Magical Thinking - Augusten Burroughs [62]
My therapist nods and listens closely. He has completely forgotten about my eruption of laughter.
I have fooled him.
Later at home, I tell the Schnauzer. “Do you think that’s weird or is it just me?”
“Oh no,” he says. “It’s definitely weird.”
“I mean, what would you do if your therapist offered you his ChapStick?”
The Schnauzer thinks about this briefly before answering. “I’d probably try and forget it happened.”
Then I call my friend Christopher, who referred me to my shrink in the first place. Christopher abandoned therapy last year, and he gave me Bruce. “You take him,” he said. “I’m flying without a net for a while.” I tell him what Bruce did, and Christopher sucks air in so sharply, I feel like my ear will be stuck to the phone.
“Is that weird?” I ask him.
“Oh my god, that is beyond weird. It’s borderline creepy.”
“I know!” I say. “I thought it was so disturbing. And then I thought, am I just overly sensitive? Is he just a normal guy, and I’m like some sort of unsocialized German shepherd? But it’s true, he’s weird.”
Christopher stops laughing long enough to tell me, “You know what? Some people are just like that with ChapStick. I think that’s all it is. I mean, I’ve known people, almost strangers, who have offered me theirs, too. So I think it’s like some people have this very liberal relationship with their ChapStick.”
The Schnauzer makes my favorite thing for dinner. He calls it Lesbian Expander. It’s a sort of chili, made from tempeh, cubed and browned on all sides in butter; brown rice, which he seasons in a mysterious and perfect way; shredded Cheddar cheese; onions; lentil chili; and jalapeño peppers. It’s named Lesbian Expander because it’s something only a lesbian would cook. And Expander because once you eat it, it swells in your stomach to six times its original mass, and you must lie on your side in bed and clutch your stomach.
So this is what we do, we lie in bed, clutching our stomachs and facing each other. I look at his eyes, then his mouth. And then his eyes do the same thing, and then we smile at each other.
“Do you want some ChapStick?” he asks.
“Okay,” I say.
“I’ll get up in a minute and get it for you.”
“Okay,” I say.
We move closer together until we are breathing the same air. And we fall asleep.
KEY WORST
T
he only Hemingway I’ve ever been remotely interested in is Mariel. Though I’ve tried to expand my mind by reading some of her grandfather’s little stories. I read The Old Man and the Sea but my eyelids bled from the toothpicks that I used to keep them open. It amuses me that Hemingway is now a line of sofas, chairs, and bedroom dressers at Thomasville furniture. I wonder how long it will be before I can get a Joan Didion coffee table or perhaps a Philip Roth throw rug for in front of the washer.
I should have considered this before Dennis and I went to Key West, Florida, otherwise known as “Hemingway’s Hideaway” or “the tropical residence of America’s greatest writer.”
I had to admit, even though I never cared much about Hemingway, the name alone lends a certain appeal, as Thomasville obviously knows through extensive consumer testing in shopping malls. “Hemingway” conjures images of thick-slat Venetian blinds, palm fronds, and quaint bungalows scattered on narrow, winding streets, paved with crushed white clamshells.
In no way did I expect a Ripley’s Believe It or Not! museum or an entire street devoted to extra-extra-large T-shirts embossed with slogans such as “I like my woman like I like my dog, on all fours” and “Yes boys, they’re real.”
“God, this is absolutely hideous. It’s worse than Fourteenth Street,” I said the instant we stepped foot on Duval Street.
Dennis is an optimist. “Hold on, hold on,” he said, dragging me by the arm. “We just got here five minutes ago. This is just a touristy part of town. Let’s give it a chance, okay?”
On the one hand, Dennis is the reasonable one in the relationship. On the other, he’ s just the slower one.