He smiled and pulled one of his hands out of his pockets. He said, “Good, because…” and handed me a freshly minted brass key.
Mitch watched as I removed my own key ring and unsuccessfully tried to pry my thumbnail into the groove to open up enough space, so I handed it over to him. “Can you do this?”
“Oh yeah,” he said, “I’m good at that.” And he was. Because in like three seconds, it was done.
I reached for my wallet and found the spare key to my own apartment that I kept in a slot with my driver’s license. I handed it over. “Maybe you can put this one on your own key ring while you’re at it.”
He was still smiling, but his smile grew even warmer, the dimples creasing both cheeks. “I love that you already have a spare with you. Like you were ready.”
“Oh, I was ready,” I told him. “I’ve been ready since I was nine.”
It actually turned out to be a weirdly romantic little moment even though it only involved a base metal.
The great thing about exchanging keys is that it’s just one or maybe two floors below the romance level of rings, and if things don’t work out—or worse, go horribly wrong—you don’t even have to ask for them back. All you need is a twenty-four-hour locksmith, and New York City probably has more locksmiths than rats.
* * *
I had stopped living according to the Gregorian calendar. Time passed in the form of dates with Mitch. Something happened not “last week” but rather “four dates ago,” and, typically, everything that happened between us happened after several martinis.
Mitch was deeply odd, and this appealed to me enormously. The fact that he was my favorite author seasoned everything about him with a kind of positive-spin saffron. My initial infatuation, though, was burnished away by almost constant contact, and I began to notice small details. For example, I saw that he had fine lines around his eyes, which I hadn’t seen before. I realized that until we traded keys and started sleeping over at each other’s places, I’d only seen him at night in dim, flattering restaurant lighting.
The sun was not his friend.
The first morning we woke up together and I looked at his face, the phrase ravaged by time came to my mind. Of course, he rolled over and smiled and said, “I love this. I love waking up next to you.”
I managed to smile back at him and say, “Oh, I know. Me too,” but what I was really thinking was, Now I need to go to a darkroom supply store and buy blackout shades for my apartment.
Another thing I noticed once we started hanging out in the sunlight with hangovers instead of at midnight with cocktails was the patchy nature of his body hair. Most of his chest was covered with short, black hair except for areas where it appeared simply to have been worn away by some kind of unexplained friction. It was the same on his arms and legs. Although I hated myself for it, I thought it anyway: he looked used up already. Mentally, I demoted him to Secondhand Mitch, a spontaneous nickname that stuck the instant it entered my small, mean brain.
I probably could have overlooked every one of these things if only he hadn’t insisted upon speaking. But all he could talk about was what a failure he was. Mitch was a bemoaner.
To me, it was a staggering accomplishment that he’d published two books. Mitch saw this as evidence of failure, because he’d written several others and none of them had found publishers. This became the only thing he talked about after the brief ceremony of exchanging keys. Dinner suddenly meant cocktails, pub burgers, and a tiresome diatribe against the publishing industry and the futility of his existence as a failed and talentless writer.
“I should just kill myself,” he groaned. “I don’t even deserve to be alive and eat burgers.”
My feeling was, But you do deserve to pay for them, that’s for damn sure. So when the check arrived, I stopped automatically reaching for my wallet.
It was actually quite stunning. The keys themselves had seemingly unlocked his negative, depressive nature and released it into the wild. I now suspected the wrinkles around his eyes were the result not of sunlight but rather scowling in misery for extended periods.
“I’ll never have another book published again,” he complained as he chewed fries. “I am such a loser. God, I hate my life.”
I tried to be encouraging. “You’re not a loser. It’ll happen again, you’ll see. And your last book was amazing. Don’t forget, that’s how we met.”
But my efforts only made him feel worse.
“Oh my God, now I have to deal with your pity on top of everything else? You should get another boyfriend, somebody who’s not defective like me.”
“But I’m defective, too,” I told him, reaching across the table for his greasy fingers. “I’m even more defective than you are, I promise.”
* * *
Mitch’s best friend was also a writer, but quite a famous one. They’d met in college, moved to the city together, and had lived practically next door to each other ever since.
He was a disarmingly sweet guy, exceedingly charismatic and funny. All of which was surprising given his reputation as a notorious egomaniac and douche-bag, known more for snorting coke off toilet lids than gentlemanly charm. I liked him a lot. He was good-looking. I might even describe him as powerfully good-looking. In fact, that’s exactly how I would describe him.
He was also an excellent cook, which I discovered when Mitch and I went to his place for Thanksgiving and he prepared the turkey himself. That doesn’t sound like much in itself, but the first time in your life you have Thanksgiving turkey that isn’t dry, you just don’t expect it to have come from the oven of an internationally bestselling novelist and fixture of Manhattan nightlife. I would have expected such a fine turkey from, say, Barbara Kingsolver. But not from this guy. So it was sort of a wow moment. Also, he looked dapper in a white chef’s apron.
There were lots of people there, including several celebrities, but I found myself most engaged by Famous Author Friend and could only look away from him with effort.
He held court majestically at his concrete-topped dining table, telling witty and unflattering stories about his celebrity acquaintances while Mitch just kind of melted back into his chair, shrinking and glowering and not saying much of anything except to occasionally interject himself into the conversation in order to argue a small and irrelevant fine point.
“And then she grabbed her Tony off the shelf and used the base to hammer the hook into the wall!”
“It wasn’t a Tony,” Mitch mumbled petulantly as he stared at the serving plate of buttered peas in the center of the table. “It was a Daytime Emmy.”
Famous Author Friend glanced over at him like, Dude, really?
The cleft in Mitch’s chin that I’d previously admired and considered one of his best features suddenly became an asshole on his face.
After we left, anxious Mitch seemed genuinely relieved, exhaling in the elevator, as though we’d escaped just barely in time, right before the electric chair was dragged out from the coat closet.
I, on the other hand, felt like we’d left the party too soon. I thought we should have stayed, perhaps even long after everyone else had left. I could have cleaned up.
On the walk to the inevitable bar, Mitch admitted that he’d had trouble in the past introducing boyfriends to Famous Author Friend, because they always ended up wanting to date him instead of Mitch. Apparently, Mitch lost two or three boyfriends in precisely this fashion.
I could immediately see what the problem was, of course: in addition to avoiding daylight, Mitch should never be seen in the same room at the same time with his friend. When you could compare them side by side like that, Famous Author Friend did come across as infinitely more exciting, appealing, and desirable. Much like thinking your own engagement ring is lovely until you see Elizabeth Taylor’s.
* * *
While I could no longer tell myself that I was drinking moderately like a normal person, my drinking didn’t seem to be a problem, because I was way more social than ever before. I was al
so not drinking quite as much as I used to. An accomplishment on two fronts.
Sure, looked at from one narrow-minded perspective, I had failed my sobriety. But examined through another, less fanatical lens, I had made real progress with my people skills.
It seemed therefore reasonable that I should touch base with a therapist. The popularly vague wisdom is that one should choose a therapist based on the recommendation of a trusted friend. But I had no such trusted friend; I had something better: I chose a therapist based on the price of real estate in Manhattan. To me, how bad could a therapist be if he was able to maintain an office along Central Park West with Lauren Bacall and Yoko Ono as neighbors?
* * *
That late fall afternoon, Central Park was like a snow globe that had been shaken, except instead of white flakes there were colorful leaves swirling past the lampposts and down along the winding paths. The air was cool and crisp as if imported from Switzerland. Looking up, I saw the shape of Jackie O in a cloud formation; she was wearing an Hermès scarf around her head and carrying a crocodile Kelly bag. She was about to be consumed by a giant panda.
It occurred to me that I had lived in New York City for thirteen years, and yet this was only the third time I had been to Central Park. The other two times were also that week. The first was on Monday when the cabdriver drove through it on the way to my new therapist in a building just down the street from the Dakota (where, as the old New York joke goes, Rosemary’s Baby and John Lennon were both shot). My second park experience was an hour later in the taxi home.
I paid the fare and stepped out of the cab. A hot dog vendor was at the corner, and I wondered if my shrink got lunch from him. When I got upstairs to his office, I’d see if I could detect faint ketchup stains on the front of his shirt or tie.
I made my way to the building and found the cavernous elevator. When I reached the floor, I arrived at a door with four buzzers, each with an engraved brass nameplate. I pushed the buzzer marked Dr. Howard Schwartz, and after a brief pause, the door unlocked.
The communal waiting area was composed of utilitarian chairs that were comfortable enough for five minutes and a glass-topped coffee table spread with magazines I didn’t even realize were still in print, like Sunset and Ladies’ Home Journal. A narrow hallway led away from the waiting area, lined with four white doors, each closed.
Just as I was sitting down and reaching for a Saturday Evening Post that could have been—or maybe was—from the 1970s, one of the doors opened, and there was Dr. Schwartz. This was the second time I’d seen him, but I’d forgotten what he looked like. He was so ordinary in appearance—a generic, middle-aged Caucasian mental health professional—that I wondered if anyone ever recognized him anywhere. I thought, He would make the perfect criminal.
I nodded and stood, hoping I didn’t look insane.
He motioned for me to come into his office.
The ritual of therapy had begun.
His office was completely nondescript, as befitting the man himself. Add a poster of a palm tree and it could have been a travel agency; slide a Texas Instruments calculator onto the desk and he could be an accountant. If there had been a dildo and a video camera in the room, he could even have passed for an ironic pornographer.
It was an utterly conflict-free space.
I sat in the brown leather recliner next to the table with a box of tissues on top, and he sat across from me in the black leather recliner. They were identical chairs in different colors. The patient’s was brown, I decided, because he or she had not yet reached the degree of self-awareness to occupy the black.
“So,” Dr. Schwartz began, “how were things this week?” He smiled pleasantly, as if we were old friends catching up.
“I think pretty great,” I said, smiling back at him. I picked up where we left off in our last session, which was also our first. He knew that I’d relapsed, but I hadn’t yet told him how I’d spent Thanksgiving.
I found that I was excited to tell him, mostly because it gave me the chance to talk about Mitch’s Famous Author Friend, and that was the next-best thing to seeing him again. Besides, I was a new patient and therefore determined to be his most entertaining, so of course I was going to name-drop.
Already, Dr. Schwartz was vastly superior to other therapists I had seen over the years because he said things. For example, he admitted that he thought my departure from strict sobriety into delicate moderate drinking was not the rough-and-tumble fall off the wagon some might consider it to be but rather a sign that I was taking control of my life. He was very positive about it, in fact.
Something latent and Baptist within me felt like shouting, “Amen!” It was one of the most liberating and invigorating therapy sessions I’d ever had. Anxiety had paralyzed me before the confession. I hated having to explain my alcoholism and subsequent relapse at the first therapy session, before I’d had enough time to make him like me. It was like being on a first date and letting your worst, awful self ooze out all over the table. That stress and worry had been for nothing, because his reaction was the next-best thing to reaching around behind his chair, grabbing a bottle of Veuve Clicquot, and popping the cork right there—cheers!
I crossed my legs and filled him in on my week. I told him about how Mitch and I spent Thanksgiving, and when I mentioned Famous Author’s name, Dr. Schwartz’s face lit up.
“Wow, that’s impressive,” Dr. Schwartz said. “He’s a genius. I’ve read several of his books.”
It seemed trivial to mention the fact that the turkey was juicy, but Dr. Schwartz appeared to believe it was significant, because he asked, “You don’t happen to know how he prepared the turkey, do you?”
I felt just the smallest pang of failure in my chest that it hadn’t even occurred to me to get the recipe. “No, we arrived too late for that,” I said.
I felt so at ease, I even described Mitch’s spotty body hair and compared it to Famous Author Friend’s much more evenly distributed fur. “You could almost comb the hair on his forearms,” I said, “while with Mitch, it’s more like somebody tried to scrub it off with a scouring pad.”
Dr. Schwartz nodded and told me that nutritional deficiencies can result in irregular body hair loss. And furthermore, many psychological illnesses have a nutritional component. He was happy that I was expanding my social circle and didn’t spend the holiday locked up alone in my apartment, as I’d admitted doing for years.
I thought, Yeah, that’s a good point.
As uncomfortable as the subject made me, I felt I had to discuss sex.
Because when I told myself things were perfect with Mitch, I meant they were perfect except for the sex. For some reason, I couldn’t seem to get or maintain an erection around Mitch. For the first few weeks, I was able to blame this on our late nights of drinking. But eventually, Mitch began pestering me for a better explanation. The trouble was, I didn’t know why my body failed to react the way it should around him.
When I explained this to Dr. Schwartz, he began to frown as he listened and nodded. At one point, he asked if I was able to get erections when I was not around Mitch.
“Oh yeah,” I said. “All the time, like a teenager. Sometimes at work for no reason. It’s annoying.”
He nodded at this, as though it served as some sort of confirmation.
I admitted that I didn’t find Mitch appealing when he was not wearing clothes. “He works out, a lot. But only his upper body. His legs are really skinny and pale, and the hair on them is especially thin and weird looking.”
Dr. Schwartz told me it wasn’t surprising I was experiencing intimacy issues. “He sounds quite imbalanced and negative.”
I nodded. “You totally get it.”
“And there’s not much sexy about a negative attitude.”
This seemed incredibly obvious, yet it hadn’t occurred to me. I rolled my eyes. “Oh my God, that is so true.”
The doctor looked at me pointedly.
“But I really love him,” I said. “I want the sex
to work.”
Dr. Schwartz asked me, “What do you love about Mitch?” He poised his pen above his pad, ready to take copious notes.
I had to think about it for a moment. “Well, he’s genuinely peculiar, not, you know, like a poser acting weird. And he’s broken, which is sad and appealing, I guess. He’s definitely smart. He’s hilarious, though I don’t think he’s trying to be funny or really even knows that he is, so it’s accidental.”
His advice was, “Sex extends from deep intimacy. You can’t rush these things.”
Tremendous relief made my body feel instantly lighter. Now Mitch couldn’t pester me about the frequency of our sex because a true and proper psychiatrist said so. More importantly, I realized that even though Dr. Schwartz was completely un-hot, I would much rather have sex with him than with Mitch. I didn’t say this out loud but only because I couldn’t think of how to phrase it without it sounding like an insult.
Toward the end of the session, Dr. Schwartz told me to pay careful attention to my own thoughts and motivations. He instructed me, “Be as honest with yourself about your feelings as possible. Knowing what you don’t feel is also a feeling.” He added, “And don’t beat yourself up like Mitch does.”
We scheduled an appointment for the following week, and I left his office feeling a glimmer of excitement. Part of me felt I was fooling myself. Because part of me believed that an alcoholic can’t ever drink again. But the rest of me felt pretty good and would feel even better after a martini.
* * *
Mitch went to many parties and out to many dinners during the holiday season, and because I was his shiny new boyfriend, I went too.
The week before Christmas, we went to Moomba, downtown on Sixth Avenue near Christopher Street.
Moomba had no sign, of course; you just had to know. And then they had to let you in. Because it was so new and so “it,” normal people couldn’t go there. The only reason I was there was because of the guy I was dating and not having sex with.
Mitch was getting angry with Colin, another famous writer who was sitting next to him.
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