Lust & Wonder by Augusten Burroughs
So should I say something now? Or just let him read, let things go on as they are. Make no move to hurt, no move to repair. Just go and drift, together, or apart.
* * *
We did not speak to each other the rest of the night. We went to bed. He made no attempt to cook, so we had nothing for dinner. I woke up in the night and ate four chocolates.
The puppy woke me at seven thirty, though I think Dennis had gotten up earlier, taken care of him, and put him back in his crate. Dennis woke up again, and while he took Bentley outside, I fed the tiny puppy and tried to get him to poop on his newspapers. When they returned, we let the dogs play.
Dennis went back to bed. We said nothing to each other. Not even “Good morning.”
Last night on the way back from the grocery store, I’d been so happy. The thing I’d always been chasing, it seemed like maybe I’d finally caught up with it. Of course, Dennis had to feel it, too. How could he not? This seventy-five degrees and cloudless content? Are you so, so happy, too?
“Not as happy as you.”
With those words, we became incompatible. Two people, not just one, not as happy as they could be in the relationship.
I could have moved to him, said something, corrected this before it got worse. But I knew that would not happen.
* * *
Bentley vomited on the rug three times. He was clingy, molding his body to fit my calves, tucking into, against, the bone. He went from Dennis on the bed back over to me on the couch. He threw up white foam as though he’d been eating pieces of the ocean.
We were halfway through day two of our standoff when we finally talked.
I am insecure and short-circuit when my security is threatened. I admitted this. But then I managed to hurt him by telling him he was judgmental every day. He asked for examples, evidence, but the drowsy feeling came.
The thing was, I felt he was so judgmental about almost everything that it was difficult to pluck a mere example out of the air to serve as evidence. It was like trying to prove we were in the midst of a sunny day. “Well, we just are. I mean, look.”
We talked but did not resolve. Things felt awkward but not awful. And like somebody who decides to leave the moldy bread in the refrigerator just to see what will eventually happen, I decided, fine.
I wouldn’t be the happier one anymore.
* * *
We moved through this conflict the way one drives through suddenly torrential and frightening rain: feeling that a crash was imminent but with an unspoken agreement to say nothing at all.
We moved out of Dennis’s Upper West Side apartment and into the house we’d built in Massachusetts, where construction was mostly complete. I was astonished by the way the formally intolerable was transmogrified into the merely mundane.
In a way, it was as though the fight that had begun on the sidewalk outside the supermarket never really ended. It merely continued into another state and extended for years. The difference was, we were no longer cooped up together in a studio apartment. We had three floors filled with distractions to keep us divided. It was fascinating how quickly and permanently we settled into a daily routine with so much physical space between us: I worked downstairs; Dennis settled into the room he created as an office upstairs. We e-mailed each other during the day, he cooked at night while I remained on my laptop, and then we ate together at midnight.
The man who bought Dennis’s New York apartment had reminded me of Dennis somehow. He was exceedingly jovial in almost exactly the same indiscriminate way, and I wondered if he and Dennis would become friends. I was surprised when Dennis was chilly with him.
I called Christopher every day and no longer thought of him as just my agent but my best friend. Though even more than this, really, because he was the only person in the world that I liked. Because he’d read every word I’d ever written about myself, he already knew exactly how horrible I was and, still, he took my calls.
I ordered him a gift from late-night home shopping TV and had it sent without a card or any return address, and he guessed it was from me right away.
“But how did you know?” I demanded to know.
He laughed into the phone. “Because who else in the world would send me a Sheena Easton doll? I mean, she’s porcelain and permanently on her knees, always just about to give a blow job; she has wings!”
* * *
Dennis pointed at the pipe sticking out of the wall in the corner of the garage and frowned. “I worry this sink will feel crammed stuck in the corner like that. I wonder if we should have moved it more toward the center.”
But of course we’d had this conversation: the sink could not be moved into the center of the garage’s rear wall because on the other side of that wall was the yellow TV room, and he knew this.
This was Dennis’s dream sink. It would allow him to indulge his fetish: washing out the rags he would use to wash our cars and buff them to a diamond finish. The builder installed the plumbing for the sink in the only place that made sense: tucked into the corner, out of the way of the counters he was also going to install.
We had been standing in the still-incomplete garage for close to forty minutes, Dennis tracing his fingers over the barn-board wainscoting he had installed. Soon there would be shelving that ran along the walls beginning midway and continuing up to the ceiling. Instead of fluorescent lights, we’d installed old hanging schoolhouse lanterns. The curtains were being sewn as we stood there and would be hung the following week. This garage was nicer than most apartments I’d lived in in Manhattan. But I lacked the patience to stand in it and second-guess the location of the sink.
Somebody told us, “Building a house together is a real test of a relationship. If you can survive that, you can survive anything.” I interpreted this as, building the house would be the single and largest test of our relationship ever, and once it’s over, you can relax and be happy, finally.
I told Dennis, “You know, it’s gonna be fine. There’s gonna be like three inches between the sink and the wall, so I think we’ll be okay.”
Dennis said, “Yeah, that’s true. There will be those three inches.”
So, these were my problems now. Will my new garage sink feel crammed into the corner, or would those three inches give it some breathing room? My new sink, in my new climate-controlled garage, in my new luxury cottage, with copper rain gutters and native stone floors. These were my concerns now. My own life felt utterly unfamiliar to me. Distant and pristine, as though belonging to somebody else. As I stood in the garage I thought, This must be what happy feels like.
I had a career that involved sitting in a comfortable chair and which provided me with enough free time to dress the dogs in T-shirts every day and laugh at them. I’d been a store detective, Ground Round waiter, and advertising copywriter, so I knew it really did not get better than this. Furthermore, I did not have a fatal illness, and I was certain baldness would be cured in my lifetime.
As far as I could see, my life now was the opposite of my chaotic, off-the-rails childhood or my drunken twenties in New York.
And yet there were certain details in my new life that seemed suspect upon closer inspection. Like the fact that Dennis and I had built this house in the same town where I was raised.
We would be living on a cul-de-sac. And while many New Yorkers sneer at stores like Target and Walmart, I was openly thrilled to be living within a few miles of both. I already had my pet superstore discount card.
When this eco-friendly, SUV-hating college town was in an uprising over the local buffalo farm being sold and developed into a Lowe’s home improvement store, I was ready to picket. “YOU CAN’T FIX A SINK WITH A BUFFALO!!! IN WITH LOWE’S!!!” I looked at the pristine Hadley farmland and could think of nothing more beautiful than replacing those trees along the borders of the fields with a parking lot for seventeen hundred cars.
I wanted a “normal” suburban childhood, and now I was going to have it, thirty years later. And I was going to have it in a plastic
This was a college town filled with extremely well-educated people who drove Volvos and wore clothing made from sustainable fibers. It had always been this way. And while there were several McMansions in the area, I was sure that in time, some local environmentalist group would burn them to the ground.
Crime in this town was mostly college kids doing vile college things involving beer, condoms, and mailboxes.
We left the garage and climbed back into the car. As we drove down the street, I was thinking about how happy I would soon be, here in this town I kind of loathed but with my stable and normal mate imported directly from the Upper West Side. I saw flashing blue lights in the rearview mirror.
“God fucking damn it,” Dennis said, looking in the rearview mirror. “Shit.”
He eased the car over to the side and threw it into park. He dropped his hands in his lap and then quickly reached for the glove compartment.
“Here, we need the registration,” he said.
It didn’t seem that we were going all that fast.
A young, beefy cop appeared at the driver-side window and said the usual, “License and registration, please.”
Dennis passed these to the cop, who then walked back to his cruiser.
As we sat, Dennis fumed. “I was not speeding. This is just bullshit. This is just…”
I warned him, “Whatever you do, don’t piss him off. Don’t get him mad. Or it’ll just be worse.”
Dennis seemed to be one of those people who had decades of rage simmering below the surface, masked by a smile.
The cop returned and passed the documents back to Dennis. He said, “Do you know how fast you were going?”
Dennis replied, “I think I was going fifty.”
The cop said, “Did you see the speed limit sign?”
Dennis told him, “Well, it was fifty-five back there. And then I think it changed to forty-five.”
The cop said, “You were going fifty-four miles per hour. And the speed limit was forty. You may not have seen the sign. But it was there.”
Then the cop noticed something on our dashboard: a small green indication lamp. He walked around to the front of the vehicle and then returned. “It’s illegal to use fog lights when it’s not foggy.”
It was currently six degrees below zero in western Massachusetts, and we drove with fog lights because there were large, flat sheets of ice on the road. They were easy to miss. Unless you had on the fog lights and could see them.
The cop wrote out a ticket and passed it to Dennis. Then he returned to his car. The ticket was for $175, including $40 for the fog lights. As we pulled out, the cop followed behind us.
Dennis kept checking his rearview mirror. “That fucker is following us,” he said. “To make sure we don’t speed.” And he pulled into the parking lot of a convenience store.
The cop drove on by. And we sat there for a moment. Dennis was fuming. “There was no fucking sign. I was going fifty-four. The speed limit was just fifty-five. I saw that sign. What the fuck?”
He said, “I’m going to fight this ticket. That was some sort of trap. Who do they think they’re pulling over? That road is all local residents going home from work.”
I knew he wouldn’t fight it, because he was speeding, if only just a little. And what sort of case is that? But the fog lights thing. That’s bullshit. That’s not a ticket for fog lights; that’s a ticket for two fags from Manhattan in a black Range Rover.
After the speeding and fog lamp ticket, we became aware of just how many cops patrolled this small New England college town where we were about to live, and it was a little alarming.
“Look at that,” Dennis said the following night as we approached the local strip mall. “Will you just take a good look at that.” He made a tsk sound and shook his head from side to side. A cop had pulled over a minivan. Peering in the window as we drove by, I saw it was an ordinary woman, probably a mother.
Dennis was still livid from his previous brush with law enforcement, so he was especially compassionate toward her. “Yeah, right. There are people who want to fly planes into our nuclear power plants and dump poison in our reservoirs, and these fat-assed college-town cops have nothing better to do than pull over some soccer mom in a blue minivan. Bullshit.”
I laughed, but then when I looked at his face, I saw he was enraged. He wasn’t being funny; he was being borderline personality disorder-ish.
But then? Less than two miles down the street, we saw another cop, this one speeding in the opposite direction. I assumed he was driving to the scene to assist the other cop with the dangerous tampon user.
Until we could move into our new house the following week, we were living in a local motel that we called the Roach Motel. It was the sort of motel where the carpets were composed of equal parts nylon fiber and dried bodily fluids. We stayed there because it was one of the few places in the area that would accept our two dogs.
The dogs had come to accept the Roach Motel as home and playpen. There were two full-sized beds in the room with only a slender nightstand between them, so the dogs were able to leap from one bed to the other. They chased each other this way, back and forth between the beds. It was as if this bit of canine acrobatics was something programmed into their genetic code.
We reached the Roach Motel and slid into the parking space directly in front of our door. The motel was actually sort of charming red brick with twenty rooms, though uncared for. But if a couple of gays were to buy the place, redecorate it, and jack the prices up and out of the range of keg-crazed frat boys with hard-ons and roofies, it’d be a nice place.
Inside the room, I grabbed my laptop and peeled back the covers. We needed to use all four flat foam pillows on our one bed.
Immediately, I noticed the smell of cologne wafting up from the sheets. I leaned in close and saw crinkly red pubic hairs. Definitely not hairs from either of us.
Luckily, the sheets on the opposite bed were clean. So I switched them around and then turned on HGTV to watch the downscale decorating shows that Dennis found so amusing. In some rear compartment of my mind, I realized I kind of liked living in the semicharming, semigross motel room and almost dreaded moving into our cedar-shingled, plaster-walled dream home.
At eleven, we drove to Chili’s to pick up our takeout order. On the way back, Dennis decided to stop into the convenience store to get some milk. But when we pulled up to the curb in front of the place, we noticed a trio of suspicious youths. What made them suspicious was that they had mullets. Programmed by years of living in Manhattan, I immediately suspected that these weren’t ordinary college kids but unsavory white trash from the nearby slum town of Holyoke. Even-staid Dennis was on alert.
“That looks a little weird, doesn’t it?” he said.
“Yes, it does,” I agreed. “I think they’re probably about to go in that store and rob it. I wouldn’t go in, seriously. They could easily have guns. This is bad. Look at their hair.”
Dennis wasn’t paranoid the way I was. But these were undeniably scummy kids. We drove away.
Then Dennis happened to glance in the rearview mirror and saw that the little psychopaths had actually walked into the center of the street and were now watching us as we drove away. So maybe I wasn’t so paranoid after all. Maybe I was just fucking savvy.
The motel was just around the corner from the store and the hoodlums. If we turned into the driveway, they would definitely see us. And even if they hadn’t intended to hold up the store and shoot the clerk in the head, now we’d insulted them by driving away at the mere sight of them. So surely they would teach us a lesson and shuffle over to the motel parking lot, find our car, and smash all the windows with large rocks. They might even try to pry their way inside the room and kill our dogs.
My therapist back in New York told me that one of my problems is that I create these elaborate fantasies—always of disaster—and then my emotional response engages a
I told Dennis I was worried the thugs were going to break into the room and kill the dogs, so instead of turning into the driveway, he made a left onto a side street.
That’s where we saw a police cruiser, slowly driving along the street perpendicular to ours, about one hundred feet away. Seeing us, the police cruiser drifted to a stop.
Now, we drove into one of the residential driveways and then backed out. We turned around. Something perfectly normal. And while it was late, it wasn’t so late. Didn’t people in the suburbs drive after 10:00 P.M.?
We cruised back to the traffic light and made a right. Safe now from the eyes of the eventual inmates, we drove up to our motel room door and parked.
“You just watch,” Dennis said, “that fucking cop is going to drive right past us now.”
And sure enough, he did.
The next morning, we saw three police cruisers in the three miles between the Roach Motel and our house. So, basically, one cop per mile.
“This is just unbelievable,” I said. Somewhere deep in my bones, I had known all along that moving back to this town had been a terrible mistake. My first childhood had been horrible enough; why would I even want a second chance in the same fucking town?
We came across a cop who had pulled over an old man in a pickup truck. An old man! In a pickup truck! These cops should be hunting down those kids from last night, I thought. They should be slamming them to the ground and beating them with nightsticks, not ticketing onion-growing seniors. I thought, We could have been killed last night. Those kids should be in handcuffs.
That evening in the room over a dinner of pizza from Joe’s in Northampton, I went online to research these Amherst cops. What I found was an interesting local Web site that displayed an activity log from the Amherst Police Department.