Lust & Wonder (11 page)

So, the hotel.

I checked in first and then called Dennis with the room number. He arrived about forty-five minutes later, looking out of breath and nervous. Because this was it. This was The Sex.

We undressed quickly, our backs to each other. Dennis finished first and climbed into bed, sliding under the sheet and then folding down the other side for me. It struck me as an oddly dated and feminine gesture, something from a Debbie Reynolds movie in the 1950s.

As I climbed into bed, Dennis said, “You have the cutest little flat butt. Almost nothing there at all.”

He was smiling, like he was being playful and sexy, except to my paranoid mind, the smile lasted for one-hundredth of a second longer than a genuine “That's adorable!” smile would have, so it looked more like “No, I'm not disappointed
at all
!”

I said, “Oh, I know. I have kind of an anti-ass, don't I?”

“No, no, no, no, no,” he protested, waving his arms. “I
do
think it's cute.”

I said, “Okay,” and I shrugged. “Then, thanks.” I was feeling exceedingly awkward.

He admitted that he was a little nervous and asked, “Can we just hug awhile?”

I lay down next to him and felt relief coupled with a nagging postponement of some inevitable task. There was no getting around the incredible and puzzling awkwardness that I felt. I mentally replayed some of our conversations and more romantic moments in order to remind myself that I knew Dennis; he wasn't just some stranger.

I slid down a little so that I could be shorter than him and then lay my cheek on his chest where the coarse, wiry hairs tickled my nose, and I kept fidgeting.

Eventually, we fell asleep like that, and I had the strangest and most vivid dream where Dennis peeled off his own face, which turned out to be a mask. And then he took this face off, which revealed another mask. And he kept going, like those Russian nesting dolls. All the while, I was fascinated by how many faces he had.

When we woke up an hour later, I was burning up, and so was he. I kicked the covers down, and we were naked.

We started kissing.

My dick was already hard because, as insurance against experiencing another erotic void like with Mitch, I'd clandestinely ordered a bulk supply of Viagra from an online pharmacy. I had been taking one before each date in case the evening spontaneously turned into sex. Dennis had no idea that when we went to that club in the West Village and sat at a small, round table near the stage, the entire time I was pretending to love crappy jazz, I was sitting there with a raging hard-on, weirdly divorced from any sort of sexual attraction. Also, the room was tinted Windex blue, and all the lights had halos. This was an actual side effect of the medication, one I rather liked. It turned the whole world faintly blue.

As Dennis's hand began the tentative journey down toward my dick, I smiled into his neck because I knew that he would not encounter the same cold, shrunken mushroom that Mitch had found on our second date.

The back of Dennis's hand brushed up against the underside of my pharmaceutically erect penis, and he said, “Wow, you're so turned on.”

I was hard, that's for sure.

And I was happy in exactly the same way I'd been happy in 1983 when my friend Melissa and I were driving around at midnight on a back road in Hadley, Massachusetts, in my fastback, talking about how hideous our lives were when we just suddenly ran out of gas. Melissa completely freaked out because she'd already been raped twice, and she wasn't even twenty. She was trembling and turning around to check and make sure her door was locked, reaching across my chest to make sure mine was.

Calmly, I looked over at her, and I said, “I have a five-gallon tank of gas in the wayback.”

Ka-boom
. Total silence. And then a tiny and adorable, “Really?”

I was grinning, because it was one of the first times I think I'd ever felt proud of what was normally a psychiatric disorder: anticipatory stress.

I was always expecting the very worst; the bright side was that I was also prepared for it. Of course, I had a big red plastic jug of gas sloshing around back there. I had figured it would come in handy for lighting something on fire as I made a quick escape, but I was just as happy to use it for the good old-fashioned reason. I poured it into the tank and smashed my foot on the gas to flood the engine a little, and we took off, Melissa rolling the windows down and trailing her fingers through the wind like it was water rushing past.

Dennis negotiated new positions for us with me standing at the side of the bed while he lay on his back, his head hanging back over the edge of the mattress and my dick torqued downward into his mouth and throat. At the same time, I was leaning forward, propping myself up on my right elbow so that I could suck him.

My penis remained chemically, magically rigid.

A terrible thought crept in:
He's not very good at this.
And then I thought,
Or is he excellent and I'm just poor at receiving?

I knew for a fact that I was excellent at giving head. This was perhaps the sole advantage of being molested at twelve by a skilled sexual predator, especially one who'd been through Catholic school and was, thus, a perfectionist. Over the years, I'd honed my skills and received many compliments, from judges to cabdrivers. Had I still been able to suck my own dick like I could when I was fourteen, it's possible I could have avoided yards and yards of shitty relationships.

Five minutes is a really long time to suck a dick.

After a while, you actually begin to wonder if the nonstop pressure against your lip-wrapped front teeth might, in fact, be loosening them.
If I end up having to have a root canal because of this
, I thought,
I will be really pissed
. Dental insurance doesn't cover blow job damage, I was almost positive.

At last, I sensed that he was about to ejaculate, and this, then, sped things up for me. We came at exactly the same moment. Dennis coughed after he finished, something I associated with guys who then said things like “I'd better get going. I have to pick up my wife's mother and sister at the airport in an hour.”

We collapsed onto the bed, giddy with relief. The mystery of “What will the sex be like when we finally have it?” was over. The answer was: like assembling a bookcase from Ikea with parts missing.

“I've never come with somebody at the same time before, I don't think,” Dennis said.

“It has to be a good sign, right?” I asked.

When there was no reply, I answered the question myself. “Yeah, I think it must be a really good sign.”

*   *   *

I asked Christopher, “So what are you doing for Thanksgiving?” and he told me he was having a bunch of people over.

Christopher had lived in a massive rent-stabilized apartment on West Seventy-Ninth Street since 1985, and now Zeke lived there, too. Not long after we met, Christopher invited me to a birthday party for his ancient Samoyed, Ripley. I met a bunch of his friends, and it was like something out of a movie, all these funny, interesting people whom he'd known for decades. We all saw the deep insanity of throwing a party for a dog, yet it was still quite a sophisticated gathering.

I was the opposite. I'd lived in a series of junky studios for as long as I'd lived in Manhattan, and I was terrible at making friends. This was a lack that truly bothered Dennis. He'd even said, “I wish you were more social and had more friends you could bring to the relationship. I feel like I'm the one with all the friends.”

And on Thanksgiving, I would meet several of them, because Dennis was hosting the holiday meal at his L-shaped studio on West Seventy-Second. The apartment had been improved since me: the boxes had been unpacked (and had contained mostly expired pens and stationery from an ancient job), and after several trips to Pottery Barn, it was slightly less pitiful.

I was excited. Normal, stable people celebrated holidays.

We went shopping at Fairway, and Dennis had already laid out several cookbooks on the kitchen counter.

I'd assumed cooking would mean throwing a turkey into the oven and opening a few cans of cranberry sauce while we lay in bed and watched pay-per-view until the guests arrived. But this was not the plan. The plan was for Dennis to create several painfully elaborate and complex dishes from
Cooks Illustrated
, using each skillet, pot, utensil, and pan at least once. My job was to remain fixed in place at the shallow stainless steel sink in his narrow galley kitchen with a scouring pad to wash and dry in a never-ending, one-man assembly line.

By the time the guests arrived, my hands were red, swollen, and steaming, but I felt I'd participated in preparing the meal; it was
our
Thanksgiving even though the table was populated with an increasingly strange group of strangers.

Sam and Paula seemed a normal enough couple, if a little grim. There was Stevie, a gay guy with tacky blond highlights, plus two single women who looked so remarkably similar I couldn't tell them apart even when I was seated directly across from them. The odd thing about Dennis's friends was that they all behaved as if they'd been dragged to this affair. Nobody spoke unless Dennis started the conversation.

“So, Paula, how's work?”

“Good. Busy.”

Silence.

“Hey, Beth, I heard you went to Buffalo for vacation. How was it?”

“Nice. But cold.”

Was I perfectly insane? Because I could not recall ever being among a group of such seemingly dead living people before. They were entirely joyless. Except for Stevie, who spoke in a kind of unwittingly comical gay slang. “So I told her, ‘Girl, you ain't right!'”

Sam and Paula weren't married but had been together long enough that people assumed they were. They also bickered in hushed tones so frequently it was natural to assume they were not only married but headed for divorce.

“No, Sam, I said the pepper, not the salt.”

“You said salt, Paula. Maybe you were thinking pepper, but you said salt. Anyway, they're both in front of you now, so take whichever one you want.”

Dennis did a heroic job of keeping the conversation as light and as jovial as possible. Though it had seemed to be an inordinate amount of preparation—each measurement involved him sliding a knife over the top of a half teaspoon or quarter cup so it was perfectly, exactly level, not a crumb more or less—the meal really was delicious. The turkey even ranked up there with Mitch's Famous Author Friend's, though one did have to watch out for those small brittle sticks of rosemary.

“The food is spectacular, Dennis,” I said, and this pleased him.

“I think the stuffing is a little dry,” he said. “I should have used more liquid from the mushrooms.”

There arrived a period of silence when people were concentrating on chewing, and it was during this moment that Dennis suddenly let out a high-pitched scream and covered his mouth. “Oh my God, oh my God!” he cried through his cupped fingers.

I tensed. Was he choking on a wishbone? Did he bite down on his tongue? Then a terrible thought:
Was there part of a rat in the creamed spinach?

He shoved back from the table, shrieking, “My cap! My cap came off! Oh my God!”

There, through the gaps between his fingers, I could see a drilled-down stump right in the front of his mouth. I glanced down at his plate, and there lay one of the perfect, white teeth I'd so admired, stuck into a braised baby carrot, flecked with fresh mint.

Others noticed it, too, and there was stifled but audible laughter.

When he pulled his hands away, he forgot to close his mouth, so he looked like a hillbilly. I saw tears spring up in his eyes as he grabbed the carrot with its embedded tooth and rushed back into the bathroom.

He slammed the door closed, something he never did, not even when he had a bowel movement, I'd discovered. Dennis was a bathroom-door-wide-open kind of guy, which frankly freaked me out. That's how I knew just how upset he was; for him to actually close the bathroom door, this must be serious.

I felt terrible for him and considered rushing back after him, but something told me he wouldn't appreciate it. With Dennis now gone, nobody said a word, and I didn't even attempt to make conversation even though, as the new boyfriend of the host, part of my cohost job description was making conversation.

When Dennis returned several minutes later, he was smiling like nothing happened, his tooth restored to its central position. He took his seat.

“Sorry for the drama and excitement,” he said, grinning. “It was this new crown. I was able to cram it back into place, but I definitely have to see a dentist.”

Paula, whose cold bitterness rendered her less interesting than under-bed dust, remarked, “I had a silver filling fall into a bowl of Cream of Wheat once.”

I thought but did not say,
Of course you did.

Gay Stevie chimed in, “Sometimes, no teeth can be an advantage! I was once with an old man who had dentures, and let me tell you, when he pulled them out of his mouth, ooh, sister, that gent had certain, shall we say,
gifts
.”

The two women who I could not tell apart hadn't actually spoken. They'd merely offered meek smiles of either feigned interest or compassion, depending on the circumstances.

I was entirely miserable.

Was this really how it was supposed to be? Dennis had known these people for years. They were all normal people, and because they were his friends, they would soon be my friends, too. “Our friends.” Normal people hadn't been molested or reared by a clinically psychotic mother, an alcoholic father, or a perversely mad psychiatrist who wore a Santa hat and performed toilet bowl readings. These were normal people, and I lived among them now. I thought,
This must be what I want
.

Over the next few weeks, I introduced Dennis to my very small collection of friends. There was Pete, an ex-boyfriend, and a former advertising coworker named Grace. Dennis and I had coffee with Sue, who owned a gift card company. We had dinner with Christopher and two writer friends. There was a great deal of laughter. Somebody snapped a breadstick, and the other half went sailing over to a nearby table, which all of us found way too hilarious.