The Golden Condom (12 page)

Even after such an insult, I never considered leaving him.

As our remaining time together grew short, I kept trying to reach him. I said it grieved me to part from anything that mattered to me, yet I welcomed the grief because it meant I had felt deeply and needed to express it. “I even had trouble leaving the Parthenon,” I told him—another object that was golden in the sunlight—“because it was so beautiful and I knew I'd never see it again.” He made a joke out of this, grinning, bowing, and pretending to shake hands with an imaginary building. Grieving was not in his repertoire.

Finally, I said the naked truth. “I just want you to hold me. I want your physical presence, because soon there will be nothing.”

“I'm sorry,” he said, “but I'm going home alone to sleep and think, and I'll call you later.” When I went home alone, I felt inconsolable.

He surprised me once more when he eventually called, days later, to ask if I wanted to see his tabla (an Indian drum; the vogue for Indian music was in full swing); it was in his hometown several hours away, in his bedroom in the house where he had grown up. He was going there on the motorcycle to plant some trees for his mother. I took along a paper to work on while he dug the holes.

It was a little frame house on a street of nearly identical houses with neat but barren yards separated by chain-link fences. The interior was dark. There were heavy curtains on the windows and Catholic devotional art on the walls (he had never mentioned that he was Catholic) as if from another era, another world. His mother was due home from work in a couple of hours, and we were staying for lunch. He was greeted by a big shaggy dog who was overjoyed to see him.

He took me upstairs to his tiny bedroom, unchanged since his high school years. I admired the tabla—he put Ravi Shankar on his old record player—and I was fascinated to see photographs of him as a crew-cut teenager, looking anything but cool. Everything there was a window into a past he had never mentioned—that he had been a runner, played various wind instruments in the school orchestra, won various academic honors, read Stendhal's
On Love.
Then we spent a ravenous hour in the bed where he had slept in the years before he turned into the striking, graceful, seemingly insouciant man I knew. The combination of physical and emotional intimacy before parting was the consolation I had longed for.

But then, to regain a sense of control and put some distance between us, he mentioned a girl he wanted to seduce when he returned to graduate school, and he warned me not to interrupt him while he was working in the yard; clearly, he had done enough relating for one day.

His mother arrived, a plainly dressed woman who seemed much older than my own mother, although they were contemporaries. He kissed her forehead with real tenderness. It was clear that she adored him and that the feeling was mutual. Then she proceeded, over a lunch of Spam and watermelon, to regale me with stories about her Mikey—how he charmed everyone, what a wonderful son he was, how he took care of her. It was almost an infomercial for my benefit. For the rest of the afternoon, I lay writing in the grass in the backyard and watching him happily working. I felt no need to interrupt.

That night when we returned to the university, he took me dancing. Afterward, we had what I had hungered for more than anything, a serious conversation about our pasts. Unprompted, he spoke at length and with feeling, telling me that he was six months old when his father had died, that his mother had been left destitute. She had “a bleak life as a clerk” and had devoted herself to raising him, sacrificing everything for him, never remarrying. They lived just above the poverty line, and—this was the only moment that bitterness over an old humiliation crept into his voice—his clothes came from a low-end mail-order catalog. No wonder he became such a good cook and a stylish dresser, and no wonder he couldn't bear to get too involved or to say good-bye; he'd endured but never fully processed more than one devastating loss—his father's death, his mother's depression, his straitened childhood. He had reason to be afraid of the dark side of life.

This was the only time Michael ever opened himself to me unsparingly. Although I didn't know it, the whole day was his unspoken farewell.

*   *   *

His actual leaving town a week later was, to borrow Michael's way of putting things, “rather different” from our last, moving idyll together. On the day before his departure, I hadn't heard a word from him and did not move from my room to make sure I didn't miss his call—but every hour passed in silence. Was he really not going to come and say good-bye? I typed ten pages about my feelings in the third person to get some perspective and stayed up all night waiting for him.

The phone finally rang at 10:00
A.M.
the next day. He was coming over, stopping by on his way out of town, on his motorcycle. He had arranged that our last moments together would be in public, at the front door of my dorm. I put myself together and greeted him without complaint. He seemed remote. I tried to set his image in my mind.

Then he told me where he had been, even though I hadn't asked. He had spent the night “consoling” a woman who was “broken up” about his leaving, one of the legion he had told me he was attracted to. “She was just released from a mental hospital,” he added by way of explanation, “and she's even crazier than you.” With that, he put his arms around me, kissed me, and said, “We won't lose touch.” As he rode away, I stood riveted to the spot in shock.

“How long before I can read this and look back without the pain stifling me?” I wrote afterward. It was to take another forty-eight years.

My dear friend, the man who had stood helplessly by while the awful endgame unfolded, fed me and took me downtown to the symphony that night for a performance of the Bach Double Violin Concerto. During the slow movement, one of the most tender and passionately entwining pieces of music every written, the sonic equivalent of fulfilled love, all my pent-up shame and rage and grief and longing overwhelmed me, and I sat there sobbing in my seat. It was the only time I have ever openly wept at a concert and the only time until now that I wept over him.

THE GOLDEN CONDOM: REVENGE, SWEET AND BITTER

I had no faith at all that Michael meant what he said about staying in touch; I thought it was a getaway line, not a promise. Once again, I was wrong. Soon I got a letter from him, printed in red ink. He referred to things we had said and done but omitted any mention of, let alone any apology for, his brutal exit. I was intensely agitated to receive it but responded in an arch style as close to his as I could manage. My hunger to maintain a connection with him, no matter how meager and unsatisfying, had not changed.

He proved more faithful as a correspondent than he had been as a lover. Every few weeks, I received a couple of pages precisely printed in red ink. Every time, I strained to find the right tone in which to craft a reply.

This odd, taxing correspondence had been going on for several months when I received a letter from him that was not quite as chatty or nonchalant as the others. It was a request for advice. He wrote to ask me, since he knew I knew about such things, how he might go about sexually satisfying the girl he had mentioned to me the day I met his mother. She was timid and naive, and he wasn't sure how to put her at ease. Could I make any recommendations based on experiences we had had together?

Nothing he had ever said or done held a candle to this. Did he really consider me a female Playboy Advisor? Then, an idea burst upon me fully formed of how to reply to what I came to call “The Sex Tips Letter”: I would send him, anonymously, a golden condom, which I would create for the occasion. This would be my way to say “Fuck you” to him for behaving as though we weren't lovers but rather partners in the seduction of an innocent girl like the sophisticated, ice-cold, coconspirators Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil in the scandalous French novel
Les Liaisons Dangereuses.
I meant it as an insult in kind, my attempt to humiliate and ridicule him for making such a sordid, selfish request of me. My implicit message was “Maybe wearing this will impress her and turn her on, since you can't seem to do it on your own.” The gilding, a reference to his coloring and his narcissism, made it even more preposterous. I was so outraged that I didn't care how he felt about it, or me, and I expected no answer. I intended it as an exorcism of his hold over me.

There were some logistical problems to work out before I could implement my plan. How would I acquire the raw materials? In the first place, in that era of the Pill, I had never even seen a condom, much less purchased one. An older friend of mine came to the rescue and provided several specimens, since it might take some practice to perfect the gilding technique. She also offered to be present when I produced the glittering item I envisioned. I bought a can of gold spray paint at a local art supply store.

Then there was the problem of finding a suitable venue in which to fabricate the object. I had just moved out of the dorm and into an apartment with a light fixture in my bedroom ceiling. Heeding the warning on the can to “use only in a well-ventilated space,” I raised the window sash and covered the floor and the nearest wall with newspaper. Then I opened the foil packet, unrolled the unfamiliar contents, attached the open end with paper clips and string to the chandelier, and began spraying. Having never done anything remotely resembling this before, I had no idea what to expect—certainly not what actually happened: the chemicals in the paint made the latex expand at least thrice its normal size and length. Here was a condom to reckon with, one as big as his ego. After my coconspirator and I laughed heartily at what I had wrought, I let my eloquent creation dry for the rest of the day, folded it up, and sent it off to him in an envelope marked “Fragile,” with no return address.

In record time, I got a call from him, the only one since he had left town. There was a hint of chagrin as well as eagerness in his voice; now that I had called his bluff, he was dying to talk to me. He saw at once that I must have been the source. He seemed abashed, but mostly he thought it was hilarious; I had exceeded even his high standards for wit and repartee. So thoroughly delighted was he that he told me he was coming back to the city at Christmas and wanted to see me. Concealing my astonishment, I replied, truthfully, that I wasn't going to be in town when he planned to be there; for once, I had no intention of changing my own schedule to suit his. Then he said words I never imagined I would hear him say, the sweetest words in the world, an unimagined triumph: “I'll wait for you.”

I had unwittingly discovered—when I was done trying—the way to his heart, at least temporarily. I had evened the score with my cheeky art project. He felt compelled to pursue me because, at long last, I had rejected him. I should have enjoyed my moment of glory, written him off, and moved on, but I wanted him even more since I had gotten him to admire my gumption.

Right around the time that “The Sex Tips Letter” from Michael arrived, Jonathan, another dancer—also a tall motorcyclist-scientist who played the oboe—took me out on a real date. I had no idea how I was going to negotiate the surfeit of suitors, with Michael waiting for me to return after Christmas and Jonathan in residence. Fate, however, intervened to prevent me from enjoying my triumph as planned. Another of Michael's red letters arrived. It was brief, sober, and terrible. He had not only succeeded in seducing the young woman in question even without the benefit of advice from me but had also gotten her pregnant. He wouldn't be coming to town for Christmas because he had to take her to Mexico for an illegal abortion, the only kind available at the time.

The news made me sick. His selfishness and his carelessness did more harm to this poor woman than anything he had ever done to me. I got away with nothing damaged but my self-esteem; she risked dying.

He called me, unexpectedly, late one night in early January. I could feel the urgency in his voice; the veneer of nonchalance was gone. “You know you're the first person I turn to when I want to talk,” he said by way of explanation. I had never imagined anything of the sort, yet here he was, seeking me out when he was in trouble. This was the fulfillment of the fantasy of everybody who has ever loved an unresponsive person.

“So why didn't you talk to me when you were here?” I asked, emboldened.

“There wasn't much to say,” he said—and then told me for the next hour, in wretched detail, everything that had happened in Mexico. Fortunately, the young woman had lived.

He was frantic, desperate, and on the verge of tears; I had never seen him like that. As reprehensible as I found his conduct, the specter of so self-contained a man revealing his distress to me—and only me—was both unnerving and gratifying. Despite everything, I also pitied him.

After we hung up, I wrote in my diary, “The thought crossed my mind when we were talking how ordinary it all was, and he was. Why had I tormented myself so over him?” “Ordinary” was the last adjective I would ever have imagined using to describe him until that moment. My Golden One was nothing but base metal.

I couldn't tolerate this insight very long, however, and very quickly I converted him in my thoughts back to “extraordinary.” He still filled my need to win the love of an unattainable man, a need I could not yet relinquish. To face the truth about him would mean I had lavished myself on someone entirely unworthy of my devotion.

I told Jonathan nothing about this conversation. “Somehow when I am alone,” I confessed to my diary, “all of Jonathan's tenderness melts away before the bright glances of Michael's elfin eyes.” When you are in thrall to an obsessive love, a reciprocated one seems less alluring. You prize what you cannot have more than what you can.

*   *   *

Michael told me he was coming back in July, and we arranged to meet. Unbeknownst even to myself, I was planning my second act of vengeance against him. The first had been for insulting me by asking for sex tips; the second would be bending him to my will to punish him for crimes of the heart against me. I wanted him to stay with me and be my lover once more, but this time, I vowed, unconsciously, that I would be in charge.