Lust & Wonder (23 page)

Burning-faced, I sat. Lopsided, blundering, I experienced a seasickness of full-force physical attraction.

I ordered the steak.

When his leg knocked against mine under the table by accident, I came very close to spitting chewed meat onto the tablecloth. I wanted to literally run from the restaurant, fleeing on foot.

His spirits were great. He was so funny. If only Dennis hadn't been there souring the evening with his endless series of tedious questions. “Were the nurses nice? I've heard that's a pleasant hospital. Is it true? Was the chemo difficult to work into your schedule?” He reeked of smallness. And I loathed myself most for reaching the point where all I could see were his flaws, whether real or conjured.

I was possessed with the most curious sense of urgency. Anyone who wasn't Christopher was wasting my time. Dinner was over in mere minutes, it seemed to me, which only heightened the sense that I had to
do
something,
say
something, take immediate action.

The drive back to Amherst seemed four times as long as the trip out. But “home” offered many distractions: a routine, work, my dogs, e-mailing my friends, my slot, my rut, my rot.

A week passed.

The dinner, the accidental knocking of his leg under the table, the way my senses became all mixed up and the way the light in the restaurant had made his hair sweet-smelling, how when he spoke, it felt as though I was about to board an ocean liner.

I was presented with a gift. It arrived in the form of certainty. Certain things, true things, facts that are made of foot-thick steel and anchored miles deep into the earth, are comforting because they provide a fulcrum around which you work or plan or live or figure things out. This is what I knew, my certainty: the thing I felt for the man who was my agent had established roots. It existed; it would continue to exist. It had been there when I first met him, and instead of evaporating, it had penetrated.

Instead of causing me to panic, oddly, this knowledge generated a tiny metallic click deep and low in my brain.
Unlocked.
It set me free. This great freedom came as an understanding that I need not move a muscle. Not all dots should be connected. I was free to love one person but live with someone else. People did that all the time. It was sad, yes. But kind of beautiful, too, right?

I closed my eyes and rested my head against the back of my chair. The steady beating of my heart inside my chest sounded like “Nope-
nope
, nope-
nope
, nope-
nope
.”

I called bullshit on myself.

There was freedom, and then there was everything else. Freedom didn't come in degrees. It was an all-or-nothing proposition.

I wanted it all.

*   *   *

Several weeks after dinner with Christopher, Dennis seemed particularly unhappy. It wasn't that he was grumpier than usual; he was even more distant. And when we did run into each other in the kitchen or on the stairs, he was exceedingly polite. I read in his smile a distinct warning. So instead of confronting him, I e-mailed him even though there was just one floor between us. I told him I knew something was wrong, could he just maybe tell me about it in a letter?

It turned out, he could. He provided me with a list several pages long of all the things he loathed about me.

He followed this up with the suggestion that we see a couples' therapist.

The list was like a blueprint of who I was as a person, and it included my choice of beverage, my nervous tics, and scores of other personal details, many beyond my control. The list was shocking to read: so many years of pent-up resentments unspooling before me on my laptop screen, a careful itemization crafted by the son of an accountant. All along, there had been “something the matter,” and all these years, he'd said there was not. The list was proof of his spectacular betrayal. The list was also the single thing I must have required to clarify my own position in my own mind, because now, it was over. At the end of the list, he made a lame apology about how he knew it was bad to keep all this stuff inside and that this was a beginning for him; he was finally talking about it.

But this was no beginning for me. This was the end.

Through a reply e-mail, I agreed to see a therapist, but I needed to be clear about why. I told him to come downstairs and help me make the bed. That's when I told him.

“This isn't to work things out between us, to save the relationship, because there is no relationship to save,” I told him. “You don't want me. I make you miserable. I won't ever want to go snowshoeing in Aspen, I will never have enough of what you want, and I will always have too much of everything you hate. We aren't good for each other. And I will see a therapist with you so that you understand and believe that it's over.”

I didn't know how Dennis felt about that. Did he want us to be over? Or did he want to stay together? He just nodded and made hospital corners with the sheet.

I believed he loved the life we built, the oil-bronze-finished door pulls, the closets filled with linens, the cars. I definitely felt our life would be perfect for him if only I wasn't in it. Our primary problem had been communication. While he would admit to having “hatred issues” with me, he wouldn't go into the specifics. “Hatred issues” was enough for me. I felt like if you have hatred issues for the person you're with, especially if you can catalog them, maybe it's time to reevaluate your situation.

Were the things he hated about me the same things I hated about myself? Or by sharing, would he give me all new things to despise? It was looking like I might never know. I wanted to end our relationship neatly, with a bow if possible. Something that resembled resolution, a truce. Perhaps therapy would be this pretty bow, even though my history with therapy had been more lumpy packages with terrible surprises inside.

At the recommendation of a physician I barely knew, we ended up in the office of a Manhattan therapist plucked from a different era. She had 1970s Joyce Carol Oates hair, a full regalia of filigree sterling silver and malachite jewelry. Even in repose, she leaned forward slightly, as if reaching for a teak-handled skewer in a fondue pot.

There may have been spider plants, and they may have been hanging. I cannot be sure, because it was difficult to lift my eyes off the Pottery Barn lamp from back in the days when Pottery Barn was a fruit crate of a store that sold chipped earthenware to slightly unwashed people who smelled like frankincense. The therapist's office itself had the aroma of beeswax and wet cork. But mostly, it smelled like sickness of the mind.

Dennis sat to my left on the sofa, I was in a shabby chair (the “chic” part had long worn away), and the therapist sat in the command chair across from us.

I felt no hatred for Dennis. Looking at him seated on the couch with his hands curled into tender fists on his lap, I felt the sickness of heartbreak, which was compounded by the feeling that I had skipped ahead and read the last chapter. I already knew how this story turned out.

This was because I had insider information: a crime in Wall Street circles; one that can land you in prison for twenty years and slap you with a $25 million fine. It was, however, a particularly valuable piece of interpersonal intel, and I was ready to deploy it: there was zero hope for us. Dennis was still of the opinion that there was something to work out; a compromise to be made and in which we could live. But this was not the case. There would be no compromise, because I was done with that.

What I saw with such clarity that day was that life is, indeed, not simply black and white but rather the gray that results from blending the two together. The
black
I felt at Dennis's bewilderment at how swiftly the world came crumbling down around him, all because of some silly list he'd been keeping about my flaws, which I saw as proof that he'd been lying to me for years.

The
white
was the cotton sheet blowing in the sun that I felt when I fantasized about Christopher, propped up against a mound of pillows somewhere and me tracing just one finger around and around each shirt button, sliding my finger through the opened vents between them. Then, trailing my finger down the side of his chest, bump, bump, bumping over the ribs until I reached his belt buckle, where my finger would pause, like Thelma and Louise on the edge of the cliff.

Dennis began to outline in the briefest, most orderly fashion the despair he'd felt with me for years. I remembered his personal ad, how well written and amusing it was, hinting at a playfulness, which, if it ever truly existed, had been flattened into a grinding daily sorrow. And because I felt betrayed, having asked him every day, “Are you sure you're happy?” and he'd replied to my face, “Yes, I'm sure,” I didn't feel like quite as much of a scumbag as I might have for letting my eyes drift away from his downturned mouth as he spoke and fixing my gaze on the atrocious broken-tile mosaic hanging on the wall while I visualized that finger of mine still parked on the edge of my agent's belt buckle, my gaze on the swell in the crotch of his pants, my eyes drilling into strained fabric over the zipper.

The therapist's strident voice startled me out of my soft-core daydream.

She said there was reason to be optimistic, that many couples could save their marriages through therapy. Something in her manner made me expect that at any moment she would pull a small deerskin drum out from under her chair and say, “Deep breathing and rhythmic drumming are powerful tools for mending a marriage. So is sage.”

I felt there could be no ambiguity. I barked, “I just need to say, we're not here to repair this. He needs to understand that it has ended. He needs to be perfectly clear that reuniting is not within the realm of possibility and that—”

She cut me off and motioned with the palms of her hands as if to push me back. “That's enough,” she said. “One step at a time. This is a process. That's an awful lot to digest all at once.”

Then she suggested ten sessions. Five plus five, a neat fair number, just right for the fifty-fifty partnership between two people.

I said, “I don't believe it will be helpful to give him false hope.” I saw no reason this couldn't be resolved within the next twenty minutes.

Her features tightened, and her mouth became a straight little line. She did not care for my bossy, let's-cut-to-the-chase-here outbursts one bit. Her eyes said, “Shut the fuck up, asshole.”

“And I don't believe,” she said, “that we should enter into therapy knowing in advance how we expect it to turn out.”

I smiled back at her and replied, “I'm sorry. I know you want me to take a time-out, and I apologize, but I'm going to say something else.” And I told her I was worried about Dennis and his ability to terminate his denial. I explained that he had already been in therapy for nearly fifteen years. Though I didn't add, “And you can see for yourself how useless it was.”

I spoke pointedly, I felt, but not disrespectfully. Like one doctor to another, except that I'm the opposite of a doctor and way more like a patient who tied the doctor up, locked him in the nurses' lounge, and is now at a shopping mall wearing his doctor's clothes.

But I was truly worried. Once Dennis realized I was gone, it would hit him hard, and he would need somebody with Joyce Carol Oates hair to steady him. Either that or he would be just manic with relief and giddy with possibility, in which case he would also need her, if only to affirm for him, “But of course it's okay for you to celebrate without feeling guilty. I saw him. He was a monster!”

She turned to Dennis and asked him, “How long have you been unhappy in this relationship with Augusten?”

Dennis shot me a bashful, sideways glance and then looked back at her before looking down at his own lap. Sullenly, he replied, “A few years. I mean, the first two were really good, but after that…” He let the thought to just drop right there, baby-on-the-church-steps style.

My hands gripped the well-worn arms of the Naugahyde armchair. “You were happy for two years, that's it?” I wanted to shout, “But that leaves eight! That means you lied to me on a daily basis for eight motherfucking years!” (Later, I did the math: 2,920 lies.)

Even though I didn't say this or anything else, the therapist had her eye on me and her hand was already outstretched, like she was petsitting a friend's ungainly Saint Bernard and warning it away from the coffee table. She again suggested we agree to ten more sessions. I thought,
She's only interested in slamming shut my blustering window so that all the cash doesn't blow out it
. At least if she'd said, “How about this: ten more sessions and I'll throw in a set of four earthenware daisy mugs and a toaster oven,” at least I could have respected her motives.

One of the items on Dennis's “One Million Things I Hate About Augusten” list was that he thought I had a forceful personality. Well, that was better than having a simpering, lying, weak personality like he did. I wanted to take that list of his and shove it down his throat.

The fact that Joyce Carol Oates was using the identical hand signals with me that a traffic cop would use to stop a cement truck from barreling through an intersection populated with children from a church group did appear to legitimize his complaint, if only slightly. She turned to Dennis, and when he spoke, he did so in a soft, hesitant voice. Carefully, he described me as a “bully,” and I thought,
Yeah, but only in comparison to someone who sucks in his lips and bites them so he won't say something terrible and coughs instead of having meaningful conversation
.

I didn't actually roll my eyes, but I did think,
I may have had the louder voice, but he had the sharper words.
Still, I had to admit it was a good strategic move on his part. He'd totally won her over to his side with that one, because Dr. Crochet Sweater Vest would like nothing more than to stab me in the eye with her “A Woman Without a Man Is Like a Fish Without a Bicycle” button.