All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found (11 page)

Half the single people my age in New York were already using the Internet as a portal to erotic adventure, but I’d always been a little slow adopting new technologies. It was the new millennium and I was still using a manual typewriter.

Main menu: Press one for sexy recorded personals, or press two for live connections on the talk line.

I pressed two.

Press one to talk to women, or press two to talk to men.

I pressed one.

Live talk main menu: Press one to connect with callers who are on the line right now. Press two to record or update your dateline personals greeting.

I pressed one.

You have ninety seconds to describe who you are and what you’re interested in. Take care with your privacy—no full names, addresses, or other information that could be abused by other callers. Here’s your chance to make an introduction. The most intriguing greetings get the most responses, so make your ad as sexy as you can. Your privacy is guaranteed. Your greeting will play only to others who are on the talk line when you are. To remove your greeting, just hang up. You can rerecord as often as you need to, until you’re satisfied. Start speaking at the tone. Press pound when you’re done. Good luck.

I was drearily earnest at first. I stressed my status as a gainfully employed, suit-wearing monkey. I laid on the midwestern charm, the whole small-town-boy-in-the-big-city act. I waxed poetic about my love of music and books, going to museums, eating out. I was, in short, Prince Charming, a perfect gentleman straight from the script of a rom-com, just the push of a button away.

Welcome to the talk line!

Rarely have I heard such scorn. Women sent recorded messages in which they simply cackled at me. Some were incredulous:
You’re actually looking for a date? On this line?
One even presumed to judge my anatomy:
Come on, little boy, pull that itsy-bitsy, teeny-weenie out of your pants and play with momma. . . .

I hung up that first night completely demoralized. I wanted to be appalled at all the perverts and misfits on their telephones across the city—the heavy-breathers, the pre-op transsexuals, the women from the Bronx looking to play for pay—but I was mostly disappointed in myself. They, at least, were candid about what they wanted.

And what did I want? There’s no way I could have been honest about that. What was I supposed to say: I need someone to sleep with me so I can tell the story of my brother’s death? That would have had the virtue of being true, as if the truth were a virtue on a phone-sex line. Over the course of a few short-lived flings in the time since Dan’s suicide, I’d discovered that sex emptied my mind of everything nonessential, and the one thing that remained essential, I thought, was the story of his suicide. Everything else was a dream or an anecdote. Nothing else meant a thing, not compared with the big story, and I just couldn’t talk about it unless I’d bared myself in physical intimacy. Hard to imagine working that up as an attractive come-on, though:
Hey, sweetheart, let’s screw with our eyes closed and then snuggle up for some pillow talk about the mysteries of self-inflicted death. Will you listen if I tell you?

In time I worked through my initial misgivings about phone sex. I did the practical thing. I listened and learned. The rules were simple. You could lie about what you looked like—who would know the difference?—but you’d best be blunt about your desires if you didn’t want to waste anyone’s time. It was all there for the ear, an aural smorgasbord of titillation and perversion, thirty-five cents per minute, seventy-five for the first, every kinky fantasy you’ve ever heard about and more, and plenty of people willing to pay and be paid for real-world sex. You listened, one after another, to little personal ads (“greetings”) in the voice of the person being personal, and make no mistake, they were personal, about everything under the sun from golden showers to gang bangs, with an emphasis on interracial pleasure seeking and an unmistakable undertone of pitiful desperation.

Press one to repeat this greeting. Press two to send a private message. Press three to ask this caller to connect with you live, one-on-one. Press four to hear the next caller’s greeting. Press five to return to the previous ad. Press seven to block this caller from contacting you.

With a bit of practice I developed a whole portfolio of personae, ranging from the iconic to the cryptic. Clark Kent Calling from a Phone Booth was my go-to line. His ready-made image allowed me to dispense with laborious physical description. He was also the perfect fantasy man of the women’s magazines—a reliable breadwinner, a modest but hunky journalist who morphed into Superman when he took off his clothes.

Super-Exhibitionistic Horse-Cock Boy was a bit of inspired ad-lib. One night I made up a story about masturbating in front of my living room window while a neighbor woman watched me from her kitchen across the courtyard. Messages flooded in. Everyone wanted to hear about it. Part of the allure of an amateur sex line involved its invitation to be playful with the rituals of the form: it felt appropriate to situate the fantasy itself inside an act of voyeurism.

The Sound of One Hand Slapping was a late addition to my repertoire, and by no means original; I heard many masterly variations. I merely put my own spin on an old phone-sex standard. The trick, of course, was in the execution. I tried at first for authenticity, recording an actual masturbatory stroke, but it was too subtle for the mouthpiece to pick up, and I kept getting a prerecorded admonition:
I’m sorry, your message must be at least ten seconds long. Please try again.
At first I misheard this as:
I’m sorry, your member must be at least ten inches long. Please try again.
I experimented until I found a plausible substitute, which involved rubbing my index finger back and forth across the mouthpiece. When I replayed the message to confirm it, I heard a sound that hinted at some sort of deviant friction. By pressing my fingertip with greater or lesser force, I could create a stylized rendition of vigorous, almost violent copulation, or gentle, sensuous cock-stroking. (Later I even recorded an actual slap, although I struck my thigh instead of my ass, having learned that on the talk line impression
is
reality.) The virtue of this method arose from its ambiguity, its invitation for others to initiate the fantasy. It allowed me, in the opening joust of a phone fuck, to shield my voice from other callers.

I’d dialed so often my voice had become a known quantity.

Once I got hooked I had to make a real effort not to call every night. Evenings when I stayed away from the phone tended to play out in the same way. I’d be abducted by one of my blue moods, a combination of loneliness and claustrophobia at the thought of all the human longing playing out in the towers and the streets, in the privacy of little urban rooms. I’d run out of patience for reading, my usual strategy of escape, so I’d pace my apartment, listening to Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins, until I tired of retracing my steps. I’d take my notebook and go for a beer at one of the Irish joints in my neighborhood: O’Hanlon’s, McCann’s, McCaffrey & Burke. There was always something soothing in the murmur of voices and the clank of glassware, men and sometimes even a few women talking in the smoky, intimate light. I liked to imagine I’d find a beautiful woman sipping whiskey all alone in the corner. Our eyes would meet. I’d buy her a drink. We’d step, just for a moment, from the frame of the Hopper painting that circumscribed our lives. Or maybe we’d step
into
the frame, create a moment of melancholy beauty we could hold with us forever.

No matter. She was never there.

One night my friend Rachel called me at home. It was rare to hear her voice but always a pleasure when it happened. We’d met during our respective internships at the
Nation
and the
Village Voice
and had kept in touch, mostly by letter, me from Montana, her from Seattle, then later me from New York and her from Virginia.

Toward the end of our brief season in the city I’d confessed my attraction to her, a confession she did not reciprocate, though I sensed no worse than ambivalence in her cryptic silence. Problem was, she had a boyfriend. But now her boyfriend had gone abroad, to study international relations at the London School of Economics, while she pursued a master’s in poetry at the University of Virginia. I’d met the boyfriend once. He was a very small fellow with unwashed hair, tiny round glasses, and tremendous, outsized hands. You couldn’t not notice his beautiful hands.

Rachel told me those hands had found another woman to reach for in her absence. He’d called and confessed this to her, two months after the fact. She told him it was over. He immediately flew to Virginia in an act of contrition. They wept, they cursed; they held each other tenderly, they screwed not very tenderly. Then he left for London. Nothing was resolved. She was alone with her wounds, alone in Charlottesville, Virginia. He called again and again and pleaded with her to give him another chance. He swore he’d prove his devotion, if only she would grant him one more chance.

She could not do that. Instead she called me.

She said she’d never stopped thinking about what it would be like to be involved with me. I hadn’t known she’d ever started—and besides, I wanted to say now, it would probably be a nightmare to be involved with me. But I stayed mum.

She said she’d been adept at disguising her attraction, but it had been there all along.

Adept is too pale a word, I told her.

She wanted to come out and say something but didn’t know if it was appropriate. She admitted she felt oddly giddy and drunk, as if she were capable, suddenly, of anything, and this scared her, made her think that she should play things close to the vest.

Go ahead, I said. Say it anyway. What’s to lose?

Our friendship, she said.

We’ll always be friends, I said.

Almost as if changing the subject, she said she’d be spending spring break in upstate New York, at her father’s country home. But she wasn’t changing the subject.

What train would I take to get there? I asked.

She told me the line and the station stop, said she’d happily meet me on arrival.

Nine days later I was there.

The country home was sprawling and drafty, nearly three hundred years old, with low ceilings and a thriving resident population of mice. Her father, a theater producer, made it clear that he was not to be bothered unless we had ideas about where he could find the money to stage an adaptation of one of Thomas Mann’s lesser novels. He gave me the once-over and then dialed someone on the phone.

After a tour of the grounds, Rachel and I walked down a long dirt road and sat in a field of what had been alfalfa the year before. The sun was warm on our faces, and we reclined at the crest of a hill where we could see out over a valley to the low mountains that rose on the far side. As the sun dropped behind her it turned her auburn hair a fiery gold. I wanted badly to kiss her but lacked the courage to move near enough to her mouth.

We walked down the hill amid the springtime smells of melting water and pine needles. I knew I would remember that afternoon with perfect clarity for the rest of my life—the blue sky, the geese and their honking overhead, the light on her hair and her nervous half-smile, the smell of dust off the road. The anticipation of how sweet and soft her lips would be.

After dinner that night she handed me a letter she’d written a couple of days earlier. She said she’d wanted to write one last time before everything changed. Then she left the room, and I sat in the lamplight, reading.

The letter closed by saying,
This is a goodbye kiss to everything that has come before
. It was a beautiful piece of writing, funny and sweet and passionate; it even included a long meditation on the beauty and eroticism of the word
passion
. I didn’t quite know what to think about what was happening between us. I’d always wanted to be more than friends. She’d always insisted we couldn’t be more than friends. I’d finally made my peace with that, and now the tables had turned. She was the one in pursuit, after I’d given up. I was more nervous now than when my feelings had gone unreciprocated. I’d become quite comfortable with my feelings going unreciprocated. Preemptive rejection kept the stakes manageable.

I sat alone with her letter for a long time. When she returned she held a glass of red wine for each of us.

I’m sick of boys, do you know that? she said. All I’ve ever had are boys. It’s time I had an adult relationship.

We drank the wine. We went upstairs together. It felt like an adult situation. We undressed and went to the bed. I was feeling more adult by the moment. After some exploratory caressing, we agreed that we’d be wiser to stop before we went too far, wait for another time when we’d be more comfortable, more sure in each other’s presence—our adult selves asserting some objective analysis on potential outcomes.

I told her I had all the patience in the world.

Coming from any other guy, she said, I wouldn’t believe that for a moment. But from you I do.

As if to disabuse her of her foolishness, I began to kiss her stomach, her thighs. It wasn’t long before we were doing exactly what we had said we weren’t going to do.

As we lay tangled in the sheets, she said, I had no idea you were so religious.

What do you mean?

You kept saying, Oh my god, oh my god.

I guess I must have. But doesn’t everyone?

I thought Catholic school had taken all of that out of you.

No, I said, I’ve merely found a new altar at which to worship.

We raked the yard in the late morning sun, exposing the fecund smell of wet, decaying leaves, the wetness trapped since autumn. She exuded elegance even in yard work, elegance in posture, an elegant wool sweater just so on her shoulders, that shy half-smile she smiled to herself that signified her mind at play. I’d never known a woman more attractive in the act of thinking. I saw in my own mind her naked body, its dips and arcing lines, petite navel, small nipples on ample breasts, powerful yet graceful thighs and calves. Cheeks round and red as plums. A delicate, slender neck. Biceps firm from regular games of squash. Pale skin and eyes of a glacial blue, a sprinkle of freckles on her face. We walked through the woods along a little creek. She tried to leap across the water and landed in mud. Her shoe, covered in slime, made a sucking sound when she pulled it free. We laughed and laughed.