Lust & Wonder

by Augusten Burroughs

  Dennis seemed too shy to kiss me on the sidewalk, so I leaned in and kissed him. It was gentle, almost like he’d never kissed anyone before. His cheeks were flushed. Because of the wine or because he was nervous?

  “I’ll call you tomorrow,” he said.

  “I had a wonderful night,” I told him.

  He took the subway uptown; I walked home. I smiled the whole way, which made me feel like a simpleton. I was a literal grinning idiot. No second-guessing, no wondering, Is he secretly married? Was he only being polite? Because these were the things we’d talked about, there was no need to worry about them now. How many times had I been on a date only to arrive back home and second-guess everything? Will he really call? I knew Dennis really would. Also, I’d already blurted out, “Do you have a terrible disease?” and he’d said no.

  I was falling in love in Manhattan. We talked about falling in love in the city, how it just pushes you right over the edge. Falling in love in New York is dangerous for tourists, because they return to their split-level homes and they sit in their recliners and they look at each other and one or both of them thinks, It must have been the Chrysler building. But falling in love in New York is safe when you’re here, and it never goes away.

  * * *

  One night, we sat on a long green bench in Central Park and talked until it was dark and the air throbbed with crickets.

  He said, “Sometimes the feeling that I might be falling in love with you kind of slips away. Do you know what I mean? Does that happen to you, too?”

  When I looked at him, healthy and strong, the only thing I could think was, Please be the one.

  I said, “I don’t know. Maybe a little. I guess feeling so much and thinking a lot about another person so intensely, it’s like you wear that circuit down smooth in your brain, so all of a sudden, it seems like there’s no feeling there. Maybe it’s like a temporary kind of numbness. Is that what you mean?”

  “That sounds like it exactly,” he said. And he was smiling again, which relieved me. So had I said the right thing to diffuse his doubt?

  When I was with him and he wasn’t talking about the feeling slipping away, when he was smiling and telling me this felt too good to be true, I had a luminous feeling, almost like opening one of those tiny doors on the Advent calendar. You got to open one door a night until Christmas. It was small, but you knew it was leading somewhere.

  * * *

  I was on my cell phone with my appalling freelance advertising client when I walked past a Borders and saw a stack of yellow Sellevision covers on the front table. The phone just drifted away from my ear as the yammering continued, and I walked into the store.

  “A novel by Augusten Burroughs.”

  It said so, right there below the title.

  It was thrilling for maybe forty-seven seconds, and then the thrill drained right away. As I walked out of the store with my phone now in my pocket, I thought, It doesn’t matter what it is. We get used to it.

  Which is both good and bad.

  * * *

  It was almost two months, and I couldn’t be sure, but I thought things were going well. Possibly they were even wonderful.

  I was in love.

  I swung by Christopher’s office, and he was on the phone with a client. He motioned for me to sit, so I did. He was wearing a plaid, chocolate-brown shirt, and his hair was different. Blonder. Like he’d been in the sun.

  While he talked on the phone, punctuating periods of intense listening with bursts of laughter, I fiddled with the loose paper clips, unforming them and using one to clean under my nail. I liked that I could be disgusting with him and it just didn’t matter.

  “So, how’re things?” he said when he hung up.

  I dropped the paper clip onto the floor so he wouldn’t see. “Things are good. So. I’m pretty much in love with Dennis, that guy I told you about.”

  “Really?” he said. “Wow, that’s fantastic.”

  He was smiling and looked really happy for me. Seeing this dented my mood. I didn’t realize it until that moment, but I’d wanted him to be slightly jealous. But it just wasn’t there.

  “You seeing anybody new?”

  He told me he was, actually. “And he’s moving in.”

  “Moving in? How long have you been seeing him? And didn’t you just break up?”

  He laughed. “It’s true. I’m a serial monogamist. Three weeks.”

  I just stared at him. “Three weeks?”

  He smiled. “Yeah, I know. I move fast. Like a lesbian.”

  “So who is he?” I asked. I couldn’t believe how not happy this was making me.

  “His name’s Zeke. He’s crazy. And super tall. He doesn’t work, so there’s that.” He switched topics, but not as deftly as he thought. “But Dennis seems like a good guy from what you’ve told me.”

  I shrugged. “Yeah, he’s a great guy, definitely. Okay, well. I should go.”

  When I left his office and started walking down Eighth Avenue, I thought, Well, he really is off the table now. He’s got somebody moving in. Which was a weird thing to think, because hadn’t I already taken him off the table? I was never going to be with somebody who was a pot of simmering AIDS stew again. No fucking way. So it was good. I was glad he’d found somebody and so incredibly fast.

  He had somebody, and now I had somebody, too. It had worked out perfectly.

  * * *

  The only thing was, Dennis and I may have waited too long to have sex.

  He was perfectly clear about his desire to not jump right into bed. He wanted to wait and allow feelings of affection and love to develop first. He’d told me this one night when we were out walking among the brownstones of the West Village. He said, “I’ve had enough sex with people just for the sake of sex. I really want sex to come from a connection with somebody I love. I want that intimacy.”

  This sounded perfect to me at the time. Given the trouble I’d had with Mitch, this was nothing but a relief. I felt confident that I would have no sexual issues with Dennis. Plus, because he wanted to wait, there was absolutely no pressure at all.

  It seemed ideal until the day we actually had sex.

  This occurred at a hotel because I had not yet cleaned my apartment to New Boyfriend Standards. So I rented a room at the UN Plaza Hotel. Two months had passed, and it was time to become, in Dennis’s word, “intimate.” And what could be sexier than doing it in a hotel with a World Health Organization rally going on outside?

  Dennis’s apartment wasn’t suitable for sex, either. It was filled with boxes and two cats that circled my legs and tried to lick my eyes. They seemed feral to me, darting wildly around the apartment, pouncing, withdrawing. I’d asked their names, and Dennis said, “I haven’t named them. I got them from this friend, Mary Ellen. She’s one of those women who lives with like a hundred cats, and she couldn’t keep these two extra ones, so I told her I’d take them.”

  I asked, “Do you like cats?”

  Dennis replied, “Not really. Or, yes, I guess. They’re okay.”

  “You should call them Licky and Clingy,” I suggested.

  He seemed depressed by the cats. “I’ve got to find a home for them. I just haven’t had time.”

  It seemed he hadn’t had time for a lot of things, including window treatments. What appeared to be burlap was tacked up makeshift fashion to his long wall of windows. It was a building from the 1960s, and nothing in his unit had been altered. It was a time capsule. The stacks of boxes added to this effect.

  But my own apartment was worse, still a disaster wrapped in the remnants of my drinking ways. Piles of magazines and books needed to be thrown out or given away. The air itself seemed sullied. It needed a profound cleaning, and I needed to throw away a lot of crap, but I’d been sober for less than a year, which clearly was not nearly enough time to clean.

  So, the hotel.

  I checked in first and then called Dennis with the room number. He arrived about forty-five minutes later, looking out of breath an
d nervous. Because this was it. This was The Sex.

  We undressed quickly, our backs to each other. Dennis finished first and climbed into bed, sliding under the sheet and then folding down the other side for me. It struck me as an oddly dated and feminine gesture, something from a Debbie Reynolds movie in the 1950s.

  As I climbed into bed, Dennis said, “You have the cutest little flat butt. Almost nothing there at all.”

  He was smiling, like he was being playful and sexy, except to my paranoid mind, the smile lasted for one-hundredth of a second longer than a genuine “That’s adorable!” smile would have, so it looked more like “No, I’m not disappointed at all!”

  I said, “Oh, I know. I have kind of an anti-ass, don’t I?”

  “No, no, no, no, no,” he protested, waving his arms. “I do think it’s cute.”

  I said, “Okay,” and I shrugged. “Then, thanks.” I was feeling exceedingly awkward.

  He admitted that he was a little nervous and asked, “Can we just hug awhile?”

  I lay down next to him and felt relief coupled with a nagging postponement of some inevitable task. There was no getting around the incredible and puzzling awkwardness that I felt. I mentally replayed some of our conversations and more romantic moments in order to remind myself that I knew Dennis; he wasn’t just some stranger.

  I slid down a little so that I could be shorter than him and then lay my cheek on his chest where the coarse, wiry hairs tickled my nose, and I kept fidgeting.

  Eventually, we fell asleep like that, and I had the strangest and most vivid dream where Dennis peeled off his own face, which turned out to be a mask. And then he took this face off, which revealed another mask. And he kept going, like those Russian nesting dolls. All the while, I was fascinated by how many faces he had.

  When we woke up an hour later, I was burning up, and so was he. I kicked the covers down, and we were naked.

  We started kissing.

  My dick was already hard because, as insurance against experiencing another erotic void like with Mitch, I’d clandestinely ordered a bulk supply of Viagra from an online pharmacy. I had been taking one before each date in case the evening spontaneously turned into sex. Dennis had no idea that when we went to that club in the West Village and sat at a small, round table near the stage, the entire time I was pretending to love crappy jazz, I was sitting there with a raging hard-on, weirdly divorced from any sort of sexual attraction. Also, the room was tinted Windex blue, and all the lights had halos. This was an actual side effect of the medication, one I rather liked. It turned the whole world faintly blue.

  As Dennis’s hand began the tentative journey down toward my dick, I smiled into his neck because I knew that he would not encounter the same cold, shrunken mushroom that Mitch had found on our second date.

  The back of Dennis’s hand brushed up against the underside of my pharmaceutically erect penis, and he said, “Wow, you’re so turned on.”

  I was hard, that’s for sure.

  And I was happy in exactly the same way I’d been happy in 1983 when my friend Melissa and I were driving around at midnight on a back road in Hadley, Massachusetts, in my fastback, talking about how hideous our lives were when we just suddenly ran out of gas. Melissa completely freaked out because she’d already been raped twice, and she wasn’t even twenty. She was trembling and turning around to check and make sure her door was locked, reaching across my chest to make sure mine was.

  Calmly, I looked over at her, and I said, “I have a five-gallon tank of gas in the wayback.”

  Ka-boom. Total silence. And then a tiny and adorable, “Really?”

  I was grinning, because it was one of the first times I think I’d ever felt proud of what was normally a psychiatric disorder: anticipatory stress.

  I was always expecting the very worst; the bright side was that I was also prepared for it. Of course, I had a big red plastic jug of gas sloshing around back there. I had figured it would come in handy for lighting something on fire as I made a quick escape, but I was just as happy to use it for the good old-fashioned reason. I poured it into the tank and smashed my foot on the gas to flood the engine a little, and we took off, Melissa rolling the windows down and trailing her fingers through the wind like it was water rushing past.

  Dennis negotiated new positions for us with me standing at the side of the bed while he lay on his back, his head hanging back over the edge of the mattress and my dick torqued downward into his mouth and throat. At the same time, I was leaning forward, propping myself up on my right elbow so that I could suck him.

  My penis remained chemically, magically rigid.

  A terrible thought crept in: He’s not very good at this. And then I thought, Or is he excellent and I’m just poor at receiving?

  I knew for a fact that I was excellent at giving head. This was perhaps the sole advantage of being molested at twelve by a skilled sexual predator, especially one who’d been through Catholic school and was, thus, a perfectionist. Over the years, I’d honed my skills and received many compliments, from judges to cabdrivers. Had I still been able to suck my own dick like I could when I was fourteen, it’s possible I could have avoided yards and yards of shitty relationships.

  Five minutes is a really long time to suck a dick.

  After a while, you actually begin to wonder if the nonstop pressure against your lip-wrapped front teeth might, in fact, be loosening them. If I end up having to have a root canal because of this, I thought, I will be really pissed. Dental insurance doesn’t cover blow job damage, I was almost positive.

  At last, I sensed that he was about to ejaculate, and this, then, sped things up for me. We came at exactly the same moment. Dennis coughed after he finished, something I associated with guys who then said things like “I’d better get going. I have to pick up my wife’s mother and sister at the airport in an hour.”

  We collapsed onto the bed, giddy with relief. The mystery of “What will the sex be like when we finally have it?” was over. The answer was: like assembling a bookcase from Ikea with parts missing.

  “I’ve never come with somebody at the same time before, I don’t think,” Dennis said.

  “It has to be a good sign, right?” I asked.

  When there was no reply, I answered the question myself. “Yeah, I think it must be a really good sign.”

  * * *

  I asked Christopher, “So what are you doing for Thanksgiving?” and he told me he was having a bunch of people over.

  Christopher had lived in a massive rent-stabilized apartment on West Seventy-Ninth Street since 1985, and now Zeke lived there, too. Not long after we met, Christopher invited me to a birthday party for his ancient Samoyed, Ripley. I met a bunch of his friends, and it was like something out of a movie, all these funny, interesting people whom he’d known for decades. We all saw the deep insanity of throwing a party for a dog, yet it was still quite a sophisticated gathering.

  I was the opposite. I’d lived in a series of junky studios for as long as I’d lived in Manhattan, and I was terrible at making friends. This was a lack that truly bothered Dennis. He’d even said, “I wish you were more social and had more friends you could bring to the relationship. I feel like I’m the one with all the friends.”

  And on Thanksgiving, I would meet several of them, because Dennis was hosting the holiday meal at his L-shaped studio on West Seventy-Second. The apartment had been improved since me: the boxes had been unpacked (and had contained mostly expired pens and stationery from an ancient job), and after several trips to Pottery Barn, it was slightly less pitiful.

  I was excited. Normal, stable people celebrated holidays.

  We went shopping at Fairway, and Dennis had already laid out several cookbooks on the kitchen counter.

  I’d assumed cooking would mean throwing a turkey into the oven and opening a few cans of cranberry sauce while we lay in bed and watched pay-per-view until the guests arrived. But this was not the plan. The plan was for Dennis to create several painfully elab
orate and complex dishes from Cooks Illustrated, using each skillet, pot, utensil, and pan at least once. My job was to remain fixed in place at the shallow stainless steel sink in his narrow galley kitchen with a scouring pad to wash and dry in a never-ending, one-man assembly line.

  By the time the guests arrived, my hands were red, swollen, and steaming, but I felt I’d participated in preparing the meal; it was our Thanksgiving even though the table was populated with an increasingly strange group of strangers.

  Sam and Paula seemed a normal enough couple, if a little grim. There was Stevie, a gay guy with tacky blond highlights, plus two single women who looked so remarkably similar I couldn’t tell them apart even when I was seated directly across from them. The odd thing about Dennis’s friends was that they all behaved as if they’d been dragged to this affair. Nobody spoke unless Dennis started the conversation.

  “So, Paula, how’s work?”

  “Good. Busy.”

  Silence.

  “Hey, Beth, I heard you went to Buffalo for vacation. How was it?”

  “Nice. But cold.”

  Was I perfectly insane? Because I could not recall ever being among a group of such seemingly dead living people before. They were entirely joyless. Except for Stevie, who spoke in a kind of unwittingly comical gay slang. “So I told her, ‘Girl, you ain’t right!’”

  Sam and Paula weren’t married but had been together long enough that people assumed they were. They also bickered in hushed tones so frequently it was natural to assume they were not only married but headed for divorce.

  “No, Sam, I said the pepper, not the salt.”

  “You said salt, Paula. Maybe you were thinking pepper, but you said salt. Anyway, they’re both in front of you now, so take whichever one you want.”

  Dennis did a heroic job of keeping the conversation as light and as jovial as possible. Though it had seemed to be an inordinate amount of preparation—each measurement involved him sliding a knife over the top of a half teaspoon or quarter cup so it was perfectly, exactly level, not a crumb more or less—the meal really was delicious. The turkey even ranked up there with Mitch’s Famous Author Friend’s, though one did have to watch out for those small brittle sticks of rosemary.