Lust & Wonder (14 page)

The cab reached a clog of traffic near midtown. We stopped moving, and I wondered,
Is this what it looks like? The worst day of your life, moments or hours or possibly even several days before you realize in retrospect this was the moment when everything changed for the worst?

My mind went in a circle, clockwise: me not hearing from Dennis today or tomorrow; Dennis not coming home because he is not alive.

Finally, we reached the apartment building, itself a skyscraper, and I ran inside. The lobby was packed with senior citizens who had ambled down from their apartments to gather and wring their hands. I strode over to the elevator banks, hating their slowness more than ever and then feeling a sting of surprise and gratitude when there was an elevator already waiting. I pressed the button for our floor and then caught myself holding my breath.

My hands were shaking when I unlocked the door.

It was empty.

He was not there.

And
wait
.

The TV was on. His briefcase there on the floor, tossed.

And Dennis
walking around the corner
, his precious face, all mine, his expression numb, so much damage in his eyes. No dust on his body, no blood, clean, pressed and whole.

I rushed into him, pressed my body against his, hard, not hard enough. He smelled like him.

Anything else can happen to me and I don't care, I realized.

What can you say? I said, “Thank God.” And I do not believe in God. Except, for this fleeting, thirty-second window of my life, I did, because he brought Dennis home unscathed.

He was bewildered. “I had the wrong day,” he muttered. “I went downtown and realized I got my days mixed up. So I went into Century 21 and bought some socks. Then I got back on the subway and came home, and Alice called from her car and said, ‘Turn on the news.'” He showed me his receipt from the downtown clothing store: he must have taken the last subway to ever leave the World Trade Center station before it was all crushed to rubble and dust.

Standing side by side, we watched the towers fall on CNN.

If his apartment had faced south instead of north, we could have watched without a television.

I led him into the narrow, windowless kitchen. I backed him against the trash can by the wall and held his face in my hands. I said, “I want to spend the rest of my life with you. I want us to be married.”

Dennis closed his eyes. He said, “Okay.”

I said, “Are you sure?”

He nodded. “You should get rid of your apartment downtown and move in,” he said in a numb monotone. He turned, walked back over to the TV, and stood there watching.

I looked at the back of his head, salt-and-pepper hair buzzed close to his scalp, and thought,
That's it—we're official.

I looked down at the worn linoleum floor. I decided to clean and wax it. I used a small brush I found under the sink to scrub it on my hands and knees. Briefly, I wondered,
Is a terrorist attack a poor reason for taking our relationship to the next level?
But he'd said yes, so I didn't want to question it. How rash could my suggestion have been if he'd agreed to it? Dennis was a bit of an emotional penny pincher, after all, kind of a cheapskate when it came to handing out the feelings.

Still, as I slopped liquid wax over his barely there, worn-out kitchen floor, I couldn't help but think it was like a macabre game show. Maybe I'd won, but would I even want the prize?
“It's the end of the world! Grab whoever's next to you and bury yourselves under the trash in the backyard! Hurry!”

*   *   *

After the grisly stench—electrical fire mixed with meat and blended with chemicals—left the city and spring had finally arrived, the area was renamed
Ground Zero
and became something that seemed permanent, a macabre construction pit on a vast scale, nothing to be visited. Life simply continued without it.

One morning as he stood in the steam-drippy bathroom trimming his soul patch with a small pair of scissors, Dennis told me that he wished I made more of a social effort. “It just feels like I'm the one who's always making plans with other people or suggesting we go to the museum or whatever.”

What he said was completely true. I was totally happy watching common TV with him, having no friends, and eating only food from takeout cartons. This, I suddenly saw, was a character flaw.

Instead of looking at me in the mirror when he said this, he leaned in close to inspect the precision of his trimming.

“Sometimes it feels like that,” he added in an offhanded way, offering me a tight little smile. “Just once in a while, you could suggest a bike ride, or maybe there's a book reading you'd like to go to.”

The only thing more distasteful than riding a bike would be riding a bike to a book reading.

I folded my arms across my chest and felt very drowsy, like I might actually nod off while standing there in the bathroom doorway.

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 know 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.