Lust & Wonder

by Augusten Burroughs

  “The food is spectacular, Dennis,” I said, and this pleased him.

  “I think the stuffing is a little dry,” he said. “I should have used more liquid from the mushrooms.”

  There arrived a period of silence when people were concentrating on chewing, and it was during this moment that Dennis suddenly let out a high-pitched scream and covered his mouth. “Oh my God, oh my God!” he cried through his cupped fingers.

  I tensed. Was he choking on a wishbone? Did he bite down on his tongue? Then a terrible thought: Was there part of a rat in the creamed spinach?

  He shoved back from the table, shrieking, “My cap! My cap came off! Oh my God!”

  There, through the gaps between his fingers, I could see a drilled-down stump right in the front of his mouth. I glanced down at his plate, and there lay one of the perfect, white teeth I’d so admired, stuck into a braised baby carrot, flecked with fresh mint.

  Others noticed it, too, and there was stifled but audible laughter.

  When he pulled his hands away, he forgot to close his mouth, so he looked like a hillbilly. I saw tears spring up in his eyes as he grabbed the carrot with its embedded tooth and rushed back into the bathroom.

  He slammed the door closed, something he never did, not even when he had a bowel movement, I’d discovered. Dennis was a bathroom-door-wide-open kind of guy, which frankly freaked me out. That’s how I knew just how upset he was; for him to actually close the bathroom door, this must be serious.

  I felt terrible for him and considered rushing back after him, but something told me he wouldn’t appreciate it. With Dennis now gone, nobody said a word, and I didn’t even attempt to make conversation even though, as the new boyfriend of the host, part of my cohost job description was making conversation.

  When Dennis returned several minutes later, he was smiling like nothing happened, his tooth restored to its central position. He took his seat.

  “Sorry for the drama and excitement,” he said, grinning. “It was this new crown. I was able to cram it back into place, but I definitely have to see a dentist.”

  Paula, whose cold bitterness rendered her less interesting than under-bed dust, remarked, “I had a silver filling fall into a bowl of Cream of Wheat once.”

  I thought but did not say, Of course you did.

  Gay Stevie chimed in, “Sometimes, no teeth can be an advantage! I was once with an old man who had dentures, and let me tell you, when he pulled them out of his mouth, ooh, sister, that gent had certain, shall we say, gifts.”

  The two women who I could not tell apart hadn’t actually spoken. They’d merely offered meek smiles of either feigned interest or compassion, depending on the circumstances.

  I was entirely miserable.

  Was this really how it was supposed to be? Dennis had known these people for years. They were all normal people, and because they were his friends, they would soon be my friends, too. “Our friends.” Normal people hadn’t been molested or reared by a clinically psychotic mother, an alcoholic father, or a perversely mad psychiatrist who wore a Santa hat and performed toilet bowl readings. These were normal people, and I lived among them now. I thought, This must be what I want.

  Over the next few weeks, I introduced Dennis to my very small collection of friends. There was Pete, an ex-boyfriend, and a former advertising coworker named Grace. Dennis and I had coffee with Sue, who owned a gift card company. We had dinner with Christopher and two writer friends. There was a great deal of laughter. Somebody snapped a breadstick, and the other half went sailing over to a nearby table, which all of us found way too hilarious.

  “Your friends are great,” Dennis told me. “See, you’re not so broken.”

  Maybe I wasn’t. When he smiled at me like that, I felt unbroken, and I felt safe. These were two things I thought I’d never feel with anyone. I cherished the feeling and longed for a lifetime of feeling so complete.

  “I didn’t know you had capped teeth,” I said out of the blue. Ever since Thanksgiving, I’d been thinking about how the most surprising thing had been that he’d never mentioned them. But why would he, really?

  He nodded. “Yeah.”

  I’d already unloaded my own inventory of bodily repairs, including multiple fillings, though no caps, and several restitched areas. He showed me his scars and opened up like a horse so I could see his rear fillings, but he hadn’t mentioned the caps. Which was fine, which was nothing.

  “Which reminds me,” Dennis said. “You should make an appointment with the dentist. You should get a whitening.”

  “I should?” I said, mumbling.

  “Yeah, it’d brighten your smile. You have a great smile,” he told me. “Like when we were out with your friends at the Italian place. I wish you smiled more, in fact.”

  I made a mental note: smile more.

  I made a second mental note: stop fucking obsessing about shit that doesn’t matter. Because all of your other relationships? They failed. But they didn’t just fail, they fucking failed. Stop screwing up your single chance at normal happiness by feeling testy when he tells you to smile more, which you absolutely should do. Stop thinking of dinner parties as threats. Stop being so damn you.

  * * *

  Dennis told me that his new therapist resembled “a soft cookie” with a pear-shaped body. At first, this was a description that I loved because it made the shrink seem completely nonthreatening, doughy but helpful. But it soon became apparent that the shrink was more cookie monster than cookie faced.

  Dennis had been in therapy for over a decade, an achievement of which he was exceedingly proud. When he spoke of his years in therapy, it was as if he was speaking of having served with distinction in the armed forces. I wanted to point out that therapy was not a test of endurance, where the person who survived the most hours would win the mental health medal, but I wisely restrained myself.

  His previous shrink had dropped unceremoniously dead of a heart attack. This new cookie-faced therapist had never met me, but I saw him as the enemy, because Dennis frequently returned from sessions with therapist-infused “concerns” or relationship script notes. He believed, for example, that our unsatisfying and increasingly rare sex was probably in direct response to the sexual abuse I had experienced as a child. I understood this was a logical conclusion, but I also didn’t believe our sexual issues had anything to do with what happened to me all those years ago. I’d worked through that shit, was my feeling.

  The therapist was also worried about my lack of closeness with family and my history of alcohol abuse. If only he could meet me, I thought, and I could explain myself. I engaged in discussions with Dennis during which I said things like “It’s smart for your shrink to be wary of you becoming involved with an alcoholic. But remember: I went through treatment at a drug and alcohol clinic in the Midwest. And even though I relapsed, I’ve been sober for nearly two years.” When what I wanted to say was, “Tell the Pillsbury Doughboy he can take his rolling pin and use it to shove his advice up his ass.”

  It was an eggshell thing. If I expressed too much resentment, I knew it would get back to the shrink, who would say, “Didn’t I warn you? He’s maneuvering to drive a wedge between us and sabotage therapy.” So I had to play along and be as encouraging as I could about Dennis’s therapy while at the same time try to subtly glean as much information about the sessions as possible, without resorting to a microrecorder dropped into his briefcase.

  “Why,” I wanted to ask him, in the kindest way possible, “after so much therapy are you so wishy-washy and insecure?”

  I thought back to the table. God. The table.

  After Thanksgiving, that very evening as I was transferring all the dirty dishes into the small, narrow kitchen for a marathon, nightlong session of washing, I noticed that each time my fingers so much as glanced the surface of the table, it jiggled. It was just a cheap throwaway table, the kind a college kid might have. I said, “We should get an antique table, one of those big, really solid things. Wouldn’t that
be great?”

  Dennis had been deeply wounded. He remained silent the rest of the night while I was doing the dishes. And I’d assumed he’d fallen asleep, but in fact, he was awake and going through my comment over and over in his mind. He’d finally screwed up the courage to confront me.

  “I feel like you think my choices aren’t good enough for you, and I’m resentful.”

  I tried to explain, “This has nothing to do with your choices; it’s just about the table. It’s not solid, you know? Didn’t you feel it at dinner, sliding around under our plates? Remember when Blanda actually apologized to it when she bumped it and made it jiggle and the waters sloshed out? Apologized … to a table. Plus, don’t you love old things? That’s all I meant.”

  Dennis smirked a tiny bit. “Her name is Brenda, not Blanda. And I remember,” he said, biting on his lip so that he didn’t actually smile.

  I loved that I could make Dennis go from grumpy to almost happy. It made me feel like the only thing he’d been missing his entire life was me. It made me feel like I was good for him. He’d been single for so long, and the more I knew him, the more I saw the loneliness at his core. I felt like I brought him to life.

  He made me feel stable and safe.

  This reminded me of what magazines and therapists were always saying about relationships: people should complement each other.

  Like us.

  We did end up buying a large, old table, and Dennis was extremely happy with it. “You were right about this. Now I’m embarrassed that I ever had the other one.”

  But that exchange stuck with me, because after more than ten years of therapy, a person really shouldn’t be so inextricably emotionally invested in his or her table choices.

  I would need to work harder to loosen him up even more.

  * * *

  My new relationship with Dennis was different from my previous ones, or at least it felt different, because I was sober and actually experiencing it. Dennis was normal and stable, and he enjoyed things I felt I ought to enjoy, too, like National Public Radio and classical music. In fact, I was feeling so positive that I decided to write him a letter, which I would present to him on our one-year anniversary. The point of the letter was to playfully demonstrate that I had been right all along.

  I begin by writing, “When you date a writer, you should get love letters. This should be one of the fringe benefits.”

  But that evening, I felt a little drained after writing almost fifteen single-spaced pages of things like “And the weird thing is, when you glared at that woman for cutting in line in front of you with her smiling and blushing, ‘Oh, pretty please? I just have the one package of dates?’ I could totally read your mind, and I knew you wanted her to be assassinated, because so did I!”

  So I drank one of my revolting cultured enzyme drinks that are supposed to make you smugly healthy, and then I went to sleep.

  The Jeep Guy was waiting for me. This time, he was turned a little sideways in the seat of our same Jeep, and he had a playful expression. He was gripping the wheel right as he shifted into first.

  “Better hold on to something,” he said, my only warning. And we were back on the trail almost on our backs it was so steep. This time, there was music I’d never heard before, and I loved it and wanted to know who it was. His answer made no sense to me. It sounded like Radio Waves Are Not a Color. But in this dream, he was gunning the engine, and we were climbing faster. I still felt like he had done all this before, and I was on his home turf, not mine. I still felt at ease, and was it in love? Maybe I was a little edgier this time around. I was asking questions.

  “Are you sure this is a safe trail?”

  But my only reply was laughter—not mean but rather intimately, affectionately tolerant.

  When I woke up my first thought was, Something must be wrong with me neurologically. Such a specific dream, so vivid and impervious to the wasting effects of time, it couldn’t just be a normal dream. Now it was an officially recurring dream, for one thing. Though I still did not know him from my waking life, I was absolutely certain that Jeep Guy was real, that he didn’t just exist in my dream world. He had gotten to know more about me. He was expecting my slight paranoia. And he was totally fine with it, charmed even, maybe. When I woke up this time, it was even harder to settle back into wakeful reality, because I had experienced what felt like love. Something so powerful it could be nothing else but love.

  Because I had committed to sharing myself fully with Dennis and containing no secrets, I told him about the dream, plus the first one I’d had a couple of years before. I explained how vivid they were.

  Dennis was into dreams. Hearing other people’s dreams didn’t bore him; it fascinated him. And he seemed really good at reading the deeper meaning within them.

  “I think it’s obvious,” he said as he scraped toast crumbs off the table and into his palm. “You are this Jeep person; he is you. He’s the rugged, capable, and confident version of yourself. You’re merging with him. You have been for years. That’s why it’s been a recurring dream. I think it means you’re becoming your truest self. It’s about growth.”

  This sounded exactly like the sort of thing you’d be able to say after spending so many years in therapy. It sounded perfectly possible, actually. It was an interpretation far too reasonable for me to ever have thought of it.

  But pressing against my skull in this matter was the insistence of what I felt: No way. Jeep Guy isn’t me. He’s Jeep Guy. Perhaps I needed the fairy tale to remain in place that my dream contained a message or a destiny and was not, as Dennis said, evidence of my own growth. It seemed silly now to think of Jeep Guy as anything besides my own best self, as he had been all along.

  * * *

  For several weeks, we had sex once a week. But swiftly, the sex tapered off so that we only had it once a month. This seemed slightly troubling, considering this was still supposed to be the whirlwind falling-in-love stage of the relationship, where everything was as good as it was ever going to get. True, he was busy with his business, and I was working on what would be my next book, and it was a little crazy jumping back and forth between his apartment uptown and mine in the East Village. So we were stressed out. But there were rumors people even had babies under such circumstances, so it seemed like a couple of guys could pull it together enough to roll around a bit.

  Dennis mentioned one evening that he preferred black men to white men.

  He said this casually as he peeled away the outer leaves of the brussels sprouts. We were in the kitchen, and I was helping him prepare dinner by cleaning things or handing him level teaspoons of whatever he needed.

  “What was that?” I asked.

  He said, especially if they’re bodybuilders with huge asses.

  I was not black and didn’t look like a bodybuilder. A kind, honest friend once told me I had the body of a tube sock.

  Dennis then admitted that for years he’d carried on a sexual relationship with a black man in Harlem. “Prior to knowing you,” he added.

  “How prior?” I asked.

  “Pretty prior,” he replied.

  He reached for a copper-bottomed saucepan and asked me to hand him the olive oil. I also did this casually, wearing a small and artificial smile.

  “There was nothing between us intellectually. In fact, I didn’t know anything about his life. All we had was intensely invigorating sex.”

  I thought, We’re doomed.

  Looking at his closed, focused face as he dumped the brussels sprouts into the pan, I knew that asking him for details would only make him hostile, which he would then mask with additional silence and a tight smile.

  I cupped my hand on top of the counter and scraped the discarded leaves over the edge into my other hand and tossed them into the trash.

  “So, do you miss him?” I asked.

  Dennis turned around and opened the refrigerator. He didn’t say anything.

  I felt an uncomfortable, hot pressure in my chest waiting for him to answ
er. “Hmmm?”

  He said, “I miss some of the things we did together. Yes.”

  I rinsed my hands because it was something to do. “So, what does that mean? You thinking of seeing him again?”

  The question seemed to offend him. “No, I’m not thinking of seeing him again. I don’t even have his number. I threw it out when I met you.”

  In his hand was a jar of pickles.

  “What are you doing with those?”

  He noticed them. “I was moving them out of the way.” He placed the pickles back in the refrigerator and closed the door. “I have no interest in seeing him again. That’s not why I brought this up. But I can see that I probably shouldn’t have, because now you’re accusing me of doing things.”

  In the old days, back before I was a sober, published author in a healthy and mature adult relationship, I would have lashed out with something like “Look, asshole, nobody is motherfucking accusing you of anything except being a complete and total dick.” But my own ways hadn’t worked, and my sorry alcoholic instincts just couldn’t be trusted, so instead of lashing out, I pulled off the road.

  “I’m sorry,” I told him, moving close. “Honestly, I didn’t mean to make you feel accused. That is the last thing I meant to do.” I hugged him and felt his stiff, angry posture relax. “I know you’re not seeing anybody else. I’m sorry.”

  * * *

  I’d finally cleaned my apartment and bought a feather bed, along with new sheets and a comforter at ABC on Broadway. It was smaller than Dennis’s place, but the bed was larger and way more comfortable. So lately, we’d been spending more time down there.

  It was a little after midnight, and I hadn’t heard from him since we’d spoken early that afternoon. I knew he had some kind of conference or something after work, but we were supposed to see each other after that. He told me he’d be finished by eight.