I stared at the back of his head and wondered if there was something else. Sometimes, his criticisms came in sets of three, like sneezes.
“All right, so you wish I was more fun, basically. What else?”
He didn’t answer. He just returned his prissy little scissors to the polished glass shelf of the medicine cabinet and closed the mirrored door. Then he splashed water on his face and patted it dry with one of the stupidly expensive hand towels that were perfectly folded beside the sink. When he finished, he said, “I think in every relationship there are things each person wished were different.”
So what else bugged him besides the fact that I didn’t throw enough fondue parties? I mentally rolled up my sleeves. I thought wearily, Is it always going to be like this with him? He was like a vending machine that swallowed my change and wouldn’t give me my fucking peanut M&M’s.
“Well, could you maybe name something? Or a few things? Because you seem a little distant, and if I don’t know what I’m doing wrong, how am I supposed to stop doing it?” I trailed him out of the bathroom, practically tugging at his sleeve like a toddler.
In fact, he’d seemed slightly distant all week. Perhaps all month, actually. Possibly longer. I’d let go of my place downtown, and we were living together now, so this was it. It had to work now.
He closed his eyes and extended his tongue between his lips before speaking, a gesture that struck me as annoyingly mannered. “Well, as a matter of fact, I can name something. It bothers me that you never seem to want to leave your, you know, computer.”
He said the word computer as though it was an entirely foreign object, something newfangled and impossibly dangerous to everyone around it, like talkies or the automobile.
It was true, of course. I was perfectly content to let a beautiful, sunny weekend pass unappreciated outside the window while I lay in bed with my laptop on my stomach, e-mailing friends and eating cheese popcorn. I’d lived in New York City since 1989 and never visited the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, or the Central Park Zoo.
I also had two herniated disks and a spinal stenosis. Eleven back specialists, each more learned and expensive than the last, told me there was nothing I could do except continue to take pain medication and wait for it to get worse. This situation made it hard for me to even bend over, let alone stand in a museum. Or ride a bike. I felt that this was a perfectly legitimate medical excuse and that I should be allowed to remain indoors forever.
Because I had not yet spoken, Dennis interpreted my silence as a possible acquiescence. He continued. “I also worry that you’re reverting back to your old ways.” His face flushed as he spoke.
“Old ways” was his code phrase for the period of ten months before I met him, when I was a bed-wetting drunk, alone in my apartment, sitting at my computer in my underwear.
In a way, he was once again correct. I was reverting. Only instead of drinking, I was writing. I saw this as progress. Wasn’t it? I wasn’t in my underwear anymore; I wore gym shorts.
I was sober and in a relationship, and that was supposed to be better than being a drunk, but I also felt like, at least when I was a drunk alone in my apartment, I didn’t feel like my walls resented me or wished I was something other than the mess I was.
* * *
Molly was also a writer, so I asked her, “Do you ever leave your house? Are you happy to always stay inside by yourself?”
She wrote back, “This was always a bone of contention in my marriage. Philip married a writer and then wondered why I wasn’t out water-skiing.”
This made me feel better for a moment, until I reminded myself that Molly and her husband had divorced. It turned out he had a secret girlfriend along with a new baby on the side. I wondered if he met her water-skiing.
* * *
I used to guilt-trip myself when I was a kid. You have to stop lip-synching in front of the mirror. It’s a beautiful day. This is not natural. Bring a hand mirror outside and use the sun as your spotlight if you must, but you need fresh air.
The thing is, I wanted to be more like the person Dennis wished I was. Dennis had the soul of an accountant, and he was exceedingly good at cataloguing my flaws. And because I contained mostly flaws, it was daunting. I had good parts and pieces, too, but these aspects of my character attracted way less attention, possibly because they didn’t require renovation.
I wanted to be somebody who made plans and had friends and knew when the farmers’ market was in the neighborhood. I wanted to be spontaneous and informed. I wanted to somehow just know when the Chuck Close exhibit was at the Met and then have the motivation to go. As opposed to suggesting, yet again, that we have sandwiches and watch old movies on TV—and not even toasted sandwiches, because that’s just extra work for nothing.
I wanted to be that guy. Or perhaps I merely wished that I wanted to be that guy. Wanting to want something isn’t the same as wanting it. I suppose what I really wanted, then, was to give more of a shit, because about certain things, I simply did not.
Dennis would have been so fucking thrilled if I only suggested we do a triathlon together. He would have gone into training immediately. Not that there’s anything wrong with people who do triathlons for pleasure. It’s just that I have absolutely nothing in common with these people. In fact, I have a great deal more in common with serial killers. I am not a triathlon kind of guy, and I don’t want to be one, either. Dennis’s idea of being a couple meant doing things together. My idea of being a couple meant being together but not doing anything except laughing at the couples who were out there doing annoying shit together. If I could attend the finish line of a triathlon and photograph the assorted leg injuries and bodily swellings, I might enjoy it.
He had said he didn’t want me to shut myself in. He was terrified (his word) of us becoming “isolated.” What alarmed me is that his idea of isolated was much closer to my concept of ideal. If we lived on a great expanse of land, Dennis would want a grand swimming pool so that we could invite all our friends over for long, leisurely weekends. Whereas I would want a moat filled with saltwater crocodiles to keep the riffraff out.
* * *
Much to my surprise and slight alarm, Dennis and Christopher formed a friendship independent of me. On the one hand, this was good, because at least Dennis was spending time with a quality person, something he had few of on his own. It also made me seem more valuable in that I had someone worth stealing. I came to the relationship with a built-in agent! Who was fun! Besides, it gave the impression that I had sanctioned the friendship but had better things to do than go out for long, loud, laughter-filled dinners.
The first time they had dinner without me, I stomped around the apartment, alternately anxious and enraged. Are they talking about me? They’d better be, and it had better be flattering. I hope Dennis doesn’t say anything that will let Christopher know what I’m really like. Fuck, I hope they’re not talking about me. They’d better not be.
When Dennis had not returned by midnight, I knew for certain that they had figured out that I was extraneous, they were having an affair, and I was about to lose a boyfriend and an agent in one dinner I didn’t even get to attend.
I fleetingly considered that Dennis had been mugged and was lying on some side street with broken ribs and no wallet, but the mental picture was too appealing at the moment. When I finally heard his keys in the door, I quickly flopped on the bed with my laptop, as if I’d been lounging there for hours, not caring that I didn’t end up with the blond literary agent even though I saw him first.
I needn’t have moved with such great haste, because the door unlocking took quite some time, what with all the key fumbling and dropping (twice) before he lurched into the apartment. If I’d lit a match at the other end of the room, I could have set fire to the liquor fumes emanating from him. He dropped his things on the dining room table and saw that I was still awake. “Oh, hi!” he yelled, like someone wearing headphones who can’t modulate his or her volume. “I didn’t kn
ow you’d still be up.”
Hoping he’d take the hint, I spoke very quietly. “Did you have a good time?”
A hint was way too subtle for someone this drunk. “It was so much fun!” He started detailing the food they’d ordered, which was not the information I wanted, but I listened dutifully.
“So you were at the restaurant this entire time?” I asked, trying not to let judgment creep into my tone, as if Mr. Distillery Breath would notice.
“No, no, no. We finished dinner a long time ago and then went out for a nightcap.”
Nightcap. It was another of those suburban 1950s concepts that seemed learned from TV or movies, not from the real world. It implied “just one more,” which appeared tonight to have been “just one more bottle.” It seemed unlikely that he’d seen Christopher naked or that they’d plotted my murder, so I just let him natter away while he got ready for bed.
If he was this smashed, I wondered what shape Christopher must be in. It’s widely known that Little People can’t hold their liquor, so he had probably passed out in a cab on the way home. I opened a new e-mail and sent him a quick message: “Hey, how was dinner?”
Mere moments later, I got his response. “It was great. Dennis is really sweet, and I see why you like him. He’s stable and handsome and smart—and boy does he know his way around a bottle of wine. Or two.” He then launched into a work issue that had come up while he was at dinner, saying he’d handle it in the morning. It all seemed disturbingly sober, especially since Dennis was already splayed out next to me snoring while Christopher was planning my career. Seemingly nothing could penetrate his shield—not AIDS, not liquor, not even a demanding, crazy author.
As Dennis thrashed and turned on his side before he began snoring again, I reminded myself just how deficient my agent would be as a boyfriend.
* * *
Dennis rented a car so that we could take a road trip out to Pennsylvania to visit his father who lived in an ingenious on-demand assisted living condominium unit. If you were relatively healthy and didn’t need any medical assistance, it was just a small efficiency apartment like any other. But if you suddenly developed a health issue, there was a white-clad medical staff on hand 24-7. You could go from living an independent, carefree lifestyle of board games and craft projects one day to being ventilated and on life support the next without ever having to leave your own unit. Dennis’s dad was popular, and as we were leaving the building to go out for lunch, two other residents engaged him in a brief conversation.
I whispered to Dennis, “I wish we could live here.”
“I know,” he said. “This is great. You know what’s best about it?”
At the same time, he said, “Laundry service,” I said, “IV morphine.”
We decided to take an alternate route back to New York, because the highway between Pennsylvania and Manhattan was such an endless stretch of tedium. We used the car’s GPS, but rather than guiding us, it kidnapped us. After four hours, we realized we’d been heading south, not east. At first, Dennis was furious, but I held his hand and told him it was a good thing.
“We’ll check into a Bates Motel and eat Kentucky Fried Chicken in bed.”
This pleased him enormously. Dennis loved eating messy food with his hands, but only when nobody else was around so that his face could be unapologetically covered with grease.
Later, we snuggled up together on the small, hard mattress with the bleach-scented sheets. We were somewhere in Virginia. My face was pressed against his neck.
“Don’t move,” I told him. “This is perfect.”
“I won’t,” he said, hugging me closer. “It is.”
“Do you think we should search the room for peepholes?” I asked.
He smiled. The room reeked of chicken. I was happy. Dennis was happy. I knew this, because I asked him, “Are you happy?”
“Yes, I’m happy.”
But I wondered. “Would you tell me if you weren’t?”
“I would tell you if I wasn’t happy,” he said.
I couldn’t leave it alone. Was it happy that I felt? As I lay against him and aligned my breathing with his, I realized the thing I actually felt was safe. Normal people who weren’t raised by mentally ill goats probably took the feeling of safety for granted. They only noticed when they suddenly felt unsafe. When the hands reach up from under the bed and grab their ankles, they scream, whereas I’m like “Wait, can you scratch my knee before you kill me?”
Expecting the mushroom cloud, I am stunned into blinking stupidity when I look at the sky and see only blue sky.
I realized I was thinking about all of this because feeling safe felt almost like drinking; something I could imagine myself becoming addicted to instantly. A feeling I would need to experience constantly, no matter what, from now on.
* * *
When Dennis had his first colonoscopy, I went with him to the appointment. When it was over, I joined him with the doctor for the results.
“Everything looks good,” he told us.
The doctor was about Dennis’s age and actually resembled him with short, salt-and-pepper hair and coordinating closely cropped facial hair.
“That’s a relief,” Dennis said.
The doctor then did something doctors don’t usually do: he made small talk. It was doctorly small talk, but still. “Anything else on your mind? How are you feeling otherwise in your life?”
By the end of the appointment, we knew that the doctor enjoyed photography and also played guitar. He was like a friendly family doctor from a Country Crock margarine commercial, except his office was within gunshot distance of the E train.
After we left, Dennis raved about the man. “We should become friends with him. He was amazing.”
It’s true, I thought. We should become friends with the man. Because like a vampire, I wanted to suck the charisma from his veins.
Over the next several weeks, I increasingly felt that Dennis ought to be with a well-adjusted proctologist instead of with me. An easygoing professional who didn’t hold a grudge against the sun and had his own scrapbook of recipes clipped from The Times over the years. I likewise worried that my true mate was somebody who was definitely out of prison but maybe on house arrest for the rest of his life because he did something absolutely awful but thrillingly interesting and unique. Or maybe somebody with a fatal sun allergy. I would love the psychological permission to draw the shades during the sunniest, most glorious day of the year so I could stay inside and type. And not feel like I was deeply defective for this. Or, at least, that I was deeply defective but, so what? Pass the chips and salsa.
I also understood that I had to expand myself as a person. Because this simply would not do, this innate character of mine.
Dennis had expanded himself by giving up his design business to become my business manager. We were an actual corporation now, with a joint checking account and letterhead. Instead of sausage casings or urinal mints, our company created books. Technically, I created the books and earned all the money while Dennis managed it and told me when I could buy a new laptop or upgrade my cell phone. It was like I finally had the dad I never had.
We were together forever. Dennis was my security.
So yes, I would expand as a person. And Dennis would simply have to understand that I could only expand so much before I burst all over the dinner guests and stained their lovely outfits with my mess.
* * *
Though I almost never visited the place, I did own a small house in Northampton, Massachusetts. While it had originally been built in the 1930s—the period in architecture responsible for the Empire State Building and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Pennsylvania masterpiece, Fallingwater—my house had possessed but a single charm: a low asking price. It was not the quaint, graceful abode one might expect of a home near the banks of the historic Connecticut River.
I bought the house before I knew Dennis. Which is to say, there was nobody to stop me from buying it at the time. My inspiration for purchasing it: ine
vitable doom. It would be my emergency bomb shelter, purchased with book advance money. If all failed, I figured, I could return to the town where I was raised and live in the most inexpensive house on the real estate market. It had been so affordable because the street was in a declared flood zone. At the time, this seemed like no big deal. I thought, So I’ll live on the second floor.
Decades ago, it had been a farmhouse with modest charms. Then it was gutted and renovated by the previous owner, a man who clearly had no more experience with home renovation than I did. As far as the craftsmanship of his work was concerned, at least the new vinyl windows were not upside down. There was not much to say beyond that.
Any original details, such as pretty crown molding or solid wood doors, had been stripped clean out and replaced with their contemporary particleboard equivalents from Home Depot. I knew nothing about the man who owned the house before me except the color of his pubic hair and the fact that he must have had a tremendous amount of it, because I was vacuuming those curly red fibers out of the beige wall-to-wall carpeting for a year.
There was a large island in the kitchen with a white laminate top, new oak cabinets, and electrical outlets in abundance, making handy electricity one of the home’s prime selling points. The sliding glass doors off the kitchen overlooked an expansive boggy field where one could easily hide among the shoulder-high weeds. I figured the place would be perfect for the future emergency me; the failed single writer who had become destitute and was now hunkering down until an asteroid hit the planet.
The fact that the house was devoid of charm meant it was easy to maintain. After all, where there are no window boxes, there can be no flowers to water. Aluminum siding meant the house could remain pristine white for all of eternity. But even a plastic wineglass of a house, as it turned out, was a tremendous amount of work for somebody who heaved heavy sighs of fatigue and annoyance when he had to lick an envelope flap and then carry the envelope all the way outside to a mailbox.
The narrow strip of dirt and weeds that separated my house from the street was in fact a Rorschach test for the rest of the nosy neighborhood, who apparently viewed it as an actual lawn—one I was expected to care about and maintain. Notes were slipped under the screen door. “Hi. I just wanted to let you know that my son could mow your lawn if you like, for ten dollars, every two weeks. I only say this because your yard is a little unruly.”