Toxic (opening chapter)

“morgan/john” (January 9)

Ted, from the safety of his idling car, watched the well-dressed middle-aged woman scurry from the driveway to the door of the McMansion. He regarded her like an enemy, despite having never seen her before that moment.

Ted was suddenly very aware of his own anxious perspiration and how he smelt. He briefly considered putting the car in gear and driving off, pretending he never came to John’s house with the intention of confronting him, all because it would be a shame to do so when he didn’t smell his best.

Nonetheless, once the woman was inside, Ted continued watching the house. Through a window by the entryway, a light switched on. The woman dropped her bags and suddenly John appeared, hugging her like he loved her, and not Ted, when Ted knew that not to be true. Ted got out of the car and approached the house with a renewed commitment. He could feel himself doing something Susan, the therapist, would call reactive or impulsive, but at this point he had little control over his body. He pressed the doorbell, which chimed through the cavernous house.

The woman answered the door, looking politely puzzled to see Ted.

“I’m looking for John,” he said, keeping his distance from the woman, fearing she could smell him.

“No-one named John lives here,” she responded with a graciously dismissive tone, as if she had settled the matter.   

But Ted did not believe her. He’d just seen John through the window, however, didn’t have the words to express this particular disbelief. Luckily, John was suddenly audible shouting to the woman somewhere from inside the house:

“Agatha – who is it?”

Agatha -- a name befitting a demented grandmother. There’s no way John could love an Agatha, Ted reasoned, suddenly feeling supremely confident that this would all go very well for him.   

John appeared at the doorway. Seeing Ted, he immediately scowled.

“Aw, Ted, what the fuck? Why are you here?”

Ted, for some unbelievable reason, hadn’t expected this reaction. When he’d met John (who, he now suspected, may not actually be named John) through Grindr, he’d been sweet, affectionate, and caring. They’d gone for drinks and laughed at their age gap, because even though Ted was twenty-five and John was somewhere in his forties, they both had the same complicated feelings about Woody Allen (who, yes, maybe molested one of his step-kids, but, on the other hand, Annie Hall is still a classic). Plus, neither really liked penetrative anal sex.  It was meant to be.

“I wanted to tell you that I love you,” Ted said, adding: “I was going to text it, but you’re not responding to my messages.”

A pathetic malaise hung in the air for a few moments.

John sighed but didn’t respond. He and Agatha had a spirited, if quiet, discussion, away from the doorway and deeper into the house, that Ted couldn’t totally hear. It wasn’t quite an argument (in fact, at one point, Agatha left the foyer entirely for a few seconds to tend to a crying baby in another room, during which time John simply stood and did not speak to Ted at all. Ted figured they were beyond chit-chat).

When Agatha returned, the baby cradled in her arms, she invited Ted inside very warmly, out of the weather, and had a candid discussion with him about hers John’s relationship. John (actually named “Morgan”) and her, she explained, have an open relationship – she and Morgan can have short-lived affairs when the other is out of town. It all sounded very modern and hip.

Morgan/John stood by silently and resentfully while this discussion occurred, and Ted nodded throughout as if this was the most normal day of his life.  At a certain point, Agatha stopped talking, and, with non-verbal cues Ted did not read, implied it was time for him to leave. Ted instead lingered, turning to Morgan/John. 

“So, you don’t love me? Just to clarify.”

Morgan/John sighed again, exasperated.

“We slept together twice, and I told you a fake name. I genuinely don’t understand how you could have gotten that impression.”

This was something Ted had heard before, not verbatim, and not from Morgan/John, but from lovers and casual fucks from whom Ted had misread flirtatious, polite, interaction for declarations of love or undying affection.

Immediately, Ted felt a well of frightening sickness fall over him, and he struggled not to cry. It wouldn’t really matter if he had cried, because the situation was already so pathetic that it was beyond repair, but Ted’s desire for some form of pride took over regardless. He took a breath, which caught in his throat.

The couple watched Ted return to his shitty car, probably just to make sure he actually left.

He drove a few blocks, past where the brand-new subdivision turned into uncorrupted scrubland, and pulled over onto a gravel shoulder. A jarring supercut of the last few minutes began playing in his head over and over again:  Ted ludicrously declaring his love for a married man with a child, being invited inside the monstrously over-designed home to be rejected by a woman he had not met, and the wail of a baby he did not know about or even consider.

(i genuinely dont understand how you could have gotten that impression)

He slapped himself, hard, on the cheek, to make the sounds stop and interrupt his self-awareness. It worked, for a moment. The palm of his offending hand hurt more than his cheek, though, and on the drive home he thought about the most self-flattering way he could present this story to Susan, the therapist, so she would know he was a good little patient.