Lust & Wonder (18 page)

In the kitchen, then, I felt the weight of our incompatibility. A sense that a split was inevitable.

But again, the other side. That people do live like that.

“I love you. I love a lot about our life,” he said.

We were being careful not to say things we could not take back.

We put the groceries away. We didn't say anything. Until finally I said, “I shouldn't ask questions if I don't want to know the answers.”

He sat at the table. He glanced at the newspaper. He turned the page and cocked his head to study the article. I stood there staring at him, hands poised on my hips. “And,” I said, “another thing. I always have to bring things up. You never tell me when something's wrong. I have to drag it out of you.”

He nodded, because this was true. He'd admitted it himself. So much for all that therapy.

I thought of something else to say but changed my mind and then decided, screw it. “You're an emotional miser.”

His glance returned to the newspaper, and he licked his lips.

Maybe this was unfair, cruel. But it felt true, especially then. Especially because I was so hurt and embarrassed that I was happy. Now, it seemed simpleminded to be happy.

My childhood had been hijacked by drunks, pedophiles, lunatics, and surrealists, so I grew up in a world unrelated to the actual planetary body beneath my feet. I was at the mercy of the off-the-rails adults around me. The upside was, I became determined as an adult to do what
I
wanted: become an author, get published, become sober, get love. Security and love, these were the two things I did not feel as a child, so I chased after them now, sometimes bumping into things and knocking them down in the process. I was an emotional Great Dane, hugely needy and clumsy.

Dennis read the paper, and I made updates to my Web site. No sense in trying to talk more about this when he'd shut down, tuning me out.

I let the puppy out of his crate. He peed on the newspaper, ideal. And then he and Bentley mouthed each other, rolled, frolicked, snapped, and chased each other around the apartment.

Dennis had moved to the sofa and was still reading the paper.

I said, “This morning, I wanted to read. Remember we talked about it last night, how I haven't been reading enough? So, this morning I was going to read, and that's when you decided to clean.”

Dennis looked up at me as I spoke but then turned his face away from me, indignant. This gesture infuriated me.

“You were dragging that fucking vacuum all over the place, but especially near the bed where I was trying to start a new book. I wanted something, and you wouldn't give it to me. I wanted one morning to read, but you don't approve of reading on sunny days, so you punished me for it.”

Today, I felt like letting nothing go.

I had been naïve. I had chosen to believe something for both of us. I believed that my own hope was enough for two. That because I was so happy with the idea of us, this of course meant he must be, too.

I was terrified. What if we split? What if this was the end? I was pushing like I was trying to make it the end, but that's not what I wanted.

Fuck.

Why couldn't we just talk about this shit?

I stomped away and went back to the dining room table where my laptop sat. Dennis shut down when there was a conflict, and I was the opposite: I had to talk about it. It was unbearable not to. His silence then became this thing I had to break apart with my words. I hated the sound of my own voice when I was like this.

Dennis just sat there, silently turning the pages as though this were the most normal thing in the world, this distance between us, this lopsided communication.

Was it normal?

Or was this a base-level problem, a foundation issue? When you added the sex in, when you considered that we barely had any, it seemed sad.

I knew that he would get up at ten or eleven to make dinner, but by then, it would be too late. And I would say, “I'm not going to eat anything this late. Don't bother if it's for me. Only cook if you want it.”

He showed his love for me by cooking. I bought ingredients, and he was not going to cook until late. He was going to withhold this. I knew him and knew this is what he would do.

Perhaps I am wrong and he will not play this game
, I thought.
Perhaps I am inventing things
.

Was I insane? Or was the window suddenly clean? It made me crazy not to know. And I was still so drowsy.

I studied him sitting there, ignoring me. I wanted to say something hurtful or sharp or pointed. I wanted to say something that could ease the tension, but I also wanted it to build and build. I always had to be the one who said, “Is something wrong?” Because if I didn't say it, it didn't get said.

So should I say something now? Or just let him read, let things go on as they are. Make no move to hurt, no move to repair. Just go and drift, together, or apart
.

*   *   *

We did not speak to each other the rest of the night. We went to bed. He made no attempt to cook, so we had nothing for dinner. I woke up in the night and ate four chocolates.

The puppy woke me at seven thirty, though I think Dennis had gotten up earlier, taken care of him, and put him back in his crate. Dennis woke up again, and while he took Bentley outside, I fed the tiny puppy and tried to get him to poop on his newspapers. When they returned, we let the dogs play.

Dennis went back to bed. We said nothing to each other. Not even “Good morning.”

Last night on the way back from the grocery store, I'd been so happy. The thing I'd always been chasing, it seemed like maybe I'd finally caught up with it. Of course, Dennis had to feel it, too. How could he not? This seventy-five degrees and cloudless content?
Are you so, so happy, too?

“Not as happy as you.”

With those words, we became incompatible. Two people, not just one, not as happy as they could be in the relationship.

I could have moved to him, said something, corrected this before it got worse. But I knew that would not happen.

*   *   *

Bentley vomited on the rug three times. He was clingy, molding his body to fit my calves, tucking into, against, the bone. He went from Dennis on the bed back over to me on the couch. He threw up white foam as though he'd been eating pieces of the ocean.

We were halfway through day two of our standoff when we finally talked.

I am insecure and short-circuit when my security is threatened. I admitted this. But then I managed to hurt him by telling him he was judgmental every day. He asked for examples, evidence, but the drowsy feeling came.

The thing was, I felt he was so judgmental about almost everything that it was difficult to pluck a mere example out of the air to serve as evidence. It was like trying to prove we were in the midst of a sunny day. “Well, we just are. I mean,
look
.”

We talked but did not resolve. Things felt awkward but not awful. And like somebody who decides to leave the moldy bread in the refrigerator just to see what will eventually happen, I decided, fine.

I wouldn't be the happier one anymore.

*   *   *

We moved through this conflict the way one drives through suddenly torrential and frightening rain: feeling that a crash was imminent but with an unspoken agreement to say nothing at all.

We moved out of Dennis's Upper West Side apartment and into the house we'd built in Massachusetts, where construction was mostly complete. I was astonished by the way the formally
intolerable
was transmogrified into the merely mundane.

In a way, it was as though the fight that had begun on the sidewalk outside the supermarket never really ended. It merely continued into another state and extended for years. The difference was, we were no longer cooped up together in a studio apartment. We had three floors filled with distractions to keep us divided. It was fascinating how quickly and permanently we settled into a daily routine with so much physical space between us: I worked downstairs; Dennis settled into the room he created as an office upstairs. We e-mailed each other during the day, he cooked at night while I remained on my laptop, and then we ate together at midnight.

The man who bought Dennis's New York apartment had reminded me of Dennis somehow. He was exceedingly jovial in almost exactly the same indiscriminate way, and I wondered if he and Dennis would become friends. I was surprised when Dennis was chilly with him.

I called Christopher every day and no longer thought of him as just my agent but my best friend. Though even more than this, really, because he was the only person in the world that I liked. Because he'd read every word I'd ever written about myself, he already knew exactly how horrible I was and, still, he took my calls.

I ordered him a gift from late-night home shopping TV and had it sent without a card or any return address, and he guessed it was from me right away.

“But how did you know?” I demanded to know.

He laughed into the phone. “Because who else in the world would send me a Sheena Easton doll? I mean, she's porcelain and permanently on her knees, always
just about
to give a blow job; she has wings!”

*   *   *

Dennis pointed at the pipe sticking out of the wall in the corner of the garage and frowned. “I worry this sink will feel crammed stuck in the corner like that. I wonder if we should have moved it more toward the center.”

But of course we'd had this conversation: the sink could
not
be moved into the center of the garage's rear wall because on the other side of that wall was the yellow TV room, and he knew this.

This was Dennis's dream sink. It would allow him to indulge his fetish: washing out the rags he would use to wash our cars and buff them to a diamond finish. The builder installed the plumbing for the sink in the only place that made sense: tucked into the corner, out of the way of the counters he was also going to install.

We had been standing in the still-incomplete garage for close to forty minutes, Dennis tracing his fingers over the barn-board wainscoting he had installed. Soon there would be shelving that ran along the walls beginning midway and continuing up to the ceiling. Instead of fluorescent lights, we'd installed old hanging schoolhouse lanterns. The curtains were being sewn as we stood there and would be hung the following week. This garage was nicer than most apartments I'd lived in in Manhattan. But I lacked the patience to stand in it and second-guess the location of the sink.

Somebody told us, “Building a house together is a real test of a relationship. If you can survive that, you can survive anything.” I interpreted this as, building the house would be the single and largest test of our relationship ever, and once it's over, you can relax and be happy, finally.

I told Dennis, “You know, it's gonna be fine. There's gonna be like three inches between the sink and the wall, so I think we'll be okay.”

Dennis said, “Yeah, that's true. There will be those three inches.”

So, these were my problems now. Will my new garage sink feel crammed into the corner, or would those three inches give it some breathing room? My new sink, in my new climate-controlled garage, in my new luxury cottage, with copper rain gutters and native stone floors. These were my concerns now. My own life felt utterly unfamiliar to me. Distant and pristine, as though belonging to somebody else. As I stood in the garage I thought,
This must be what happy feels like.

I had a career that involved sitting in a comfortable chair and which provided me with enough free time to dress the dogs in T-shirts every day and laugh at them. I'd been a store detective, Ground Round waiter, and advertising copywriter, so I knew it really did not get better than this. Furthermore, I did not have a fatal illness, and I was certain baldness would be cured in my lifetime.

As far as I could see, my life now was the opposite of my chaotic, off-the-rails childhood or my drunken twenties in New York.

And yet there were certain details in my new life that seemed suspect upon closer inspection. Like the fact that Dennis and I had built this house in the same town where I was raised.

We would be living on a cul-de-sac. And while many New Yorkers sneer at stores like Target and Walmart, I was openly thrilled to be living within a few miles of both. I already had my pet superstore discount card.

When this eco-friendly, SUV-hating college town was in an uprising over the local buffalo farm being sold and developed into a Lowe's home improvement store, I was ready to picket. “
YOU CAN'T FIX A SINK WITH A BUFFALO!!! IN WITH LOWE'S!!!
” I looked at the pristine Hadley farmland and could think of nothing more beautiful than replacing those trees along the borders of the fields with a parking lot for seventeen hundred cars.

I wanted a “normal” suburban childhood, and now I was going to have it, thirty years later. And I was going to have it in a plastic bag with a logo stamped on the front, along with a coupon to save 5 percent next time.

This was a college town filled with extremely well-educated people who drove Volvos and wore clothing made from sustainable fibers. It had always been this way. And while there were several McMansions in the area, I was sure that in time, some local environmentalist group would burn them to the ground.

Crime in this town was mostly college kids doing vile college things involving beer, condoms, and mailboxes.

We left the garage and climbed back into the car. As we drove down the street, I was thinking about how happy I would soon be, here in this town I kind of loathed but with my stable and normal mate imported directly from the Upper West Side. I saw flashing blue lights in the rearview mirror.

“God fucking damn it,” Dennis said, looking in the rearview mirror. “Shit.”

He eased the car over to the side and threw it into park. He dropped his hands in his lap and then quickly reached for the glove compartment.