Lust & Wonder (26 page)

When the cactus Web page offered nothing of interest, I returned to my phone to continue watching a period drama on Netflix, and Christopher opened an e-mail query from an aspiring writer. Several moments passed in silence before I realized, quite unexpectedly, what we needed.

“Holy fucking shit,” I announced.

He turned to me.

“Google ‘kumquat tree,'” I told him.

He typed it in, and I leaned over him and watched the images scroll past.

He smiled and nodded. “Uh-huh,” he said in his
totally
tone of voice.

“Right?” I said.

“I like this idea. A lot.” I got the eyebrow raise on
a lot.

So there it was: we would plant a kumquat tree in the window, which of course would not do anything to solve the looming issue of botanical self-sufficiency. But this didn't matter anymore. We'd just have to remember to water them and be better plant parents, that's all.

“And we could plant tall corn plants in the other windows,” I realized.

There was a brief silence. “Like,
corn
corn?”

“Sure,” I said. “In those long, skinny window boxes they make for the outside. Only we could use them inside.”

I saw the flash of alarm on his face. He had a falling window box incident in his past, the result of which could have sent him to Rikers Island and I would be without him.

Unthinkable.

“
Indoor
window boxes,” I told him to alleviate the anxiety that I knew the phrase inspired in him.

“With corn,” he said again, thinking about it, trying to picture it.

“Real corn. That grows all the way up to the ceiling,” I said. The hard sell.

He smiled. He loved me. But there was no way he was going to let me plant corn in the window, I could see it on his face.

*   *   *

Months went by, and we fell into a comfortable routine of sneaking around. We spent all our time together, except for the many hours of daily separation while Christopher was at work. Ever the writer, I was only starting to realize that he had other clients, who I'm sure were perfectly nice people, but they were hogging all my time with him. We found a practical rhythm for dealing with our business, which somehow became easier and more efficient. We'd always spoken with complete honesty, but now he didn't even need to spin things like “Let's make the next one a game changer” because he could go right for “Your career is in the shitter if this next one doesn't work,” which I appreciated. (The delivery method, if not the message.)

We had known each other well enough and for long enough that most of the new information we exchanged was about things that had happened that day. The surprising facts about me were few, having published enough memoirs for an octogenarian and Christopher having read large chunks of them that never made it to print. He definitely had a few surprises still tucked away, but we'd known one another for a decade before getting romantically involved. We were a unique couple.

One thing we were not was official. We couldn't go public before telling Dennis, and I dreaded doing that. Christopher was still maintaining a relationship with him, but he was increasingly uncomfortable, mostly with his own behavior.

“I haven't told him a direct lie, and I don't say anything self-serving to mislead him,” Christopher told me, “but now my entire conversational style is one big all-night lie of omission.”

At some point, Dennis invited Christopher to the Massachusetts house for a weekend, and Christopher made up a last-minute lie to get out of it.

“I can't go there and allow him to host me,” he said. “I'm a terrible enough friend right here in Manhattan.”

“I have to tell him,” I said in a miserable monotone.

“He really does deserve to know. The thing is, your relationship is already so fraught that he's never going to hear this the right way. You'll lead with ‘Christopher and I are sleeping together,' and the rest will be a fight.”

“So what are you saying? I should write him a letter? E-mail him?”

“No, no, it definitely has to be done in person.” He paused. “The thing is, I would do a much better job than you.”

I let a nanosecond pass before “Really? You think so? Okay,” came tumbling out of my mouth as one sentence.

“I would approach it like an agent,” he said.

“Yes,” I agreed, but not too eagerly, “like you're pitching a novel.”

“Right.” He sighed. “A horror novel.”

A few weeks later, Dennis drove down with the dogs for the weekend. He arrived, dropped them off, and went to run errands and do New York things. That afternoon, I got an e-mail from Christopher that said, “We're meeting at seven for drinks and dinner.”

I responded: “
TELL HIM
.”

*   *   *

Christopher's instruction was to call me as soon as the deed was done and Dennis was on his way back downtown. As I waited, worry took over to the point that I couldn't even look at jewelry online. What was happening? Had Dennis thrown a glass of wine in his face? Had he shattered a bottle against the wall and cut Christopher's throat with the jagged edge? When I hadn't gotten a call by ten, I was certain this was the case. The dogs picked up on my anxiety and nuzzled into me on the bed. What if this was the last time I ever saw them? The thought made me hyperventilate. I tried to imagine how nice it would be to have an aneurysm and not have to face a future without them or any of the carnage I knew awaited.

By eleven, I was manic. By midnight, I was ready to take a cab up to find the crime scene. This could not have gone well. Five hours? Even if he didn't bring it up right away (“Cheers, good to see you, I've been fucking your ex for six months”), how could it possibly take so long?

Shortly after 1:00
A.M.
, Christopher finally called. The phone had barely rung before I grabbed it and said, “Oh thank God. What happened? Did you tell him?”

“Oh yeah, I told him,” he said.

“And?”

“And … it was really weird. Of course, I made sure we were both reeeeeally drunk before I brought it up.”

“Was he furious?”

“No. That was the weird part. I think he was so shocked that he didn't know how to react. But he wasn't angry. He said it was going to take time to sink in. And then the strangest thing of all. After dinner, he said the same thing he's said after every meal we've ever had: ‘Do you want to get a nightcap?'”

Nightcap
. Of course. His inner '50s housewife needed it.

“So wait. You went out and drank more?”

“We did. I can't believe he wanted to sit across another table from me, but that's what we did.” I had paused in my terror long enough to hear the thickness of the liquor on his tongue. “I poured him into his cab, and he's on his way. So. All yours! Good luck!”

*   *   *

Somewhere in the twenty-minute taxi ride between the Upper West Side and Battery Park City, it had sunk in for Dennis. The day before, he'd asked if he could spend the night in the apartment, which seemed intolerable to me, but could I say, “No, you may not”?

He returned to the apartment ashen and zombielike. The dogs jumped up and ran to him when he came in, but he barely saw them. He took off his shoes and lay on the very edge of the bed, as far from me as he could possibly get while still occupying the same piece of furniture.

“So,” I said, “I guess Christopher talked to you.”

There was silence for a moment. He cleared his throat. “I can't talk about it now.”

“Okay. Well. When you…” I stammered.

The tensest silence of my life followed.

Dennis lay stiffly in the same position all night, though he did not sleep. When the sun had just barely risen, he got up, threw his few items in his bag, leashed up the dogs, and walked out the door without a word.

As if I had conjured the dreaded event simply by allowing it to enter my brain, that was the last time I ever saw my dogs.

*   *   *

Once Christopher and I were free to tell people we were a couple, I was able to focus on the happiness of that future even as I mourned my past. I was furious with Dennis for masquerading as someone who cared about me and furious with myself for not seeing through it, but the joy our friends displayed when they heard the news pulled me along.

The one blip on the happiness chart was Christopher's boss, the proprietor of the small agency where he worked. A longtime friend and previously a reasonable person, he became enraged when Christopher told him. His anger extended from his worrying we'd break up and I'd fire Christopher, to it looking bad that one of his agents was not just sleeping with a client but was a home wrecker in order to get him, to his being kept in the dark for so long. When the man dropped dead a month later, Christopher, in shock, said flatly, “I guess we know what did
him
in.”

*   *   *

Because I missed the dogs, I decided I needed a replacement, a breed that would fit into this microspace. Walking through a pet store around the corner from Christopher's office, we noticed a sweet, sleepy Italian greyhound that was the skinniest puppy I'd ever seen. They took him out of his cage so we could play with him, and he cuddled in my arms and licked me twice with his tiny, dry tongue.

I looked up at Christopher and grinned. “Add to cart!”

He snorted. “And now we have to tell people we bought a pet store dog.”

“Technically, we did rescue him from this disgusting pet store,” I said.

We named him Wiley, pulled from a list of Civil War–era names, and he pranced liked a reindeer on pipe-cleaner legs. He was also shaky and agoraphobic. When strangers saw him cowering and shivering and skittering, they all assumed he'd had a dramatically abusive past. And by “all,” I mean every single person who saw him. Each one felt the need to make sad faces and say, “Awwww, look at how scared he is. He must be a rescue.” I quickly got to the point where I wanted to say, “Actually, no, he's a purebred, but I beat him.”

Thin as a cardboard paper towel tube, Wiley turned out to be hugely rambunctious and mischievous in private. For having almost no body mass, he generated an incredible amount of heat that radiated out from beneath the layers of blankets and sheets where he'd burrow. In researching the breed, I learned that they had in fact been bred in the UK (not Italy, curiously) as royal bed warmers. This made perfect sense, given his standoffishness to grubby strangers and my being a direct descendant of King James of Scotland. So I essentially wore a crown and ruled a land, and Wiley was my servant.

*   *   *

Because things were going so well and I was happy, I just couldn't shake the feeling that if a taxi didn't careen onto the sidewalk and crush me, it was going to be something else just as bad, and soon. I felt stalked by doom. Christopher left for his office in the morning, and I stayed on top of the bed, laptop poised, panic ticking.

I never left my apartment except for the briefest and most necessary trips to the small grocery store exactly one block to the west. I thought of myself as
reclusive
. But I'd actually become something a little closer to agoraphobic.

I stopped taking Adderall, the legal speed, crystal meth with a better name, and I started to feel crazy. Meaning drained out of my life. A drudge appeared, a thick glue that fused me to the empty moment, preventing me from filling it with any activity except my circles of worry. But I hated being on psychoactive drugs like my insane mother had been all of my life, so I was determined to stick it out. I needed to give my brain chemistry a chance to settle back into whatever decrepit state was its normalcy. The Adderall had helped me, but then it seemed not to help. So maybe it had done its job and rewired something? I had to find out.

Skinny Wiley jumped off the bed; I experienced a pang. Though over a year old, he was not housebroken yet; he still had accidents. But I suspected his accidents were fully intentional, as he disliked going outside into the rain or wind or sun or weather or air. I merely called them
accidents
, because that way, I retained hope that he hadn't figured it out yet and would, eventually, learn to go outside like every other dog in the world.

But, of course, he had learned. And so had I. Housebreaking had been our private little war. I would take him outside to pee, and he would fidget and look all around, as if being stalked. He would tremble and pace but not pee. When I urged him on, “Hurry up, Wiley, go ahead,” he would glare at me with the most human of faces, as if to say, “Yeah, asshole, take me back upstairs, and I'll be happy to piss. I don't see you whipping it out to have a slash out here, so gimme a break.” He'd simply learned it was nicer to shit on the warm bathroom floor than the cold, windy asphalt of the dog park. He was an Italian greyhound, but I rechristened him an imperial greyhound because it suited his personality better.

It did occur to me that instead of properly training him, I had succeeded merely in transferring my own phobias onto his exceptionally sensitive nature.

I worried about his chewing; he gnawed the legs off the sofa, the red lacquer Chinese side table, the zebra rug. Only the cement antelope was safe from his little monster teeth.

I worried about money, my taxes. I was criminally overdue. Why had I purchased so many antique opal, emerald, and diamond rings? Why had I invested so heavily in midcentury men's rings of chrysoberyl cat's-eye, jade, and sapphire when men didn't even wear rings anymore? I shifted part of the blame onto Adderall. It had a way of underscoring my obsessions, making them seem desperately important. I had such focus: I could spend nineteen hours looking at pictures of gemstones or rings online and still have dreams about them after I fell asleep.

I also blamed my grandmother Carolyn. She'd been dead for years, though I missed her daily, more now in fact than when she was alive and placing tomatoes in her windowsill to ripen.