The Golden Condom (7 page)

*   *   *

These four obsessive affairs, so different on the surface, serve similar functions. Their hidden themes are identity, desirability, and redoing history. Each of these driven people was trying to re-create past experiences or relationships in new guises. For the duration of their doomed romances, all four were under the spell of the repetition compulsion, pulled inexorably back into their unmetabolized longings and losses. Maggie found her father again in her philosophy major, David tried to regain his mother's exclusive love through Anna, José strove to revive his younger self, and Monica was revising the devastating experience of being her estranged parents' child.

It is much easier to say what doesn't work to control this emotional imprisonment than what does. Like chronic dieting, the cheerleading advice and behavior tips on online self-help sites, such as making lists of the beloved's hateful behaviors or obnoxious qualities or imagining him or her covered in vomit—are of limited long-term value. The only way out of pain is through it.

Obsessive love is built on a tissue of illusions: that by having sex with someone you can possess that person's soul; that you can transmute past defeats into present triumphs without understanding or mourning; that you can make the unloving love you by constancy, uncomplaining availability, and molding yourself into what you think that person wants. The only remedy is to recognize, acknowledge, and grieve that you have attached your hopes and handed over your destiny to someone who does not deserve them and who can never satisfy your desire.

Is there an effective way out of the self-inflicted madness of hopeless attachments? W. Somerset Maugham, in
Of Human Bondage,
his autobiographically inspired novel about a humiliating love affair, hints at the path to freedom. It is usually long and slow, with many setbacks and small advances, insights that slowly eat away at the desperate desire for what you cannot have, which begins to look less appealing than what you can. Paradoxically, it is inaction, or what looks like inaction, but is actually intense self-examination and loving self-restraint, that opens your eyes to possibilities for real mutual surrender and fulfillment. As Maugham asserted, “Self-control might be as passionate and as active as the surrender to passion.”

 

3

VENGEANCE IS MINE

The Dark Side of Rejected Love

THE WAGES OF SIN

She opened the hood, unscrewed the radiator cap, and methodically stuffed the bits of frozen tilapia she had painstakingly cut into little pieces as far down into the radiator shaft as she could reach. Then she closed it, confident that when water circulated through the heating system, an ineradicable stench of rotten fish would fill the car belonging to her sixty-year-old husband's twenty-six-year-old lover (who was also their joint employee), insulting its owner's femininity in the grossest terms and forcing her to ponder her foul deed. This would certainly make the employee rue the day that she e-mailed her paramour a photograph of herself naked in front of his own family Christmas tree, an act of heedless bravado documenting the yearlong affair that his wife had discovered only days earlier. Not only would the culprit now have an inescapable reminder of her guilt, but she would never, ever be able to sell the car.

The proverb says that revenge is a dish best eaten cold, when one can savor it more. But in this case, even though the instrument of revenge was frozen, the passionate hatred with which it was wielded was red hot. It is telling that the Internet lists many variations on how to stink up a car to get back at someone, suggesting the popularity of this activity, as well as of the actions that provoke it.

I heard the story from a close friend of the perpetrator. This confidante had talked the betrayed woman out of her original plan, which was to send an illustrated, incriminating letter to the young woman's mother. The employer and her now-former employee had been on such intimate terms that she knew the mother and had even been her houseguest in Mexico. Her friend had argued persuasively that the tilapia strategy was preferable, because only the guilty party and no innocent bystander would suffer the consequences. It was, the two friends agreed, a fitting penalty for a serious crime of the heart that would otherwise have gone unpunished.

There was plenty to punish, as it turned out; the incriminating photograph was just the tip of the iceberg. As soon as her eyes were opened, the wife discovered that, even as she and her employee were regularly going out to lunch together and having heart-to-heart talks, the lovers had been conducting an extensive erotic e-mail correspondence, that they had trysted regularly at out-of-town business gigs, and—the final blow—that the young woman who had been like a daughter to her had recently miscarried his child.

Why did she feel compelled to dramatically punish her husband's paramour (she had already dealt with him by starting divorce proceedings), and why did she only damage her rival's property rather than try to mentally torment, hurt, or even kill the paramour herself, as women scorned often do in tragedies and in the tabloids? I understood instinctively why she chose to punish the woman in this intimate way rather than her husband; unrealistically, most women (and many men) expect more loyalty from friends—even when they work for us—than from lovers or spouses, and therefore, betrayal by a friend seems more unforgivable. Since love is a passion, we are not shocked when it blows off course. Given the nature of the betrayal she was punishing, this woman believed that simply trashing the car would not have sufficiently expressed her outrage. In addition, although the wife was vindictive, she was not violent, except perhaps in her fantasies. She wanted the guilty woman to remember, so killing her was out of the question as well as against the law and the sixth commandment. Tilapia filled the bill.

The underlying purpose of her vengeful act was to restore her own self-esteem and sense of control, to undo an overwhelming feeling of powerlessness. “I didn't want her to get away without suffering as she had made me suffer,” she told her friend. “I felt so much better knowing that in the hot Miami sun that fish would stink, and the smell of it wouldn't go away.” Thanks to this ploy, she believed that the pervasive olfactory evidence of guilt would prevent the paramour from driving away scot-free. And it worked—at least on the surface. “She was the happiest woman,” her friend told me. “She was liberated.”

But was she? Neither the car saboteur nor her friend questioned whether it really was possible to guarantee that the paramour would suffer as she herself had suffered or even suffer at all. The car saboteur felt compelled to force her rival to feel
something
, even if it was not the regret she wanted her rival to feel. However, there is no guarantee that revenge will have the desired effect, a fact often ignored in the frenzy of enacting it.

By doing the most insulting thing she could imagine, the wife wanted to humiliate her rival as she herself had been humiliated. However, having a car's resale value destroyed, even if it makes the owner feel as rotten as her car now smelled, is far less devastating than having a marriage destroyed in a double betrayal of trust. Whether the intended victim actually was horribly insulted or was simply furious or dismissed the sabotage as the behavior of a crazy person acting out jealous rage, the perpetrator would never know. In fact, nobody can neutralize a grave injury that has already occurred by inflicting one in return. The past can never be undone, even though its meaning and impact can evolve over time, and the anguish can diminish.

Authentic liberation from the pain of betrayal involves more than turning the tables. It is hard emotional work and requires a much bigger commitment of time and mental energy than even the most cunning act of vengeance. Delivering retribution is a Pyrrhic victory unless the betrayed person then turns inward and processes the impact of what has befallen her. In this case, the wife would have to confront her own blindness and misplaced trust and understand their origins in her own history. Only serious self-examination could then enable her to rebuild her life on less shaky ground. She would have to mourn for her losses—by confronting the fault lines in her marriage and her husband's character, acknowledging that she had been helpless to prevent another woman from taking his love, and working through her hatred for the two of them for betraying her and for herself for being oblivious. Revenge may be a dish best eaten cold, but the best revenge of all is living wisely and well—learning from the past and applying those lessons in the future.

Is there such a thing as healthy revenge? The auto vandal genuinely felt better afterward. Her spiteful glee at getting even lessened her losses—of her marriage, her trust, her former friend and employee, her emotional foundation—at least temporarily. As long as she had no illusions that it was a lasting solution to the task of recovering her self-respect, it served a purpose. Had she gone on to defame her rival on the Internet, kill her cat, try to ruin her life, or become obsessed with her, she would have continued to be victimized by the betrayal and allowed the affair to warp her permanently. But if the tilapia gave her momentary solace in extremis and if in addition she had no illusions that employing it circumvented the grieving process ahead, it was money and effort well spent, even if technically illegal.

I heard from her friend that the erstwhile employee vanished and that the wife got a healthy divorce settlement. But I had to ask one final question: why did she specifically use tilapia to do the job? “It was cheap, and she probably had it on hand in her freezer,” the friend replied. “I certainly wouldn't choose Copper River salmon as
my
revenge fish.”

*   *   *

The woman who advised the betrayed wife against sending an incriminating letter to her husband's lover's mother spoke with the authority of personal experience. “I told her not to do it, because when you send something like that into the world, it comes back; it really does,” she told me. “I know, because it happened to me. I lived it.” She took this stand because she wanted to spare someone she identified with from her own fate—a fate she believed was retribution for an act of vengeance she herself had meticulously plotted and carried out a decade earlier (she was forty years old at the time) after discovering that her boyfriend and her own closest female friend had betrayed her.

Hers was a subtler, secret, and darker revenge than car vandalism. Instead of ice, she used fire—photographs, artifacts, and names written on slips of paper incinerated with a curse in a black magic ritual.

“I lived with Don for years,” she said. “Right before we broke up, he started an affair with my friend Sandy. He denied it, but I knew it was true from seeing them together.” Here too, e-mail confirmed an illicit relationship between two people who had been trusted and whose characters had never been suspected. Here too, the woman friend's behavior hurt more, especially since she had been one of a group of people who had long shared a summer house with the couple. “I felt so betrayed by her—I couldn't believe that a girlfriend would do that to another woman, because my girlfriends were my family,” she explained.

When she found the incriminating e-mail exchange, she let all their mutual acquaintances and housemates know what had happened. She wanted to defame their characters, and she succeeded. “I made it my business to tell everyone we knew in common about them,” she said. However, there were unanticipated consequences to her revelation. “People were shocked—but in telling them all, I created a division among our friends.” It was satisfying to expose the transgression, even though she lost some friends and sowed dissent that resulted in the disbanding of the close-knit group. “I felt better. I was vindicated,” the avenger said. “It felt good to show them that they couldn't just get away with doing this and not have to pay for it.” She was willing to pay the price in lost friendships herself in order to assure that their actions had consequences.

But sweet though it was, broadcasting the affair was not enough to sate her urge to get back at the couple. She wanted to cause more insidious and permanent damage than simply public censure; she wanted to destroy their chances for happiness. She picked a night with a full moon to carry out a rite intended to curse them. “I needed a sense of cleansing, so I took sage and a candle and things of theirs—including a photo of Sandy I found at our upstate place, and a piece of paper with Don's name written on it—and I burned them together to deny them their love. I wanted their love to fall apart. If I couldn't have love, I didn't want them to have love; it was the only control I had over an uncontrollable situation. I felt helpless to change what happened, to do anything about it. To me, this was a way of getting power back when I had lost it. It gave me the strength to go on.” Like the woman she later advised, she too had been desperate to recover a sense of agency after betrayal, and revenge was the only way she felt she could do it, even though she was frightened of the forces she might be unleashing. “I was also a bit scared, since I felt I was dealing with something I didn't really understand in my own little black magic ritual,” she admitted.

As it turned out, she came to believe that her own long-term losses undid any short-term gains she had achieved from performing her satanic ceremony, despite the comfort she derived at the time. “A friend told me that wishing other people ill comes back twofold on you, and it did,” she said. “It ended up backfiring. Don has been in a good relationship with someone else for eight years, and I've yet to have a good relationship myself.”

What in fact caused her enforced solitude? Was it retribution from the universe for summoning the powers of darkness as she herself believed? Or did that explanation come from her own guilty conscience, as I believe? In either case, she was convinced that she herself had been the one who was punished by her mental cruelty and condemned to a life without love.