Lust & Wonder

by Augusten Burroughs

  All of me, each cell and membrane, every part of me was focused on one thing: making him laugh.

  When I finally finished making the revisions and sent the manuscript back to him, it only took him overnight to read it. “It’s great. It’s fucking hilarious and sick, and Jen’s gonna totally love it.”

  Jen was an editor at St. Martin’s Press. He was going to send the manuscript out to a dozen editors, but she was the one he told me would love the book. He managed to get it into her hands right before she left for Germany for the Frankfurt Book Fair, one of the publishing industry’s major events.

  After two torturous days, he started getting responses. No, no, no.

  “Don’t worry. I still haven’t heard back from Jen, and I know her really well. She’ll get it.”

  My friend Molly tried to be supportive, but there had been a bidding war for her novel, so I wasn’t sure she grasped my despair. “He says he knows just the right publisher,” I moaned to her, “and now I’m pretty sure it’s Kinko’s.”

  At the end of the third day, Christopher called me. “I just talked to Jen from Frankfurt. She started reading it on her nightmare plane ride, and then when she got to her hotel and they had no room for her, she finished it in their lobby and laughed her ass off. She said everything since she left town has been a disaster except this book. Plus she’s a TV home shopping fanatic, so she says nobody else can publish it except her.”

  I felt blood rush into my head and pound against my eardrums.

  “She won’t be able to make a firm offer until she’s back in the office, so she told me to give her until next week.”

  I panicked. “What if her return flight is shot down over the Atlantic? What if her jet lag wears off and she realizes her grave error?”

  Christopher’s way of reassuring me was to howl with laughter in my ear. “You are totally insane. She loves it. She’s gonna do it. Just hang on until Monday, end of day.”

  Four entire days is a painfully vast expanse of time if you experience each second passing like one thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three.

  When I called Christopher at nine thirty Monday morning, he told me to hang on, because he’d just walked in the door and had to set his coffee down and stash his briefcase.

  When I called him at noon, he said, “It’s not end of day yet, so, no. No word.”

  I asked, “Is no word bad? Should we have heard by now?”

  He laughed again and told me, “No word means it’s only lunchtime and she’s rallying the troops, and she’ll call with a firm offer by the end of the day, just like she said.”

  Three o’clock seemed “end of the day” to me, so I called him back. “I knew it was you,” he answered.

  Finally, at a little after five, by which point I had planned my memorial service, he told me the news. Jennifer had made an offer. “Seven thousand dollars,” he said, his always-laughing voice suddenly betraying nothing.

  “That’s … not very much, is it?” I said.

  “Not in the real world, no. But it’s your first book, and they’re really enthusiastic and just weird enough that they’ll do a great job with it.”

  “Plus, I can buy a new wardrobe from the Gap with my advance.”

  Christopher said, “And with my commission, I can get a new pair of socks.”

  “So, did you say yes?”

  He said, “No. You have to tell me if you want to do it.”

  I thought, She could be changing her mind right now. “Yes, yes, tell her yes. Hurry. Don’t keep wasting time talking to me. Oh my God, you’ll ruin my career before it even starts.”

  He said, “’kay, I’ll let her know and—”

  “Hurry!” I yelled.

  Four and a half minutes later, he called me back. “Okay, it’s done. And I even got her to bring it up to a princely seventy-five hundred because I’m such a hard-ass. Congratulations. You just sold your first novel to St. Martin’s Press.”

  I wanted to hug him, but he was on Eighteenth Street, and I was down on Tenth, so I stroked my thumb across the printed manuscript he’d marked up in red, making sure I only traced along his red pen marks.

  “Thank you so much, Christopher. I just don’t even—”

  “Oh, my pleasure. Believe me.” He barked out a laugh. “This has been a blast. Totally.”

  * * *

  “So, what’s the deal with you, boyfriend-wise? You seeing anybody?” I asked this as casually as I possibly could manage, given that the question was entirely out of nowhere. I was at Christopher’s office because I’d lied and told him I had a freelance advertising client in the neighborhood. He knew I was earning money freelancing, so why would he suspect anything?

  Slowly he said, “Am I seeing anybody?” Worse, when he said this, he stopped stapling; he just sort of froze with his hand poised over the black Swingline on his desk. “Where did that come from?” he asked.

  I was wearing a tight T-shirt and jeans. I’d been to the gym that morning, so my arms were large. “Oh, I don’t know. I just wondered. It doesn’t matter.” As a rule, if I am offered a choice between two things, I will take both and then run.

  The truth was, it mattered enormously. Because over the past few months that he had been my agent and I had been his client, I had not been able to stop thinking about my alternate life, the one where he didn’t agree to be my agent and was instead my boyfriend. I had begun to feel tricked, like I’d been paid $7,500 not to date him, and now it was seeming like I should either get way more money or get him.

  He finished his stapling and then grabbed his coat from the back of the door. “Well, since you ask, I just broke up with somebody, a complete and total asshole, and I am so happy to be free of him.”

  I said, “Ouch. Sorry to hear about that,” though mentally, I was high-fiving myself.

  We walked back to Florent and ordered burgers again. This had become our routine; we met here at least once a week. Unless I stopped by his office for no reason, entirely unannounced, like I had done today. In which case, I might be able to sneak another lunch into the week. I’m highly sensitive, so I would have sensed—I believed—if I were being incredibly annoying. Which is exactly how annoying people justify being so insufferable.

  It’s possible my own internal bad-behavior radar had malfunctioned, but he never gave me any overt sign that he wished I would just go away, so I just kept at it.

  It was here over burgers that he opened up about his life a little more, starting with, “I’ve been HIV positive since 1984.”

  In the time it took me to lower my glass to the table, an AIDS montage had played through my mind at methamphetamine speed: IV tubes, pumps and wires, tiny glass bottles filled with clear liquid, hypodermic syringes, amber bottles of capsules and tablets, pill splitters, pill boxes embossed with the days of the week, internists, specialists, bruised flesh, diarrhea.

  “But I’m good. I stopped working for a while, just as the wave of new meds came along, so I never got sick. So far, they’ve kept me alive enough to eat cheeseburgers.” He laughed and took a massive bite, the meat threatening to shoot right out the other end of the bun.

  I said, “It’s amazing that you’re still healthy after being positive for so long.” But what I was thinking was, You just drove a stake right through the heart of my boyfriend fantasy. After George, I would never again date somebody with that horrible disease. Or any other horrible disease, for that matter.

  Instead of admiring the way his blue eyes flashed as he nudged his plate back with his elbows and exclaimed, “That was really good! Was yours okay?” I noticed he’d dripped something on the front of his shirt again. I pointed to it.

  “Is that water?”

  He glanced down. “Of course not. It’s burger grease.”

  From this moment forward, I would take a careful inventory of all of Christopher’s flaws, shortcomings, and abnormalities and create my own virtual catalogue of deal breakers.

  The next time I was in his office, I w
atched him pull a step stool up to his bookcase to reach a title from the top shelf, and it stunned me. Was he short? What grown man couldn’t reach the top shelf without assistance? That’s when it occurred to me: he was short, actually.

  “Oh my God, you’re a short little troll,” I called out.

  He laughed as he said, “You’re just noticing now?”

  Obviously, I could never date somebody short. So even if he hadn’t had AIDS, this short thing would have spoiled everything, anyway. I felt slightly better.

  * * *

  It had been nine months since I’d had a drink. This seemed impossible, and yet it was true. I hadn’t attended a single AA meeting or counted days on my own. I hadn’t read any books on the subject or had a spiritual awakening. I just hadn’t reached out for a glass and then poured alcohol in it and gulped it down. I had not done that one thing. I had written a book and found an agent, and now my book would be published in mere weeks. It was at the printer, being churned out by the thousand, like Charleston Chew bars. It made the top of my head blow off to think about it, which is exactly what Emily Dickinson said can happen when you think about heavy shit.

  I still felt blindsided by Christopher. In many ways, actually. He had become, by far, my favorite person in the world. Not just because he had plucked me from obscurity and was about to deliver me to the remainder bins of bookstores nationwide, though no doubt I was in his debt. It’s that everything about him pleased me. I was funny with him. I could tell him anything. I could be my true, most horrible self, and he never withdrew. In fact, we grew closer, it seemed, by the day. His mannerisms fascinated me, and I was obsessed with his personal life away from the office because I knew so little about it.

  Thinking about dating him and then learning he was medically off-limits still had me reeling, so I continued to find things wrong with him that I could point out. One day, he was wearing another of his complicated shirts with hidden buttons and fancy stitching, and I said, “What’s with all the nursing blouses? Are you breastfeeding in the office?” Inch by inch, I became mean to him, but because he always laughed, my own meanness was disguised to myself as hilarity. Each snide remark or sarcastic observation was a handy little poker stick to ensure a certain distance between us was maintained.

  I also realized, if I couldn’t date him, I had to date somebody.

  I saw that I’d never been my actual true self on a date before. Because my first book was about to be published and since writing felt like the thing I was meant to do, I felt almost virginal. It was suddenly breathlessly simple to ignore all my other failed relationships and terrible dates, because those happened to the old, unpublished, non-self-actualized version of me. They didn’t count anymore. So I decided to troll some personal ads online.

  I’d never had any problem with the concept of online dating, because how the fuck else can you meet somebody new without having to take a shower, leave the house, or brush your hair? It baffled me that so many people were still freaked out by the idea. Going on a white-water rafting trip was better? Out there in nature, the very place most manhunts for escaped serial killers begin?

  I went to one of the popular dating sites that didn’t just simply omit the option for male seeking male in their pulldown menu and then entered my zip code. My feeling was, if you’re in the same zip code, you and I have enough in common.

  Right at the top of the freshly sorted list was an incredibly verbose ad by a dude with salt-and-pepper hair and a great smile. Reading through his ad, I was charmed by how well written it was. It was funny, too, though I couldn’t quite be sure if it was intentionally funny or if he was simply neurotic and befuddled by modern technology. But he could write, he looked great, and he was nearby. So I wrote him back.

  He responded immediately but briefly. I wrote him a fat, long letter and pretended I was writing to Christopher so that I would be most myself.

  He replied that he’d been planning on removing his personal ad that day and had just logged on to his account to do it because he’d received so many replies from the Philippines. This had infuriated him—“I said, ‘NYC area only.’ Can’t people read?” He also admitted that my response had intimidated him and that he was only writing me back because he’d shared it with his business partner, and she’d told him, “You write that man back this instant.”

  This gave me pause. What had I said that had intimidated him and made him not want to reply? Then I thought, It’s good that I intimidate people. That’s a compliment.

  His name was Dennis. After several back-and-forth e-mail exchanges, he suggested we speak on the phone. I almost never spoke on the phone anymore to anyone but Christopher. If he’d suggested we meet in person, I would have been game. But I realized speaking on the phone first had its advantages. Sometimes, somebody’s voice just vibrates all wrong against your eardrums. Plus the whole “not taking a shower or getting dressed” part.

  When we finally spoke the following week, we stayed on the phone for three hours. Technically, this is known as “hitting it off.” To me, the next logical step would be to set up a coffee date. But Dennis felt we should continue with the phone for a while. He appeared to have an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality, and I reminded myself that normal, sane people are in no hurry, so I didn’t push for an in-person meeting.

  For the next two weeks, we spoke almost daily. Such concentrated, focused time on the phone with a stranger does peculiar things to the mind. You begin to conjure the person’s physical being so intensely, you can nearly forget you don’t know each other. You begin to tell yourself that no matter what they look like, the virtual chemistry you share is so powerful, it will be love on contact the instant you sit down across from each other at a rickety café table. But I was wise to this sort of brain trickery, because I’d dated, it seemed, most of the single guys in Manhattan at one point or another. Granted, many of them were indistinguishable blobs in my alcoholic smear of a social life, but I knew how the mind lulled you into a state of perilous complacency when all you had was a personality and a disassociated voice.

  Meeting soon in person was essential. The longer we avoided this, the more likely it was I would loathe him. Looking forward to something with too much intensity was a total setup. I was reminded of being eight years old and seeing a “ghost” advertised in the back of a magazine for ten dollars. It took weeks and weeks for my ghost to arrive, and I felt each minute of those weeks. When at last it came, I was horrified to see that the ghost was nothing more than nylon string and a white plastic bag with two holes cut out for eyes. I had genuinely expected something vaporous and magical and ended up with a marketer’s middle finger.

  I was able to persuade Dennis to meet me at a Starbucks downtown after work. When he showed up, I was pleased and surprised that he looked as handsome as he did in his picture. Though, upon closer scrutiny, his mouth was on the small side, the corners downturned, and this lent him a minor air of generalized disapproval. This could be easily overlooked, however, because the way he trimmed his goatee optically enlarged the mouth, like a woman does with lip liner or an eyebrow pencil. This had to be intentional, and I had long believed that knowledge of one’s deformities, flaws, or personal shortcomings frequently rendered them entirely beside the point. The sculpting of his facial hair to disguise his small, displeased mouth had to be rewarded by my own overlooking of it. And though he was not tall, he wasn’t dwarf short, like inappropriate, medically and fashion-challenged Christopher.

  We exchanged more e-mails after that first meeting. We had another date, and it, too, was a success.

  Dennis asked, “Do you enjoy jazz? Because I love it, and I know of a place downtown where we could go.”

  “And then we can have broken glass and arsenic for dinner!” I felt like replying, because I barely tolerated jazz when I encountered it in elevators or dental offices. But I considered that when you meet somebody who really loves something, the high-road thing to do is to try to love it, too, so I wrote bac
k, “That sounds great!”

  We made a date for the following Friday.

  In the meantime, I called Christopher. “Do you like jazz?”

  “Not at all,” he said immediately. “I mean, I respect it. It’s a form of genius. But no.”

  “Would you date somebody who loved jazz?”

  He took in a sharp breath. “God, no, of course not.”

  Christopher loved music intensely and had even recorded albums with a band. He played piano and told me he owned a black trumpet and a red accordion. His holiday mix CDs were legendary.

  “What do you listen to?” I asked.

  He said, “Oh, tons of different stuff. A lot of times, I just put my iPod on shuffle. Today on the subway, I listened to the Go-Go’s, Slim Whitman, the Association, Steve Reich, lots of stuff.”

  I’d heard of the Go-Go’s.

  * * *

  Dennis stood at the intersection of Seventh Avenue and Bank Street telling me he had a choice: we could either stay out all night and he’d be a mess in the morning or he could go home. He couldn’t be drunk after just a few drinks, but he seemed tipsy and was in fact tipping over in my direction. Cars and yellow cabs rushed around us, a boxy blue-and-white Con Ed truck parked beside a manhole, lights were flashing, people were walking … the city whirled around and around us like a euphoric child.

  The club had been larger than I’d expected and the jazz not nearly as bad, mostly because it could be ignored as we sat across from each other at a small round table with a votive candle in the center. The votive was the red glass kind usually found in standard-issue Italian restaurants, with little indentations like a child had pressed her fingertips into the glass all around.