Lust & Wonder

by Augusten Burroughs

  There would be a search with no results. I had accepted this.

  Just as I was about to begin keening like a mother when presented with the mutilated remains of her child, Christopher casually said, “Look, here comes Kate with the dogs.”

  Impossibly, it was true. Radar trundled along close to Kate’s fine legs. Wiley pranced.

  * * *

  A nameless, formless dread free-floated through my life. It attached like a cell to anyplace it could find a receptor. And the receptor was a question. Will the flight be late? Is it cancer? Was he lying all along behind my back? The answer was always briefly touched by something terrible, the worst possible outcome.

  Friends had come and gone throughout my life; so had lovers, jobs, money, youth, and hair. These things had proven less durable than the leaden core of untamable doom that traveled with me. Even thinking, How sad that only fear has followed me around all my life? resulted in a follow-up thought: How bad is the defect in the prefrontal cortex of my brain?

  It was tiring being me. I was tired of me.

  But both dogs followed Kate back to the house, and I was lying on the convertible bed with the warm bulk of Radar beside me, his German shepherd face pressed against my ribs, Wiley folded tight for warmth in the narrow space between my shins. Christopher was on the other side of Radar, reading a manuscript and checking his Twitter feed. It was like every other Saturday afternoon, except we were at the ocean.

  Suddenly, it felt like a lead dental cape had been lowered over me. I cannot see myself ever walking along a beach unencumbered, I thought darkly.

  Was it that way when I was drinking? It seemed I was a great deal freer when I was drunk. The magnetic dread still filled me, but if it tried to attach itself to my thoughts, it slipped away with the gallons of liquor.

  It was certainly true that I made a mess of things when I was a drunk. But weren’t things an even bigger wreck now? While it was also true that I accomplished many things sober that would have been impossible while I was drinking, if you cut out this middle section of accomplishment, I was living in the same neighborhood I had when I first moved to New York and drank a bottle of Absolut vodka every night. In fact, my home was an apartment directly across the street from my first. I could see it out my window. My current apartment was a studio; back then I lived in a one-bedroom. I owned now instead of renting. But as the accountant said when Christopher asked if a lien would be placed on the apartment, “That hasn’t already happened?”

  So there was a window in which I wrote many books and traveled the world and met many people and earned a great deal of money, and now there was the stillness of living within what remained. And I could not say for sure that my sober life was a better life. I wanted to be able to say that, but I didn’t think I could.

  Alcohol numbed me. But if my senses were so overly electrified, was numbing such a terrible thing?

  Without alcohol, there was no escape of any kind.

  Drunk, I could run along any beach with my dogs. I could throw their leashes into the waves. I could do this while singing. I could probably do this naked.

  Sober, I sat with a fist in my chest, knowing they’d never return.

  I was sober when I unlatched my retirement account and siphoned the money into my own checking account. I was many years sober when I purchased the $18,000 chrysoberyl cat’s-eye ring, the $47,000 five-carat diamond, the imperial jade beads, and carving. I was sober each time I clicked ADD TO CART and purchased loose rubies from Sri Lanka, golden-yellow sapphires, blue zircons, strands of uncultured saltwater pearls from Basra.

  The horrible thing about being sober is you lose your excuse for being so fucked up.

  They should tell you this in rehab. You should have to sign a release saying you understand and are okay with it.

  If I had twenty dollars left to my name, I would certainly find a humble pair of natural stone earrings on which to spend it.

  I became my own private department store vintage jewelry buyer.

  I harpooned my own security. And I did this while under the influence of nothing but my own substance-untouched mind.

  It dawned on me that had I been drunk, I probably would have passed out during the checkout process of many an online purchase. For that reason alone, it was quite possible I would be in better financial health if I still drank to blackout nightly.

  In rehab, I was told, “Your addiction will always try to talk you back into drinking.” That was precisely what was occurring at that moment. I imagined jogging up the stairs and pouring myself a glass of red wine. Impossible to say, really, what the result would be of a long-lost night of drinking. But I knew what my first morning questions would be: Did I say anything awful? Did I do something terrible? And of course, to how many people must I apologize?

  * * *

  I had an imaginary friend as a child. I wonder now if I only believed it to be a friend and that what I formed was actually an imaginary enemy. A compressed orb of fear and reflex, positioned just behind my eyes in the center of my forehead. So that it would have front-row center seats for everything that would ever happen to me in life and could preside in cautionary judgment and alarm. “You don’t need anyone else. You have me,” it says. When I am presented with a plate of ocean-fresh oysters on an elegant bed of rock salt, this voice whispers just two words into my ear: “Mercury poisoning.”

  * * *

  It was many years ago that I hired a contractor to build a house in Massachusetts. During the framing of the structure, there was one particularly thick post of wood, situated in what would become the rear of the house. The builder informed me that this beam of wood supported the full weight of the structure.

  “So, if I sawed through it with a chain saw?” I asked.

  He laughed and replied, “Well, the house would fall down.”

  It stunned me. This wood should be stained red, I thought. Or it should be made of steel. All the other wood forming the skeletal outline of the house disappeared. Only this supporting beam mattered. When the house was finished, I could not get the image out of my mind that no matter how many locks I had on all the doors, one single madman with a chain saw could make the entire house fall down if he knew just where to aim.

  I have heard people talk of their own “irrational fears.” But my fears are not irrational. They are just unlikely.

  My house had a spine, and somebody could sever it.

  This was the house I built with Dennis. After we finished construction and then decorated it and moved in, a careless plumber made an error in one connection, and the house was flooded. The floors were warped forever. I was told that if I’d discovered the leak later than I did, the whole house could have been simply destroyed. By the kitchen faucet.

  I spent a great deal of time trying not to imagine this. But it was irresistible. What if I’d overslept and come downstairs two hours later? Would the lumber from which the house was built become soggy? The day the house flooded was the day I should have walked out. I shouldn’t have even turned off the faucet. We had already drowned ourselves by then, and we hadn’t needed a drop of water.

  How many of the things I fear or dread are actually things that I want?

  * * *

  I was five years old but just, because we hadn’t gone to Mexico yet. We were seated at an iron table with scrollwork chairs. The ground upon which the table rested unsteadily was brick. I was having a tall Coke with flaky crushed ice and a brownie that was exactly as thick as three of my fingers. The brownie was almost perfect, because one of these fingers was made out of icing and not brownie. It did contain nuts, though I was able to tolerate it by sliding them out and tucking them into my square paper napkin. In addition, when chewed by mistake, they were not quite so terrible as I expected each time.

  My mother was writing with a felt-tip marker inside a blank black book. I was with her, but we were not together. “I am not to be disturbed when I’m writing,” she had trained me. She was there, but also she was not there. />
  I could not take my eyes off the woman several tables over who was speaking animatedly to her faceless, formless companion. The woman was all I was able to see.

  I was entranced by her earrings. They dangled and glittered and fascinated me. As a result, I was doing one of the things my mother told me never to do: stare.

  Quite unexpectedly, the woman rose from her table and approached ours. She smiled as she lowered herself almost to a kneel and spoke in a language I had never heard before but which instantly made me think of milky pale-blue, slate-gray, and white eggs. There was sunlight in her voice, slanted, late fall. In that moment, I wanted to belong to her.

  Though I could decipher nothing she was saying in her musical and seemingly pretend language, I understood perfectly: love.

  She reached up to her earlobe and slid the wire out. The gold was like a thin line of summer. She took my left hand and wrapped the stem of the dangling earring once around my middle finger and then carefully again, forming a ring. A crimson stone, cut with facets that shone white. She inspected her work and looked pleased as she stood and nodded to my mother, who had looked up from her notebook and was smiling. The woman’s blond straight hair hung halfway down her back, and it swayed as she strode away. I looked down at my new ring, and the gold streak glinted, sparking the stone, which sang red.

  From that moment forward, I found comfort in gemstones and jewelry. When I was bullied in the fifth grade for my tallness and strangeness, my reward would be a silver ring with a protective bar of turquoise set horizontally across the front.

  There was much bullying; there were many rings.

  * * *

  Summers, I was flown to Lawrenceville, Georgia, to spend time with my grandparents. My grandmother wore a large oval jade stone the color of asparagus. It rested in a woven basket of gold. When her hands gripped the knobby steering wheel of her Fleetwood and the light hit the jade stone just right, it looked as though it was filled with juice, and it made my mouth water.

  The earrings she wore around the house were set with rubies. “They come from the Orient,” she told me. “Your grandfather brought them back from Burma.”

  The name Burma sounded irresistibly appealing to me, smoky and also sweet, like the dusty sticks of incense my mother planted in the potted trees in the living room. Almost as exciting as the scent were the wispy loops of smoke they produced.

  “Where does jade come from?” I asked my grandmother.

  “Why, from the same place in the Orient as the rubies,” she told me. “Isn’t that something?”

  I agreed that it was quite something.

  “Don’t you wish you were growing up in a place where you could dip your hands down into the dirt and pull out a ruby or a nice piece of green jade?”

  I wished this more than anything else, more than my parents being killed in a plane crash, which was among my primary wishes.

  In my town of Shutesbury, Massachusetts, we had only two different varieties of rocks: tan rocks that sometimes had brown freckles and other rocks the color of a car’s exhaust pipe. We were starving to death for beautiful things to look at that were not gray or brown or tan. “We have leaves,” I told my grandmother. “Red and gold.”

  She looked at me significantly. “But only in the fall,” she reminded me. “And then they die and turn brown and fall onto the ground, and you have to rake them up.”

  Raking leaves was the opposite of ruby earrings or a jade ring. Raking leaves was possibly the meanest thing life made us do.

  * * *

  I was in my midforties, so I should not have been surprised when my almost-seventy-year-old uncle survived cancer only to die the following year of a lung disease. His wife was also dead within the year. This loss did not seem possible or even real at all. I was leveled by it. I felt that I would have drunk if only I had the energy to do so, but I did not. Instead, I placed an iolite gemstone under the microscope and peered into its soul.

  Looked at from one direction, it was clear and colorless except for the vaguest silvery hint, like water in a stainless steel bowl. But when I rotated the stone, it was suddenly the same definitive blue of a sapphire from Kashmir or Ceylon. This was called pleochroism, when one stone will appear as two or even three different colors, depending upon the angle.

  Much of life was like that. It was a relief to be sober. It was also a burden and a great unfairness.

  Death, I had observed, displayed no such pleochroism. It was only one thing.

  Diamonds appeared oily upon magnification. Rubies were busy inside. Sapphires sometimes appeared to contain a galaxy, and emeralds could blind you with green. Opals reminded me of a beehive. Sometimes jade looked like sticky rice, and inside some alexandrites, it appeared to be raining.

  Was it a universal truth that the closer you looked at something, the more you would see but the less you would understand what you were looking at?

  * * *

  My first emotion of the day upon waking was anxiety. Buying a jade bangle online or an antique carved jade pendant would alleviate this anxiety almost instantly, I knew, but I had already spent all the money I ever earned on jewelry, so I was forced to read a book, which felt like a punishment that was only slightly self-inflicted.

  As I turned the page of the book, my eye caught a flash of perfect, midnight blue from the massive sapphire of my platinum pinky ring.

  I glanced down at the ring and thought, Pinky rings are kind of tacky. But I also knew that I, myself, was somewhat tacky. So in no way did I feel the need to remove this ring. I paid $9,000 for it and could probably have taken it over to Forty-Seventh Street and gotten $4,000 in cash.

  Then I could spend the next two weeks obsessively searching for an untreated piece of jade jewelry by searching my vast online resources. It was possible that after looking at several thousand images of items for sale, I might locate that single jade stone that I could tell just from the picture had not been chemically treated. Dyed or polymer impregnated jade was very difficult to distinguish from the valuable untreated variety, but I had, as they say, the eye. And I was almost never wrong.

  That is what I wanted to do, but instead, I remained rooted to the chair. I put the book down, picked up my laptop, and began writing.

  I used to love writing.

  In fact, I used to require time to write every day. If I did not write, I could feel mental illness flare up and spread within my mind like a rash.

  When did I begin to detest it? I had actually considered attending a barber school in Tribeca, because trimming the nose hairs of bankers seemed a far preferable way to spend my time than writing. Writing—especially if one is a memoirist—is dangerous, because it can lead to self-awareness. And I did not want self-awareness. I wanted gems. Or cocktails. Or sex. Or anything, really, except a book or anything having to do with books. I was feeling petulant, and the fact that I was no longer allowed to drink seemed profoundly depressing.

  I knew that when Christopher came home from work, my misery would be lifted. I also knew this was the sure sign of a mentally unstable person. But I had finally reached the age where mental health was no longer a goal. Relief from my own foulness of mood was the only goal.

  * * *

  Christopher was wearing royal-blue drawstring shorts and nothing else. His blond hair had taken on a silver sheen from the sun, his skin was rich and dark, and the hairs on his legs and arms and chest sparkled.

  There was a charcoal grill outside, and we loaded it with steaks and corn, unhusked.

  There were three bedrooms at our rented villa, and we used them all. We took a great many naps, often in the middle of the day.

  We drank lemonade from sweating glasses filled with ice. We swam naked in the pool. He lay on the inflatable yellow raft, and I steered him through the water.

  Anytime I wanted to, I could lean right over and kiss him anywhere I chose. He always let me. He always loved it.

  He hadn’t shaved since we arrived on the island of Saint John four days ag
o, so each day he became a slightly different man. And each day I thought, He’s more handsome today than he was yesterday.

  When he finally shaved his face, I was hit with a sweet pang in the center of my chest, because I realized I had missed that face.

  We drove to the beach and were dive-bombed by a seagull, and we wondered, “Is Tippi Hedren still alive?”

  I thought, This is how it feels inside the right decision.

  We were more than halfway through our ten-day vacation when I turned to Christopher, who was gripping the wheel of the Jeep and driving along the winding, climbing road. Suddenly, I recognized him. How could I have not seen this before?

  “Oh my fucking God. You’re the Jeep Guy!” I shouted.

  “What? What?” he said, checking his rearview mirror, shooting me a glance like, Did I hit a goat or something?

  Of course he was Jeep Guy. It was so blindingly obvious that I had missed it all along.

  I said it again, half laughing and half shouting, manic from my epiphany. “You. You are totally him! I’ve had recurring dreams about you for years and years and years, and I only just now realized it, watching you drive.”

  But this made zero sense to him, because he didn’t know about my Jeep Guy dreams; I’d never mentioned them.

  Plus, the moment I said the words recurring dreams, I could see that I’d lost him. Christopher has a zero-tolerance policy for the retelling of dreams.

  “Oh no, please don’t,” he said. Then he added, “I mean, I’m glad if my driving makes you happy, and you’re perfect for me in every way, but the dream thing is just beyond my ability to comprehend.”

  I smiled at him. My cheeks actually stung with the authenticity and size of my grin. But I barreled through and told him about Jeep Guy, anyway. “I mean, I never even liked or dated rugged blond guys, and yet I had these dreams, and now, here I am with you—and you’re that guy!”

  His water bottle was crammed between his legs, so I grabbed it and took a sip. I poked him on the shoulder. “Oh my fucking God.” Poke, poke, poke, poke, poke.