Magical Thinking (27 page)

Instead, I wrote back a confident I Will Make You Seem Crazy e-mail that read: “Wow. I didn’t realize you were so upset over the lotion. I never intended that. I actually thought it was kind of funny to hide your lotion and get you all ruffled. But I never imagined that you were truly upset. It’s almost like I bought you a new color television but you like your black-and-white because you’ve never seen color. So all I wanted to do was turn you onto the new and better color.”

He wrote back five minutes later saying “I am embarrassed now and feel like a fool.”

I was immediately distressed; I’d gone too far. I never wanted him to feel embarrassed, because I wanted him always to feel he could tell me anything, no matter how seemingly small. So I wrote him back and said just this, adding “I felt so close to you when you told me you were still mad at me. I smiled, fell asleep instantly.”

He wrote back and said he knew what I meant, he felt it, too.

Then, on the way home, I thought about taking the new lotion and throwing it into the trash, all three bottles. I thought maybe he would finally acquiesce and look for it to at least try it. And it would be gone and he would be puzzled, and I would say glibly “I threw it out,” and this would build into a fight.

Or perhaps I would stop at Saks on the way home and buy two thousand dollars’ worth. I would fill the medicine cabinet with these lotion bottles as a statement: “Not only do I embrace change, but I finance it.”

I was mad walking home, making myself even madder by thinking of possible scenarios involving Dennis, myself, and bottles of lotion. What if I emptied his own lotion bottle and then replaced it with the new, technologically superior lotion. And then when he commented “See? My face looks great, my lotion is fantastic,” I would reveal the ruse.

Who, but two gay men, could possibly have a fight over moisturizing lotion?

But as I passed Lincoln Center, I decided that it wasn’t as shallow as it seemed. There was the very real issue that ten years come between us. That Dennis is much more conservative in many ways than I. He is averse to change and slow to make decisions. By the time I made it to the Tower Records a few blocks from our apartment, these seemed like insurmountable obstacles.

Until I imagined him being hit by a Honda Accord while he crossed the street, distracted and feeling bad about my manipulative e-mail. I saw him lying on the sidewalk, sliding into unconsciousness. And here, I nearly heaved a sob. I was overcome with a powerful feeling of utter devastation and loss. A door opened a crack, and I was able to see that I was now far beyond the point of merely being able to throw in any towel. Clearly, I was no longer dating somebody or living with somebody or in a relationship with somebody. I was married to somebody. I was merged with somebody.

Truthfully, if Dennis wanted to moisturize his face with mayonnaise, I would be in the kitchen cracking jumbo eggs and separating the yolks.

Tonight we saw the film
Iris
, with Judy Dench as Iris Murdoch, the acclaimed British author who descended into Alzheimer’s. As we watched Iris Murdoch watch
Teletubbies
and pee in the living room, I had to breathe deeply to avoid making incredibly loud, humiliating heaving sobs in the theater.

“I’ll take care of you when you get like that next year,” I said, as we left the theater. Although realistically, I felt it was
I
who would be the one to lose his mind and probably not even when I’m old and have lived a rich, full life. Possibly as early as next spring.

It’s ten-thirty on a Monday night, and Dennis is in the kitchen, lean cuts of pork splayed out on plastic wrap on the floor. He is wearing his suit, and in his left hand he is holding a silver meathammer thing. He places a sheet of plastic wrap on top of one of the cutlets, and he begins to smack it with the hammer. And it’s surprisingly loud. I mean, you would really be amazed by how much sound a filet of pork can make when you place it on the floor and hit it with a hammer.

Before I moved in, Dennis had problems with his downstairs neighbor. The way I understand it is, the neighbor used to slam his door—at all hours. And the sound came straight up through the floor and into Dennis’s eardrums. So he actually had to go downstairs and tell the man, don’t slam your door. And ever since then, they’ve been like two wheaten terriers who see each other on the sidewalk and snarl.

So I was thinking about this as I watched him pound the meat. I was thinking,
Any minute, our neighbor is going to come upstairs and tell us to stop hammering into the floor. And I would then have to explain, we’re not hammering. We’re cooking. We’re tenderizing. We’re just doing it on the floor
.

Of course, the fact that this is Monday night at ten-thirty and Dennis is still in his suit and now in the kitchen pounding pork on the floor to make me dinner from a recipe in
COOK’S Illustrated
magazine is testament to his character. I truly, truly feel guilty that I am the only one who gets to have him as my mate.

“I love doing this,” Dennis says when I tell him how sweet it is of him and how guilty I feel that he’s going to so much trouble after working all day. And I believe him, I think he really does love to cook.

I bought him a set of French copper pots and pans, and he enjoys these. The saucepan weighs like seventeen pounds. The endorphins released just from picking the thing up make you drunk enough to think,
Snails are great! Bring on the stomach lining!

At midnight, we eat. Our beastly French bulldog watches us for a few minutes, but he is too tired to stare with his typically penetrating gaze, and he goes under the table to become flat. When he is exhausted, he lies down on his belly, all his little arms and legs sticking out straight.

And it was incredible, the dinner. It was one of his best, and this is saying quite a lot because Dennis is an incredible cook.

I washed the dishes, and while I was washing, Dennis went into the other room to lie on the bed. Or so I assumed.

A moment later, Bentley was barking, and I could hear his nails scratching along the floor, like he’s chasing. Or being chased. Then, more barking. It was his play bark, the bark he makes in the mornings when Dennis chases him around nude after his shower.

I said, “No, don’t do that. Don’t get him all excited before bed. We need to wind him down.”

Bentley is the first dog Dennis has ever lived with. We got him together. But I was raised with dogs. So I am our resident dog expert. “Really,” I shouted over the running water, “just put him on the bed and stroke his back, make him calm.”

Dennis called back to me, but I couldn’t understand him. I heard only the one word “he.”

So I said, “What?” The dog’s barking was getting more intense. I was now positive our neighbor was going to knock on the door. First the pounding, now the crazed animal. “Dennis,” I shouted, “don’t get him all excited.”

And Dennis shouted right back, “I didn’t start it.
He
started it.”

I turned off the water and walked out of the kitchen. They were together on the bed, Dennis attempting to turn down the covers and Bentley standing on the covers. Dennis was fluffing the pillows, panting. Bentley’s eyes were crazed, like he’d just swallowed a package of bacon, wrapper and all. Dennis, also, looked slightly crazed. He was smirking, and I could tell he was hot. His face was red, and he was beginning to sweat. Dennis sweats at the first sign of physical exertion.

“Let me get this straight,” I said. And I said this still wearing the yellow rubber dish-washing gloves. “What you’re saying to me is, ‘It’s not my fault. He started it’?”

Dennis choked out an absurd half laugh, but then his face registered indignation. “Well, yes. I suppose that is what I said, but it’s true. He started it. I didn’t. I was making the bed, and he thought it was a game.”

“So in other words,” I continued, “this master/dog stuff is just bullshit, because HE STARTED IT.”

Dennis said, “Well. Yes. He started it. It’s his fault, not mine.”

Another reason why I am lucky to have Dennis.

So clearly, we are not this dog’s owners. We are not his masters. We are his peers.

And I wonder if this is because we let him sleep with us. Not only in bed, but under the covers, between us in bed.

It seems impossible not to. It seems like maybe we tried to sleep normally a long time ago, when Bentley was a puppy. But
then he gradually moved from his little bed to the floor next to our bed. And then from the floor to the foot of the bed. And then from the foot to next to me. And now from next to me to between us, under the covers, with his head on a pillow next to ours.

And at this point, I do not know if I could sleep any other way. Even though this is probably horribly unhealthy and is creating all sorts of terrible canine-dependency issues for the dog. Or us.

But it works. At night, we all crawl into bed and watch a little TV, or we read our books and Bentley falls asleep between us, and then when we turn off the light, of course we don’t ask him to move. He snores softly and like a Glade plug-in, his puppy scenter becomes activated, and the smell makes my mouth water. And how could I move him?

So we don’t. I turn on my side, Dennis turns on his side, facing my back, and Bentley lies between us. Then Dennis reaches his arm across Bentley and hooks it under my arm, so that his forearm rests against my chest. Which is exactly, exactly as it should be.

I watch him in the kitchen, and I think of how much it hurts to love somebody. How deep the hurt is, how almost unbearable. It’s not the love that hurts; it’s the possibility of anything happening to the object of your love. Like, I would not want Dennis to lose his mind. But I’d be much more fearful of me losing my mind, because then he’d be the one left alone.

Just like I want him to die first, so that he doesn’t have to lose me and then be alone. Or if I do have to die first, I want to find him another boyfriend beforehand, I want to hand-pick somebody and then get to know this person and make sure he’s up to the task. I imagine there would be paperwork involved, with serious consequences if he breached the contract in any way. Love, unconditional. Or else you will lose your 401(k) plan, and
your credit report will be forever destroyed, and there will be prison time.

So then I stop myself from thinking these thoughts because it’s like tearing at a wound, opening it wider when it’s trying to heal. Or actually, it’s more like inflicting the wound yourself with a paring knife.

What’s painful and wonderful about loving somebody is loving their small things, like the way he is able to smile when he sips his wine, the way his hands fall down at his sides, fingers slightly cupped, or the way he is conducting the orchestra on the radio. Or now, the way he is lighting candles, just now this one in front of me. This is the one he lit first, actually. The one in front of me. Even though there was one on the way, he passed that one, lit it next.

The truth is, Dennis has no bad qualities and no faults. When he’s working late and I’m alone, or sometimes when we’re in bed together, the lights off, I try and make even a small list in my mind of his faults: Things I Put Up With Out of Love. But I haven’t been able to think of a single thing that I am not able to first overlook and then come to cherish. Even the fact that he sometimes loses things has led to a treasured nickname: Mittenclips.

Because sometimes, he misplaces things: keys, his wallet, our car once. But his face, when he sees that he’s done this—where are my keys?—it’s the most precious crestfallen face, and I tell him, “Have you checked the pockets on that jacket you wore last night?” And I check the bathroom and the floor under the sofa and all the unlikely but possible places for lost things to be. And we always, always manage to find whatever was missing.

Unconditional love. That’s what this is. I love him, as is, fully. I’ve had to stop arm wrestling with the facts. Why me? Didn’t I already have a big love once? And lost it? So why should I get it again? I’ve had to stop trying to look for cracks and flaws to prove that it’s not as good as it seems. Because it’s as good as it
seems. Even when we fight, we fight inside the container of
good
.

Somehow, through a flip of the coin, I ended up here. Feeling like somebody at the top of the heart-lung transplant recipient list. Damaged but invigorated and fucking lucky.

My doctor, whom I found on referral from my cocainesnorting, Xanax-popping friend Sean, cleared his throat and leaned forward. He spoke in a low, blackjack dealer voice. “What are you asking?”

I don’t know why I thought to press it. Call it the addict’s instinct. “I was just wondering if there’s any way I can, you know, go on steroids.”

It turned out, there was a way. Eighty-five dollars in cash and a zipped lip.

“I believe in hormone-enhancement therapy,” he told me. “A lot of doctors just dismiss it entirely, without thinking about it. Look, I’ve done a lot of research in this area, published a lot of papers. And I’ve found that many patients experience enormous benefits from a very moderate dose.”