Bill Clegg - Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man

I can’t get out of there fast enough. As I reach the door, Lisa grabs at my jacket. I can smell her perfume and cigarette smoke as I shake her off and run toward Ninth Avenue. She follows fast behind, screaming at me to come back. A cab jerks up to the curb. I get in and yell, Go! which, thank God, it does. The sun blazes off the chrome and glass of oncoming traffic and I have to squint to see Lisa run into the street, hail a cab that barely stops as she yanks the door open and jumps in.

As I shout to the driver not to let the cab behind us follow, I cringe in shame at how cartoonishly awful the situation has become. Like so many other moments, this one feels lifted from an after-school special or Bright Lights, Big City . The cabdriver plays his part — rolls his eyes, drives on. Through the rear window, I can see my family and Noah scatter onto the street. It is midday in the city and the world rushes on around them. I am struck by how small they are, this is. How swiftly these unseen little urban dramas are done and gone. Doors click shut, motors roar, taxis squeal away, people disperse. Through the window, I watch them recede to dots. Light flashes from everything and I can barely see.

After three years in remission, my mother’s breast cancer has returned. The literary agency Kate and I have started has been open for a few months and we finally have phone lines. I am determined to have a 212 area code and, against the advice of several friends, pick ATT as our carrier because it is the only one that won’t saddle us with a 646 or, worse, 347 prefix. This matters to me. Many delays and snafus follow, and I come to find out that Verizon controls the equipment in Manhattan, and ATT is their client, so the glitch in our line has to be dealt with through Verizon but mediated by an ATT troubleshooter in Florida. These phone calls take hours each day. At several points during the first weeks of doing business on cell phones, it is made clear that we can easily have phone service if we just give up and go with Verizon. I refuse, again and again, and hold out for the 212 area code. I even instruct the printer to go ahead and print all the stationery before it’s clear we’ll be able to use those beautiful 212 numbers ATT assigned us months ago.

During this time I sell more books than I had expected to; with Kate’s help, staff the agency with assistants and a foreign-rights director; show up for lunches with publishers and authors; and talk to my sister and mother several times a day. My mother is going to a breast cancer clinic in Boston, driving three hours each way from Connecticut to see a doctor who has laid out a course of treatment. After a few weeks it is decided that she will have a double-radical mastectomy and, on the same day, reconstructive surgery. It means she will be in the operating room for eight or nine hours, but she won’t have to go back under if all goes well.

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.