Lust & Wonder (10 page)

He responded immediately but briefly. I wrote him a fat, long letter and pretended I was writing to Christopher so that I would be most myself.

He replied that he'd been planning on removing his personal ad that day and had just logged on to his account to do it because he'd received so many replies from the Philippines. This had infuriated him—“I said, ‘NYC area only.' Can't people read?” He also admitted that my response had intimidated him and that he was only writing me back because he'd shared it with his business partner, and she'd told him, “You write that man back this instant.”

This gave me pause. What had I said that had intimidated him and made him not want to reply? Then I thought,
It's good that I intimidate people. That's a compliment.

His name was Dennis. After several back-and-forth e-mail exchanges, he suggested we speak on the phone. I almost never spoke on the phone anymore to anyone but Christopher. If he'd suggested we meet in person, I would have been game. But I realized speaking on the phone first had its advantages. Sometimes, somebody's voice just vibrates all wrong against your eardrums. Plus the whole “not taking a shower or getting dressed” part.

When we finally spoke the following week, we stayed on the phone for three hours. Technically, this is known as “hitting it off.” To me, the next logical step would be to set up a coffee date. But Dennis felt we should continue with the phone for a while. He appeared to have an “if it ain't broke, don't fix it” mentality, and I reminded myself that normal, sane people are in no hurry, so I didn't push for an in-person meeting.

For the next two weeks, we spoke almost daily. Such concentrated, focused time on the phone with a stranger does peculiar things to the mind. You begin to conjure the person's physical being so intensely, you can nearly forget you don't know each other. You begin to tell yourself that no matter what they look like, the virtual chemistry you share is so powerful, it will be love on contact the instant you sit down across from each other at a rickety café table. But I was wise to this sort of brain trickery, because I'd dated, it seemed, most of the single guys in Manhattan at one point or another. Granted, many of them were indistinguishable blobs in my alcoholic smear of a social life, but I knew how the mind lulled you into a state of perilous complacency when all you had was a personality and a disassociated voice.

Meeting soon in person was essential. The longer we avoided this, the more likely it was I would loathe him. Looking forward to something with too much intensity was a total setup. I was reminded of being eight years old and seeing a “ghost” advertised in the back of a magazine for ten dollars. It took weeks and weeks for my ghost to arrive, and I felt each minute of those weeks. When at last it came, I was horrified to see that the ghost was nothing more than nylon string and a white plastic bag with two holes cut out for eyes. I had genuinely expected something vaporous and magical and ended up with a marketer's middle finger.

I was able to persuade Dennis to meet me at a Starbucks downtown after work. When he showed up, I was pleased and surprised that he looked as handsome as he did in his picture. Though, upon closer scrutiny, his mouth was on the small side, the corners downturned, and this lent him a minor air of generalized disapproval. This could be easily overlooked, however, because the way he trimmed his goatee optically enlarged the mouth, like a woman does with lip liner or an eyebrow pencil. This had to be intentional, and I had long believed that knowledge of one's deformities, flaws, or personal shortcomings frequently rendered them entirely beside the point. The sculpting of his facial hair to disguise his small, displeased mouth had to be rewarded by my own overlooking of it. And though he was not tall, he wasn't dwarf short, like inappropriate, medically and fashion-challenged Christopher.

We exchanged more e-mails after that first meeting. We had another date, and it, too, was a success.

Dennis asked, “Do you enjoy jazz? Because I love it, and I know of a place downtown where we could go.”

“And then we can have broken glass and arsenic for dinner!” I felt like replying, because I barely tolerated jazz when I encountered it in elevators or dental offices. But I considered that when you meet somebody who
really
loves something, the high-road thing to do is to try to love it, too, so I wrote back, “That sounds great!”

We made a date for the following Friday.

In the meantime, I called Christopher. “Do you like jazz?”

“Not at all,” he said immediately. “I mean, I respect it. It's a form of genius. But no.”

“Would you date somebody who loved jazz?”

He took in a sharp breath. “God, no, of course not.”

Christopher loved music intensely and had even recorded albums with a band. He played piano and told me he owned a black trumpet and a red accordion. His holiday mix CDs were legendary.

“What do you listen to?” I asked.

He said, “Oh, tons of different stuff. A lot of times, I just put my iPod on shuffle. Today on the subway, I listened to the Go-Go's, Slim Whitman, the Association, Steve Reich, lots of stuff.”

I'd heard of the Go-Go's.

*   *   *

Dennis stood at the intersection of Seventh Avenue and Bank Street telling me he had a choice: we could either stay out all night and he'd be a mess in the morning or he could go home. He couldn't be drunk after just a few drinks, but he seemed tipsy and was in fact tipping over in my direction. Cars and yellow cabs rushed around us, a boxy blue-and-white Con Ed truck parked beside a manhole, lights were flashing, people were walking … the city whirled around and around us like a euphoric child.

The club had been larger than I'd expected and the jazz not nearly as bad, mostly because it could be ignored as we sat across from each other at a small round table with a votive candle in the center. The votive was the red glass kind usually found in standard-issue Italian restaurants, with little indentations like a child had pressed her fingertips into the glass all around.

Dennis seemed too shy to kiss me on the sidewalk, so I leaned in and kissed him. It was gentle, almost like he'd never kissed anyone before. His cheeks were flushed. Because of the wine or because he was nervous?

“I'll call you tomorrow,” he said.

“I had a wonderful night,” I told him.

He took the subway uptown; I walked home. I smiled the whole way, which made me feel like a simpleton. I was a literal grinning idiot. No second-guessing, no wondering,
Is he secretly married? Was he only being polite?
Because these were the things we'd talked about, there was no need to worry about them now. How many times had I been on a date only to arrive back home and second-guess everything? Will he really call? I knew Dennis really would. Also, I'd already blurted out, “Do you have a terrible disease?” and he'd said no.

I was falling in love in Manhattan. We talked about falling in love in the city, how it just pushes you right over the edge. Falling in love in New York is dangerous for tourists, because they return to their split-level homes and they sit in their recliners and they look at each other and one or both of them thinks,
It must have been the Chrysler building
. But falling in love in New York is safe when you're here, and it never goes away.

*   *   *

One night, we sat on a long green bench in Central Park and talked until it was dark and the air throbbed with crickets.

He said, “Sometimes the feeling that I might be falling in love with you kind of slips away. Do you know what I mean? Does that happen to you, too?”

When I looked at him, healthy and strong, the only thing I could think was,
Please be the one
.

I said, “I don't know. Maybe a little. I guess feeling so much and thinking a lot about another person so intensely, it's like you wear that circuit down smooth in your brain, so all of a sudden, it seems like there's no feeling there. Maybe it's like a temporary kind of numbness. Is that what you mean?”

“That sounds like it exactly,” he said. And he was smiling again, which relieved me. So had I said the right thing to diffuse his doubt?

When I was with him and he wasn't talking about the feeling slipping away, when he was smiling and telling me this felt too good to be true, I had a luminous feeling, almost like opening one of those tiny doors on the Advent calendar. You got to open one door a night until Christmas. It was small, but you knew it was leading somewhere.

*   *   *

I was on my cell phone with my appalling freelance advertising client when I walked past a Borders and saw a stack of yellow
Sellevision
covers on the front table. The phone just drifted away from my ear as the yammering continued, and I walked into the store.

“A novel by Augusten Burroughs.”

It said so, right there below the title.

It was thrilling for maybe forty-seven seconds, and then the thrill drained right away. As I walked out of the store with my phone now in my pocket, I thought,
It doesn't matter what it is. We get used to it
.

Which is both good and bad.

*   *   *

It was almost two months, and I couldn't be sure, but I thought things were going well. Possibly they were even wonderful.

I was in love.

I swung by Christopher's office, and he was on the phone with a client. He motioned for me to sit, so I did. He was wearing a plaid, chocolate-brown shirt, and his hair was different. Blonder. Like he'd been in the sun.

While he talked on the phone, punctuating periods of intense listening with bursts of laughter, I fiddled with the loose paper clips, unforming them and using one to clean under my nail. I liked that I could be disgusting with him and it just didn't matter.

“So, how're things?” he said when he hung up.

I dropped the paper clip onto the floor so he wouldn't see. “Things are good. So. I'm pretty much in love with Dennis, that guy I told you about.”

“Really?” he said. “Wow, that's fantastic.”

He was smiling and looked really happy for me. Seeing this dented my mood. I didn't realize it until that moment, but I'd wanted him to be slightly jealous. But it just wasn't there.

“You seeing anybody new?”

He told me he was, actually. “And he's moving in.”

“Moving in? How long have you been seeing him? And didn't you just break up?”

He laughed. “It's true. I'm a serial monogamist. Three weeks.”

I just stared at him. “Three weeks?”

He smiled. “Yeah, I know. I move fast. Like a lesbian.”

“So who is he?” I asked. I couldn't believe how not happy this was making me.

“His name's Zeke. He's crazy. And super tall. He doesn't work, so there's that.” He switched topics, but not as deftly as he thought. “But Dennis seems like a good guy from what you've told me.”

I shrugged. “Yeah, he's a great guy, definitely. Okay, well. I should go.”

When I left his office and started walking down Eighth Avenue, I thought,
Well, he really is off the table now. He's got somebody moving in
. Which was a weird thing to think, because hadn't I already taken him off the table? I was never going to be with somebody who was a pot of simmering AIDS stew again. No fucking way. So it was good. I was glad he'd found somebody and so incredibly fast.

He had somebody, and now I had somebody, too. It had worked out perfectly.

*   *   *

The only thing was, Dennis and I may have waited too long to have sex.

He was perfectly clear about his desire to not jump right into bed. He wanted to wait and allow feelings of affection and love to develop first. He'd told me this one night when we were out walking among the brownstones of the West Village. He said, “I've had enough sex with people just for the sake of sex. I really want sex to come from a connection with somebody I love. I want that intimacy.”

This sounded perfect to me at the time. Given the trouble I'd had with Mitch, this was nothing but a relief. I felt confident that I would have no sexual issues with Dennis. Plus, because he wanted to wait, there was absolutely no pressure at all.

It seemed ideal until the day we actually had sex.

This occurred at a hotel because I had not yet cleaned my apartment to New Boyfriend Standards. So I rented a room at the UN Plaza Hotel. Two months had passed, and it was time to become, in Dennis's word, “intimate.” And what could be sexier than doing it in a hotel with a World Health Organization rally going on outside?

Dennis's apartment wasn't suitable for sex, either. It was filled with boxes and two cats that circled my legs and tried to lick my eyes. They seemed feral to me, darting wildly around the apartment, pouncing, withdrawing. I'd asked their names, and Dennis said, “I haven't named them. I got them from this friend, Mary Ellen. She's one of those women who lives with like a hundred cats, and she couldn't keep these two extra ones, so I told her I'd take them.”

I asked, “Do you like cats?”

Dennis replied, “Not really. Or, yes, I guess. They're okay.”

“You should call them Licky and Clingy,” I suggested.

He seemed depressed by the cats. “I've got to find a home for them. I just haven't had time.”

It seemed he hadn't had time for a lot of things, including window treatments. What appeared to be burlap was tacked up makeshift fashion to his long wall of windows. It was a building from the 1960s, and nothing in his unit had been altered. It was a time capsule. The stacks of boxes added to this effect.

But my own apartment was worse, still a disaster wrapped in the remnants of my drinking ways. Piles of magazines and books needed to be thrown out or given away. The air itself seemed sullied. It needed a profound cleaning, and I needed to throw away a lot of crap, but I'd been sober for less than a year, which clearly was not nearly enough time to clean.