Lust & Wonder (31 page)

Boyfriend
has become the perfectly acceptable term for an unmarried adult man in a relationship. It's cute, even as it grossly exits the wrinkly mouth of a middle-aged bald guy. And Christopher is a man unafraid to post on Twitter, “I'm only one Demi Lovato tweet away from an Amber Alert!” So though he's even older than I am,
boyfriend
comes naturally to him. Now, with our shiny wedding rings glinting in the sun, we'd lost a word forever.

Language Police 1, Gay Marriage 0.

We eloped on April Fools' Day because we are both, in fact, fools. We didn't tell anyone all week, and then midway through Christopher's fiftieth birthday party on that Friday, we surprised the guests by announcing that they were actually at a wedding celebration. The applause and cheers in the room were spontaneous and deafening. That, people, is what love sounds like. One by one, his friends came up to me and congratulated me but also made me know, in no uncertain terms, that if I ever fucked up and hurt him, that would be it.

I just could not stop smiling. I was Kate Middleton, the commoner marrying the prince. And I was totally okay with that. I was more than okay with that. I was born for it.

For the rest of the party, we were asked three questions repeatedly: “Where are you registered?” “Are you going to have kids?” and “Where are you going on your honeymoon?”

When we gave the answers “Nowhere,” “No,” and “Nowhere,” I was able to count cavities in people's mouths, they were so astonished. The implication was if you weren't getting the Williams-Sonoma steak knives or purchasing a baby or going to Saint John, why did you marry at all?

The one element I got absolutely right was our wildly inappropriate rings. As a gemologist and lifetime jewelry collector, I chose them both. Most self-respecting men would not wear diamond rings as large and flashy as these. We've often joked (because we're deadly serious) about what “bad gays” we are, and with no big ceremony, no gifts, no trip, and no children, we confirmed it. Our wedding was apparently about jewelry, which is gay, but bad gay.

Our young and deeply attractive friends Eric and Nick are good gays. They married last summer on a lush, emerald-green lawn in the Hamptons. They wore matching cotton suits of the palest, most pleasing shade of blue imaginable. They have wonderful taste, and corsages look intended for them.

If I were to wear a corsage, something bad would happen. A tiny sprig of poison oak would be mixed in with the greenery, or a wasp would fly out and sting the first wasp-allergic child I bumped into.

Another element we got right was hiring the same talented baker who made Nick and Eric's wedding cake to create ours. Theirs had a spill of fresh, colorful flowers atop it like the cover of
Martha Stewart Living
. We requested no fresh flowers; just give us the damn cake. Nick and Eric saved a piece in their freezer to have on their first anniversary. Christopher and I took the top tier of the cake and pretty much inhaled it at 2:00
A.M.
after the party.

So in addition to rings, our wedding was about sugar.

And one name fewer by which we could refer to each other.

So what had we gained? Well, that's the funny thing. I didn't expect that being married would feel any different from being unmarried. I had fought back my romantic feelings with a machete because he was my literary agent and there were a thousand other reasons my attraction to him was impossible.

But impossible is a concept that makes one's heart laugh and throw peanuts at the television. I lost my internal machete war and finally confessed in 2009 to my best friend and the only agent in Manhattan who didn't turn me down that I was in love with him.

My life was a mess in numerous ways. But I loved every dent, tear, and crack, because Christopher was now at the heart of it all. I never imagined being married would feel any better or worse than every other day with him: slightly miraculous and always exciting. It has now been fifteen years of this excitement, the last five of which have been as a couple.

But there was something else I felt walking away from our perfect-for-us civil ceremony when I realized we couldn't call each other boyfriends anymore, and husband didn't really fit.

I felt official.

For me, saying, “I am married now,” was like saying, “I am lucky now.” I stumbled and crashed my way into the literal arms of something I never quite believed in before: my soul mate. A man who frequently smelled like cheeseburgers and made me laugh hard every day and made me want to be worthy of being his husband.

That trumps the loss of
boyfriend
and having to withstand the silent judgment of “Huh, so you're the wife. I wondered how that worked.”

Getting married felt as if the city clerk was looking at us and saying, “Admit it. Just admit it.” And we were smiling and laughing because it was true, and we both knew it. So we each said, “Yeah, I do.”

When he concluded, “By the power vested in me by the State of New York, I now pronounce you married. You may seal the marriage with a kiss,” I kissed Christopher and then threw my arms hard around him and pressed my mouth against his ear, barely able to speak even in a whisper, and said, “I won.”

“So did I,” he replied.

*   *   *

Christopher generally fell asleep and into a rhythmic snore within about forty-five seconds of laying his head on the pillow. This had been his way since we had been together, sawing logs within the minute.

My nights were usually spent two-thirds trying to fall asleep, one-third fitfully sleeping. First, I had to kind of decompress in the pillow, which frequently meant going over whatever slight injustices I imagined I incurred during the day and fantasizing about better courses of action I could have taken. Or sometimes my mind would just turn on its own TV, and I'd get caught up in a story of my own making, though it always seemed like it already existed and I was only watching. I also worried a lot at night, mostly about my teeth and skin rashes.

But I learned that when I finally did recline and turned on my side and he rolled an arm over me, that would be the last thing I remembered. It always made me smile and not quite grunt but almost. Like a semigrunt, semilaugh. And that was it. Blackout.

So his ability to fall asleep instantly could override my tendencies toward insomnia if there was physical contact. If he stayed on his side of the bed and I stayed on mine, I'd be up all night. But when we were touching, his sleeping patterns trumped my insanity. Even when I thought it wouldn't happen.

*   *   *

I never had another Jeep Guy dream. But I was married to him now. As surely as this unknown-to-me man drove me up the Rockies in his beat-up rig, this identical figure had transitioned from my dream state to my bed. It was, of course, preposterous and maybe psychotic, but it was also, in fact, true.

*   *   *

I hardly said four words to Christopher the whole night of our wedding party. We were too busy wearing suits and pouring champagne and smiling. But late in the evening, we passed each other in his walk-through office, and his face was … well, you can't fake a face like that. The guy with that face was insanely in love with whatever he was looking at.

Because I was the only other person in the room, it had to be me. “Husband,” he said.

“Married,” I said like,
Can you even fucking believe it?

I had to head into the kitchen for another bottle, and he was headed to the bedroom to get somebody's coat. But I had to ask him to make sure.

“Are you steeping in regret?”

“Totally not. You're perfect for me,” he said, sounding postgame happy, and then he cracked up. I could still hear him laughing as he walked down the hallway.

*   *   *

I was standing behind him, my hands in the front pockets of his jeans. We were at a New Pornographers concert in Williamsburg, and I liked that we were standing so close to the speakers I could feel the music on the surface of my skin.

I didn't like the idea of coming tonight and being stuck inside such a massive, throbbing crowd, but Christopher loved this band, and I was so tired of being afraid of things, so I came, and now I was happy because this was the first time I'd ever stood pressed against him from behind like this with my hands in his pockets and music crawling all over us, and I loved getting to spend time with the back of his head because it's a really nice back of the head.

When we got home, Radar trundled over to the door, banging the walls with his twelve-pound tail, and Wiley crawled out from his burrow of covers and stood on the bed, trembling and expectant. Christopher laughed like he always does, raised his arms above his head, and called out, “Look how tall!” Wiley responded by standing on his skinny rear greyhound legs to show how tall he really was. Then Radar somehow projected himself from the floor directly onto the bed, where he crashed into Wiley, and the three of them formed a pileup on top of the covers.

We took off our clothes and changed into gym shorts and T-shirts. After we fed the dogs and grabbed two bottles of lemon seltzer water, we climbed onto the bed. There was a copy of
The New York Times
on Christopher's bedside table, and he grabbed it. In the Arts & Entertainment section, there was an article about
The Wizard of Oz
. He showed me the picture of Dorothy and the green witch. He chuckled as he said excitedly, “My favorite part of the whole movie is where you can see one of the yellow bricks mechanically kind of rise up and rotate so that smoke can come out.”

“What?” I said, staring at him incredulously.

“It's true. I noticed it when I was a kid. I loved it. Next time it's on Turner, I'll point it out.”

I looked at him, and I thought,
You are a spectacular creature
.

He shrugged. “It's funny. You'll love it,” he said, and then he tossed the paper onto a chair and picked up his laptop because there was no music playing.

I started looking at antique opal pendants online because I didn't currently own a really fine black opal, and this was a problem for me.

Christopher was playing one of the German modernist composers, and after a while, I remarked, “This isn't music; it's just noise. It doesn't need to exist.”

A small, pitying laugh burped out of him. “Well, it's not
noise
. But I can understand why you wouldn't enjoy it.”

To be an asshole, I said, “Right, except it actually
is
just organized noise. It has no
musicality
”—a word I'd picked up from him.

Christopher is an actual musician, and I do not even know where middle C is on a piano. So normally he could just walk away from some ignorant idiot talking shit, but now he was married to this idiot, so he had to put up with it.

His laugh was the kind you make when some product fails in your hands, like the shampoo cap cracks totally off or the spatula handle snaps in half. With tolerant authority, he replied, “It's not melodic; it's definitely music.”

I just grinned, because even when I really tried, it was impossible to annoy him.

He lacks the annoyance chip.

Just like he doesn't really feel melancholy, rage, or anxiety. These emotions are not part of his repertoire. It's almost an autistic quality. He mostly has one mood, and it's a very good one. I had to find somebody who was immune to me in order to have a great relationship.

All of a sudden, there is proper music: bouncy, catchy, could be '80s but isn't. I look over, and he says, “The Veronicas.” This is followed by June Christy singing “Something Cool,” We Are Scientists, Jóhann Jóhannsson's
IBM 1401, A User's Manual
, and Mary Schneider, whom, he informed me, “is the queen of yodeling.”

He started laughing about something I'd written earlier where I said his dick was as thick as a subway pole. “I can't believe you put that in. You have to take it out.” But it was really cracking him up even though it's not that funny.

I told him, “I'll change it to ‘His dick was as thick as Linda Hunt's wrist
.
'”

This made him laugh so much harder that he was doubled over forward, and his eyes looked like,
Oh shit. This is really it. I'm gonna stroke out
. Watching him, I thought, he could actually have a heart attack and drop dead right now. Not from AIDS or from cancer but from Linda Hunt's wrist.

We settled into our laptops.

Later, an old Barbara Stanwyck movie came on. Whenever her face appeared on the screen, we both looked up.

Christopher adopted his smart-ass tone. “You'd better hope your next husband doesn't like movies in color.”

I turned and looked at him. “What do you mean
next
?”

He was scrolling through album covers, because it was New Release Tuesday, the best day of the week when all the new songs came out.

He paused and met my gaze.

There was nothing sarcastic on his face, no spin. “You know,” he said. “I mean,
come on.
”

I looked back at my laptop and slid my finger across the trackpad. “I know what, exactly?” I glanced back at him.

His smile had kind of faded. “You know that I'll die before you. In all probability.”

I sighed. “I suppose I know it's possible. But I also know you promised not to.”

Which was also true.

I said, “Or you know what? Maybe I'll go ahead and die before you. What would you think of that?”

He grinned.

Then I reminded him, “We wouldn't even be in this situation if you hadn't been such a stupid blond slut when you were in your twenties.”

Christopher always laughs from his stomach, never his chest or throat. So the bed always shakes when he laughs, and sometimes he wakes up the dogs.

I slid my laptop onto the dresser beside the bed, next to my gemological microscope. A strand of glassy, untreated emerald-green jade beads from Myanmar hung from the left eyepiece. I removed the strand and slid it between my fingers for luck.