I have started seeing a therapist. This one is not the first. The first one was five years before, a balding, wiry man near Gramercy Park named Dr. Dave. Dave is the guy I see when I am twenty-five and still living with Nell, when the once faint, unobtrusive recognition of male beauty begins to bully its way into something more urgent. At that point, my sexual history with men amounts to a urinal skirmish in a train station bathroom in college and a few makeout sessions with an oncology resident who lives near my first apartment in New York. I chalk these up to curiosity and push them from my mind. But toward the end of my relationship with Nell, before meeting Noah, I become preoccupied with men — their bodies, their voices, their smell. I begin trying to remember what it was like kissing Ron, the oncologist, and am only able to recall the thrill of stubble against my face and the smell of his clean, pressed shirts. I call a phone line a few times, advertised in The Village Voice for men cruising for sex, and when Nell is away I meet up with a few of them. Nothing will be as exciting as I remember those first moments with Ron, but I am still drawn back to that phone line — listening to what I imagine as lonely, desolate men trawling the night for sex. I think if I go to a shrink and talk it through, I can make that need, that new urgency, go away, or at least recede to a place where I won’t need to act on it.
Without going into the reasons, I ask my boss and several friends for names of therapists and psychiatrists. I see five or six, two of them twice, and finally decide on Dr. Dave. He’s $175 an hour — down from his usual $250 because I don’t make much money — and he wants to see me twice a week. It takes three or four sessions of examining my attraction to men before we get to my boyhood friends — Kenny, Adam, Michael — and whether or not I had sexual feelings for them. I don’t think so, and he presses for memories of seeing their penises and whether or not they saw mine. At one point I say, matter-of-factly, that no one would have seen my penis. When Dr. Dave reminds me that I described seeing Michael’s several times as we fly-fished on the Housatonic River, I say, again matter-of-factly, that I never peed in the river but instead always went to shore and into the woods.
Why? he asks.
I don’t know, I answer.
Were you ashamed or embarrassed by your penis? he continues.
No, I don’t think so.
Then, why?
Why? he repeats.
And then. There I am. Eleven or twelve. In the woods, behind some tangle of branches, thrashing and jumping and manhandling my dick as if it’s on fire and I’m trying to put it out. And with that one memory, all at once a million memories. I don’t believe them at first, but there is some physical sensation, some old bodily recognition, then and after, that keeps me from dismissing them as crossed wires in my mind.
Dr. Dave and I spend a year and a half remembering all of it — the nurse’s bathroom, the blood-spotted underwear, my father. We spend a lot of time on him. What he said, how he said it, how it made me feel. All that. And then, after I meet Noah and we move in together six months later, I grow weary of reoccupying my boyhood struggles and stop seeing Dr. Dave. One day I just don’t go. He leaves a few messages, but I pay his bill and don’t return his call. I don’t say anything about what I remembered to anyone, and after a while I begin again to wonder if I had made it all up. Eventually it recedes and, for the most part, fades from my thoughts.
Now, three years later, I’m thirty years old, and I have left the job I’ve been in for seven years, the only job I’ve had in New York, to start an agency with a friend. I have met Noah by now — on a night when Nell is out of town and I call one of those phone lines. He walks into the entryway of my apartment and without speaking we kiss. We talk all night. He is manly but silly, too, and warm, and I tell him I am a year younger than I am, that I went to Harvard, and that my father grew up on Marlborough Street in Boston. I correct the first two lies before morning but leave the last one untouched. It will be my father, years later, when they meet for the first and last time, who will tell Noah that he grew up in Dedham, Mass., a middle-class bedroom town just outside Boston.
We tell everyone that we met at a birthday party in Brooklyn for a client of mine who is an old schoolmate of Noah’s. This is the first secret we keep together.
I drink too much, and I can’t keep from dialing dealers and staying out until all hours. I’m a crack addict, I know this, Noah knows this, but to everyone else I am a dependable, decent guy with a promising new company and a great boyfriend. We live in a beautiful apartment that Noah’s grandmother paid cash for, and we’ve filled it with vintage photographs and furniture and expensive Persian rugs. From a distance, it looks like an enviable life. Up close, it’s partly what it looks like: I’m in love with Noah, but beyond the drug-related infidelities, I’ve had two affairs — one with a man and another with a woman. It is my firm belief that he has been faithful to me throughout the relationship. We’re proud of the apartment, the things we’ve carefully arranged there, but we both call it One Fifth instead of home.
It feels as if each week, there is some lunch or some dinner or some phone call that is going to blow my cover, reveal that I am not nearly as bright or well read or business savvy or connected as I think people imagine me to be. My bank account is always empty, and when I look at the ledgers at the agency, I wonder how we will pay our employees, the rent, the phone bill, without Kate writing another check to float us. Noah is covering my expenses at home, but we are keeping a tally so that I will pay him back once the money from commissions starts coming into the agency. I remember the lines from a Merwin poem I used to read to Nell all the time, I have been a poor man living in a rich man’s house, and cringe each time. I often wish it all felt the way it looked, that I could actually be living the life everyone thinks they see. But it feels like a rigged show, one loose cable away from collapse.
Noah is making trips to L.A. and Memphis to rustle up producers and cast and money for the film he has been working on for years. When he is away, I call Rico or Happy or go see Julio, a guy I meet through another guy I met at Fitz’s place on the second and last time I went there. This guy, a twenty-year-old Hispanic kid with gray teeth, will invite me to Julio’s, and I will end up going there for years. People come to Julio’s and he lets them do drugs and have sex, as long as they share both. These nights were once few and far between — every two or three months — but now they are every other week, and while they would once end around one, they are now creeping closer and closer toward dawn.
After another rough morning, after Noah has begged me to get help, I agree to see a psychiatrist who specializes in addiction issues. We get a name from a college friend of Noah’s and I go. His office is in his very large, very elegant Riverside Drive apartment. It’s a short meeting. He asks why I’m there. I tell him about my drug use and how I want to stop but can’t seem to and he asks about my drinking. My drinking? I ask, as if he’s suddenly mentioned the weather in Peru or the price of IBM stock. He says I need to stop drinking before he will agree to see me and I politely excuse myself and leave.