Lust & Wonder by Augusten Burroughs
He gave me crazy-person side eye, but he didn’t swat my hand away from his shoulder or take back his water bottle, and I realized I could do anything to him and he would never hate me. I could never drive him away, spoil things between us, or otherwise sour things in his eyes, because he already knew how horrible I could be, yet he loved me, anyway.
The truest thing was, I just plain worshipped his ass. I also knew that in my twenties if some guy had said, “I worship you,” I would have smiled politely, suddenly “remembered” a dental appointment, and then never fucking called him again. Yet when we arrived back at the villa with heavy shopping bags of steak, corn on the cob, and ice cream, I said exactly those words to him, and he smiled and then laughed, utterly pleased.
“I am so glad,” he said.
“But I really do,” I continued with some anxiety. I needed him to understand. “No … I mean, I actually worship you, just every aspect, every detail. The hair on your legs is like fireworks. I could stare at it for hours.” I wanted him to know how lower brain stem my attraction was, how deeply rooted and complete, how obsessive and terminal.
“I know you do,” he told me. “Can you hand me the butter?”
After grilled steaks, we stripped off our clothes and walked outside. The pool wasn’t huge, but it was amazing, sitting on a deck that overlooked a couple of miles of palm trees and then nothing but the blue Caribbean beyond. When I next glanced at Christopher, he was already airborne, having ejected himself from the edge of the pool straight out in shockingly perfect form so that he seemed to hover in the air above the water before arching himself directly into it.
He was smiling when he surfaced for air at the other side of the pool. “You should come in. It feels great,” he said.
I was staring at him in open bewilderment. “So wait. How could I know you for like ten years and be with you for more than one year and yet not know you could do this?”
“Do what?” he asked, swiping his wet hair out of his eyes.
“Um, diving like that?”
“Oh, that,” he laughed. “Yeah, I was a swimmer when I was a kid. I can’t believe you didn’t notice all the trophies in my old bedroom at my parents’ house. Come on, get in,” he said, slapping the water.
I walked down the steps into the pool, trying to look cool as I checked for dead snakes lurking in the corners. I dived beneath the surface and opened my eyes underwater. I swam toward him and grabbed his dick as I broke the surface to find he was already laughing.
* * *
The fired-clay tile floors of our villa were cool underfoot, and the bed was carved wood with four posters, hung with white mosquito netting that looked like a billowing wedding veil. At some point before the sun went down, we’d have to climb into the Jeep and drive on the wrong side of the road into town to buy essentials for the evening: steaks, corn on the cob, avocado, and mineral water.
I was reading a book about the Hope Diamond. Christopher was reading Billboard. We were both wearing shorts and nothing else. When he stood up to walk to the freezer for more ice, I watched the way his heavy penis swayed in his shorts, and I got up and followed him.
When I wrapped my arms around him, he laughed.
“You used to moan when I came up behind you like this,” I told him. “Now, you just laugh.”
He turned around. When he opened his mouth to say something, I kissed him. He laughed again.
“Oh, okay,” I said. I could tell he was not in the mood. I felt slightly sad, but that’s the way it was. I reminded him, “We used to have a lot more sex.”
He looked at me like, Are you even real? “We had sex three times today,” he told me. “That’s more sex than most people have in a whole week. Some in a month.”
When he put it like that, it did seem like I couldn’t complain even though I wanted to. I felt like if we were standing before a judge, there was no way on earth the judge would side with me.
A few months before, Christopher had done the math. We’d had a lifetime’s worth of excellent sex in the first year we were a couple. We front-loaded. I’d already asked him this question many dozens of times, but I asked it again now, fresh. “Would you marry me right now?”
“Yes,” he said, laughing.
“But I’m serious. Would you?”
“Yes,” he said, repressing a laugh.
“Are you sick of me yet?” I pestered.
“No,” he laughed.
“Will you ever get sick of me?”
He cocked his head to the side in make-believe thought. “Well…”
* * *
When we returned from vacation, I was overwhelmed by all the daily life things that needed to be done: the apartment was filthy and needed to be cleaned, I had to write a bunch of checks, I needed to get back to my writing, I also had to make an appointment with the dentist because I was almost positive one of my crowns was cracked.
These were exactly the sorts of things that I used to run away from by drinking. Ordinary tasks have always overwhelmed me.
But I had no desire to drink now. There was nothing in my life I wanted to obliterate, not even the crappy stuff.
* * *
I was wearing a three-piece, pin-striped suit and trying not to scuff my black shoes as I shoved my way through the aggressively revolving glass door of the Marriott to meet Christopher’s parents in the lobby.
When his parents stepped from the elevator, I saw them before they saw me in the crowded lobby. I wanted to call out, but I suddenly wasn’t sure what to call them. Mom and Dad seemed somehow forced and awkward. Shouting out their first names also seemed weird, but then Mr. and Mrs. Schelling would be worse. I settled on “Hey!” while waving my arms in their direction.
“Oh, hey!” his dad said, smiling and giving me a hug. I kissed my mother-in-law on the cheek and told her she looked beautiful.
I led them outside, and we climbed into the back of a cab. “Fifty-Fourth and Eighth,” I told the driver. I was taking two septuagenarians to 54 Below, a Manhattan nightclub in the basement of the former Studio 54, where their son would be playing piano.
* * *
Here’s another thing they do not tell you in rehab: if you are an alcoholic and you stop drinking alcohol, every drink you order in a restaurant for the rest of your life will arrive with a straw in it.
So there I was at a legendary disco-and-drug den, drinking Diet Coke, the single worst liquid ever invented. This was the closest I would ever get to that legend, and my drink had a straw.
The upside was that the show was phenomenal. Christopher was the musical director and accompanist for his friend Anne, an amazing singer and actress. There was a standing ovation, and for a moment, I was happier than I had ever been in my life. Christopher was wearing a black-and-white Versace jacket with black pants, and his mustache looked like a horseshoe, and he seemed famous but wasn’t. All those years he’d been just my agent there had been hidden under his clothing a concert pianist, a diver, a World Series watcher, and a great body with numerous impressive attributes. In fact, each day, things were revealed to me casually and often by accident that seemed incredibly essential for me to know, things I should have already known. Like, he could sing. I didn’t even know he was color blind until six months into the naked part of our relationship. I, who had written dangerously close to a dozen books about myself, simply could not conceive of a person who didn’t just blurt it all out.
Christopher’s mother leaned over and said, “Those music lessons were worth every penny.” She was beaming.
Christopher’s dad looked like he may well explode in tears.
That was when I decided there was no reason they couldn’t be my parents, too. I had been cursed with the worst parents in the world, and I’d suffered through them for decades. Now that I had found two of the very best, it seemed foolish to let them get away.
* * *
The dogs crowded us to the edges of the bed when we slept, even though it was a king-sized mattress and the dogs
So one morning, I suggested we add a second bed. “A twin, at the foot of the king.” I told him, “Remember in the 1970s? Maybe your mother didn’t do this, but mine made a sofa out of a twin bed by using pillows and Indian bedspreads.”
Christopher paused in the bathroom doorway, holding his coffee cup. “Yeah,” he said, “if we’re going to imitate one of our mothers, let’s make sure it’s yours. That’s a really good idea.” His mom had been a schoolteacher in Ohio; mine was a mentally ill poet whose psychiatrist raised me in exchange for her child-support checks.
Christopher said, “Plus, if we get a twin bed, that’s where I’d end up sleeping while you and the dogs hog the king.”
* * *
That night, I had a dream that Christopher was just a dick. He was a total asshole to me. I woke up in a foul mood.
“I can’t believe you’re mad at me for something I did to you in a dream,” Christopher protested.
His incredulous laugh was different from his normal laugh, and I suspected I might be the only one who got to see it.
“Don’t even speak to me,” I said.
After five minutes, I said, “But I would marry you, even though you were just awful to me.”
* * *
On April 1, 2013, Christopher and I took the ferry to Staten Island and stood before a dignified and genuinely funny city hall clerk, while down in Washington the Supreme Court was considering two watershed cases. Gay marriage was seriously trending.
As we walked out the front door of city hall, Christopher turned to me and exclaimed, “You’re my husband!”
I smiled, because this was true. I was his husband and he was my …
Christopher’s smile faded, too. “Wait,” he said. “That makes me the wife.”
Since I had been thinking the same thought at that moment, this confirmed that I had married the right person. But what he said was true. I tried reversing the roles by calling Christopher “my husband.” And sure enough, in my mind’s eye, I immediately became Tippi Hedren in The Birds: pea-green suit, blond chignon, heels.
I couldn’t call Christopher my husband, because saying it made me feel like a cross-dresser. And believe me, I do not judge cross-dressers. But I lack the motivation to dress properly as a man, let alone an archetypal woman with layers of accessories. I have needed new sneakers for four months. How hard is it to go buy a pair of sneakers? Apparently, very.
Likewise, I don’t have anything against wives, but surely I don’t need to elaborate on the bullying of gay boys for being effeminate, forcing us into the caveman stance of “I ain’t no damn wife.”
So on this gay day, when I experienced firsthand what I believe is a civil right, instead of feeling triumphant and proud, I felt tricked.
“Getting married took away one of our words,” I said.
We had previously referred to each other as boyfriend. Age inappropriate to some, but it did just fine. Partner sounds cloyingly, politically correct, or as if we work at a law firm. In spouse, I mostly hear “S.mouse,” the name of Chris Lilley’s blackface teenage rapper in Angry Boys. And it’s stiff and formal and a little heavy in the sibilant S department. The best suggestion came from Liz, one of our witnesses at the ceremony, a brilliant contraction of boyfriend and husband: boyband. We’re all word people, so this made us laugh, yet there was an unavoidable whiff of “I married an old man who thinks he’s in One Direction,” which is when I stopped laughing.
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.
* * *