted proctologist instead of with me. An easygoing professional who didn't hold a grudge against the sun and had his own scrapbook of recipes clipped from
The Times
over the years. I likewise worried that my true mate was somebody who was definitely out of prison but maybe on house arrest for the rest of his life because he did something absolutely awful but thrillingly interesting and unique. Or maybe somebody with a fatal sun allergy. I would love the psychological permission to draw the shades during the sunniest, most glorious day of the year so I could stay inside and type. And not feel like I was deeply defective for this. Or, at least, that I was deeply defective but, so what? Pass the chips and salsa.

I also understood that I had to expand myself as a person. Because this simply would not do, this innate character of mine.

Dennis had expanded himself by giving up his design business to become my business manager. We were an actual corporation now, with a joint checking account and letterhead. Instead of sausage casings or urinal mints, our company created books. Technically, I created the books and earned all the money while Dennis managed it and told me when I could buy a new laptop or upgrade my cell phone. It was like I finally had the dad I never had.

We were together forever. Dennis was my security.

So yes, I would expand as a person. And Dennis would simply have to understand that I could only expand so much before I burst all over the dinner guests and stained their lovely outfits with my mess.

*   *   *

Though I almost never visited the place, I did own a small house in Northampton, Massachusetts. While it had originally been built in the 1930s—the period in architecture responsible for the Empire State Building and Frank Lloyd Wright's Pennsylvania masterpiece, Fallingwater—my house had possessed but a single charm: a low asking price. It was not the quaint, graceful abode one might expect of a home near the banks of the historic Connecticut River.

I bought the house before I knew Dennis. Which is to say, there was nobody to stop me from buying it at the time. My inspiration for purchasing it: inevitable doom. It would be my emergency bomb shelter, purchased with book advance money. If all failed, I figured, I could return to the town where I was raised and live in the most inexpensive house on the real estate market. It had been so affordable because the street was in a declared flood zone. At the time, this seemed like no big deal. I thought,
So I'll live on the second floor.

Decades ago, it had been a farmhouse with modest charms. Then it was gutted and renovated by the previous owner, a man who clearly had no more experience with home renovation than I did. As far as the craftsmanship of his work was concerned, at least the new vinyl windows were not upside down. There was not much to say beyond that.

Any original details, such as pretty crown molding or solid wood doors, had been stripped clean out and replaced with their contemporary particleboard equivalents from Home Depot. I knew nothing about the man who owned the house before me except the color of his pubic hair and the fact that he must have had a tremendous amount of it, because I was vacuuming those curly red fibers out of the beige wall-to-wall carpeting for a year.

There was a large island in the kitchen with a white laminate top, new oak cabinets, and electrical outlets in abundance, making
handy electricity
one of the home's prime selling points. The sliding glass doors off the kitchen overlooked an expansive boggy field where one could easily hide among the shoulder-high weeds. I figured the place would be perfect for the future emergency me; the failed single writer who had become destitute and was now hunkering down until an asteroid hit the planet.

The fact that the house was devoid of charm meant it was easy to maintain. After all, where there are no window boxes, there can be no flowers to water. Aluminum siding meant the house could remain pristine white for all of eternity. But even a plastic wineglass of a house, as it turned out, was a tremendous amount of work for somebody who heaved heavy sighs of fatigue and annoyance when he had to lick an envelope flap and then carry the envelope all the way outside to a mailbox.

The narrow strip of dirt and weeds that separated my house from the street was in fact a Rorschach test for the rest of the nosy neighborhood, who apparently viewed it as an actual lawn—one I was expected to care about and maintain. Notes were slipped under the screen door. “Hi. I just wanted to let you know that my son could mow your lawn if you like, for ten dollars, every two weeks. I only say this because your yard is a little unruly.”

Ignoring passive-aggressive notes like this was a specialty of mine, so I welcomed my neighbor's “thoughts.” Even though I was rarely at the house, it made me feel secure to own it. I just never expected that I would one day need to expose a boyfriend to it.

When Dennis first saw the place, his distaste revealed itself on his face in the form of furrows and frown lines, even though his mouth evicted the words, “It's cute.” Which was exactly what he said the first time he saw my flat butt and tried to mask his disappointment.

“It does have a luxurious number of outlets in the kitchen.” I smiled expansively, just like the Realtor had done with me. I even made the same sweeping hand gesture.

“I guess that's a good thing,” he said, frowning.

But as much as he loathed my little house, he did like being in rural Massachusetts. And because my career hadn't failed as I'd expected and because I was now part of a couple instead of part of a suicide pact with other survivalists, we decided to sell my little house and build our own new, vastly superior house in the next town.

Construction took almost two years. The doors were solid. The trim was wood, not Sheetrock. The shingles were cedar instead of aluminum. From nature's point of view, our new house was entirely edible.

*   *   *

One unexpected benefit of suddenly owning a new house that required as much attention as a newborn was that we now traveled between the apartment in New York and the house every weekend. It wasn't that I enjoyed the three-hour drive, but now we just didn't have as much time to spend with Dennis's soul-numbing friends, and this secretly delighted me. For the most part, I saw them as place-holder friends, waxworks from a cobwebbed museum of people he'd accumulated over the years without much thought given to their actual personalities. If there was a trait they all shared, it was a peculiar emotional remove that made interactions with them puzzlingly impersonal. I felt certain that chinless Brenda, whom he'd known for over a decade, couldn't even spell Dennis's last name. And on the rare occasions when one of his friends called him, it was usually because they were dutifully returning his call to them.

“It's not that I hate your friends,” I lied. “It's that none of them seem to have any real affection for you. It's almost like they're generic.”

Dennis felt I was making him choose between me and his friends; I felt I was making him choose between actual friends and a bunch of names in an address book.

There were exceptions. His South American friend, Marta, was smart and filled with life; she adored Dennis. And his former business partner, Alice, was fun. But for every Marta or Alice, there were four or five Gray Garys. Gary's skin was actually the color of a fly's wings. I once had to sit across from him at dinner while he described the difficulty he'd experienced opening a jar.

His wife had joined the discussion. “I told him he should try running the lid under the hot-water faucet,” she'd said in a voice just barely above a mumble. I could never remember her name, so I dubbed her Tedia.

Gray Gary said, “So I did like she said and ran the lid under the hot water. I had to dry it off because the water made it slippery, you know?”

Dennis nodded enthusiastically, like this was the most scandalous story he'd ever heard, positively dripping with suspense and intrigue.

“And then once it was dry, I was finally able to twist it off. Seemed like a lot of trouble to go through for some pickles,” he said in thrilling conclusion.

Tedia added, “They were those pickles sliced lengthwise, for sandwiches.”

Because I am a horrible person, my eyes bored through her skull as I sat there smiling and thinking,
Oh my fucking God, please stop talking about pickles. Please stop breathing. Nobody in the world cares about a single mushy word falling out of your face, so at least shut up so I don't have to look at your tan teeth.

It was sometime after this endless dinner when I realized that almost all of Dennis's friends seemed clinically depressed. Lumpy Tina, whom I'd only met once and had forgotten by the time I turned away from her; Pat, who lived in suburban Pennsylvania and collected plastic food storage containers; Roxy and Chaz, whom I at first presumed to be a lesbian couple on the verge of breaking up were in fact man and wife, newly married.