* * *
Dennis, meanwhile, still did not understand what had happened with our relationship. He sent an e-mail referring to our “trial separation.”
I wrote back quickly. “This is not a separation.” (I refused to include “trial,” because it added a layer of hope and took a step away from truth.) “This is the end,” I told him decisively. Yet he still e-mailed about my “coming home” despite my already feeling Massachusetts was another life, as remote as another planet.
Another sensitive area was Christopher’s friendship with Dennis. Since they were not the ones who had lived together and grown to loathe one another, they had a good time when they went out. Christopher is bighearted, and he genuinely liked Dennis. It was also tough, because Dennis needed a confidant, and he knew that Christopher knew my crazy better than anyone.
Since I hadn’t successfully convinced Dennis that we were broken up, Christopher and I felt weird about actually having sex. It was unlike either of us to show such moral fiber, but I didn’t want infidelity heaped on top of any other accusations. What was it going to take to make him see?
The following week, The New York Times published an article about my newly decorated and highly eccentric apartment; Dennis was referred to as my “former partner” in one of the opening paragraphs. It was hard to ignore the message after that.
* * *
Ten or perhaps twelve minutes later, Christopher and I stood wearing jeans but no shirts in the tiny hallway of my studio apartment. As we moved in toward one another, I stopped and said, “What if one of us barfs?”
He said, “That’s when we’ll know this wild experiment has gone horribly wrong. But if it happens, I hope it’s you.”
Then it was like, “Oh, so this is sex.” This is what all those therapists meant when they talked about how sex was a connection to another person. I’d never before experienced that. I’d never felt sex travel through my arms before. I’d never felt sex spread above the waist. I’d never come three times a day with such regularity. Near the end of—and for a while after—every orgasm, Christopher laughed. This made me crack up at the spectacle.
We destroyed the sheets. It was disgusting and awesome in equal measure. I stopped cleaning. I didn’t care anymore about dust and grossness. I just wanted to be in bed with my agent and fuck all day. The one thing I hadn’t expected was that he’d look so completely hot out of his clothes: he was naturally muscular, like a gymnast, and hairy, which was also good. Just well shaped all over. And his skin was so sensitive that I could raise goose bumps with just a single finger, hovering—not even touching—anywhere over his body. Crack was nothing compared to this high. Booze was less than zero.
I mashed my face up against his neck and pressed my body as tightly as I could against his. “I can’t fucking get close enough to you,” I said.
He pulled me even closer. He was strong.
“Would you marry me right this second if you could?” I asked.
“I would,” he said.
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
“Is sex with me better than with the other boyfriends?”
He laughed from his stomach, which was ribbed like a lobster’s shell from laughing so much over the many years. “Way.”
“Are you still gonna take a fifteen percent commission?”
“No, of course not,” he said, kissing me tenderly on the neck. Then he murmured forcefully into my jugular, “We’ll start with twenty-five and see how it goes.”
* * *
We couldn’t tell anyone yet, that much was clear. At the very least, we had to continue our constant sex in order to figure out exactly what it was that we had before we could reveal it to anyone. We weren’t going to tell my editor, Jen, or Christopher’s agency colleagues or even any of our friends that this amazing thing had happened, if there were even the tiniest possibility that it could fizzle out three weeks later. That would have made for one of my most awkward “just kidding!” scenarios ever, and that’s saying something. We both knew it was real and that the whole test-drive thing was basically over after our first official date. But we sure as hell weren’t ready to tell Dennis, so it just seemed easier to not tell anyone.
The silver lining to being one another’s dirty little secret was that it was hot. Sneaking around and holding on to wonderfully explosive information ratcheted up the already-boiling sexual tension and made it seem illicit and slightly unbelievable. We added to that illusion when we both went to a writers’ conference in Boston and had wild sex in our hotel room between appointments.
That Sunday afternoon, we had a little under an hour before the train left for New York. Christopher and I are both speed eaters, so we decided to grab lunch at a pub across the street from Back Bay station. It had tables outside, and the grayish sky didn’t look like it was actually going to pelt us with rain before our train left, so it seemed safe enough to eat outdoors.
Christopher loved the cold so much that he slept with the windows open in winter. He also loved plaid, so this so-chilly-but-not-freezing weather made him very happy, because he got to wear his blue plaid Windbreaker with the extra zippers.
We snarfed down our semi-good bacon cheeseburgers and fries, observing and inventing dramas being played out in the courtyard nearby. (The Asian woman holding the flower was being stood up by her blind date. Later, she’d have a Lean Cuisine dinner by herself and contemplate but not actually commit suicide.) The waitress cleared our plates, and Christopher signaled her for the check.
As he reached around for his wallet in his back pocket, he was smirking. He was prone to laughing for seemingly no reason, usually because he was thinking of a tweet he’d read or a video he’d seen—babies shooting off the backs of treadmills, brides tripping into swimming pools, that kind of thing delighted him. He was holding his nubby black electric eel-skin wallet, and my eyes were drawn to his fingers as he freed several ATM-fresh twenties. I glanced at his crotch and then at the horseshoe mustache that framed his smile. The sharp wind had popped the collar of his jacket, and it was flapping against his neck. He was eighties in the seventies, and he was eighties now; he was spectacular.
Watching him sitting there, his compactness was somehow more obvious than when he was standing. It made me gnash my teeth. He looked like … I couldn’t quite say. I almost had it, but not quite. It was on the tip of my brain tongue.
I raised my phone and took his picture.
When I saw the shot, I instantly knew what it was. Of course.
I turned my phone around and showed it to him. I smiled. “Look,” I said, “it’s a chimp with a wallet and a big dick.”
When Christopher laughed at indoor restaurants, he frequently got shushed. He laughed with gusto and volume, but that day, we were outside, and the rain had started, after all, so we were alone and nobody hushed him. For once.
“You are so awful!” he said when his roaring died down. He smirked again. “But at least I’ve got a wallet.”
We were both laughing, and we couldn’t stop, one wave crashing into another. The waiters watched us warily from inside the warm, dry restaurant. We were displaying much more joy than is customary in Boston, so we packed up our merriment and went to catch our train.
* * *
Once a month or so, Dennis would drive down to the city with the dogs. A few times, he left them with me for a couple of weeks, but he usually came in for a weekend to do New York things, so I got them in three-day bursts.
“Where does Dennis stay when he’s in town?” Christopher asked.
“Here, in the apartment,” I told him.
There was a short silence, and then he gave a sort of “no comment” snort.
“What?” I asked, knowing exactly.
“Nothing,” he said. “It’s just a little weird that when he comes into the city you sleep in the same bed.”
He was right, of course. It was awful and awkward, and the only reason it was even possible was because it wouldn’t be
for much longer: reality was sinking in for Dennis. A few times, he’d already stayed with friends in Brooklyn instead. I saw this as progress.
Besides, who was Christopher to talk about exes sleeping over?
His apartment on the Upper West Side was like a New York City apartment in a movie. It had three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen with a swinging door, and a pantry. There was a piano in his bedroom, but if the door was closed, you couldn’t hear him playing from the next room. That’s how thick the old prewar walls were. The first thought I had when I walked in was, If there’s ever a nuclear blast in Manhattan, this is the place to be.
It was rent stabilized, which is one notch down from the holy Manhattan grail of “rent controlled,” and it belonged to his first boyfriend, Harvey, who died of AIDS.
The apartment was also occupied by Zeke, his brilliant and never-employed former boyfriend who bore a strong resemblance to George Clooney. Zeke was the boyfriend who moved in shortly after they began dating in the late 1990s, and after an amicable breakup, he simply never moved out.
Christopher was a hairy little madman who, in his own more adorable way, rivaled me maniacal act for maniacal act. He was also strictly an as-is guy, not a fixer-upper. An all-sales-final guy. He felt responsible for Zeke, like he would a mentally disabled brother, which I understood, except Zeke possessed an odd and appealing artistic genius. A mutual friend once said, “Zeke is not an idiot savant. He’s a savant idiot,” but regardless, his talents demonstrated far more mental ability than I myself possessed at that stage in my broken-down life. I sometimes felt Zeke needed to be kicked out of the nest. And then the tree needed to be sawed down so that Christopher and I could burn the wood for heat.
The funny thing is, when Christopher moved into his massive apartment twenty-eight years previously, he moved in with Harvey and Harvey’s ex-boyfriend, who was still living there. So this was a learned behavior. This was why he didn’t want to let it go: layers of history iced with mental illness.
It is also fair to say that twenty-eight years ago was the last time it was cleaned. It had no operational lighting in the kitchen (opening the refrigerator door would do) and no cold water in one of the bathrooms. It was perfectly insane, the residence of a deeply authentic eccentric, one with exceptional night vision.
If Christopher and I ever got married, Zeke would be part of the dowry. This seemed like it should be entirely unacceptable to me, except that it wasn’t. I liked Zeke a lot. He was stark-raving mad in the best way. And I didn’t care if there were no lights in the kitchen, because I happened to own several antique coal miner’s lanterns, each in perfect working order.
History was important to Christopher.
He still had people from his youth that he saw with some frequency. He and four New York publishing friends had been meeting for breakfast every Thursday at the same diner since 1997. I mean, who has a Breakfast Club in real life?
He was not one to discard things; he gathered them.
I, on the other hand, threw everything away, like all the cell phones that ended up in the back of the graveyard drawer the day newer, cooler models were released on any carrier. I would just add that carrier and never bother to cancel the previous one. I was a pathological future addict, running from my past, and he was the unmovable bull of now.
* * *
The three potted lemon cypress trees on the brutally sunlit windowsill were dying. We decided to replace them with something sturdier and more self-sufficient, which was how we ended up on the Web site of a cactus nursery.
“Wait. Go back,” I said.
I reached over and dragged my fingers across his laptop screen to slide the page.
He rolled his eyes. “It’s not a touch screen.”
Was he even serious? “Then just scroll on the track pad while I touch the screen.”
“Oh my God,” he said under his breath.
To his credit, he did scroll, and the screen slid back a few pages to where I wanted it. So it turned out his laptop was a touch screen, after all.
With everything, there is a trade-off. With a cactus, you get the autistic brother of a houseplant, something that asks nothing of you and remains alive. The trade-off is that if you barely touch it, there is a crime scene’s amount of blood. Plus, ugly. And after ten years, it might be an inch taller.
“Maybe we should just stack underwear in the window,” I said. The plants were only there for privacy, and underwear wouldn’t need to be watered or have its leaves dusted.
The downtown apartment was on the eleventh floor and had windows that faced south and west. Also north if you didn’t mind sticking your head out the bathroom window, which I didn’t. Across the street was a remarkably—in a boring way—similar building. I had a telescope so powerful I could read magazine page numbers inside those apartments, which is how I knew for a fact that our lives were infinitely more interesting and watchable than our neighbors’. Which is why we needed the privacy.
A four-poster bed sat in the center of the apartment, draped with Indian sari fabric curtains. Each wall was a different gemstone color—turquoise, jade, ruby red, amethyst purple, a couple of orange tones. A curtain of plastic ruby beads hung behind the bed, illuminated by workroom lights from the 1940s. A two-hundred-year-old cement antelope weighing almost four hundred pounds, originally a French garden ornament, peered lovingly out one window while two lamps made from antlers and quail feathers perched in another. Somehow, inside the confines of this single studio apartment, we had managed to cram an upright piano, a complete gemological laboratory, including a stereo microscope and a kiln (a kiln!), a dining table, two sofas, a desk, numerous chairs and tables, three dressers, two eight-foot cabinets filled with rare books, mineral specimens, and other assorted curiosities, along with a bench detailed with carved swan necks. The windows had large, old farmhouse shutters with peeling green paint. I bought them on eBay for an astonishingly low price; they were so authentic they looked entirely fake, faux finished to appear “rustic chic.”
Our neighbors in the high-rise across the street, on the other hand, had beige sectional sofas across from large-screen televisions. Their walls were off-white. They used energy-efficient lightbulbs and sat around tapping at their iPads.
It all boiled down to this: our neighbors consumed entertainment, and we manufactured it.
“I don’t think we should stack our underwear in the windowsill,” Christopher told me. “It would cross the Grey Gardens line.”
I made a hmpf noise, because didn’t we cross that line when I began using the cement antelope’s horns as a place to store my huge collection of jade bangles? Or uptown, where he and Zeke had been slowly turning into Big Edie and Little Edie until I performed a successful intervention?
When the cactus Web page offered nothing of interest, I returned to my phone to continue watching a period drama on Netflix, and Christopher opened an e-mail query from an aspiring writer. Several moments passed in silence before I realized, quite unexpectedly, what we needed.
“Holy fucking shit,” I announced.
He turned to me.
“Google ‘kumquat tree,’” I told him.
He typed it in, and I leaned over him and watched the images scroll past.
He smiled and nodded. “Uh-huh,” he said in his totally tone of voice.
“Right?” I said.
“I like this idea. A lot.” I got the eyebrow raise on a lot.
So there it was: we would plant a kumquat tree in the window, which of course would not do anything to solve the looming issue of botanical self-sufficiency. But this didn’t matter anymore. We’d just have to remember to water them and be better plant parents, that’s all.
“And we could plant tall corn plants in the other windows,” I realized.
There was a brief silence. “Like, corn corn?”
“Sure,” I said. “In those long, skinny window boxes they make for the outside. Only we could use them inside.”
I saw the flash of
alarm on his face. He had a falling window box incident in his past, the result of which could have sent him to Rikers Island and I would be without him.
Unthinkable.
“Indoor window boxes,” I told him to alleviate the anxiety that I knew the phrase inspired in him.
“With corn,” he said again, thinking about it, trying to picture it.
“Real corn. That grows all the way up to the ceiling,” I said. The hard sell.
He smiled. He loved me. But there was no way he was going to let me plant corn in the window, I could see it on his face.
* * *
Months went by, and we fell into a comfortable routine of sneaking around. We spent all our time together, except for the many hours of daily separation while Christopher was at work. Ever the writer, I was only starting to realize that he had other clients, who I’m sure were perfectly nice people, but they were hogging all my time with him. We found a practical rhythm for dealing with our business, which somehow became easier and more efficient. We’d always spoken with complete honesty, but now he didn’t even need to spin things like “Let’s make the next one a game changer” because he could go right for “Your career is in the shitter if this next one doesn’t work,” which I appreciated. (The delivery method, if not the message.)
We had known each other well enough and for long enough that most of the new information we exchanged was about things that had happened that day. The surprising facts about me were few, having published enough memoirs for an octogenarian and Christopher having read large chunks of them that never made it to print. He definitely had a few surprises still tucked away, but we’d known one another for a decade before getting romantically involved. We were a unique couple.
One thing we were not was official. We couldn’t go public before telling Dennis, and I dreaded doing that. Christopher was still maintaining a relationship with him, but he was increasingly uncomfortable, mostly with his own behavior.
Lust & Wonder Page 19