When you are engulfed in flames - By David Sedaris Page 0,78
work — like having one job while applying for another. One boyfriend was all I could handle, all I wanted to handle, really, and while I found this to be perfectly natural, my friends saw it as a form of repression and came to view me as something of a puritan. Am I? I wondered. But there were buckles to polish and stones to kneel upon, and so I put the question out of my mind.
I needed a boyfriend as conventional as I was, and luckily I found one — just met him one evening through a mutual friend. I was thirty-three, and Hugh had just turned thirty. Like me, he had recently broken up with someone and had moved to New York to start over. We had a few practical things in common, but what really brought us together was our mutual fear of abandonment and group sex. It was a foundation, and we built on it, adding our fears of AIDS and pierced nipples, of commitment ceremonies and the loss of self-control. In dreams sometimes I’ll discover a handsome stranger waiting in my hotel room. He’s usually someone I’ve seen earlier that day, on the street or in a television commercial, and now he’s naked and beckoning me toward the bed. I look at my key, convinced that I have the wrong room, and when he springs forward and reaches for my zipper I run for the door, which is inevitably made of snakes or hot tar, one of those maddening, hard-to-clean building materials so often used in dreams. The handle moves this way and that, and while struggling to grab it I stammer an explanation as to why I can’t go through with this. “I have a boyfriend, see, and, well, the thing is that he’d kill me if he ever found out I’d been, you know, unfaithful or anything.”
Really, though, it’s not the fear of Hugh’s punishment that stops me. I remember once riding in the car with my dad. I was twelve, and it was just the two of us, coming home from the bank. We’d been silent for blocks, when out of nowhere he turned to me, saying, “I want you to know that I’ve never once cheated on your mother.”
“Um. OK,” I said. And then he turned on the radio and listened to a football game.
Years later, I mentioned this incident to a friend, who speculated that my father had said this specifically because he had been unfaithful. “That was a guilty conscience talking,” she said, but I knew that she was wrong. More likely my father was having some problem at work and needed to remind himself that he was not completely worthless. It sounds like something you’d read on a movie poster: sometimes the sins you haven’t committed are all you have to hold on to. If you’re really desperate, you might need to grope, saying, for example, “I’ve never killed anyone with a hammer” or “I’ve never stolen from anyone who didn’t deserve it.” But whatever his faults, my dad did not have to stoop quite that low.
I have never cheated on a boyfriend, and, as with my father, it’s become part of my idea of myself. In my foiled wet dreams I can glimpse at what my life would be like without my perfect record, of how lost I’d feel without this scrap of integrity, and the fear is enough to wake me up. Once I’m awake, though, I tend to lie there, wondering if I’ve made a grave mistake.
In books and movies infidelity always looks so compelling, so right. Here are people who defy petty convention and are rewarded with only the tastiest bits of human experience. Never do they grow old or suffer the crippling panic I feel whenever Hugh gets spontaneous and suggests we go to a restaurant.
“A restaurant? But what will we talk about?”
“I don’t know,” he’ll say. “What does it matter?”
Alone together, I enjoy our companionable silence, but it creeps me out to sit in public, propped in our chairs like a pair of mummies. At a nearby table there’s always a couple in their late seventies, holding their menus with trembling, spotted hands.
“Soup’s a good thing,” the wife will say, and the man will nod or grunt or fool with the stem of his wineglass. Eventually he’ll look my way, and I’ll catch in his eye a look of grim recognition.