Lust & Wonder Read online

  I called an ex-boyfriend who worked as a bartender in Soho and asked if he wanted to get together when he was done for the night.

  An hour later, we were crammed against each other in the bathtub of his East Village apartment. We’d just had sex, but it seemed we were about to get at it again.

  Sex with Doug had always been excellent. It was everything else between us that didn’t work. Nothing that came out of his mouth interested me in the slightest. And his ears seemed to turn off whenever I spoke a word.

  It was almost six in the morning when I finally dressed and walked back home to my place. Once there, I sat on my bed in the dim, opening light of the morning and thought, Now it’s over with Mitch. Now that I’ve cheated on him, I can’t ever be honest.

  I lay back against the pillows and stared up at the ceiling. I hated myself. I thought, I am just a destructive force in the world. Look at all the bodies I leave behind me.

  * * *

  By the close of the following week, I had decided not to tell Mitch about my infidelity because I’d come to see it in a different light. I hadn’t simply been horny and called an ex to get off. It had been far more academic in nature: I needed to see if I even could still have sex.

  Which I could.

  So I had learned that nothing was broken exactly.

  The problem was that sex with an ex-boyfriend isn’t ideal from a research point of view. There was history, familiarity, a certain degree of comfort and ease. That one night, I realized, simply hadn’t told me enough. It would be far more helpful to observe my emotions and responses with somebody I didn’t know. A stranger. Therapy could take forever to fix a complex sexual issue like mine. What if I could fix it myself? Wasn’t it worth a try at least?

  Especially considering Mitch’s latest ultimatum. He’d confronted me early one morning with another frank discussion about the withered state of our sexual relationship. Very soon, he said, we needed to resolve the sexual issues between us, because he was feeling increasingly frustrated and hurt. “It’s making me want to cheat on you,” he told me. “And that makes me hate myself even more than I already do.”

  He further admitted that Famous Author Friend “thinks we should break up. He said if we’re not having sex, we don’t have a real relationship, anyway.”

  I was horrified that Mitch had talked about this stuff with him. Because now, a gigantic stopwatch had been set above my head. If I didn’t fix myself fast, Mitch would have no choice but to dump me. Then at next year’s holiday parties, I would be talked about as the unsexual ex-boyfriend, the one with a smooth, Ken-doll crotch.

  What bothered me most of all was that I had been neutered in the eyes of Famous Author Friend himself.

  And that would simply not do.

  * * *

  The ticking of the stopwatch above my head—get fixed, have sex, get fixed, have sex—placed me in a constant state of anxiety.

  I thought of sex incessantly. Not of having it but of why I wasn’t. When I closed my eyes to sneeze, I saw Mitch’s pale, skinny legs, his wiggling toes. I heard, “Hey, baby!” spoken in a goofy, cartoonish voice.

  If he wasn’t sullen and depressed, Mitch was playful and odd. He collected action figures and wore superhero underwear. His rumpled hair made him look like Bart Simpson’s older brother.

  I was pretty goofy, too. In many ways, it seemed, we were so much alike. And this was what made me pause and wonder, exactly how much alike?

  * * *

  On AOL, you could have up to five different screen names, each with a different profile. Mitch’s profile, attached to the only screen name I knew, contained several unusual abbreviations.

  Brn for his hair, Bloo to describe his eye color. His height and weight were not approximate but exact, because Mitch was obsessive about his body, though only the top half.

  He listed the circumference of his chest: fifty-three inches.

  AOL allowed you to search member profiles by entering information into any of the search fields. You could search by age, astrological sign; whatever string of characters you entered would be matched against existing member profiles.

  The results were returned in the form of a list.

  When I did this, it spat back two names: one was Mitch’s own e-mail address, the one I used every day.

  And a second, unfamiliar screen name: RealGuy100.

  I clicked on the link to open the profile, and almost line for line, it was a match with Mitch’s, except that this screen name listed him as single as opposed to blank like his familiar profile. Blank, of course, could mean many things, one of which was “seriously dating somebody and madly in love.”

  I knew two things: this was definitely Mitch, and single meant single.

  I immediately added RealGuy100 to my buddy list. The next time he logged on, his name would appear in a little window on the corner of my screen, along with the names of other people I knew who were also online.

  I waited.

  A half hour later, RealGuy100’s name popped up.

  AOL allowed you to click a name, and if the person was in a public chat room, it would tell you which one. I pressed the LOCATE MEMBER ONLINE button and it said, “RealGuy100 is in member chat room NewYorkCity Men 4 Men NOW.”

  I thought, Well, well, well.

  I poured myself a tall glass of scotch and settled in. This was deeply thrilling.

  How far would he go? Would he actually hook up with somebody? Would he have sex with some complete stranger and then act as if nothing had happened the next time we were together?

  Obviously, I realized, I had no choice. If Mitch was sneaking around behind my back and having sex with people he met in common chat rooms, that would change everything. I could never be with somebody who wasn’t trustworthy and monogamous.

  I would have to lay a trap.

  I created my own new screen name: SwellGuyNY. I added a fantasy profile, assembling all the physical qualities I knew Mitch found attractive in a man. When SwellGuyNY entered the same chat room and Mitch clicked on the screen name, the profile would be irresistible to him.

  Using his own profile measurements as a starting point, I subtracted one inch in height and added several inches to the diameter of my legs. I then named several movies, all of which I knew to be Mitch’s favorites. I quoted something from a book I knew he loved and said I had a dog, because one of Mitch’s greatest sources of complaint was that his building would not allow them and someday he wanted one.

  I logged on under my new name and clicked my way into the chat room where I’d seen RealGuy100. There were twenty-three other people in the room. Instantly, a chat window appeared with RealGuy100’s name.

  What’s up?

  Thinking of hooking up, I replied.

  Me too, he said.

  I asked, What are you into?

  He wrote, Totally versatile … love kissing … getting really oral, etc.

  It was the etc. that made me feel queasy. What the fuck did that mean? I could not believe that I was dating somebody who would “etc.” with strangers and then wanted to kiss me with that same RealGuy100 mouth.

  I now loathed Mitch. I typed, Send me your picture?

  He did, and it was Mitch, a scan of his six-year-old author photo. His mother had taken the picture.

  I logged off. I just dumped him there. Now, not only was his boyfriend rejecting him sexually at home but so were the guys in the AOL chat room. Perhaps this new anonymous rejection would send him into a spiral of misery, which I felt he absolutely deserved.

  An hour later, he called and left a message on my answering machine. “Are we getting together later?” he asked.

  I didn’t call him back. He called three more times, and I let the machine answer.

  The following morning when he called, I did pick up. “Hey,” I said, upbeat.

  He was crying. “What did I do? Are you mad at me? Where have you been?”

  I told him I’d been exhausted and fallen asleep last night.

 
He said he was going crazy because it felt like things between us were falling apart. He asked if I’d been to my psychiatrist, and I told him, “He bumped me up to twice a week.”

  Then I suggested we take some space.

  I used exactly that word because it’s the most infuriating word of all.

  He tearfully muttered, “Maybe space is a good thing.”

  Of course, it never is, but he agreed. He was sniffling when he hung up.

  A minute later, RealGuy100 logged on and went into a chat room. I’d cloaked my name, made myself invisible so he couldn’t see me but I could see him. Now I knew that my sexually frustrated and weepy boyfriend was completely willing to screw around on me behind my back.

  And I knew this because I was stalking him like a psychopath online. I was exactly like Kathy Bates in Misery, except not as fat and therefore more nimble.

  * * *

  Dr. Schwartz looked drained that evening when I arrived for my emergency appointment at eight. A puffy-faced, red-eyed woman who had obviously been crying for the last fifty minutes was just leaving his office when I got there, and he ushered me in immediately. No doubt she had originally been his last appointment for the day, so I actually felt sorry for him.

  But once I pulled out all my printouts, the pages and pages of documentation detailing Mitch’s online exploits with strangers, each of which happened to be me using a different screen name, Dr. Schwartz seemed anything but weary.

  Each of my different online identities had a unique photo, lifted from elsewhere on the Web. Along with this, I had brought a stack of e-mails from Mitch, with lines like “I would never cheat on you, but maybe we have to have an open relationship even though that’s not what I want.”

  Using these documents, I explained what I had done, or rather, how I’d tried to fix myself.

  He was riveted.

  He was holding all my printouts in his lap. “Help me understand,” he said. “After you had bathtub sex with your ex-boyfriend, what triggered the series of affairs that followed?”

  I explained how the first affair happened because I thought maybe I needed to “practice.” Maybe I just needed to oil the machinery and I would be okay. I could forgive myself, I thought, because I was doing it for us, not me.

  “Besides,” I explained, “with an ex-boyfriend, it’s easy to just sort of add that one sexual encounter to all the other times you had sex before, when you were a couple. So in a real sense, that first affair didn’t even happen.”

  Dr. Schwartz nodded. He was following me. Possibly, he even approved of my logic. It was hard to know for sure.

  “The next affair happened because the first one really didn’t teach me anything, and I thought, I have to do this again but with a total stranger. But that was a failure, as well, because the guy I had sex with was physically much more my type than Mitch.”

  “I’m confused,” he said. “How was this second affair a failure? Were you unable to get an erection?”

  “No,” I explained. “I got several erections. It was a failure because the guy was much hotter than Mitch could ever be. So it wasn’t a fair and unbiased study, you know what I mean? It’s like, obviously, I can get it up for the Brazilian soccer player with the philosophy scholarship at NYU, because who wouldn’t be able to get it up for him? I mean, he was semipro, you know?”

  Dr. Schwartz glanced up at the ceiling as if performing calculations. Eventually, he looked back at me and said, “Okay, I think I’ve got it straight.”

  I continued. “The third affair happened because I couldn’t tell after either of the first two whether this was a control issue I was dealing with or maybe the need to be degraded. I just didn’t know. So I picked a guy who was just plain ugly, and we went back to his place in Brooklyn. Everything about him was tacky, including his apartment. I mean, he was really nobody’s type.”

  “And?” Dr. Schwartz asked, leaning forward with what I thought might perhaps be an extra degree of interest.

  “And I couldn’t really get it up at first. Only when I pretended I was a hustler, then I could. That’s when I knew it wasn’t about being degraded. It was about control. But control of what?”

  He shook his head like he just didn’t know.

  “Exactly,” I said. “That’s why the fourth affair had to happen. I had to find out what it was I was trying to control.”

  “So, what was this fourth affair?” he asked.

  I leaned back against the brown leather and looked at him with importance. “It was the fourth affair that told me everything,” I said.

  Dr. Schwartz leaned so far forward he was in real danger of tipping his chair off balance and tumbling onto the carpet. “And why is that?”

  “Because the fourth affair was with George,” I admitted.

  “Who’s George?” Dr. Schwartz asked, puzzled. He began riffling through his notes. “I don’t recall that name. Have you mentioned him?”

  I sighed and looked down at the arm of the chair. “No, I don’t think I’ve mentioned George yet. But probably, I should have,” I said.

  * * *

  George had been one of the first people I met after moving to Manhattan in 1989. He was an investment banker, and on our first date, I learned two stunning things about him. First, his office was directly across the street from my Battery Park City apartment. In fact, from his desk, he would be able to peer out the window and look directly into my bedroom. The other thing I learned was that he had a “roommate,” which made no sense to me because he was an investment banker and thus shouldn’t need a roommate.

  This was actually the last thing he told me on our date after he handed me his phone number: “And if somebody else answers, don’t worry; it’s just my roommate.”

  As I walked away, I actually considered tossing the number into the trash because, roommate, my ass. But then? It spooked me that he could see my apartment from his office. Because nobody lived downtown in my neighborhood. It was originally created from the landfill generated during the construction of the Twin Towers, so New Yorkers jeered at the neighborhood. It was considered the New Jersey of Manhattan. The fact that George could see my unmade bed from his desk drenched our meeting in destiny.

  As I sat in the windowsill of my apartment overlooking the West Side Highway, I held the scrawled number in my hand. Somehow I knew that to call it would alter my life.

  Of course, I had been right. There had never been a roommate, only a lover of almost seven years who was dying of AIDS. The lover had contracted the virus by having an affair. George remained HIV negative.

  I fell in love with him. And one of the things I loved most about him was that he wouldn’t leave his boyfriend for me. They’d been out of love for several years, but George couldn’t abandon him. This made him mythic in my mind. Heroic.

  I was absolutely obsessed with him. Because I couldn’t see him constantly and we had to meet downtown at my apartment during lunch or at night when he was walking his dog, I redecorated my apartment to look like his.

  Then his boyfriend became seriously sick and was hospitalized. There was a great deal of bleeding, and George couldn’t bring himself to wear gloves. Several months later, the boyfriend was dead, and George tested positive himself.

  And suddenly, he was mine. Everything I wanted, I had. Except I knew I couldn’t really have it.

  He’d been HIV positive now for five years. And all this time, I’d been trying my hardest to fall out of love with him.

  * * *

  “I don’t understand,” Dr. Schwartz interjected. “Why have you spent so much time trying not to be in love with George?”

  I just looked at him as though he were a madman. “Because George is dying,” I said. “I mean, he wasn’t dying at first, but I knew he would eventually, and now he is. And why on earth would I want to be with somebody who was only going to abandon me?”

  Now Dr. Schwartz leaned back in his chair and resumed the more traditional posture of a psychotherapist. “I see,” he said.
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  “So I’ve been pulling away from him, you know? Especially over the last two years, I’ve really pulled back. And he’s become sicker and sicker. Over the past six months, I’ve hardly seen him at all. And when I have, it’s been shocking.”

  An image of George waiting for me on a bench outside a coffee place on Hudson Street came to mind. He was so skinny. He had a walking cane leaning against his knee.

  I went on. “I just felt like if I could make him fade away instead of just suddenly vanishing right in the middle of love, that would be easier, you know?”

  To my enormous surprise, my eyes flooded with tears.

  “Has it worked?” Dr. Schwartz asked.

  Well, that’s not fair, I thought. You can’t ask that question after you see the tears.

  “No,” I said. “I mean, yes,” I corrected myself. “It has worked. In a way. I mean, I’m not in love with him anymore. I’m in love with Mitch instead.”

  He nodded but didn’t say anything, so I went on.

  “It’s just that, well, I wondered something. I wondered if I could still have sex with George, after all this time. It’s been almost a year. And sex with him was the best sex I ever had. It always had been.”

  “Is that right?” Dr. Schwartz asked.

  He looked sad, and I wondered if he was just so tired of hearing people’s problems all day. I wondered if he’d rather be home watching game shows and eating takeout lasagna from Zabar’s.

  “So I called him up, and he was totally shocked to hear from me, but he was also really happy. I asked if I could come over, and he said, ‘Yes, right away, come now.’”

  Dr. Schwartz leaned over and plucked a tissue from the iris-printed box, and I expected him to hand it to me and was about to thank him, but he kept it for himself. He just held on to it, resting his hands on top of my computer printouts in his lap.

  A strange feeling of loss began to creep over me as I kept talking. “So I went over to George’s apartment and had sex with him. Even though he’s wasted away to nothing and was hooked up to an IV line and even though it was the most awful, sickening scene in some horrible way? It was also the best sex I’ve ever had. Even though the only thing that happened was he rubbed my dick through my jeans. He didn’t even rub it, he just put his hand on top of my lap as we sat side by side on the edge of his bed, and I came instantly, harder than I’ve ever come in my life.”