Lust & Wonder

by Augusten Burroughs

  “I haven’t told him a direct lie, and I don’t say anything self-serving to mislead him,” Christopher told me, “but now my entire conversational style is one big all-night lie of omission.”

  At some point, Dennis invited Christopher to the Massachusetts house for a weekend, and Christopher made up a last-minute lie to get out of it.

  “I can’t go there and allow him to host me,” he said. “I’m a terrible enough friend right here in Manhattan.”

  “I have to tell him,” I said in a miserable monotone.

  “He really does deserve to know. The thing is, your relationship is already so fraught that he’s never going to hear this the right way. You’ll lead with ‘Christopher and I are sleeping together,’ and the rest will be a fight.”

  “So what are you saying? I should write him a letter? E-mail him?”

  “No, no, it definitely has to be done in person.” He paused. “The thing is, I would do a much better job than you.”

  I let a nanosecond pass before “Really? You think so? Okay,” came tumbling out of my mouth as one sentence.

  “I would approach it like an agent,” he said.

  “Yes,” I agreed, but not too eagerly, “like you’re pitching a novel.”

  “Right.” He sighed. “A horror novel.”

  A few weeks later, Dennis drove down with the dogs for the weekend. He arrived, dropped them off, and went to run errands and do New York things. That afternoon, I got an e-mail from Christopher that said, “We’re meeting at seven for drinks and dinner.”

  I responded: “TELL HIM.”

  * * *

  Christopher’s instruction was to call me as soon as the deed was done and Dennis was on his way back downtown. As I waited, worry took over to the point that I couldn’t even look at jewelry online. What was happening? Had Dennis thrown a glass of wine in his face? Had he shattered a bottle against the wall and cut Christopher’s throat with the jagged edge? When I hadn’t gotten a call by ten, I was certain this was the case. The dogs picked up on my anxiety and nuzzled into me on the bed. What if this was the last time I ever saw them? The thought made me hyperventilate. I tried to imagine how nice it would be to have an aneurysm and not have to face a future without them or any of the carnage I knew awaited.

  By eleven, I was manic. By midnight, I was ready to take a cab up to find the crime scene. This could not have gone well. Five hours? Even if he didn’t bring it up right away (“Cheers, good to see you, I’ve been fucking your ex for six months”), how could it possibly take so long?

  Shortly after 1:00 A.M., Christopher finally called. The phone had barely rung before I grabbed it and said, “Oh thank God. What happened? Did you tell him?”

  “Oh yeah, I told him,” he said.

  “And?”

  “And … it was really weird. Of course, I made sure we were both reeeeeally drunk before I brought it up.”

  “Was he furious?”

  “No. That was the weird part. I think he was so shocked that he didn’t know how to react. But he wasn’t angry. He said it was going to take time to sink in. And then the strangest thing of all. After dinner, he said the same thing he’s said after every meal we’ve ever had: ‘Do you want to get a nightcap?’”

  Nightcap. Of course. His inner ’50s housewife needed it.

  “So wait. You went out and drank more?”

  “We did. I can’t believe he wanted to sit across another table from me, but that’s what we did.” I had paused in my terror long enough to hear the thickness of the liquor on his tongue. “I poured him into his cab, and he’s on his way. So. All yours! Good luck!”

  * * *

  Somewhere in the twenty-minute taxi ride between the Upper West Side and Battery Park City, it had sunk in for Dennis. The day before, he’d asked if he could spend the night in the apartment, which seemed intolerable to me, but could I say, “No, you may not”?

  He returned to the apartment ashen and zombielike. The dogs jumped up and ran to him when he came in, but he barely saw them. He took off his shoes and lay on the very edge of the bed, as far from me as he could possibly get while still occupying the same piece of furniture.

  “So,” I said, “I guess Christopher talked to you.”

  There was silence for a moment. He cleared his throat. “I can’t talk about it now.”

  “Okay. Well. When you…” I stammered.

  The tensest silence of my life followed.

  Dennis lay stiffly in the same position all night, though he did not sleep. When the sun had just barely risen, he got up, threw his few items in his bag, leashed up the dogs, and walked out the door without a word.

  As if I had conjured the dreaded event simply by allowing it to enter my brain, that was the last time I ever saw my dogs.

  * * *

  Once Christopher and I were free to tell people we were a couple, I was able to focus on the happiness of that future even as I mourned my past. I was furious with Dennis for masquerading as someone who cared about me and furious with myself for not seeing through it, but the joy our friends displayed when they heard the news pulled me along.

  The one blip on the happiness chart was Christopher’s boss, the proprietor of the small agency where he worked. A longtime friend and previously a reasonable person, he became enraged when Christopher told him. His anger extended from his worrying we’d break up and I’d fire Christopher, to it looking bad that one of his agents was not just sleeping with a client but was a home wrecker in order to get him, to his being kept in the dark for so long. When the man dropped dead a month later, Christopher, in shock, said flatly, “I guess we know what did him in.”

  * * *

  Because I missed the dogs, I decided I needed a replacement, a breed that would fit into this microspace. Walking through a pet store around the corner from Christopher’s office, we noticed a sweet, sleepy Italian greyhound that was the skinniest puppy I’d ever seen. They took him out of his cage so we could play with him, and he cuddled in my arms and licked me twice with his tiny, dry tongue.

  I looked up at Christopher and grinned. “Add to cart!”

  He snorted. “And now we have to tell people we bought a pet store dog.”

  “Technically, we did rescue him from this disgusting pet store,” I said.

  We named him Wiley, pulled from a list of Civil War–era names, and he pranced liked a reindeer on pipe-cleaner legs. He was also shaky and agoraphobic. When strangers saw him cowering and shivering and skittering, they all assumed he’d had a dramatically abusive past. And by “all,” I mean every single person who saw him. Each one felt the need to make sad faces and say, “Awwww, look at how scared he is. He must be a rescue.” I quickly got to the point where I wanted to say, “Actually, no, he’s a purebred, but I beat him.”

  Thin as a cardboard paper towel tube, Wiley turned out to be hugely rambunctious and mischievous in private. For having almost no body mass, he generated an incredible amount of heat that radiated out from beneath the layers of blankets and sheets where he’d burrow. In researching the breed, I learned that they had in fact been bred in the UK (not Italy, curiously) as royal bed warmers. This made perfect sense, given his standoffishness to grubby strangers and my being a direct descendant of King James of Scotland. So I essentially wore a crown and ruled a land, and Wiley was my servant.

  * * *

  Because things were going so well and I was happy, I just couldn’t shake the feeling that if a taxi didn’t careen onto the sidewalk and crush me, it was going to be something else just as bad, and soon. I felt stalked by doom. Christopher left for his office in the morning, and I stayed on top of the bed, laptop poised, panic ticking.

  I never left my apartment except for the briefest and most necessary trips to the small grocery store exactly one block to the west. I thought of myself as reclusive. But I’d actually become something a little closer to agoraphobic.

  I stopped taking Adderall, the legal speed, crystal meth with a better name, and I started t
o feel crazy. Meaning drained out of my life. A drudge appeared, a thick glue that fused me to the empty moment, preventing me from filling it with any activity except my circles of worry. But I hated being on psychoactive drugs like my insane mother had been all of my life, so I was determined to stick it out. I needed to give my brain chemistry a chance to settle back into whatever decrepit state was its normalcy. The Adderall had helped me, but then it seemed not to help. So maybe it had done its job and rewired something? I had to find out.

  Skinny Wiley jumped off the bed; I experienced a pang. Though over a year old, he was not housebroken yet; he still had accidents. But I suspected his accidents were fully intentional, as he disliked going outside into the rain or wind or sun or weather or air. I merely called them accidents, because that way, I retained hope that he hadn’t figured it out yet and would, eventually, learn to go outside like every other dog in the world.

  But, of course, he had learned. And so had I. Housebreaking had been our private little war. I would take him outside to pee, and he would fidget and look all around, as if being stalked. He would tremble and pace but not pee. When I urged him on, “Hurry up, Wiley, go ahead,” he would glare at me with the most human of faces, as if to say, “Yeah, asshole, take me back upstairs, and I’ll be happy to piss. I don’t see you whipping it out to have a slash out here, so gimme a break.” He’d simply learned it was nicer to shit on the warm bathroom floor than the cold, windy asphalt of the dog park. He was an Italian greyhound, but I rechristened him an imperial greyhound because it suited his personality better.

  It did occur to me that instead of properly training him, I had succeeded merely in transferring my own phobias onto his exceptionally sensitive nature.

  I worried about his chewing; he gnawed the legs off the sofa, the red lacquer Chinese side table, the zebra rug. Only the cement antelope was safe from his little monster teeth.

  I worried about money, my taxes. I was criminally overdue. Why had I purchased so many antique opal, emerald, and diamond rings? Why had I invested so heavily in midcentury men’s rings of chrysoberyl cat’s-eye, jade, and sapphire when men didn’t even wear rings anymore? I shifted part of the blame onto Adderall. It had a way of underscoring my obsessions, making them seem desperately important. I had such focus: I could spend nineteen hours looking at pictures of gemstones or rings online and still have dreams about them after I fell asleep.

  I also blamed my grandmother Carolyn. She’d been dead for years, though I missed her daily, more now in fact than when she was alive and placing tomatoes in her windowsill to ripen.

  One of my sharpest, finest memories is of being six or seven and sitting beside her as she steered her Cadillac Fleetwood along the highway in Atlanta, my eyes fixed on her bony fingers, glittering with rings of jade, coral, and diamond. My mother and father sent me south to stay with my grandparents when things between them became particularly explosive, so I associated my grandmother and her rings with comfort and safety.

  I had been buying rings and jewelry for my entire life.

  When Christopher sold my first book, I spent the advance money on two things: a signed first edition of Anne Sexton’s Live or Die and a white-gold ring from Cartier.

  The manuscript for my current book was late. This was because I seemed unable to write. When I typed, only gibberish came out. But if I didn’t turn in a manuscript, there would be no money. And what money remained was swiftly spiraling down the drain. My solution to the rising panic I felt over my writing was to search out jewelry. At the time, each one seemed absolutely essential. I may end up homeless, I thought, but at least I’ll be wearing a vintage platinum ring set with an emerald from Colombia’s legendary Muzo mines.

  * * *

  When you’re lathering yourself in the shower and you find a lump, it’s always cancer. Before it turns out to be a pimple or a mosquito bite you forgot about or some other not much of anything, it’s cancer.

  Yesterday, when I felt a swollen gland along my inner thigh, I felt blinded with certainty that it was lymphoma. Christopher had lymphoma in 2008; it began as a lump in exactly that spot. Because he was essentially a survival expert, I decided not to tell him what I found.

  But after I dried off and climbed onto the bed in which we slept, socialized, and worked, the beating wings of anxiety pushed the words out of my mouth.

  “Where is it?” he asked.

  This was not what I was expecting him to say. I had been prepared to hear, “It’s nothing.” Instead, he wanted specifics.

  I dreaded this. I pulled the waistband of my shorts down to reveal the flat part near the hip, which I’m not sure even has a name, except it’s where lymphoma lives.

  “Here?” he said, pressing on the gland.

  That he’d found it so quickly was, as far as I was concerned, confirmation. There would be no need of a biopsy.

  “That’s nothing,” he said.

  “Nothing?”

  He said, “No. Are there any cupcakes left?”

  I told him I thought there might be two or three. “Why is the pimple always cancer for me?”

  He laughed and told me it’s because I’m a catastrophist. Then he brought up the rooftop swimming pool. “Remember?” he said, teasingly.

  Yeah, I remembered. Because, crazy.

  We’d been in bed watching a movie, and there was this sound. It was loud and came from above us somewhere in the building. We looked at each other, and he kind of shrugged and went back to the TV, but I continued to stare up at the ceiling. Eventually, he noticed and said, “What are you looking at?”

  His question had snapped me right out of it. I’d been trapped inside this superrealistic fantasy where the rooftop pool was crashing through all the floors, and in my mind, I was imagining a huge hole ten feet from the bed and extending all the way to the door, blocking our exit. I imagined this hole plunging eleven stories, straight down to the ground. So when he asked, I was actually trying to remember how to tie secure knots so that I could knot the sheets together and hang them out the window, praying they would be long enough to get us onto the sidewalk. Then I realized I would have to secure the sheets to the iron bed, because when tugged, it would smash up against the window frame but not fit out it, so we’d be secure. This played out like a warp-speed movie in my mind, and I was actually feeling sweaty and nervous, stressed out.

  “And do you remember what I said to you when you told me about this crazy disaster porn?”

  I nodded.

  He reminded me again, poking my shoulder. “I told you, there is no rooftop pool.”

  I swatted away his gloating hand and said, “Yeah, but it could have been the roof deck that came crashing down; it didn’t have to be a pool.”

  He rolled his eyes, but I could tell he was also impressed. “You’re the master of disaster.”

  Several days later, we climbed into a 2001 Acura belonging to our friends Laura and Leslie, and the four of us drove to see Punch Brothers, a bluegrass band so brilliant, its lead member won a MacArthur grant. I spent most of the concert at the Tarrytown Music Hall, a Queen Anne–bricked playhouse built in 1885, feeling that it was probable the balcony, where we were seated, would collapse on the people below due to the uproarious foot pounding that was going on.

  In my mind, I frequently see these movies of terrible things that may happen. When I was young, I considered this to be both a side effect of my unstable and rather terrible childhood but also the very reason I was able to survive it. When the Titanic went down, I would have already been sitting in the first lifeboat ten minutes after we boarded.

  The thing is, the Titanic doesn’t always sink. In fact, it almost always stays afloat.

  So I imagine terrible things in advance of their occurrence to prepare myself. And when I was small, it’s true that one terrible thing after another did happen. And it was good, in a sad way, that I had been waiting, bags packed, ready for anything, no matter how sharp the blade. But as an adult and one with some success, the terr
ible things happened with less frequency.

  I’ve never been able to stop the blockbuster disaster film from playing on an endless loop in my mind.

  I see the terrible coming, whether it is or not.

  * * *

  In many ways, book tours are like stepping onto a factory conveyor belt. My publisher arranges all the travel, including car services to pick me up and drop me off. Things generally flow smoothly, but once in a while, there’s a glitch. It’s usually something small like having the wrong address for a radio station, so I’m always ready for that. What I don’t expect is a tiny glitch that changes my life, so of course that’s exactly what happened.

  I had a Friday morning television interview in Chicago, and my driver had expected more traffic than we encountered, so I arrived at WGN-TV studio about an hour and a half early. I went into their spooky, empty cafeteria, sat on one of the plastic chairs, and stared at the wall-mounted television. Rachael Ray was making deviled-egg-and-bacon sandwiches, and I remember thinking, That girl needs to stand up straighter, or the countertop on her set should be taller. When I reached my threshold for food preparation demonstration broadcasting, I pulled out my phone and started reading. When I next looked up, it was probably forty-five minutes later, and what I saw on the screen caused me to freeze. It was a close-up of a puppy with ears that stuck almost straight out from its head. I stood and walked over to the TV. Rachael Ray was gone; this was local. And that could only mean one thing: that puppy with the Flying Nun ears was in the very building.

  Sure enough, the segment featured three women volunteers from A Heart for Animals of Huntley, Illinois. They were on WGN to find homes for these three Corgi-shepherd mixes. When the segment ended, I walked into the hallway and waited for the stage door to open. The women appeared, each holding one of the puppies. I casually strolled the length of the hallway where, of course, others had gathered to fuss over the dogs.

  One of the women handed me a puppy as though she’d been expecting me. I took it in my arms. It was soft and warm, and the heaviest part of the entire puppy was its paws. I could actually hold puppies for a living, so I lost track of time. I had to hand the dog back in order to be attached to a mic and shuffled onto the set for my interview.