Lust & Wonder

by Augusten Burroughs

  The therapist’s strident voice startled me out of my soft-core daydream.

  She said there was reason to be optimistic, that many couples could save their marriages through therapy. Something in her manner made me expect that at any moment she would pull a small deerskin drum out from under her chair and say, “Deep breathing and rhythmic drumming are powerful tools for mending a marriage. So is sage.”

  I felt there could be no ambiguity. I barked, “I just need to say, we’re not here to repair this. He needs to understand that it has ended. He needs to be perfectly clear that reuniting is not within the realm of possibility and that—”

  She cut me off and motioned with the palms of her hands as if to push me back. “That’s enough,” she said. “One step at a time. This is a process. That’s an awful lot to digest all at once.”

  Then she suggested ten sessions. Five plus five, a neat fair number, just right for the fifty-fifty partnership between two people.

  I said, “I don’t believe it will be helpful to give him false hope.” I saw no reason this couldn’t be resolved within the next twenty minutes.

  Her features tightened, and her mouth became a straight little line. She did not care for my bossy, let’s-cut-to-the-chase-here outbursts one bit. Her eyes said, “Shut the fuck up, asshole.”

  “And I don’t believe,” she said, “that we should enter into therapy knowing in advance how we expect it to turn out.”

  I smiled back at her and replied, “I’m sorry. I know you want me to take a time-out, and I apologize, but I’m going to say something else.” And I told her I was worried about Dennis and his ability to terminate his denial. I explained that he had already been in therapy for nearly fifteen years. Though I didn’t add, “And you can see for yourself how useless it was.”

  I spoke pointedly, I felt, but not disrespectfully. Like one doctor to another, except that I’m the opposite of a doctor and way more like a patient who tied the doctor up, locked him in the nurses’ lounge, and is now at a shopping mall wearing his doctor’s clothes.

  But I was truly worried. Once Dennis realized I was gone, it would hit him hard, and he would need somebody with Joyce Carol Oates hair to steady him. Either that or he would be just manic with relief and giddy with possibility, in which case he would also need her, if only to affirm for him, “But of course it’s okay for you to celebrate without feeling guilty. I saw him. He was a monster!”

  She turned to Dennis and asked him, “How long have you been unhappy in this relationship with Augusten?”

  Dennis shot me a bashful, sideways glance and then looked back at her before looking down at his own lap. Sullenly, he replied, “A few years. I mean, the first two were really good, but after that…” He let the thought to just drop right there, baby-on-the-church-steps style.

  My hands gripped the well-worn arms of the Naugahyde armchair. “You were happy for two years, that’s it?” I wanted to shout, “But that leaves eight! That means you lied to me on a daily basis for eight motherfucking years!” (Later, I did the math: 2,920 lies.)

  Even though I didn’t say this or anything else, the therapist had her eye on me and her hand was already outstretched, like she was petsitting a friend’s ungainly Saint Bernard and warning it away from the coffee table. She again suggested we agree to ten more sessions. I thought, She’s only interested in slamming shut my blustering window so that all the cash doesn’t blow out it. At least if she’d said, “How about this: ten more sessions and I’ll throw in a set of four earthenware daisy mugs and a toaster oven,” at least I could have respected her motives.

  One of the items on Dennis’s “One Million Things I Hate About Augusten” list was that he thought I had a forceful personality. Well, that was better than having a simpering, lying, weak personality like he did. I wanted to take that list of his and shove it down his throat.

  The fact that Joyce Carol Oates was using the identical hand signals with me that a traffic cop would use to stop a cement truck from barreling through an intersection populated with children from a church group did appear to legitimize his complaint, if only slightly. She turned to Dennis, and when he spoke, he did so in a soft, hesitant voice. Carefully, he described me as a “bully,” and I thought, Yeah, but only in comparison to someone who sucks in his lips and bites them so he won’t say something terrible and coughs instead of having meaningful conversation.

  I didn’t actually roll my eyes, but I did think, I may have had the louder voice, but he had the sharper words. Still, I had to admit it was a good strategic move on his part. He’d totally won her over to his side with that one, because Dr. Crochet Sweater Vest would like nothing more than to stab me in the eye with her “A Woman Without a Man Is Like a Fish Without a Bicycle” button.

  As the session drew to a close, it was agreed that we would return, Dennis first, for a one-on-one.

  Outside on the sidewalk, I said, “Well, at least she got to see me be a bully.”

  And though it was small and sad, Dennis laughed for the first time in what seemed like years.

  I knew he did not understand why I stuffed a bouquet of dynamite into the crevice that had opened between us, lit it, and watched it blow us completely apart. But I did contain hope within my chest that someday, he would understand. Perhaps we’d been not in a relationship together, after all, so much as crouching together in the same hiding space, a true limited liability partnership.

  Maybe for a time, the fact that both of us wanted it to work made up for the fact that it really never did. With the relationship over, I wasn’t sure if we would even be friends. It didn’t seem likely we’d even be left with that.

  Two years before, we’d bought a studio apartment in downtown New York City. The plan had been to fix it up like a hotel room so we could return to Manhattan whenever we wanted and not be trapped in the country, which is exactly what we were. But we’d never furnished it. In fact, it contained only a floor lamp and an air mattress, also on the floor. I would be staying in the New York apartment, and he would return to the house in Amherst.

  It was awkward standing there on the sidewalk outside the therapist’s brownstone, because we weren’t accustomed to going in opposite directions. We nodded solemnly and agreed we’d be in touch before the next session. He asked me to gather any mail that came and send it on to him. He said if there was mail for me back in Amherst, he’d bring it with him to the next therapy appointment. Moments before, we had been confronting our most devastating, life-changing feelings and shredding the fabric of our decade together, and now he was scheduling mail delivery.

  As I walked away, I felt a kind of speedy sadness, raw-nerved. My eyes felt like they must be ringed with red. At the same time, I felt an urgency in my chest, not like butterflies but rather more like crows were wrestling inside, beating their wings against my rib cage.

  I was free.

  And didn’t this mean, wasn’t it possible, I might have another chance? To find somebody I wouldn’t have to change for, somebody who wasn’t bothered so much by the many troublesome things about me or maybe even liked them?

  When I had first started dating after meeting him and deeming him unacceptable, I believed I could find “somebody like Christopher,” but that was ridiculous. I didn’t want somebody like Christopher. He was the only one like him. That’s the one I wanted. What if I just went ahead and told him how I felt? How I’d felt all along? So what if he laughed in my face and then fired me as his client and had me blacklisted from publishing? At least I could tell myself that I’d seen the thing I wanted, and I’d chased after it.

  Dennis had hurt me. He’d lied to me for so many years, shoplifting time that belonged to me. But as I crossed Broadway, another thought came into my mind. Each time I asked Dennis, “Are you happy with me?” what if I was really asking this of myself?

  What if I had been the one lying?

  What if the only person I could blame was myself?

  I passed one of those ubiquitous Irish pubs with n
eon clovers in the windows and signs for Pabst on tap. I knew that if I walked into that pub, it would be dank and cool and dark and that I could slide onto a well-polished bar stool and order a tumbler of vodka or maybe a gin and tonic. I also knew, after two or three of these, all blame would recede from me as surely as an ocean tide. Nothing would be my fault.

  The catch was I could never leave the bar.

  I walked past it. Sober for yet another fucked-up, mistake-drenched day. But there was one hell of a wind blowing against my back, and it almost made walking as easy as one of those sliding airport walkways. In that moment, it kind of felt like a present from the universe.

  * * *

  Several days later, the doctor who referred us to the ’70s patchouli therapist called. He’d received a message from the therapist saying she was unwilling to see me and Dennis again. That seemed a little unprofessional. Shouldn’t she have contacted me herself? Surely such a roundabout message was in violation of something, and certainly she should be punished.

  On the other hand, I appreciated the swift efficiency of her act. The brutal reality of it. Like a Joyce Carol Oates novel.

  It reminded me of when I first started to go bald. I went in for a haircut, and my hairdresser sat me down as usual, poised the shears over my head, and then reconsidered and put them down. He grabbed the clippers.

  “Why no scissors all of a sudden?” I’d asked, genuinely curious.

  He leveled a gaze at me in the mirror and then glanced down at what was left of my hair. He wasn’t mean about it, but he shrugged and said, “Not really much point anymore, you know? Clippers for you from now on.”

  Looking at myself fresh through his eyes, I suddenly saw that what was actually on top of my head was not so much hair as the fuzzy remains of my own denial. Motherfucker.

  * * *

  In my empty studio apartment, I thought about Dennis. I imagined he must have been so lonely to occupy the same house, the same life with somebody who couldn’t have sex with him and who didn’t even see how brutally unhappy he was.

  He said to me once that he felt responsible for staying. He said that so many bad things had happened to me, he could not bear to be another one of them. So he stayed. I was the one who left. I was the one who tore apart our lives. But I did it for him as much as for me. I did it because I could, and he could not.

  Molly told me, “Divorce is like a Polaroid picture. What truly happened will develop over time, and you will see.”

  She was right about that.

  To admit early on that we seemed incompatible, unable to communicate freely and easily and honestly, would have felt like an act of such savage destruction. We were making plans for our fine, good life together, and they would to have been thrown away. Which is exactly what happened, only much later and leaving behind a much larger debris field.

  I know now: what is is all that matters. Not the thing you know is meant to be, not what could be, not what should be, not what ought to be, not what once was.

  Only the is.

  * * *

  I bought furniture for the apartment, and after ten years of living with somebody, I was on my own again. I missed my dogs. Dennis offered to drive into the city with them and let me have them on weekends, but I found myself worrying about him being alone in the house we built, the one we used to share, if he didn’t have the dogs, without something to worry about and take care of.

  My instincts told me that no matter how hard it was for me to be without them, no matter how closely the physical ache I felt without them resembled impending heart failure, it would be worse for Dennis. After all, wasn’t I the expert at losing things?

  When the dogs were with me, I was grateful. I didn’t have an actual job, so I could spend all of every prized day on the bed with them both.

  I shopped online for vintage jewelry to comfort myself. My grandmother had been one of those Southern ladies who dripped with jade bangles, diamond rings, emerald necklaces, and earrings of beaded rubies. Since I was a little boy, I have loved all things shiny and sparkly. Now, because I had no control or judgment or real-world knowledge, I was siphoning my 401(k) to buy them.

  I scrolled through Web site images of jade rings. I climbed up off the bed to get treats for the sleeping bulldogs.

  Add to cart, add to cart.

  III

  I sent Christopher an e-mail telling him how I felt. An e-mail seemed better than a phone call or a meeting in person, because he was accustomed to me dumping my words all over him. Plus, it was how I was most comfortable, and I couldn’t screw it up.

  Christopher,

  Two things. First, did you ever hear back from the sub-rights agent about a sale for India?

  The other thing is slightly out of the blue. I love you, is the thing. And I mean love love, not love you, bro. I mean, I am in love with you, and it’s an eye-color kind of love, unchangeable and bright. I know this must be somewhat shocking (appalling?) to you, because you’ve never given any indication that you felt anything but professional agent friendliness for me, but I have felt much more for so long it’s possibly caused me brain damage. Also, I am certain you love me, too. Or at least mostly certain. Or at least I hope.

  What I want is for you to cab downtown right now so we can quickly go over to city hall and get married. I don’t want us to be agent and client for one more moment. I want us to be together, permanently. I also need to know certain things about you. For example, I can’t even remember your birthday. Also, I’ve never seen pictures of your childhood house, or better yet, heard you describe it. I don’t even know if you had stuffed animals as a kid.

  I want to know everything. Shoe size, dental history, allergies, favorite color, special abilities or skills, gluten tolerance level. I require complete knowledge and 100 percent access to all of you. I am like the fat girl at a buffet with three plates balanced on her arm like a waitress. “That bitch, did you see her? She just took all the Bac-Os.” My greed and hunger with respect to you are without limit.

  You should know, I tried for many years not to be in love with you, but I failed. And I really did try very hard. But it was not possible, and it never has been, because I have actually loved you from very early in our relationship. Possibly as early as our first meeting.

  A small part of me is aware that this might be somewhat blindsiding for you. I also know it’s gross for the famous author to fall in love with his literary agent, but on the flip side? At least we’re not twenty-four. That’s what saves us from being entirely repulsive as a couple. In fact, it’s almost romantic, isn’t it? Like Charles and Camilla.

  And no, I’m not drunk.

  He wrote me back pretty quickly. “Well, that certainly qualifies as your most shocking piece of writing in my learned opinion. But as fascinating and flattering and strangely hallucinatory as I found it, it can’t possibly be true. I am a crusty old sack of disease with holes blown through it, like a horror movie character that can’t be killed. Which makes you, sir, crazy. So snap out of it,” he concluded. “This is just a phase.”

  His reply was very much the words of a literary agent caught off guard, defusing his unstable writer.

  I replied, “Will you at least consider trying to see me as more than just a client?”

  He wrote back, “I have AIDS and cancer, and you’re a Purell addict.”

  “Plus short,” I reminded him. “Everything you said so far plus short.” I also told him that I’d never been as sure about anything else. I said, “I’d already lost one boyfriend to AIDS when I was in my twenties, and I decided never again. So when I met you, you were off-limits. I decided I couldn’t love you. The problem was, I did. And ten years later, here we are. All those reasons I had for it being impossible between us, they’re nothing. I’m not just in love with you. I’m insanely in love with you.”

  He called me then so that I could hear his laughter in my actual fat ear and not read LOL on screen.

  I asked him if he would meet me in Hell’s Kitchen for
burgers.

  “Be there in twenty,” he said.

  We went to a sports bar near Worldwide Plaza on Forty-Ninth. As soon as we were seated, I knew. I could see it in his eyes as surely as their color: he loved me, too. He did. There was disbelief there, too, but there was no doubt.

  “This is crazy,” he said.

  I reached under the table while the Yankees got clobbered, and I traced my finger along his calf.

  “You know what else it is?” I asked him, feeling the hairs through his pants. “It’s happening.”

  Christopher had never thought of me in romantic terms. He said this and even used that word terms, ever the commission-sucking agent. Whereas I had been thinking of him lustfully for an alarmingly long time. Yet, there over burgers, there was a transformation. His perspective did shift, and he was quite able to see me as more than just a client, partly because I was groping him under the table and partly because we were by now the best of friends, able to laugh at the absurdity of the situation.

  Near the end of the meal, I went to the bathroom to take a leak. I was shocked when I looked in the mirror and saw that a spot on the front of my pants was already wet, as though I’d pissed a little in them.

  Maybe this was an actual nervous breakdown, I thought.

  When I returned to the table, his face was flushed. He looked at the crotch of my jeans, and he knew, exactly. When he stood up, I could see he was hard. We were way too old and worn out for this shit, but there it was, right in front of us.