Lust & Wonder

by Augusten Burroughs

  This is my agent.

  Under his suit, out of his office, Christopher reclined in a hammock and looked into the camera, lens flare, his hair swept away from his face, a face more beautiful than I’d allowed myself to realize in years. I’d spent so much time dissecting his flaws, a process that always made him laugh.

  I despised whoever took that photograph, but I could not look away.

  It felt as if I had just walked in on my boss in the bathroom stall at the office and he was whacking off, a Barbie Thumbelina in his free hand and a poppers-soaked dust mask covering his mouth. Except my dick was hard, much harder than it’d been in over a decade. So in this case, I was also my boss, and I had walked in on myself.

  This is the first symptom of a brain disorder, I thought earnestly.

  I wondered if I could make the picture larger.

  Following the initial electrical discharge of distaste, my galaxy of neurons was once again able to provide me with a net of something akin to reason.

  “Well, it’s a very flattering picture. And I don’t believe I’ve seen that hairstyle before. It’s also very late, and I’m wiped out. So this whole thing, actually, it’s funny!”

  Then another voice, also inside my own head, spoke up. “It never went away, did it?”

  * * *

  The day I first saw Christopher, when he turned off Hudson Street and came walking toward me on Gansevoort Street, I could see the V of flesh at the top of his shirt from a half block away, and something about his hair made me want to grip his head and run my fingers through it.

  Over the years, I’d noticed that everybody who greeted him hugged and kissed him hello and good-bye except me. Why was that, exactly? When it came time for us to say good-bye, there was a stiff handshake, possibly a snide remark from me, but absolutely no hint from him that we should hug and kiss, too.

  The voice in my head said, “Please. This is something new?”

  This was very much like going through rehab for alcoholism or drug abuse: your substance of choice was ruined forever. Oh, you could drink again, and you could snort away your 401(k)—or what was left of it—but not for one instant would you fall down the lovely rabbit hole of complete oblivion. Because now, you know. And knowledge spoils everything. Unfortunately, one can never un-know something.

  It was like that with Christopher. Before the picture: you pulled it off, told yourself he was off-limits and turned your mind away from him. After the picture: you’re in love; you’re in lust; you’re in trouble.

  Dennis was still asleep, and the room was silent. I stared over the laptop screen into the dark, and my mind throbbed, Wow, wow, wow, wow, fuck.

  The phrase “in the pit of your stomach,” I realized, is fully accurate. For there did seem to be a central pit located inside me. The pit contained facts cloaked in darkness. Gleaming things in hiding. Sparkly threads of gold, hairs on a wrist. Now, a hammock with a nearly naked man enveloped in it. It was my own junk drawer, filled with the tangled truth.

  I actually suggested to myself, Now that I have acknowledged it, it will go away.

  As I discovered over the following days, that was not precisely what occurred. Rather, I found myself even more distracted.

  “Where is that wetsuit picture, the one from Saint Lucia?” I wondered, scrolling wildly through my image files.

  My photo file contained several images of Christopher from some past life, most taken at an unknown beach at an unknown time. This activity inspired within me a feeling akin to swallowing one’s own child’s pain medication: “God, I am a sick and horrible person. But where the fuck is that pill?”

  Meanwhile, it was business as usual. “Hey, what’s up? Did I tell you that my life with Dennis is totally falling apart because I feel like he hates me and I’m not in love with him, which means I signed away half the rights to all my books to somebody who would totally benefit if I had fatal illness?”

  Because nothing had changed on Christopher’s end, I felt extra insane. Something had shifted inside of me, and normally, he was the very person I would have told. But I couldn’t tell him, I’d become fixated on pictures of him.

  “Hey, check this out. I haven’t told anybody else, but I’m growing a tail. Just lemme get this belt undone, and I’ll show you. Soon it’ll be too big to keep tucked inside. I’m gonna have to see somebody about it.”

  I had stuffed him and my feelings for him as far down as I could, and for a few years there, I even convinced myself that it worked. Living in Massachusetts had put physical distance between us; I couldn’t just drop into the office, and our homes were no longer a mere seven blocks apart. I still saved my cruelest and funniest lines for him, but they were frequently directed at him, a pathetic attempt to minimize him in my brain and in my heart. He brought out the worst in me but in the best possible way. What he brought out in me was the truth, and it wasn’t always beautiful or handsome.

  I’d watched him cycle through a couple of relationships while I myself met somebody and decided to fall in love and create a stable life for myself.

  Yeah, I did that. I decided to fall in love. God sees that remark, and he circles it with his big red felt pen, chuckling.

  My relationship with Dennis had closed the door and locked it on my agent. He was single again, had been for a few years, and according to him, would be for the rest of his life. Professing to be tired and old, he claimed that his large circle of friends and his ability to find uncomplicated sex would be enough. He didn’t have the energy, he said, “to tell my entire fucking story to someone. It’s also why I don’t get back into therapy. My crust is now armorlike.”

  If I felt a flicker of jealousy at the time, it was too deeply buried for me to acknowledge it. I made a joke about a team in hazmat outfits having to come in and burn the sheets after he and some other infected old man covered them with their sex disease, and of course he laughed, though of course it just wasn’t funny.

  It took something terrible to punch the truth out of my stomach and allow me to realize an attraction remained.

  I was in a hotel room in LA with Dennis when Christopher called to tell me he had cancer. He couched the news with this: luckily, it was Hodgkin’s—“the good cancer”—and really there was nothing to worry about. Our mutual friend David had Hodgkin’s when he was in his twenties, and Christopher said David told him, “Aside from thyroid cancer, which is treated with a milk shake, this is the most desirable one available.”

  I felt a wishbone lodged in my throat when I tried to swallow and breathe. I also made a wisecrack, something to lance the moment, drain it of its significance, reassure him of the normalcy of life.

  When I hung up the phone, it was shocking to feel my body begin to convulse without permission, to heave for air as I cried. When was the last time I’d cried? Maybe 1982? I was astounded that such a magnitude of physical motion was even possible against my will or knowledge. It was like sneezing for twenty minutes, plus a broken heart.

  I cried past the point of grief, so far past it that I was able to sit on my hotel mattress and say, “Okay, this is idiotic now. I never cry. And I can’t stop. It’s so Julianne Moore. Is something broken?” When I walked into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror, I laughed out loud at what a wreck I was, all puffy and leaky. Which brought on another wave.

  It’s like he knew about the hammock picture, that he had access to the contents of my brain as I saw it, and now he was making himself even further off-limits with a new death-threatening illness. He was stoic, facing six months of chemotherapy alone. Oh, surrounded by dozens of friends and a nearly 150-pound dog, to be sure. But alone. And this felt wrong, like a clerical error.

  I swooned. I wondered if all those feelings could be fatal. If my brain could be overwhelmed, too much blood sent to the surface convolutions of the brain itself, causing a hemorrhage. It seemed dangerous to think of them.

  My doggedly, Catholically loyal partner was right there in the room with me through it all. He even h
anded me tissues and told me to press an icy washcloth to my eyes to reduce the swelling. Horribly, I did think, Why couldn’t it be him? When I glanced over at Dennis, I was certain he could read my thoughts, so I turned away.

  * * *

  When I next saw Christopher, he was bald and old and impossibly fat.

  “They’re giving me steroids to keep my energy up, which also increases my appetite, and then I gain weight,” he explained. “So I lost my hair and got fat. I’m getting Uncle Fester chemo.”

  It shocked me so much that during lunch I bit the inside of my cheek four times, having misplaced the exact location of my own teeth. He was genuinely upbeat and charming while I was genuinely terrified and struck by awe. He physically revolted me, and I realized, I love him so permanently.

  * * *

  The next time I saw him was three months after his treatment ended. Dennis and I were joining him for dinner.

  We were slightly late. Also, we stank like acrid sweat, because we’d been wordlessly arguing in the car on the way into the city from Massachusetts.

  Christopher was already seated at the table, and in all the years I had known the man, he had never looked so fine. Vigorous and healthy, free not only from cancer but from everything else that clings to a person and diminishes them.

  Years were missing from his face.

  Radiance, when actually encountered in a person, causes you to blink.

  He fought cancer, and look who won.

  I could not take my watery eyes off him. I could feel Dennis’s quizzical stare, but I could not look away from the man before me, my agent, my best friend. He was heroic. And standing there before him, pulling my chair out, finally, to be seated, I surprised both of us by reaching out and gripping the back of his chair. My knuckles dragged against the back of his neck, briefly.

  Burning-faced, I sat. Lopsided, blundering, I experienced a seasickness of full-force physical attraction.

  I ordered the steak.

  When his leg knocked against mine under the table by accident, I came very close to spitting chewed meat onto the tablecloth. I wanted to literally run from the restaurant, fleeing on foot.

  His spirits were great. He was so funny. If only Dennis hadn’t been there souring the evening with his endless series of tedious questions. “Were the nurses nice? I’ve heard that’s a pleasant hospital. Is it true? Was the chemo difficult to work into your schedule?” He reeked of smallness. And I loathed myself most for reaching the point where all I could see were his flaws, whether real or conjured.

  I was possessed with the most curious sense of urgency. Anyone who wasn’t Christopher was wasting my time. Dinner was over in mere minutes, it seemed to me, which only heightened the sense that I had to do something, say something, take immediate action.

  The drive back to Amherst seemed four times as long as the trip out. But “home” offered many distractions: a routine, work, my dogs, e-mailing my friends, my slot, my rut, my rot.

  A week passed.

  The dinner, the accidental knocking of his leg under the table, the way my senses became all mixed up and the way the light in the restaurant had made his hair sweet-smelling, how when he spoke, it felt as though I was about to board an ocean liner.

  I was presented with a gift. It arrived in the form of certainty. Certain things, true things, facts that are made of foot-thick steel and anchored miles deep into the earth, are comforting because they provide a fulcrum around which you work or plan or live or figure things out. This is what I knew, my certainty: the thing I felt for the man who was my agent had established roots. It existed; it would continue to exist. It had been there when I first met him, and instead of evaporating, it had penetrated.

  Instead of causing me to panic, oddly, this knowledge generated a tiny metallic click deep and low in my brain. Unlocked. It set me free. This great freedom came as an understanding that I need not move a muscle. Not all dots should be connected. I was free to love one person but live with someone else. People did that all the time. It was sad, yes. But kind of beautiful, too, right?

  I closed my eyes and rested my head against the back of my chair. The steady beating of my heart inside my chest sounded like “Nope-nope, nope-nope, nope-nope.”

  I called bullshit on myself.

  There was freedom, and then there was everything else. Freedom didn’t come in degrees. It was an all-or-nothing proposition.

  I wanted it all.

  * * *

  Several weeks after dinner with Christopher, Dennis seemed particularly unhappy. It wasn’t that he was grumpier than usual; he was even more distant. And when we did run into each other in the kitchen or on the stairs, he was exceedingly polite. I read in his smile a distinct warning. So instead of confronting him, I e-mailed him even though there was just one floor between us. I told him I knew something was wrong, could he just maybe tell me about it in a letter?

  It turned out, he could. He provided me with a list several pages long of all the things he loathed about me.

  He followed this up with the suggestion that we see a couples’ therapist.

  The list was like a blueprint of who I was as a person, and it included my choice of beverage, my nervous tics, and scores of other personal details, many beyond my control. The list was shocking to read: so many years of pent-up resentments unspooling before me on my laptop screen, a careful itemization crafted by the son of an accountant. All along, there had been “something the matter,” and all these years, he’d said there was not. The list was proof of his spectacular betrayal. The list was also the single thing I must have required to clarify my own position in my own mind, because now, it was over. At the end of the list, he made a lame apology about how he knew it was bad to keep all this stuff inside and that this was a beginning for him; he was finally talking about it.

  But this was no beginning for me. This was the end.

  Through a reply e-mail, I agreed to see a therapist, but I needed to be clear about why. I told him to come downstairs and help me make the bed. That’s when I told him.

  “This isn’t to work things out between us, to save the relationship, because there is no relationship to save,” I told him. “You don’t want me. I make you miserable. I won’t ever want to go snowshoeing in Aspen, I will never have enough of what you want, and I will always have too much of everything you hate. We aren’t good for each other. And I will see a therapist with you so that you understand and believe that it’s over.”

  I didn’t know how Dennis felt about that. Did he want us to be over? Or did he want to stay together? He just nodded and made hospital corners with the sheet.

  I believed he loved the life we built, the oil-bronze-finished door pulls, the closets filled with linens, the cars. I definitely felt our life would be perfect for him if only I wasn’t in it. Our primary problem had been communication. While he would admit to having “hatred issues” with me, he wouldn’t go into the specifics. “Hatred issues” was enough for me. I felt like if you have hatred issues for the person you’re with, especially if you can catalog them, maybe it’s time to reevaluate your situation.

  Were the things he hated about me the same things I hated about myself? Or by sharing, would he give me all new things to despise? It was looking like I might never know. I wanted to end our relationship neatly, with a bow if possible. Something that resembled resolution, a truce. Perhaps therapy would be this pretty bow, even though my history with therapy had been more lumpy packages with terrible surprises inside.

  At the recommendation of a physician I barely knew, we ended up in the office of a Manhattan therapist plucked from a different era. She had 1970s Joyce Carol Oates hair, a full regalia of filigree sterling silver and malachite jewelry. Even in repose, she leaned forward slightly, as if reaching for a teak-handled skewer in a fondue pot.

  There may have been spider plants, and they may have been hanging. I cannot be sure, because it was difficult to lift my eyes off the Pottery Barn lamp from back in the days when Potte
ry Barn was a fruit crate of a store that sold chipped earthenware to slightly unwashed people who smelled like frankincense. The therapist’s office itself had the aroma of beeswax and wet cork. But mostly, it smelled like sickness of the mind.

  Dennis sat to my left on the sofa, I was in a shabby chair (the “chic” part had long worn away), and the therapist sat in the command chair across from us.

  I felt no hatred for Dennis. Looking at him seated on the couch with his hands curled into tender fists on his lap, I felt the sickness of heartbreak, which was compounded by the feeling that I had skipped ahead and read the last chapter. I already knew how this story turned out.

  This was because I had insider information: a crime in Wall Street circles; one that can land you in prison for twenty years and slap you with a $25 million fine. It was, however, a particularly valuable piece of interpersonal intel, and I was ready to deploy it: there was zero hope for us. Dennis was still of the opinion that there was something to work out; a compromise to be made and in which we could live. But this was not the case. There would be no compromise, because I was done with that.

  What I saw with such clarity that day was that life is, indeed, not simply black and white but rather the gray that results from blending the two together. The black I felt at Dennis’s bewilderment at how swiftly the world came crumbling down around him, all because of some silly list he’d been keeping about my flaws, which I saw as proof that he’d been lying to me for years.

  The white was the cotton sheet blowing in the sun that I felt when I fantasized about Christopher, propped up against a mound of pillows somewhere and me tracing just one finger around and around each shirt button, sliding my finger through the opened vents between them. Then, trailing my finger down the side of his chest, bump, bump, bumping over the ribs until I reached his belt buckle, where my finger would pause, like Thelma and Louise on the edge of the cliff.

  Dennis began to outline in the briefest, most orderly fashion the despair he’d felt with me for years. I remembered his personal ad, how well written and amusing it was, hinting at a playfulness, which, if it ever truly existed, had been flattened into a grinding daily sorrow. And because I felt betrayed, having asked him every day, “Are you sure you’re happy?” and he’d replied to my face, “Yes, I’m sure,” I didn’t feel like quite as much of a scumbag as I might have for letting my eyes drift away from his downturned mouth as he spoke and fixing my gaze on the atrocious broken-tile mosaic hanging on the wall while I visualized that finger of mine still parked on the edge of my agent’s belt buckle, my gaze on the swell in the crotch of his pants, my eyes drilling into strained fabric over the zipper.