Lust & Wonder (27 page)

One of my sharpest, finest memories is of being six or seven and sitting beside her as she steered her Cadillac Fleetwood along the highway in Atlanta, my eyes fixed on her bony fingers, glittering with rings of jade, coral, and diamond. My mother and father sent me south to stay with my grandparents when things between them became particularly explosive, so I associated my grandmother and her rings with comfort and safety.

I had been buying rings and jewelry for my entire life.

When Christopher sold my first book, I spent the advance money on two things: a signed first edition of Anne Sexton's
Live or Die
and a white-gold ring from Cartier.

The manuscript for my current book was late. This was because I seemed unable to write. When I typed, only gibberish came out. But if I didn't turn in a manuscript, there would be no money. And what money remained was swiftly spiraling down the drain. My solution to the rising panic I felt over my writing was to search out jewelry. At the time, each one seemed absolutely essential.
I may end up homeless
, I thought,
but at least I'll be wearing a vintage platinum ring set with an emerald from Colombia's legendary Muzo mines.

*   *   *

When you're lathering yourself in the shower and you find a lump, it's always cancer. Before it turns out to be a pimple or a mosquito bite you forgot about or some other not much of anything, it's cancer.

Yesterday, when I felt a swollen gland along my inner thigh, I felt blinded with certainty that it was lymphoma. Christopher had lymphoma in 2008; it began as a lump in exactly that spot. Because he was essentially a survival expert, I decided not to tell him what I found.

But after I dried off and climbed onto the bed in which we slept, socialized, and worked, the beating wings of anxiety pushed the words out of my mouth.

“Where is it?” he asked.

This was not what I was expecting him to say. I had been prepared to hear, “It's nothing.” Instead, he wanted specifics.

I dreaded this. I pulled the waistband of my shorts down to reveal the flat part near the hip, which I'm not sure even has a name, except it's where lymphoma lives.

“Here?” he said, pressing on the gland.

That he'd found it so quickly was, as far as I was concerned, confirmation. There would be no need of a biopsy.

“That's nothing,” he said.

“Nothing?”

He said, “No. Are there any cupcakes left?”

I told him I thought there might be two or three. “Why is the pimple always cancer for me?”

He laughed and told me it's because I'm a catastrophist. Then he brought up the rooftop swimming pool. “Remember?” he said, teasingly.

Yeah, I remembered. Because,
crazy.

We'd been in bed watching a movie, and there was this sound. It was loud and came from above us somewhere in the building. We looked at each other, and he kind of shrugged and went back to the TV, but I continued to stare up at the ceiling. Eventually, he noticed and said, “What are you looking at?”

His question had snapped me right out of it. I'd been trapped inside this superrealistic fantasy where the rooftop pool was crashing through all the floors, and in my mind, I was imagining a huge hole ten feet from the bed and extending all the way to the door, blocking our exit. I imagined this hole plunging eleven stories, straight down to the ground. So when he asked, I was actually trying to remember how to tie secure knots so that I could knot the sheets together and hang them out the window, praying they would be long enough to get us onto the sidewalk. Then I realized I would have to secure the sheets to the iron bed, because when tugged, it would smash up against the window frame but not fit out it, so we'd be secure. This played out like a warp-speed movie in my mind, and I was actually feeling sweaty and nervous, stressed out.

“And do you remember what I said to you when you told me about this crazy disaster porn?”

I nodded.

He reminded me again, poking my shoulder. “I told you, there is no rooftop pool.”

I swatted away his gloating hand and said, “Yeah, but it
could have been
the roof deck that came crashing down; it didn't have to be a pool.”

He rolled his eyes, but I could tell he was also impressed. “You're the master of disaster.”

Several days later, we climbed into a 2001 Acura belonging to our friends Laura and Leslie, and the four of us drove to see Punch Brothers, a bluegrass band so brilliant, its lead member won a MacArthur grant. I spent most of the concert at the Tarrytown Music Hall, a Queen Anne–bricked playhouse built in 1885, feeling that it was probable the balcony, where we were seated, would collapse on the people below due to the uproarious foot pounding that was going on.

In my mind, I frequently see these movies of terrible things that may happen. When I was young, I considered this to be both a side effect of my unstable and rather terrible childhood but also the very reason I was able to survive it. When the
Titanic
went down, I would have already been sitting in the first lifeboat ten minutes after we boarded.

The thing is, the
Titanic
doesn't always sink. In fact, it almost always stays afloat.

So I imagine terrible things in advance of their occurrence to prepare myself. And when I was small, it's true that one terrible thing after another did happen. And it was good, in a sad way, that I had been waiting, bags packed, ready for anything, no matter how sharp the blade. But as an adult and one with some success, the terrible things happened with less frequency.

I've never been able to stop the blockbuster disaster film from playing on an endless loop in my mind.

I see the terrible coming, whether it is or not.

*   *   *

In many ways, book tours are like stepping onto a factory conveyor belt. My publisher arranges all the travel, including car services to pick me up and drop me off. Things generally flow smoothly, but once in a while, there's a glitch. It's usually something small like having the wrong address for a radio station, so I'm always ready for that. What I don't expect is a tiny glitch that changes my life, so of course that's exactly what happened.

I had a Friday morning television interview in Chicago, and my driver had expected more traffic than we encountered, so I arrived at WGN-TV studio about an hour and a half early. I went into their spooky, empty cafeteria, sat on one of the plastic chairs, and stared at the wall-mounted television. Rachael Ray was making deviled-egg-and-bacon sandwiches, and I remember thinking,
That girl needs to stand up straighter, or the countertop on her set should be taller
. When I reached my threshold for food preparation demonstration broadcasting, I pulled out my phone and started reading. When I next looked up, it was probably forty-five minutes later, and what I saw on the screen caused me to freeze. It was a close-up of a puppy with ears that stuck almost straight out from its head. I stood and walked over to the TV. Rachael Ray was gone; this was local. And that could only mean one thing: that puppy with the Flying Nun ears was in the very building.

Sure enough, the segment featured three women volunteers from A Heart for Animals of Huntley, Illinois. They were on WGN to find homes for these three Corgi-shepherd mixes. When the segment ended, I walked into the hallway and waited for the stage door to open. The women appeared, each holding one of the puppies. I casually strolled the length of the hallway where, of course, others had gathered to fuss over the dogs.

One of the women handed me a puppy as though she'd been expecting me. I took it in my arms. It was soft and warm, and the heaviest part of the entire puppy was its paws. I could actually hold puppies for a living, so I lost track of time. I had to hand the dog back in order to be attached to a mic and shuffled onto the set for my interview.

When I was off the air several minutes later, the women were still there with the puppies in their arms. So I lingered. And I spotted the puppy with the sticking-out ears. Somehow, though I don't even remember asking, I ended up with that puppy in my arms.

The next thing I knew, I was standing with him in front of a giant clown having my picture taken. (Seriously, WGN was the original broadcaster of Bozo the Clown, so they have a twenty-foot-tall likeness in their lobby.) I had to leave, because I was already going to be late for my radio interview (which I did, actually, miss), so I handed the puppy back.

In the car, I looked at the photo and sent it to Christopher. But as I looked at the shot, I saw that the puppy and I each had the identical semipathetic expression on our faces. We matched, exactly. In my note with the picture, I said to Christopher, “I feel I have made a grave mistake and should have the car turn around to get the puppy. He is already a TV star, and some unworthy person is going to snatch him up.”

I was joking, of course. We had been discussing how a second dog might make Wiley slightly less of an unsocialized freak, but I knew Christopher would laugh and say, “Yeah right. Finish your tour, and we'll see about another puppy when you get home.”

Instead, though, he contacted the ladies at A Heart for Animals and made the necessary arrangements to adopt the puppy and have him flown to New York on Sunday.

I said, “You're not just doing this because of me, are you?”

“Are you kidding? I found the segment online, and I was laughing so hard. He's the one in the middle whose eyes kept following the camera, right? He's perfect and great. Totally ours.”

If there hadn't been a glitch and I hadn't arrived at the TV studio over an hour early, there wouldn't be a puppy with Flying Nun ears waiting for me when I got home a week later.

*   *   *

Christopher's most dominant feature was his laugh. He laughed frequently and hard; the laugh of a shaggy cartoon dog, full of gusto and physical shaking. In all his childhood pictures, he is either smiling or teetering on the edge of hysterics.

He only had one mood.

I had known him for thirteen years and never tired of his mood. It did not swing. He was in a great mood when he woke up each morning, and he would be in a great mood when he came home from work in the evening. The single exception would be while he watched sports. During the World Series, he was liable to scream at the TV, “No, no, no,
come on
! What is this,
The Bad News Bears
?” The only time I ever saw Christopher genuinely close to rage was during the US Open.

I, too, had one primary emotion: worry.

That's why we work
, I thought. My endless cycles of obsessive dread and worry were just a joke to him, something to laugh at. “You're getting a cavity filled, not having a lung transplant.”

*   *   *

I hadn't been able to write a good, solid word for three years, and I hadn't read a book for almost ten years. As a writer, these were difficult things to admit. I was such a good monkey for so many years, cranking out the books like they were hot dogs. Though as a writer, I felt totally comfortable mixing metaphors involving simians and ballpark franks.

When I realized at almost exactly the same time that the man I had built a life with did not love me and I myself had loved Christopher from the very start, a biological event occurred, something new became alive in me. The shell that had contained it ruptured. I hemorrhaged cash.

Was it my own trust in myself that was broken? Dennis had been my source of comfort. The smoke and mirrors of it was he hadn't been that at all. I had been comforted by my belief in who he was and what we were. But the bald facts had never been a safe place for me. My comfort and sense of security had been an illusion, a work of my own creation.

This knowledge in no way led to understanding. My malformed, childlike brain knew only that it felt safe for the first time in its life, yet suddenly there was more terrible chaos than it had ever known. The difference was, in the center of the spiraling whirlpool as everything was sucked away from me, there was Christopher, the single thing I had told myself I never loved but always had. There was proof: the best thing in life and the worst thing you can imagine can happen—and do—at exactly the same moment.

It's not that I couldn't write any longer. It's that I was alive, and it was hard for me to pull myself away from it.

*   *   *

When you lose one thing, it's like there's a contraption in the sky that blinks awake and starts counting and displaying all the other things you lost but hadn't realized, all the things that are teetering on the edge.

Christopher had cancer and AIDS, and every moment was so precious that I had to think about motives. Wasn't it just a little bit true that I wanted him to give up the place on Seventy-Ninth Street so that he would be stuck here with me in the tiny studio with the dogs and the sun coming through the antique farmhouse shutters? Slats of brightness and shadow, wallpaper made out of sheet music, walls the color of gemstones, two dogs, a bed draped like a Bombay whorehouse, a bookcase with glass doors that was filled with my abominations: diamond rings, South Sea pearls, chrysoberyl cat's-eye rings in eighteen-karat gold, two emeralds from the ancient Muzo mines in South America, jadeite beads in apple green from the old mountains in Burma, untreated, so rare it took me forty-seven years to even see a strand this fine.

I wore my finest piece of jade around my neck. It is the color of an emerald from the old mines in South America and so translucent it's almost transparent. It was carved by a thoughtful hand in the 1930s, and you can see art deco itself in the lines. Sometimes when I look at it in the middle of the night, I can feel the slightest pinprick of tears sprouting in my eyes. The closest I come to crying is this.

My most precious things. I needed them. I wanted them all within arm's reach. So yes, I admit that much. It did not make me sad to think of Christopher leaving his twenty-eight-year-old apartment behind. It did not pain me to imagine him working beside me on the bed where I worked.