Exodus: A memoir

by Feldman, Deborah

  There was a pit in my stomach as I walked toward him in the dim light of the restaurant, already thinking of ways to shorten our meeting. He was in a corner, wearing his ubiquitous scarf, tied in that same signature way. He stood up to hug me, and we both held on a moment longer than normal. And just like that, my anxiety dissipated like a rain cloud banished by the sun. I felt as if I were seeing a very old friend from a distant past, like a friend from home. He radiated warmth and affection.

  I sat down. We joked awkwardly with the waiter. We smiled at each other. He looked straight at me, just like he had when we’d first met, the kind of gaze that most would find disconcerting but that I interpreted as a desire to really see me, as a commitment to get to know me. I let him stare.

  At one point, after a bit of small talk, I reached my hands out across the curiously long, narrow table between us. I couldn’t reach his end of it, but I let my hands dangle there anyway, as if to illustrate the physical gap between us.

  “Let’s not do this,” I said. I had told him over the phone that I didn’t want to do dinner or drinks. I didn’t want a date. I wanted a friend, a lover, a real connection. I didn’t want to go through the alienating motions of convention.

  “What?”

  “Let’s not put a table between us.” I was reminded of the table that had separated me from my future husband ten years earlier, when we had met for the first time.

  “Let’s not do that whole dinner thing when we get together. We don’t have to do that. Why can’t we just hang out, go for a walk, just be around each other? We don’t need to structure it.”

  “Come sit here,” he said, smiling. His seat was a silver booth built into the wall. I came over to his side. We kissed, and it was familiar, as if we kissed the same way. Our spontaneous impulses, although generated individually, felt like they traveled along the same track. His movements anticipated my own.

  “You’re perfect,” he said, looking intensely into my eyes. “You’re so unexpected. I’ve never met anyone like you.”

  In my head I heard Conor whispering into my ear, “You’re beautiful.” It was that simple. All I needed was a man to tell me I was worth loving.

  Jonathan took me upstairs to show me his room. He opened the enormous closet, and sure enough, there were his twenty pairs of shoes, his three enormous suitcases.

  He pointed out all the little details of the room he was so proud of. The rain shower, the flat-screen, the glittering view of Manhattan, the vista of bridges crossing the river to Brooklyn. Then he put his hands on my neck, pushed me up against a wall, and kissed me hard and fast, tugging the Hermès scarf tied at my neck so that it acted as his personal harness. He threw me down on the bed and tried to kiss me again, and I giggled into his mouth.

  “What?” he said, lifting his face off mine to look at me.

  “C’mon, this is funny!”

  “Why?”

  “Because people do this in the movies! People don’t do this in real life!”

  “Of course people do this. I’m doing it and you like it!”

  “Yes, but it’s also funny.”

  He lifted my hands above my head, kissed me again. I kissed back, but I turned him over so I was on top of him. We began to wrestle, pushing each other to see who could maintain control.

  “You don’t have to dominate me,” I said to him.

  “But you want it.”

  “I want equality. We can take turns. You don’t have to be the boss.”

  There was something exhilarating about the energy between us that night. We stayed fully clothed on that bed for a while, playing the same game. One of us would let the other take charge until the other felt the need to take over. After a while, I felt as if someone had opened a pressure valve in my body and released me of tension. I was an uncoiled spring. We lay side by side for a bit, holding hands, not talking.

  I reached my hand under his shirt and around his waist. The soft skin of his stomach, scarred from motocross accidents, felt intoxicatingly warm. I lifted my head and looked at him and felt completely and wholly attracted to him. Everything about him seemed beautiful all of a sudden; his jaw testified to his tenderness, his eyes spoke to his compassion. Every feature I focused on seemed evidence of his best traits. Before, his face had been an unreadable mask; now, it was a poem only I could interpret.

  “You’re just . . . lovely,” I said out loud, wishing there was a better phrase I could use to express my epiphany.

  He looked away. “I’m really moved . . . the way you just said that . . . people have complimented me before, but when you say it, it sounds real.”

  “You mean because I’m so stingy with the compliments?” I said, laughing.

  “Because you’re so brutally honest. I know you don’t feel the need to lie just to please people.”

  “That’s true.” But I never felt like I could trust others to do the same. This was what I had found most bewildering about my new world, the skillfulness and ease with which people set about deceiving each other. It was as if everyone were in a chess match and cheating was the only way to come out a winner in life. Jonathan had professed not to be a player, but in my mind, if you were born into the game, you played—whether you liked it or not.

  “What do you need?” he asked, as we were lying on the bed together, staring up at the ceiling.

  “What do you mean?” My head jerked up so I could look him in the eyes. It was an unexpected question. “You mean, right now? Nothing. I’m fine. I’m happy.” And I was, in that limited moment, a moment that had only just begun and would end very soon, never to be reclaimed. I didn’t need anything more; just lying there next to him was enough.

  He nodded thoughtfully. “Okay . . .” he said, as if calibrating something in his head, perhaps trying to figure out what I would require of him and whether he could measure up.

  We didn’t do anything more that night, which was a credit to Jonathan, who never pushed, even though I might have given in had he tried. But he urged me to go, as I had a two-hour drive to New England ahead of me. As I got up to leave, already feeling the coldness that came from being separated from his body, I felt a sudden, immense sense of dread. Jonathan’s face was once again an unreadable mask.

  “While I’m gone, someone will come and sweep you off your feet,” Jonathan said. He was flying to L.A. in two weeks to shoot an episode for another popular TV series.

  Did Jonathan assume I charmed everyone I met as much as I charmed him? Or did he wish he didn’t carry the responsibility of being the only one to make it past my prickly exterior?

  I told Jonathan I had no expectations, and I didn’t, at least not conventional ones. What I didn’t tell him about was the disease that lived in my brain, programming it to expect the worst, filling it with images of grief and disaster. After Jonathan walked me to my car and kissed me good-bye, I drove away from him feeling as if the worst result had already happened, pre-living the ache as if I could prevent it by doing so.

  I proceeded to torment myself all week, losing my ability to sleep, eat, or focus, going back and forth between my rational mind, which assured me there was no reason to worry, and my gut, which screamed, “You’re in deep shit! You’ll never recover from this!”

  I cried a lot, which upset me. I had been doing so well for months now. How could the entrance of a man into my life cause me to fall so far behind? Would it always be like this, me thinking I was okay and then falling apart again when I tried to let someone in? I was losing it, but at the same time that my emotions were exploding at the seams, I recognized how shameful it was. My response was not in any corresponding proportion to the event.

  I became deeply suspicious, suddenly convinced that Jonathan was hiding something. Or that he was lying. Something was off.

  And then of course I wondered if that voice in my head came from the little child in me who had only ever been dece
ived and hurt. Was I doomed to see pain in every risk? I understood that the way I was feeling wasn’t normal, wasn’t okay.

  Perhaps I willed the ending into being. I often felt that I manifested my own worst fears into existence simply so that I would have to confront them and thereby neutralize their power. I did fall for Jonathan, mostly because he had looked into my eyes and said I was perfect, and I tended to deduce from that sort of comment that a man could really see me, and I longed for nothing more than to be seen. So I fell hard and fast, and he promptly had a change of heart. Where before he had been attentive and solicitous, he was now cold and indifferent. I couldn’t bear to drag out his rejection, so I called him on it.

  “I never wanted a relationship,” he said. “I just liked you. You were like no one I had ever met before. But you see my life—it’s crazy! I have no time for you; I don’t even have time for my own daughter. I don’t want to do this with you.” Gone was the man who had wheedled and seduced, and in his place was an amnesiac. I was flabbergasted at his ability to turn on his own word.

  I said good-bye and felt enormous relief as I walked the slick streets of Manhattan in the early-evening drizzle. No more wrestling with my suspicions, trying to figure out whether to listen to my gut or to my reason. No more fear, no more feeling like I had put my power in someone else’s hands. It was back in my control. At the very least, I could draw my walls around me again and retreat into safety.

  I’m still okay, I said to myself. I got out just in time. This won’t destroy me. As I told myself these things, an ever-present voice began to grow powerfully in the back of my mind, like a climbing weed, threatening to take the place of every healthy thing in its presence. You’ll never be able to have faith in people again. Whatever shred of ability you still had to trust someone else is definitely gone for good now. You’re officially ruined.

  No, I told that voice. You don’t get to say that.

  I pounded the pavement as if every time my shoe slapped the ground was a confirmation of my own ability to stay upright, to keep moving forward. I had not been knocked down, I told myself. I was still standing.

  “Why do you look so happy?” people kept asking. I glowed for weeks afterward. It was the glow of empowerment. I had survived the one thing that I thought still had the power to destroy me. I had been hurt, and it had not been the worst thing.

  When I was very young, my family members would often use a particularly cruel manipulation technique to get me to confess whatever they wanted to hear. They’d change the tone of their voice into something sugary sweet, dangling the possibility of love as a reward for my action. Just say this, they implied, and you’ll finally be one of us. We will finally love you like you’ve always wanted. For a long time, it worked. I always reached for the apple, and my fist always came up empty.

  I stopped reaching after a while. When Jonathan came into my life I immediately recognized that familiar swinging fruit and I almost laughed at how silly it was. Surely I knew better than to fall for that. It was so clear to me at the very beginning that the apple was attached to a string. And yet, that fruit kept dangling in front of me for weeks, and eventually that old instinct won, and I reached. Once again, I was played for a fool. It brought up memories of each humiliation I had ever endured at the hands of the people who raised me.

  What I learned, though, walking away from that, was that I could never really hope to erase the desire for love. I didn’t need to. Love is a basic human right, and although that right was denied me, that doesn’t mean that I have to accept a future devoid of it.

  Some people wonder if I can recognize love when it comes, considering I’ve never known it. This is true, and something I fear, but although the energy that has come into my life under the guise of love may only have been a poor imitation, I have decided that if the fake kind can feel so good, then I want the real thing. It’s enough to keep taking risks and to keep getting hurt.

  Members of my community are rooting for me to fail. They want to point to my unhappiness and say that it’s proof that no good can come of leaving. And it’s true that leaving is only the first step to a solution; it takes a lot more work to actually build a new life after that. And failing is likely for many who try, and was always a distinct possibility for me. I understand that, and I’m even fine with it. Failure is okay. It will be enough for me to achieve self-ownership. I don’t necessarily need to have it all to feel like it was worth it, but I want to. Because I don’t want all those women to look at me and say, “She left but she never really found a better life. So, it’s possible to leave, yes, but the situation is hopeless.”

  I want to prove the statistics wrong. To do that, I have to find a new algorithm; I have to find the factor that changes the formula. Abuse minus healing equals love. Or is it pain minus love equals happiness? Is it grace plus acceptance equals peace? I’m determined to try them all.

  VII

  secrets

  As I endeavored to discover my romantic needs, somewhere along the way I started to suspect that they were darker and more complex than I had previously imagined. Perhaps it was that night in the winter of 2012, when I went on a date with a man named Otto. He was German, very tall and broad-shouldered, with a strong nose. We spent the evening wandering around Williamsburg, the cool part on the north side of the Williamsburg Bridge, and we talked and laughed, and it was fun, but the energy between us was strange, almost crackling with aggression. I had never encountered it before and didn’t quite know what to make of it.

  We ended the night at the foot of the bridge, in a little park that marked the boundary between the two communities, one old, and one new. My past was literally behind me as I sat on the steps leading up to a statue of some general on a horse, facing the twinkling lights of new developments ahead.

  I don’t know how it was we got the idea to role-play. It just happened. He was German, I was Jewish, we were in Williamsburg—it seemed the right moment for just such an experiment.

  “Let’s pretend it’s 1939. You’re a Nazi, and I’m a Jewish girl you found on the street.”

  And wouldn’t you know it, he did just that. He stood up, his large figure blocking the light from the streetlamp, and loomed over me like some cartoonish shadow. He demanded to see my papers with the straightest face I had ever seen. As I withdrew into myself in some strange, otherworldly response, he leaned closer, more threateningly, as if he was serious.

  I pulled my knees to my chest and wrapped my arms around them, as if I could roll into a ball. Looking up at his impenetrable face, I felt inexplicably and powerfully targeted. It was real, like going back in time, to some other dimension of possibility. Was this what it had felt like to some other girl who could have been me? Would she have seen someone’s fury and power so focused on her and shrink under its gaze, like a turtle withdrawing into its shell?

  Afterward we were both embarrassed by what we had done. Otto for getting so carried away—and me for feeling as if it were real. It wasn’t real. We were just people, people who responded to each other intensely for no reason we could discern. It was as if there was some secret dynamic at work.

  What did I go looking for in Otto’s eyes that night? My tormentor, perhaps?

  I found another German a few months later, Christopher, a Harvard professor and distinguished author of a book that examined the source of Third Reich ideology. We walked around the West Village after a literary conference, and we kissed. There was nothing magical there, but there was something in his German accent, in his paternal manner toward me, that felt like it was awakening a sleeping beast inside my chest.

  During my time at Sarah Lawrence, I met a young woman who worked as a dominatrix in a Manhattan dungeon and who confided to me that she repeatedly had visits from “rabbis” who wanted her to dress up as a Nazi and beat them.

  “They’re not all rabbis just because they have beards!” I said.

  But that anecdote
stuck with me. Were there really men from Williamsburg, raised by Holocaust survivors, who sought to put a face on their inherited persecutors and reexperience the pain their parents and grandparents endured? Was this simply survivor’s guilt, or was there something darker, and more erotic, in that impulse? More important, did I suffer from the same affliction?

  I had never articulated to myself a desire for pain, but I had noticed my desire for power, both in myself and others. I considered that what had drawn me to Conor was the recognition that he could see all of my deep-seated aggression and not feel dwarfed by it.

  Once, I removed his belt and restrained him with it, and he simply looked at me curiously. I didn’t know what to do with the power once I had it, considering I was so sexually inexperienced, but I felt a fleeting sense of satisfaction then, being in charge. And Jonathan, too, understood something about that, the desire one might have to experience a power struggle in a relationship, as a way of enacting the inner struggle in oneself. I had sought a battle that would transform me, and while the one I got wasn’t exactly what I wanted, I can’t say it wasn’t what I anticipated. I expect to be transformed. I demand it. No matter how painful, something in me was crying out for the stick, and for the chance to overpower the one who wielded it.

  Of course, there may be a simple answer—I was controlled and overpowered as a child, and here was my opportunity to relive the experience with a different ending. And yet, there was also something very seductive about giving up, and I didn’t enjoy finding that out about myself.

  I’d found myself celebrating the birthday of an Austrian man on one of my nights in Paris. There were six of us: a brassy sculptor from Haiti, his formerly Mormon manager, a Norwegian art collector, Richard, myself, and Kristoff—the Austrian, whose birthday fell on Hitler’s birthday. Kristoff had the classic Aryan looks of the most vicious Nazis, the ones who greedily participated in murder by day and hugged their children at night. Those angular jawbones, those cold blue eyes, the wide and hollow smile—it was terrifying, but also hypnotic. I felt as if I could not tear myself away from his company.