Lust & Wonder (22 page)

I couldn't be with somebody who couldn't stand me. That's crazy.

If I vacuumed the downstairs? Dennis would hear the vacuum and come downstairs and vacuum over again. If I dusted, he dusted the areas I just dusted. So I just stopped attempting any of these domestic chores because, frankly, I didn't give a fuck if the house was dusty. We live in a universe filled with dust. To fight it is to fight against the flow of time itself.

If I moved something in the medicine cabinet because I used it every morning, when I next opened the cabinet, it was back where he'd placed it, behind the taller things that are mostly never used. This is how it was: the warfare of our relationship played out wordlessly through a medicine cabinet.

He said he wanted to work on us. But his eyes said, “It's too late.” And they had great shards of rage in them.

The only reason we were together now was because it's a lot of work to break up. I saw him at eight in the morning when he walked the dogs. Then again at midnight when he said good night to them.

*   *   *

So there I was in bed at two in the morning. But instead of sleeping, I had my laptop on my thighs, and I was squinting at the screen and typing a quick piece of code—chmod + x ~/.scripts/culturealarm—so that my computer's arcane Linux operating system would wake me each morning with the top video on YouTube.

As I strained to double-check the tiny white monospace characters of my command in the terminal emulator window, I saw something out of the corner of my eye. It was like a great shadow had crossed a wall or lightning had flashed in the distant corner of the room. I could not identify what I had seen, but inexplicably, I felt the rush of blind yet unmistakable lust.

Lust was disconcerting; it was not a part of my feeling world but rather something I vaguely remembered from my twenties with George, a sensation from the last century reserved for doomed bankers.

I clicked the Linux nonsense out of the way and spotted the coy slideshow widget on the desktop. While I was focused on my exacting, geeky task, my right eyeball had been busy scoping out the photographs without my knowledge. The slideshow widget fed from a file of photos somebody recently sent. They were not my pictures, but I knew most of the people in them.

“Who the fuck is that?” I said, but only in my mind because the person I vowed to spend the rest of my life with was asleep on the other side of the mattress. I checked on him to make sure he hadn't heard the racket going on inside my body, but he was asleep. So I looked back at the widget and leaned forward, nearly pressing my oily nose to the screen in order to scrutinize the picture.

It vanished, replaced by a photo of a collie.

I actually flinched, as though I had lost my footing and stepped off the edge of a backyard deck, my body anticipating the crack of the hard earth. A quick jab at the picture frame thing with my pointer brought back the previous image.

I stared. My throat was dry. A prickle of sweat stung my head.

It had actually only taken a mere thousandth of a second for me to recognize the person in the photograph. Hardly surprising; there are more neurons in the brain than there are stars in the known universe, and recognizing somebody one has known for ten years and speaks to every day—either in person or in e-mail—is not such a drain on one's neural resources. Not like, say, being the first to decipher hieroglyphics.

But tucked inside that fraction of a moment, it seemed to take an eternity for those familiar features to at last resolve into.… what? And before they did, before I was able to name the person, I was able to form the feeling: “I would die for him.”

First, I felt love. Second, it was like a fist had been jammed into my crotch and pressed against my balls, an ache. I felt ownership, primal, just a mouth going, “Mine, mine, mine.” And there at last it was: absolute recognition. And: Are you fucking kidding me? Not again. This. Is. Not. Possible.

This is my agent
.

Under his suit, out of his office, Christopher reclined in a hammock and looked into the camera, lens flare, his hair swept away from his face, a face more beautiful than I'd allowed myself to realize in years. I'd spent so much time dissecting his flaws, a process that always made him laugh.

I despised whoever took that photograph, but I could not look away.

It felt as if I had just walked in on my boss in the bathroom stall at the office and he was whacking off, a Barbie Thumbelina in his free hand and a poppers-soaked dust mask covering his mouth. Except my dick was hard, much harder than it'd been in over a decade. So in this case, I was also my boss, and I had walked in on myself.

This is the first symptom of a brain disorder
, I thought earnestly.

I wondered if I could make the picture larger.

Following the initial electrical discharge of distaste, my galaxy of neurons was once again able to provide me with a net of something akin to reason.

“Well, it's a very flattering picture. And I don't believe I've seen that hairstyle before. It's also very late, and I'm wiped out. So this whole thing, actually, it's funny!”

Then another voice, also inside my own head, spoke up. “It never went away, did it?”

*   *   *

The day I first saw Christopher, when he turned off Hudson Street and came walking toward me on Gansevoort Street, I could see the V of flesh at the top of his shirt from a half block away, and something about his hair made me want to grip his head and run my fingers through it.

Over the years, I'd noticed that everybody who greeted him hugged and kissed him hello and good-bye except me. Why was that, exactly? When it came time for us to say good-bye, there was a stiff handshake, possibly a snide remark from me, but absolutely no hint from him that we should hug and kiss, too.

The voice in my head said, “Please. This is something new?”

This was very much like going through rehab for alcoholism or drug abuse: your substance of choice was ruined forever. Oh, you could drink again, and you could snort away your 401(k)—or what was left of it—but not for one instant would you fall down the lovely rabbit hole of complete oblivion. Because now, you know. And knowledge spoils everything. Unfortunately, one can never un-know something.

It was like that with Christopher. Before the picture:
you pulled it off, told yourself he was off-limits and turned your mind away from him.
After the picture:
you're in love; you're in lust; you're in trouble.

Dennis was still asleep, and the room was silent. I stared over the laptop screen into the dark, and my mind throbbed,
Wow, wow, wow, wow, fuck
.

The phrase “in the pit of your stomach,” I realized, is fully accurate. For there did seem to be a central pit located inside me. The pit contained facts cloaked in darkness. Gleaming things in hiding. Sparkly threads of gold, hairs on a wrist. Now, a hammock with a nearly naked man enveloped in it. It was my own junk drawer, filled with the tangled truth.

I actually suggested to myself,
Now that I have acknowledged it, it will go away
.

As I discovered over the following days, that was not precisely what occurred. Rather, I found myself even more distracted.

“Where is that wetsuit picture, the one from Saint Lucia?” I wondered, scrolling wildly through my image files.

My photo file contained several images of Christopher from some past life, most taken at an unknown beach at an unknown time. This activity inspired within me a feeling akin to swallowing one's own child's pain medication: “God, I am a sick and horrible person. But where the fuck is that pill?”

Meanwhile, it was business as usual. “Hey, what's up? Did I tell you that my life with Dennis is totally falling apart because I feel like he hates me and I'm not in love with him, which means I signed away half the rights to all my books to somebody who would totally benefit if I had fatal illness?”

Because nothing had changed on Christopher's end, I felt extra insane. Something had shifted inside of me, and normally, he was the very person I would have told. But I couldn't tell him, I'd become fixated on pictures of him.

“Hey, check this out. I haven't told anybody else, but I'm growing a tail. Just lemme get this belt undone, and I'll show you. Soon it'll be too big to keep tucked inside. I'm gonna have to see somebody about it.”

I had stuffed him and my feelings for him as far down as I could, and for a few years there, I even convinced myself that it worked. Living in Massachusetts had put physical distance between us; I couldn't just drop into the office, and our homes were no longer a mere seven blocks apart. I still saved my cruelest and funniest lines for him, but they were frequently directed
at
him, a pathetic attempt to minimize him in my brain and in my heart. He brought out the worst in me but in the best possible way. What he brought out in me was the truth, and it wasn't always beautiful or handsome.

I'd watched him cycle through a couple of relationships while I myself met somebody and decided to fall in love and create a stable life for myself.

Yeah, I did that. I
decided
to fall in love. God sees that remark, and he circles it with his big red felt pen, chuckling.

My relationship with Dennis had closed the door and locked it on
my agent
. He was single again, had been for a few years, and according to him, would be for the rest of his life. Professing to be tired and old, he claimed that his large circle of friends and his ability to find uncomplicated sex would be enough. He didn't have the energy, he said, “to tell my entire fucking story to someone. It's also why I don't get back into therapy. My crust is now armorlike.”

If I felt a flicker of jealousy at the time, it was too deeply buried for me to acknowledge it. I made a joke about a team in hazmat outfits having to come in and burn the sheets after he and some other infected old man covered them with their sex disease, and of course he laughed, though of course it just wasn't funny.

It took something terrible to punch the truth out of my stomach and allow me to realize an attraction remained.

I was in a hotel room in LA with Dennis when Christopher called to tell me he had cancer. He couched the news with this: luckily, it was Hodgkin's—“the good cancer”—and really there was nothing to worry about. Our mutual friend David had Hodgkin's when he was in his twenties, and Christopher said David told him, “Aside from thyroid cancer, which is treated with a milk shake, this is the most desirable one available.”

I felt a wishbone lodged in my throat when I tried to swallow and breathe. I also made a wisecrack, something to lance the moment, drain it of its significance, reassure him of the normalcy of life.

When I hung up the phone, it was shocking to feel my body begin to convulse without permission, to heave for air as I cried. When was the last time I'd cried? Maybe 1982? I was astounded that such a magnitude of physical motion was even possible against my will or knowledge. It was like sneezing for twenty minutes, plus a broken heart.

I cried past the point of grief, so far past it that I was able to sit on my hotel mattress and say, “Okay, this is idiotic now. I never cry. And I can't stop. It's so Julianne Moore. Is something broken?” When I walked into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror, I laughed out loud at what a wreck I was, all puffy and leaky. Which brought on another wave.

It's like he knew about the hammock picture, that he had access to the contents of my brain as I saw it, and now he was making himself even further off-limits with a new death-threatening illness. He was stoic, facing six months of chemotherapy alone. Oh, surrounded by dozens of friends and a nearly 150-pound dog, to be sure. But alone. And this felt wrong, like a clerical error.

I swooned. I wondered if all those feelings could be fatal. If my brain could be overwhelmed, too much blood sent to the surface convolutions of the brain itself, causing a hemorrhage. It seemed dangerous to think of them.

My doggedly, Catholically loyal partner was right there in the room with me through it all. He even handed me tissues and told me to press an icy washcloth to my eyes to reduce the swelling. Horribly, I did think,
Why couldn't it be him?
When I glanced over at Dennis, I was certain he could read my thoughts, so I turned away.

*   *   *

When I next saw Christopher, he was bald and old and impossibly fat.

“They're giving me steroids to keep my energy up, which also increases my appetite, and then I gain weight,” he explained. “So I lost my hair and got fat. I'm getting Uncle Fester chemo.”

It shocked me so much that during lunch I bit the inside of my cheek four times, having misplaced the exact location of my own teeth. He was genuinely upbeat and charming while I was genuinely terrified and struck by awe. He physically revolted me, and I realized,
I love him so permanently.

*   *   *

The next time I saw him was three months after his treatment ended. Dennis and I were joining him for dinner.

We were slightly late. Also, we stank like acrid sweat, because we'd been wordlessly arguing in the car on the way into the city from Massachusetts.

Christopher was already seated at the table, and in all the years I had known the man, he had never looked so fine. Vigorous and healthy, free not only from cancer but from everything else that clings to a person and diminishes them.

Years were missing from his face.

Radiance, when actually encountered in a person, causes you to blink.

He fought cancer, and look who won.

I could not take my watery eyes off him. I could feel Dennis's quizzical stare, but I could not look away from the man before me, my agent, my best friend. He was heroic. And standing there before him, pulling my chair out, finally, to be seated, I surprised both of us by reaching out and gripping the back of his chair. My knuckles dragged against the back of his neck, briefly.