Lust & Wonder

by Augusten Burroughs

  When I was off the air several minutes later, the women were still there with the puppies in their arms. So I lingered. And I spotted the puppy with the sticking-out ears. Somehow, though I don’t even remember asking, I ended up with that puppy in my arms.

  The next thing I knew, I was standing with him in front of a giant clown having my picture taken. (Seriously, WGN was the original broadcaster of Bozo the Clown, so they have a twenty-foot-tall likeness in their lobby.) I had to leave, because I was already going to be late for my radio interview (which I did, actually, miss), so I handed the puppy back.

  In the car, I looked at the photo and sent it to Christopher. But as I looked at the shot, I saw that the puppy and I each had the identical semipathetic expression on our faces. We matched, exactly. In my note with the picture, I said to Christopher, “I feel I have made a grave mistake and should have the car turn around to get the puppy. He is already a TV star, and some unworthy person is going to snatch him up.”

  I was joking, of course. We had been discussing how a second dog might make Wiley slightly less of an unsocialized freak, but I knew Christopher would laugh and say, “Yeah right. Finish your tour, and we’ll see about another puppy when you get home.”

  Instead, though, he contacted the ladies at A Heart for Animals and made the necessary arrangements to adopt the puppy and have him flown to New York on Sunday.

  I said, “You’re not just doing this because of me, are you?”

  “Are you kidding? I found the segment online, and I was laughing so hard. He’s the one in the middle whose eyes kept following the camera, right? He’s perfect and great. Totally ours.”

  If there hadn’t been a glitch and I hadn’t arrived at the TV studio over an hour early, there wouldn’t be a puppy with Flying Nun ears waiting for me when I got home a week later.

  * * *

  Christopher’s most dominant feature was his laugh. He laughed frequently and hard; the laugh of a shaggy cartoon dog, full of gusto and physical shaking. In all his childhood pictures, he is either smiling or teetering on the edge of hysterics.

  He only had one mood.

  I had known him for thirteen years and never tired of his mood. It did not swing. He was in a great mood when he woke up each morning, and he would be in a great mood when he came home from work in the evening. The single exception would be while he watched sports. During the World Series, he was liable to scream at the TV, “No, no, no, come on! What is this, The Bad News Bears?” The only time I ever saw Christopher genuinely close to rage was during the US Open.

  I, too, had one primary emotion: worry.

  That’s why we work, I thought. My endless cycles of obsessive dread and worry were just a joke to him, something to laugh at. “You’re getting a cavity filled, not having a lung transplant.”

  * * *

  I hadn’t been able to write a good, solid word for three years, and I hadn’t read a book for almost ten years. As a writer, these were difficult things to admit. I was such a good monkey for so many years, cranking out the books like they were hot dogs. Though as a writer, I felt totally comfortable mixing metaphors involving simians and ballpark franks.

  When I realized at almost exactly the same time that the man I had built a life with did not love me and I myself had loved Christopher from the very start, a biological event occurred, something new became alive in me. The shell that had contained it ruptured. I hemorrhaged cash.

  Was it my own trust in myself that was broken? Dennis had been my source of comfort. The smoke and mirrors of it was he hadn’t been that at all. I had been comforted by my belief in who he was and what we were. But the bald facts had never been a safe place for me. My comfort and sense of security had been an illusion, a work of my own creation.

  This knowledge in no way led to understanding. My malformed, childlike brain knew only that it felt safe for the first time in its life, yet suddenly there was more terrible chaos than it had ever known. The difference was, in the center of the spiraling whirlpool as everything was sucked away from me, there was Christopher, the single thing I had told myself I never loved but always had. There was proof: the best thing in life and the worst thing you can imagine can happen—and do—at exactly the same moment.

  It’s not that I couldn’t write any longer. It’s that I was alive, and it was hard for me to pull myself away from it.

  * * *

  When you lose one thing, it’s like there’s a contraption in the sky that blinks awake and starts counting and displaying all the other things you lost but hadn’t realized, all the things that are teetering on the edge.

  Christopher had cancer and AIDS, and every moment was so precious that I had to think about motives. Wasn’t it just a little bit true that I wanted him to give up the place on Seventy-Ninth Street so that he would be stuck here with me in the tiny studio with the dogs and the sun coming through the antique farmhouse shutters? Slats of brightness and shadow, wallpaper made out of sheet music, walls the color of gemstones, two dogs, a bed draped like a Bombay whorehouse, a bookcase with glass doors that was filled with my abominations: diamond rings, South Sea pearls, chrysoberyl cat’s-eye rings in eighteen-karat gold, two emeralds from the ancient Muzo mines in South America, jadeite beads in apple green from the old mountains in Burma, untreated, so rare it took me forty-seven years to even see a strand this fine.

  I wore my finest piece of jade around my neck. It is the color of an emerald from the old mines in South America and so translucent it’s almost transparent. It was carved by a thoughtful hand in the 1930s, and you can see art deco itself in the lines. Sometimes when I look at it in the middle of the night, I can feel the slightest pinprick of tears sprouting in my eyes. The closest I come to crying is this.

  My most precious things. I needed them. I wanted them all within arm’s reach. So yes, I admit that much. It did not make me sad to think of Christopher leaving his twenty-eight-year-old apartment behind. It did not pain me to imagine him working beside me on the bed where I worked.

  How much life did we get to have together? If I believed in God, and I wish I did, I would pray right now: two long lives, all the rest of them. But what if we had less? What if there were only ten years ahead of us? What if only five? What if one? What if not even that?

  Or perhaps I would die first, struck down by an SUV while I was examining my ring in the sunlight at the crosswalk.

  * * *

  I keep a gemological binocular microscope on the dresser beside the bed so that I can lean over whenever I like and stare deep into the heart of any gemstone. I could study the swirling horsetail inclusion inside a demantoid garnet from the Ural Mountains or spot a glass-infused ruby by the air bubbles trapped inside.

  There was a time before diamonds were widely known when pearls were considered the rarest, most precious gems in the world. In many portraits depicting early monarchs, the crown features pearls instead of diamonds. But if you dropped a pearl into a glass of vinegar, it would eventually disintegrate.

  That was what time did to life: it disintegrated it. Time was like low-grade acid that slowly worked against the shell of everything, splitting it apart into powdery nothingness.

  Alcohol did this, too. Whole sections of my life were splashed with liquid from a bottle and were now undecipherable, smeared and forever unreadable. Which I supposed was fine, because the past had been swallowed and digested. One must not write letters or leave voice mail for the pork chop one had for dinner four years ago.

  * * *

  My neighborhood was quickly transforming into something recognizable: a terrorism tourist attraction. When I moved to Manhattan in 1989, Battery Park City was new and sterile. You could practically smell the glue drying.

  But along with the new World Trade Center was a new industry of tourism. The other day, I had gone across the West Side Highway to get a box of Red Bulls because they cost two dollars less at a tiny deli across the highway, and I was pretending like that made me fiscally responsible. On my way ba
ck, I came upon a group of tourists and their guide.

  It would be obvious to anyone walking past that these people were tourists, probably Eastern European. The overembellishment of stitching on the jeans was like a shrill, emphatic cry of “Designer!!!” And the jeans themselves were a shade of blue unworn by Americans or Europeans; a post-acid-wash pale blue that suggested the peeling lead paint of a cold-war maternity ward.

  The colors of the assorted parkas and jackets worn by the group were also out of tune: irradiated green, paste beige, seagull-belly gray. Several of the tourists wore brand-new Nikes, but the trademark swoosh was upside down. I supposed they were from a landlocked nation; Belarus perhaps, or maybe Slovakia. They had done their vacation wardrobe shopping at Wall of Marts, their homegrown imitation.

  The tour guide was talking about fingers. I imagined he was telling them that for weeks after the 9/11 attacks, people were brushing fingers and ears and other human whatnots off the window ledges of office buildings. Such ghoulish trivia would probably be fairly obvious if you considered the situation even briefly. But here was a man making a living by taking tourists around and showing them just where certain parts and pieces had been found.

  I thought, They never should have cleaned up Ground Zero. They should have added a tram and let people ride through the smoking carnage.

  No matter how awful something is, you can always sell tickets.

  The thing is, I had always loved living there by the water and the tower, never more so than during its rebuilding, its rising from the smoldering ashes. Floor by floor, the new World Trade Center rose, and I would look at it out my bathroom window as I brushed my teeth and think, Okay, rebuilding seems possible. I had come to this apartment after Dennis feeling ruined, and now I felt my life to be vastly superior to the one before.

  Just vastly.

  * * *

  We were in Dayton for Christmas. Christopher’s parents had been married for almost sixty years, which explained a great deal about Christopher. They met as students at Detroit’s performing arts high school, the same one Diana Ross and Lily Tomlin attended. This time, we were at a hotel, but sometimes when we visited them, we stayed in Christopher’s old bedroom, which still had his high school trophies on the bookshelves. A paint-by-number clown hung above the plaid armchair next to the bed.

  It was a time capsule and contained no dust anywhere.

  The house sat atop what in the suburb of Kettering probably qualified as a hill but which I saw more as a gentle rise. There were homes on both sides, to the rear, and across the street, and their yard sloped gently downward into the neighborhood one street over.

  Christopher decided it was fine to let the dogs off the leash. I reacted as though he’d suggested we make blender drinks, strip naked except for our socks, and then run down the street, each of us holding one edge of a rainbow flag. “Are you fucking kidding?”

  He told me I was being ridiculous, that this was a perfectly safe thing to do. “It’s my parents’ backyard,” he said. Meaning: nothing bad can possibly happen to us. If I’d had his parents, it’s likely I would have felt this way. But what I felt was, if they don’t run into the street and get hit by a milk truck, a hawk will spiral down from the sky and lift the skinny one up off the ground and into a tree for dinner. Unleashing the dogs was the equivalent of beheading them.

  When he unhooked them, they looked surprised at this sudden, unprecedented freedom and charged off down the hill. In that instant, I saw them vanishing into the distant horizon. But Christopher called them, and they returned. He had to speak their names five or six times, but they turned around.

  When they were close enough, I reached out and grabbed them like they were standing on the slippery deck of a sailboat in exceedingly rough seas, and I snapped their leashes back on to their collars.

  In the car as we were driving back to the hotel, I was going over what I would say if I ever spoke to him again. In my mind, we had barely escaped complete and catastrophic disaster. He did not understand this. My blame would crush him like a Zamboni falling from the sky.

  The thing is, the off-leash experience hadn’t worked out as well as he believed it had. My brain was currently playing the Imax 3-D film What Could Have Happened to Wiley and Radar, and in this motion picture, the dogs did not turn around when he called them. They simply kept running until they were truly and fully gone from our lives.

  Knowing that I am super paranoid and irrational on the best day did not alter my state of mind to the slightest degree. It merely reminded me that I was also constantly roiling with rage and terror.

  He started laughing, a wildly inappropriate response, while I planned the details of our ugly breakup.

  “What?” I muttered.

  “My mother,” he said, still laughing and shaking his head. “Do you know about the wedding dress?”

  It was like being pulled from the sucking muck of quicksand, those distracting sidebars of his. “What wedding dress?” I said. “What are you talking about?” I tried not to sound miserable but also resented that he was oblivious to my misery.

  He told me that the family had gathered for his parents’ fiftieth anniversary, and after the celebratory, wine-fueled dinner, his mom thought it would be a spectacular idea for all three granddaughters to try on her old wedding dress, which was packed away upstairs.

  He was laughing harder now. “After all the girls had modeled it, she thought she’d try it on herself. A few minutes later, she came down the stairs, laughing. She turned around and said, ‘I couldn’t zip it all the way up, but not bad, right?’”

  I could absolutely picture this. Christopher’s mother at seventy could have passed for a woman in her fifties.

  “Then she started twirling around, and she lost her balance and tripped on the train, and she fell right into the chair and onto me. I was trying to get her back up, and she was sort of rolling around and laughing hysterically, and I was like, oh my God, my mother is giving me a lap dance in her wedding dress.”

  He was laughing so hard that he should have pulled the car over. It was like driving in a sudden torrential downpour, but I was laughing almost as hard—but at him, not his story. The only reason I was not doubled over in hysterics and practically banging my head on the dash was because the warning system in my brain was telling me to prepare for a front-end collision.

  It was almost enough to kill the joy, but it didn’t. Because I realized, there could not possibly be a better way to die.

  I became angry when I was worried, and when my worry was derailed, the anger became brittle and cracked away. I could see what was beneath it: pretty fucking happy.

  * * *

  We reached our friend Kate’s place on the Carolina coast, and the beach was massive and white, and there was not another person in sight. My thinking was, We’re here for four days, so let’s let the dogs get accustomed to the beach and the waves and the sand and the strange house with the strange people and then maybe before we leave, we can let them off the leash. I showed Christopher the sixty-foot rope I had brought along.

  “What in the world did you bring that for?” he asked as I slid it out of my bag.

  “It’s so we can tie it to their collars. It’ll be like they’re off leash.”

  He said, “Um, no, actually, it won’t.”

  The rope was put away, a squealing rabbit with patchy hair stuffed back into the magician’s threadbare black velvet bag. I submitted to the tide of reason: a person who cannot allow his or her dogs the freedom to run off leash on a beach has no business having dogs. The inner voice that told me this had pursed lips and sterling silvery hair pulled into an eye-tighteningly disciplined bun.

  We walked along the beach with Kate before doing anything else. She bid us to leave our socks and shoes by the hammock and stepped into the sand. Christopher carried both dogs’ leashes, and although I felt a tightening in my throat, as though a miniature being were inside my chest pulling on a flagpole’s rope, I was also genuinely surpri
sed when I saw the permanently skittery little greyhound prance; a cartoon fawn move he only pulled when he was supremely pleased. Like the time I left the kitchen and he stood on his hind legs and used his front paws exactly like human hands to pull the bacon I’d just fried off the paper towel on the counter. He sure did prance then.

  He pranced now. Radar chased him. They did, indeed, frolic.

  My anxiety became a castle made of sand, built so carefully and heavily but nonetheless much too close to the shore. Its walls eroded.

  Kate pronounced, rather than merely said, “There is no better place for dogs than on a beach.” That rang like a bell of truth.

  After a long walk, during which they did not run away or into someone else’s home or find somebody they would love more, we returned to the room. In the evening, Kate made the best spaghetti Bolognese I’d ever had.

  The next morning, I slept late. When I finally made it to the kitchen for coffee, Christopher was barefoot, looking pleased.

  “Kate just took the dogs for her walk on the beach,” he told me. He went back to his reading without acknowledging that he’d just said, “Good morning! I murdered the dogs!”

  It took a minute for me to speak. “So. You had Kate take Wiley, who won’t even come to us when we call, without a leash?”

  Still maddeningly impervious to my impending mental meltdown, he said, “You should have seen how much fun they were having,” as he went for a coffee refill. “So cute!”

  An hour later, they had not returned. I had been perched at the edge of the screened porch the entire time, sweating not from the heat but from rage and terror and grief. My worst suspicions were confirmed when I saw Kate’s figure approaching.

  “Here she comes,” I said. “And she’s only got one dog.”

  Christopher squinted down the beach to where I was pointing. He snorted and said, “That’s a man.”

  Obviously, jittery Wiley had rebelled and fled into the dunes. Kate hadn’t come back yet because she couldn’t figure out how to apologize, or perhaps she was gathering a group of Navy SEALs from the naval base nearby.