“I understand that,” he said. “A lot of people do. I can only speak for myself when I say that, for me, it’s not appropriate. I’ve tried to be friends with exes, and there is always some element left over, something I get out of it that is different than other friendships, and that I don’t think is fair to the person I am actually dating.”
“Well, that makes sense. I just think differently.” And we let it go.
To my surprise, as much as I judged him for those statements and had felt judged, my feelings for him seemed to grow instantly stronger. The sex we had that night was our best yet.
“I mean, that’s ridiculous, right?”
My therapist smiled.
“No? You don’t think it’s totally controlling and possessive.”
“I don’t.”
I threw up my hands. “So am I just totally off the map when it comes to appropriate boundaries in relationships, or what?”
She smiled. “No. …”
“But what? I must be.”
“No, you don’t have a great knowledge of those boundaries, but you do have a desire for them.”
“Are you talking about sex here? I told you we have totally normal sex—to both of our surprise, actually, I think.”
“No, I’m not talking about sex. I think that your desire for strict boundaries in sex, your desire to be dominated, comes partly from a desire for nonsexual boundaries. Emotional boundaries. Just plain old limits.”
There it was again—the reverberation of truth, humming like a tuning fork into the silence. I knew she was right.
“You mean that I wanted him to tell me it was inappropriate for my ex to sleep in my bed?”
“And for you to take baths with someone other than him.”
“That, too? But I said that to calm him down!”
“I think you said that to provoke him.”
I sat back in my chair.
When I examined a list of my exes to whom I still spoke, it was obvious that Barrett was right. Those relationships fed my need to be desired, to feel as if I had more than one pot on the stove, just in case. When I was fearful or bored in a relationship, I started calling them, offering subtle encouragements for them to think that maybe someday we could try again. I started fantasizing about them when angry at my current partners. The ex who had slept in my bed didn’t fit that description, but what was the difference in relation to Barrett? What a mundane revelation, that there should be certain courtesies extended to your partner out of consideration or as a simple gesture of commitment. And yet it had never occurred to me. It would have occurred to me when appraising someone else’s relationship; I could have prescribed behavior for a friend based on such a belief, but I never practiced it myself.
Only when I stopped did I realize how much energy I put forth in seduction. Everyone I met! I wanted everyone I met to be a little bit in love with me. There was magic in the way that Barrett’s setting limits relieved me of this need. It reminded me of when Greta had told me I couldn’t lie anymore, that lying needed to be taken off the menu. What a relief! The craving was lifted, just like that. It turned out to be a surrender to values I already had, which had been buried under some more desperate instinct. No one had ever given me a “no” that I believed in. Was that all I was looking for? For someone else to tell me that I wasn’t capable of anything, that I didn’t make up all the rules? In a way, it made sense. What a responsibility!
I remember being seventeen years old, living on my own in Boston, fascistically independent. Still, I took the 88 bus to work every day and was quietly amazed that I made it across the city in one piece, that the bus came on time and drivers obeyed traffic laws, that the world managed for one more day not to dissolve into total chaos. I’m not sure where this fundamental suspicion that the world was perpetually on the brink of dissolving originated from. I remember realizing as a child that my parents were fallible, my teachers tired and often misinformed; that the government could not be trusted; that electricity, money, television shows, and the bus came to me from places invented and managed by people; and that people could be wrong, and cruel, and confused. These are also mundane revelations. Most children experience them, but not every child decides they need to play God. For some reason I did. In drugs, in the dungeon, in my relationships, and in my mind, I was always trying to manage the responsibility of keeping everything under control, trying to prove that it was possible, and then trying to find a way out of it. With drugs and with domming, it was always the two extremes: total forfeit of power and annihilation of will or complete control, a godlike power to manage both my internal and external environments. Both were exhausting. I had gone so far as I did to prove that I could survive anything, to allay my fears. I was preparing myself for the imminent dissolution of the world, but I was also looking for permission to stop.
Greta had talked about aligning my will with the will of a higher power, and I realized that I had aligned my behavior with what I believed. I no longer had to think about what that was anymore, I just knew immediately if I acted in some way incongruent with it. Which I still did sometimes. Especially in the first year with Barrett, I would resort to old methods: withholding, willfulness, attempts to claim more than my share of power in the relationship, testing him. Admitting my own desires sometimes made me feel like a panicked animal. But they didn’t work anymore. Our dynamic created a paradigm different from any previous relationship I’d had, one in which those methods no longer worked. It only worked in balance; if I tried to take more, I got less. So I stopped trying. Like my cravings for drugs, these impulses petered out until there was only a bare flutter left, little more than a reminder of what I once would have done.
37
DO YOU MISS IT?” Autumn leaned over the table, one arm wrapped around her pregnant belly, and plucked the last dumpling out of the bamboo steamer. She was also with a new man, one who didn’t need her money. Midday at Zen Palate in Union Square was a zoo; frantic servers jostled our table with their hips and the man behind Autumn barked with laughter. At a certain level of noise and crowd, New York’s mania can be a comfort, like bobbing on top of a salty wave, everyone shifting in tandem—tightly bound molecules pulled by some greater force, the jumbled twine of our wills somehow unifying into a single tide.
“Sure! Parts of it, anyway. Don’t you?”
“I don’t miss giving enemas.”
“All those hairy asses in panties, ugh.”
We laughed, still happy to share this experience and happy to be on the other side of it.
“No, but I miss that feeling, you know?”
“Like you own the world?”
“Yeah, like it’s real. Reminds me of the first time I did cocaine.”
“Right! So invincible.”
We split the check and kissed good-bye before she headed for the train. Her days were then spent studying for anatomy exams and elevating her swollen feet. It’s funny but not surprising that she ended up a bona fide nurse. I’ve known more than one former sex worker who did. Whatever other reasons brought you to it, our work required a patience with the human body—call it nurturance, caretaking, or curiosity—that not all people have and only some can learn. To my surprise, mine dissipated soon after I stopped needing it. I was never particularly squeamish as a child, increasingly less as I got older, and barely flinched at all the bodily grotes-queries during my years at the dungeon but had since become faint at the mention of blood. Cleaning a surface wound on my dog gave me vertigo mere months after I stopped domming. In so many ways, it was a return to more tender states, as if my suppressed innocence had been preserved for all that time.
Barrett and I moved in together after three months, to a leafy neighborhood a few blocks north of Prospect Park. The routine of our life asserted itself quickly, as if it had been waiting to relax into its natural state and was relieved at our readiness finally. I taught, wrote, went to class, and ran in the park with the dog—a big beautiful animal that had been Autumn’s, whose needs
and neuroticism lent me more patience for my own.
The normality of my life felt sometimes like a huge practical joke. Mostly though, it felt like a blessing, like finally being ready to relax into my own natural state. Barrett never knew me as an active addict, a dominatrix; no one I met then had. They saw me as I was after those things had passed; they saw what those things made me: a sober, moral, responsible woman who laughed easily, was early for everything, and liked to be in bed by 11:00 P.M. Sometimes it felt like a lie, though I knew it wasn’t. If anything, I had more conviction and confidence in the way that I lived than most people I knew. I rarely wanted to be anywhere or anyone else. That is the gift of taking the long road; you know you’re not missing anything.
I used to think that happiness, like God, was an idea weaker people were sold on, to manage the grief of a world with so much suffering. It is just easier, I thought, to decide that you are doing something wrong and you just need to buy the right thing, read the right book, find the right guru, or pray more to be happy than to accept that life is a great long heartbreak. Happiness is not what I imagined that mirage to be: an unending ecstasy or state of perpetual excitement. Not a high or a mirage, it is just being okay. My happiness is the absence of fear that there won’t be enough—enough money, enough power, enough security, enough of a cushion of these things to protect me from the everyday heartbreaks of being human. Heartbreak doesn’t kill you. It changes you.
After watching Autumn waddle down the subway stairs, I walked across the park, killing time before I had to head up to school. I did miss it sometimes. I still had the dreams—I would for a long time. But I didn’t miss the best part—that feeling of pressing up against the barest parts of being human. I’d thought I had to look for it in dark places, that it would be hidden. Turns out it wasn’t.
Acknowledgments
WHILE WRITING A BOOK can be a lonely task, it is not one that can be done alone. Above all, I must thank all the brave and beautiful people I knew during the years that this story takes place, the ones I included, and the ones I didn’t. I am enormously grateful to my agent, Scott Hoffman, for asking all the right questions and accepting nothing less than my best, but most of all for his faith and encouragement throughout the painful process of ushering my story into the right hands, and for knowing whose those were. I cannot imagine a more perfect editor to have worked with than Karyn Marcus, whom I trusted instantly for her marvelous vision, understanding, and belief in this book. For their invaluable guidance, I owe more than I can say to Jo Ann Beard, Nick Mills—who suggested I write this, and especially Vijay Seshadri. And thank you to those who helped me maintain my sanity all along the way, among them my first readers: Caitlin Delohery, Susan DeFord, Shelly Oria, Elizabeth Reichert, Jill Jarvis, Alanna Schubach, Shoshana Sklare, Michael Mah, Erin Duff Shanahan, Emily Anderson, Claire Boland Gage, Anne Hall, Laura Snyder, Jill Stoddard, Jenna Giannasio, Kat Byrne, Beth O’Brien, Laura Schurich, Will Mangum, Nelly Reifler, Joan Silber, Kathleen Hill, Irini Spanidou, Jan Clausen, James Marcus, Seth Colter Walls, William Georgiades, and all my Saturday ladies, who listened. And to Ann Roberts, without whom this book could not have been written. And to my family, for never doubting me. And to Barrett, my happy ending.
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