Lust & Wonder

by Augusten Burroughs

  I finally just spoke the words out loud to myself. “Is he with the guy in Harlem?” Dennis had described him only as his “former fuck buddy” and claimed to know almost nothing about him even though they had a physical relationship for over a decade. Though one thing Dennis did tell me about him was that the guy had gone to an Ivy League college and worked in academia. Because I had so few actual details about the man himself, I had to invent them: six-and-a-half feet tall, sculpted from muscle, the color of bittersweet chocolate, and with a penis the diameter of a baseball bat. In my mind, he was also a classical musician and stand-up comic. He held a gray metal box with a red button protruding, and when he pushed the button, Dennis got a shock in the ass and dropped whatever he was doing and took a train up to Harlem to lie on his back and throw his legs up in the air.

  I suspected he’d either slept with this allegedly retired fuck buddy again or was going to sleep with him that night. Then I wondered, is he actually in love with the guy? Several times, Dennis had spoken of his attraction to African American men. But was this attraction just a general preference? Or maybe did it center around one particular African American man?

  I thought back to our awkward conversation on the phone that afternoon. It had been somewhat stilted, polite. Impersonal. Like he was somebody from customer service and we were chatting it up.

  He was far more upset today than he let on, I thought, and I think something is coming to a head tonight. This would explain why I had been in such an outrageously foul mood all day long, unable to do anything except dwell. I thought, I have known somehow. Picked something up. Understood on a level not quite conscious.

  It was after two in the morning when Dennis finally showed up at my apartment. He was sweaty and clammy and looked exhausted. He said he was late because he went out for drinks with a girl after the cocktail party in midtown, and then he went back to his office and sat in a chair in the dimmed lights.

  “I did some thinking.”

  That sounded much worse than taking the subway uptown to see his former fuck buddy. No good ever comes of sitting alone in a dark office and thinking. Next to “needing some space,” perhaps “doing some thinking” was the worst phrase to hear from somebody you were dating. The words filled the air with grim reaper–breath incense.

  “Just alone? In the dark? What were you thinking about?” I had to ask even though I suddenly felt narcoleptic and like I wanted to crawl in the closet and sleep under the coats.

  Dennis undressed, removing his shirt and draping it carefully over the back of my desk chair. He removed his pants, aligning the creases in the leg, folding them once, laying them gently on top of the arm of the couch. This undressing struck me as unspoken good news: Who gets undressed before storming out of a relationship?

  He came over and sat on the bed. “I was thinking about us. Nothing new. Stuff we’ve talked about already. Sometimes, I just wonder if I’m not meant to be in a relationship. Like I just don’t know what I’m doing. I worry about us being so different.”

  “I worry about that, too,” I told him.

  The relief on his face was instant. “You do? You never told me that.”

  “I do think about it, but I don’t worry so much about it, like you do. I guess I feel more like we complement each other.”

  Dennis put his arm around me. “We do complement each other, you’re right. And I love you.”

  When he was warm and open like this, I loved him and wished I could put a freeze on the moment, make it longer, make it stay.

  “I thought you’d say, ‘Fuck it,’ and that would be it—we’d be finished. I wasn’t expecting you to say you also had doubts.”

  I saw that his eyes were moist.

  I leaned into him, but what I thought was, Wait. Was that what he really wanted, for me to say it was over?

  Why did I feel like he was holding something back?

  I supposed I was holding back, too. In the last twelve hours alone, I went from feeling incredibly close to him to feeling like we would break up the next time we were together. In fact, I constantly expected it. But then I always expected the worst and tried to prepare for it.

  My brain got broken a long time ago, and as a result, a car driving along the street is never just a car driving along the street; it’s a death machine with eroded brake lines, and the driver is sneezing and doesn’t see that he’s careening toward me. So many years of anticipating disaster is exhausting. Though I have tried to train myself not to think this way, it never works, so plan B is to go ahead and think this way but then remind myself I’m wrong. Which means I can only cobble together a life by clobbering my faulty “gut instincts” 100 percent of the time.

  Soon, though, the relief on Dennis’s face melted away and was replaced by duress. “I was thinking something else tonight,” he said.

  I had the sensation of being on a roller coaster, the part where it suddenly dips.

  We were seated in bed, propped up against the pillows.

  “Do we move in together? Do I need to see you every night?” he asked.

  I looked at him to try to read his face. He looked sort of miserable. As though this were a question of which of his children should be taken off life support.

  I thought, Is it really so terrible? The possibility of living together?

  “I’m just very new to this, relationships,” he said. “You’re more experienced than I am. I’ve never been in something this serious and intense. I just don’t know what we do. I don’t know if my feelings are okay or if they mean something.”

  I wanted to say, “Yes, that’s what we do. We move in together.” But I didn’t say this, because Dennis was all about taking things slow, and it was still too soon.

  And it would be still too soon for the foreseeable future. This was, after all, a man whose last official date had been ten years earlier. If he could go a decade between dates, he could certainly allow thirty or forty years to pass before deciding we should share a mailbox. So he threw the relationship ball back into my court because I was “more experienced” in terms of relationships. If failed relationships and blackout sex count as experience, that is.

  Just when I thought he was finished confessing all the things he’d thought about when he was alone in his dark office, he admitted that he had a desire to go back to his old life.

  “Not that I would, but I have to admit, I think about it sometimes. It’s tempting.”

  He shot me a guilty blush when he said it, so I figured he was talking about getting fucked by the African American Adonis. Which meant I’d been half-right. Maybe he hadn’t actually been with the guy, but he’d been sitting in the dark daydreaming about it.

  Dennis stared down at his lap. “I hope I have the courage to continue with us,” he said.

  I smelled a setup. Now he could break up with me without conflict. He could, in the days or weeks to come, simply reveal that he lacked the “courage.” In this way, continuing would be impossible, the fault entirely his. Maybe I was being paranoid and this was more of my piano-falling-from-the-sky kind of thinking, but it seemed to me Dennis had just laid the groundwork for an incredibly polite breakup.

  I sank back against the pillows. I kind of wanted to scream and bash my head back against the wall and jump out of the bed and run somewhere.

  I was so confused.

  I was in love with him.

  I wanted us to live together, because he made me feel safe and secure. Except? What I was feeling now was the opposite of safe and secure. So what did he make me feel?

  Sleepy.

  It’s so hard to really trust what’s inside another person, to really believe someone’s intentions and what he or she says. I wished I could just trust him completely, without my own constant doubts regarding his constant doubts.

  * * *

  One clear autumn morning, I arrived nearly a half hour early for my nine o’clock chiropractic appointment in Soho. This happened because I gave myself forty-five minutes to travel from Dennis’
s apartment on the Upper West Side to Spring Street, a twenty-minute commute. Because of my unbridled anxiety about being late for anything, I am accustomed to being laughably early for everything, so I figured I’d walk around the neighborhood looking at the sparkly sidewalks, dented trash cans, and homeless meth addicts. But this turned out to be one of those days where each actual second seemed to take numerous additional seconds to actually pass. After ten minutes, I felt like I’d been walking for a week. I wandered into a Starbucks and ordered a double espresso. Once I had the hot little paper cup in my hand, I wondered why I’d even ordered it; I didn’t really like espresso, though I did like swirling it around in the cup and watching the caramel-colored foam stick to the sides.

  I gulped it down in one bitter and semiscalding swallow, tossed the cup in the trash on the way out the door, and was walking along Spring Street when a woman shouted from a window overhead, “A plane flew into the World Trade Tower!”

  She was screaming this over and over. It seemed like I should be able to see her hanging out the window, but I couldn’t. She was just a frantic voice. I assumed she was drunk. Who else would hang out the window before nine in the morning and scream things onto an empty street?

  It was almost nine. The espresso left a bitter aftertaste.

  I wandered to the corner of Prince and Mott to see if anything had actually hit one of the buildings. I walked slowly, one step above bored.

  There was a low playground across the street, and this was why I could see straight downtown. The World Trade Tower was venting a column of black smoke as thick as the building itself.

  As I stared, the top of the other tower exploded.

  I love a good disaster. News coverage of a plane crash will keep me glued to the television without sleep and only very rushed bathroom breaks. But as I watched the towers burn, I felt something sharpen within me. This was the realization that I was not merely watching the spectacle of disaster occur on my wide-screen television; soon I would smell smoke. It instantly stopped being fascinating and amazing and became real: horrifying and impossible but happening, and what was happening?

  And something else.

  A nagging sensation.

  Had I left the house without my keys? I slapped at my hips and felt the keys in my left pocket. What, then? The oven? Didn’t use it. What was it?

  Dennis. But what about him?

  I was hypnotized by the smoking towers. The woman wasn’t screaming out the window anymore, and the street was empty. Where were the cars? The towers burned and churned out roiling blackness, and the fact that I was watching this happen did not in any way make it seem like it actually was.

  I remained rooted to the sidewalk, feeling the heat from the flames on my face, which was impossible. I wondered if more buildings in Manhattan had exploded. Was this the end of something?

  Dennis?

  He had left before me in the morning to go to his therapy appointment at eight thirty.

  My brain prodded me. “And where was Dennis’s therapy session?”

  The answer crawled forward slowly, as if there was a delay in my ability to think. Dennis’s therapy session was downtown. In the World Trade Center.

  I turned away from the towers. Immediately, I felt clear and focused. My nose decongested. My back did not hurt.

  Dennis would be walking out of therapy soon, and he would exit the base of the building not knowing that it was burning. Pieces of tower would be falling to the ground, burning. He could be hit with debris. I thought, I have to go downtown and find him. Then I thought, I’ll be able to find him. It will just happen. I would be able to find him, because I have always been able to do things that seem unlikely or even impossible.

  I jogged over to Broadway. The WALK light was flashing, but I stopped. It would be chaos down there. Of course, there would be no way to find him amid the destruction and commotion.

  People on the street were sobbing and pointing. They were screaming. Some were running.

  Dennis was to meet his business partner uptown at the apartment at ten. I would go there, and when she arrived, we would take her car. If she hesitated, I would buy her car from her on the spot, drive downtown, and find him that way.

  I saw a cab. Impossibly, it was free, so I raised my hand, and it veered over to the curb and stopped hard. I gave him the address uptown, and as he drove, we were in salute; hundreds of people lined the streets, hands raised seeking cabs.

  I tried my cell phone, and it did not work.

  My body chemistry began to slow as I realized, with an awful finality, that Dennis could be dead.

  The radio said the word terrorists.

  Fire trucks and ambulances were screaming downtown. Of course it was terrorists. I hadn’t even paused to consider the why of what was happening. If a dinosaur stomps onto your lawn, you run. You don’t stay in the pool and go, “Now wait a minute, just how did you…?”

  The cab was making all the lights, but I still wasn’t home. I called it home, but it was really Dennis’s apartment. I was destined to return to my filthy studio alone. Because I loved him so much after having lived a life without love, after having only needed, that is why I would lose him. I needed him too much, so he’d be taken away now. I was happy. The rug, therefore, must be pulled.

  The cab reached a clog of traffic near midtown. We stopped moving, and I wondered, Is this what it looks like? The worst day of your life, moments or hours or possibly even several days before you realize in retrospect this was the moment when everything changed for the worst?

  My mind went in a circle, clockwise: me not hearing from Dennis today or tomorrow; Dennis not coming home because he is not alive.

  Finally, we reached the apartment building, itself a skyscraper, and I ran inside. The lobby was packed with senior citizens who had ambled down from their apartments to gather and wring their hands. I strode over to the elevator banks, hating their slowness more than ever and then feeling a sting of surprise and gratitude when there was an elevator already waiting. I pressed the button for our floor and then caught myself holding my breath.

  My hands were shaking when I unlocked the door.

  It was empty.

  He was not there.

  And wait.

  The TV was on. His briefcase there on the floor, tossed.

  And Dennis walking around the corner, his precious face, all mine, his expression numb, so much damage in his eyes. No dust on his body, no blood, clean, pressed and whole.

  I rushed into him, pressed my body against his, hard, not hard enough. He smelled like him.

  Anything else can happen to me and I don’t care, I realized.

  What can you say? I said, “Thank God.” And I do not believe in God. Except, for this fleeting, thirty-second window of my life, I did, because he brought Dennis home unscathed.

  He was bewildered. “I had the wrong day,” he muttered. “I went downtown and realized I got my days mixed up. So I went into Century 21 and bought some socks. Then I got back on the subway and came home, and Alice called from her car and said, ‘Turn on the news.’” He showed me his receipt from the downtown clothing store: he must have taken the last subway to ever leave the World Trade Center station before it was all crushed to rubble and dust.

  Standing side by side, we watched the towers fall on CNN.

  If his apartment had faced south instead of north, we could have watched without a television.

  I led him into the narrow, windowless kitchen. I backed him against the trash can by the wall and held his face in my hands. I said, “I want to spend the rest of my life with you. I want us to be married.”

  Dennis closed his eyes. He said, “Okay.”

  I said, “Are you sure?”

  He nodded. “You should get rid of your apartment downtown and move in,” he said in a numb monotone. He turned, walked back over to the TV, and stood there watching.

  I looked at the back of his head, salt-and-pepper hair buzzed close to his scalp, and thought, That’s it—we�
��re official.

  I looked down at the worn linoleum floor. I decided to clean and wax it. I used a small brush I found under the sink to scrub it on my hands and knees. Briefly, I wondered, Is a terrorist attack a poor reason for taking our relationship to the next level? But he’d said yes, so I didn’t want to question it. How rash could my suggestion have been if he’d agreed to it? Dennis was a bit of an emotional penny pincher, after all, kind of a cheapskate when it came to handing out the feelings.

  Still, as I slopped liquid wax over his barely there, worn-out kitchen floor, I couldn’t help but think it was like a macabre game show. Maybe I’d won, but would I even want the prize? “It’s the end of the world! Grab whoever’s next to you and bury yourselves under the trash in the backyard! Hurry!”

  * * *

  After the grisly stench—electrical fire mixed with meat and blended with chemicals—left the city and spring had finally arrived, the area was renamed Ground Zero and became something that seemed permanent, a macabre construction pit on a vast scale, nothing to be visited. Life simply continued without it.

  One morning as he stood in the steam-drippy bathroom trimming his soul patch with a small pair of scissors, Dennis told me that he wished I made more of a social effort. “It just feels like I’m the one who’s always making plans with other people or suggesting we go to the museum or whatever.”

  What he said was completely true. I was totally happy watching common TV with him, having no friends, and eating only food from takeout cartons. This, I suddenly saw, was a character flaw.

  Instead of looking at me in the mirror when he said this, he leaned in close to inspect the precision of his trimming.

  “Sometimes it feels like that,” he added in an offhanded way, offering me a tight little smile. “Just once in a while, you could suggest a bike ride, or maybe there’s a book reading you’d like to go to.”

  The only thing more distasteful than riding a bike would be riding a bike to a book reading.

  I folded my arms across my chest and felt very drowsy, like I might actually nod off while standing there in the bathroom doorway.