Magical Thinking (20 page)

I am going to feel this plate on my head. It’s nice. I like it.

It was a good date.

He is a good guy.

I am going to read a book.

I read forty pages. Then I turn off the light, which can be dangerous. But my mind is clear. I dream of disks. One red. One green.

Bring it on.

T
HE
S
CHNAUZER

 

 

 

I
n bed the Schnauzer lies on his back. His chest is muscular and tight with coarse hairs, which he clips short. His chest is like a bed in the military: you could bounce a quarter off it. When I first saw him without his shirt, as he reclined against the pillows, he laughed hard at something I said, and I happened to look at his stomach. There, I saw an extra bone. It ran horizontally just below his rib cage. At first this disturbed me. It was like seeing an extra toe. Could I love him despite this mutation? Then when he laughed harder, another bone appeared. And I realized they were not bones; they were abs.

I looked down at my own stomach which is not fat, which is sort of flat, but does not have defined abs.

I asked him, “What’s the biggest disability you could overlook in a guy in order to date him?”

The Schnauzer turned to me, and his blue eyes sparkled. “What do you mean?”

I nestled up against him and placed my head on his chest. “You know, like a missing leg, no arms?”

“Oh,” he said.

I sat up to watch him think.

With his left hand, he scratched behind his right ear. This caused the biceps in his arm to swell to the size of a ripe mango. He looked like a magazine centerfold, like he should have a line of staples right down the middle. “A limp I guess,” he said with a smile.

I laughed at him. “A limp! I can’t believe you said a limp.” I pretended to be appalled by his shallowness, although I, myself, would have problems with even a limp. “You’re certainly willing to cut people slack.”

He hugged me closer. He was smiling, the full smile that I like most. The one that gives him dimples and lights up his eyes and makes him look like a movie star. The smile that makes me feel lucky when I see it because I know that he couldn’t flash it all day. Not everyone gets to see it. In fact, I’m starting to consider it mine alone.

“Could you date somebody with Down’s syndrome?” I ask.

Without thinking, he replied, “If he had a bubble butt, pecs, and a big dick.”

He thinks he’s being very clever, so I tell him my scary story. I say, “You remember I told you about my Australian friend, Hateful Harold?”

The Schnauzer nods because he does remember Hateful Harold; he remembers everything I tell him.

“Well, he got drunk one night and went to that awful Ty’s bar on Christopher Street?”

The Schnauzer made a sour face. He knows the bar and can imagine exactly the sleazy clientele that goes there, a crowd that
has already been to every other bar on the street and is now sweating and desperate. I continue, “So he was depressed and at this pit of a bar, and he was drunk and horny. And all of a sudden, some guy came up to him, and they started talking. But Hateful Harold wasn’t in a talkative mood, so he suggested they just hop on the subway and go back to his Jersey City apartment. So that’s what they did.

“Flash forward to the next morning, when Hateful Harold wakes up, completely hungover and next to a body. The guy’s back is to him, and he can barely remember even going out the night before, let alone picking somebody up. So gently he turns the guy over, and—surprise—the guy had Down’s syndrome.”

The Schnauzer yelps with glee.

“It’s true!” I say. “And so then he, the guy with Down’s syndrome, wakes up with this big fat hard-on and Hateful Harold just recoils from the bed. He flies out of it and stumbles backward. And the Down’s syndrome guy says to him, ‘I love
you
.’ ” Here, I look directly into the Schnauzer’s eyes. “So you better be careful what you wish for.”

 

Later we order Chinese food. It arrives about forty-five seconds after we hang up the phone. We open the bag and fortune cookies wrapped in cellophane spill onto the counter. I take one, rip off the wrapper and break the cookie in two. I peel out the fortune and read it. “You are gifted in business matters.”

“We must have the wrong order,” Dennis says.

“I am good at business,” I protest.

“Oh?” he says, raising just an eyebrow. With this look I know he is referring to my oven. The thing is, I live in a studio, so space is limited, and I never cook. So naturally, I keep all my tax crap in the oven.

“Ick, what is this?” I say, peeling the plastic lid off one of the containers.

“It doesn’t matter,” Dennis says. “It all comes from the same place.” Then he explains Chinese food in Manhattan to me: “See the way it works is, there’s one central location out on Long Island where all this stuff is made. Then it’s piped into the city through a series of underground pipes that run parallel to the train and subway tracks. The restaurants then just pull a lever. One lever for General Tso’s chicken, another for beef with broccoli sauce. It’s like beer; it’s on tap.”

It’s amazing how convincing he is when he says this. There’s no pause in his description, nowhere for him to stop and think, to make this up as he goes along. It’s as though he’s simply repeating something he read in the
Times
yesterday.

This makes me love him more than I did just five minutes ago.

 

The Schnauzer is a responsible business owner who balances his checkbook down to the penny. Whereas I throw my bank statements into the trash unopened. He shops at Fairway market, where there is an entire aisle devoted to olives. I shop at the Korean market downstairs from my crummy apartment, where there is an entire aisle devoted to cream-flavored Japanese gummy worms.

There are other differences between us.

He washes and reuses Zip-Loc storage bags. And I have single-handedly destroyed many acres of rain forest through my extensive use of yellow Post-it notes and paper towels, which I use compulsively for everything.

He has no vices whereas I have had all of them at one point but now have only Nicorette gum, which I chew constantly, causing my jaw to snap and pop.

The Schnauzer listens to jazz. I listen to jazz because he likes it, and I have even gone to jazz concerts with him, but truthfully I would rather listen to retarded children pounding on pan lids with wooden spoons.

Our many differences have been cause for worry for the Schnauzer. And he has had many therapy sessions devoted exclusively to this topic.

“I’m just getting used to the fact that people have differences and that in a relationship, you make sacrifices and compromises,” he tells me. “But sometimes I worry about our differences. I worry that we have too many.”

I try to comfort him with the one fact that I believe and hold onto: we are nearly the same on a molecular level; on the soul level, where it truly matters, we are identical. Therefore, I never worry about our differences and in fact find many of them amusing if not outright hysterical.

For example, I am into furry arms and legs. While the Schnauzer has a thing for butts. Some people are into hair. Or hands. Or legs. Or chests. Or feet. Or genitals. The Schnauzer is a butt connoisseur. He likes a full, round muscular butt. Street name: bubble butt. It’s a butt most commonly attached to muscular black men. Which could explain why Dennis has always had a thing for beefy black guys.

Which can make a tall white guy who is already neurotic to begin with even more insecure. But he reassures me that I have a fine butt, that it’s not as flat as I believe it to be. He tells me this despite what I see in the mirror, which looks like an eleven-year-old’s butt. So while I never much considered butts before, now I want one. And it’s one of those things you can’t really get.

So it occurs to me that the Schnauzer is accepting a handicap with me in a way. My lack of a bubble butt, his favorite body part, is worth giving up for more. Which is generous. Which seems shallow to talk about but actually, like so much that is shallow, is a quality that runs deep through his strata. The Schnauzer is a very generous man. It’s his nature. He likes people because he likes to share in conversations. I like people when they have large checks for me.

 

______

 

Because of my questionable background Dennis has encouraged me to go to therapy. Perhaps “encouraged” isn’t the right word. Perhaps “insisted” is more accurate. But I don’t mind; I’ve had some very interesting experiences behind the closed doors of a psychiatrist’s office.

My therapist is a slim, attractive man in his mid-forties. He’s extremely intelligent and truly loves what he does. More important, he has impeccable taste. His office reflects a man with interests in the world, an understanding of fabric and financial success. If a therapist has a plain, white office with two chairs and a white noise machine, I won’t come back. I require a therapist with a tasteful, well-decorated office. I tell my therapist, “I’m tired of living in the shallow end of the pool.”

He says, “What do you mean?”

I reach into my backpack and hunt for my ChapStick. I am thinking as I do this, stalling for time.

“Do you need something?” he asks.

“I’m just looking for my ChapStick,” I tell him.

He reaches into his front pocket and offers me his. First, I am surprised that he has ChapStick not only within reaching distance, but on his person. And second, that he would offer me this very intimate personal item.

I can’t help it—I instantly imagine taking the ChapStick and then, when he turns his head, biting off the end before handing it back to him.

I am reeling from this. My therapist has offered me his Chap-Stick. It almost seems like something a therapist could be fined for.

I break into a fit of laughter.

“What is it?” he asks, grinning.

Then, when I can’t control my laughter, can’t slow it or stop it altogether, when I begin to get tears in my eyes, his smile fades.

“What?” he says.

I pull myself together slightly. “I’m sorry. It’s just . . .it’s nothing. I mean, I’m such an ass. I’m just laughing because I’m talking about how worried I am about being shallow, which in itself seems like such a vapid concern, being worried about being shallow. Worried, why? Because of what other people think? That’s shallow. Worried that I’m not ‘deep’ enough for Dennis? He knows me. Knows I am.”

My therapist nods and listens closely. He has completely forgotten about my eruption of laughter.

I have fooled him.

Later at home, I tell the Schnauzer. “Do you think that’s weird or is it just me?”

“Oh no,” he says. “It’s definitely weird.”

“I mean, what would you do if your therapist offered you his ChapStick?”

The Schnauzer thinks about this briefly before answering. “I’d probably try and forget it happened.”

Then I call my friend Christopher, who referred me to my shrink in the first place. Christopher abandoned therapy last year, and he gave me Bruce. “You take him,” he said. “I’m flying without a net for a while.” I tell him what Bruce did, and Christopher sucks air in so sharply, I feel like my ear will be stuck to the phone.

“Is that weird?” I ask him.

“Oh my god, that is beyond weird. It’s borderline creepy.”

“I know!” I say. “I thought it was so disturbing. And then I thought, am I just overly sensitive? Is he just a normal guy, and I’m like some sort of unsocialized German shepherd? But it’s true, he’s weird.”

Christopher stops laughing long enough to tell me, “You know what? Some people are just like that with ChapStick. I think that’s all it is. I mean, I’ve known people, almost strangers, who have offered me theirs, too. So I think it’s like some people have this very liberal relationship with their ChapStick.”

The Schnauzer makes my favorite thing for dinner. He calls it
Lesbian Expander. It’s a sort of chili, made from tempeh, cubed and browned on all sides in butter; brown rice, which he seasons in a mysterious and perfect way; shredded Cheddar cheese; onions; lentil chili; and jalapeño peppers. It’s named Lesbian Expander because it’s something only a lesbian would cook. And Expander because once you eat it, it swells in your stomach to six times its original mass, and you must lie on your side in bed and clutch your stomach.

So this is what we do, we lie in bed, clutching our stomachs and facing each other. I look at his eyes, then his mouth. And then his eyes do the same thing, and then we smile at each other.

“Do you want some ChapStick?” he asks.

“Okay,” I say.

“I’ll get up in a minute and get it for you.”

“Okay,” I say.

We move closer together until we are breathing the same air. And we fall asleep.

K
EY
W
ORST

 

 

 

T
he only Hemingway I’ve ever been remotely interested in is Mariel. Though I’ve tried to expand my mind by reading some of her grandfather’s little stories. I read
The Old Man and the Sea
but my eyelids bled from the toothpicks that I used to keep them open. It amuses me that Hemingway is now a line of sofas, chairs, and bedroom dressers at Thomasville furniture. I wonder how long it will be before I can get a Joan Didion coffee table or perhaps a Philip Roth throw rug for in front of the washer.