My impression of New York women, which I mistakenly thought were typically American, was not very favorable in those days. I detested the way those in their forties and fifties dressed in those ridiculous cutie-pie clothes, with wigs, bows, and triple rows of eyelashes, trying to compete with their daughters. In the afternoons you would see them walking into Bonwit Teller with all those loud colors, and from the back you sometimes couldn’t tell who was mother and who was daughter. Unlike Europe, you rarely see a warm, motherly type because the Manhattan woman refuses to grow old with grace. Carl’s mother was one of them.
A fourth member of the Gordon household was Dudley, the toothless little Worcester terrier that Carl’s mother fed like a baby and talked to like a human.
From our first introduction I don’t think that woman cared for me. I tried to be natural and spontaneous with her, and she was insecure and phony with me. And, to be candid, I didn’t endear myself when I replied to her bad French the way the language is spoken in France.
However, I had to try to get along with them because I was going to be their daughter-in-law if, indeed, the day ever came.
It was three months after I arrived in America, and I was still not married. I was living with Carl, and my visa was expiring. I pointed out that if we weren’t married soon I would have to leave the country, but this didn’t hurry him up. “Get a job at a consulate and get a diplomatic visa,” he said.
So I took a job in a foreign consulate, and just as well, because I started needing money.
Soon after I arrived here I learned that the free-spending Carl in South Africa was a man very much on an expense account: In New York there were no lavish meals or any presents. Carl was even so stingy that he wouldn’t pay my dry-cleaning bill. He paid the food and the rent, but everything else was at my expense. He even got mad at me one time when he saw me sending money home to my family.
“Carl, I have been educated by my parents in a good way,” I reminded him. “I studied music, speak seven languages, and have traveled all over Europe with them. They have given me the best they could, so why should I neglect them now after my father’s long illness that left him in bad financial shape?” And I sent them something from my salary every week.
Another thing I was disturbed to find out about Carl was his anti-Semitism. I knew his mother had changed her religion to Presbyterian, and Carl, it seemed, also did everything he could to conceal his Jewish origins.
He was even a member of the supposedly anti-Semitic New York Athletic Club, and once, when he took me there for a fencing competition, he made me conceal my Star of David pendant. “Hide it in your sweater,” he whispered, “and they’ll never know you’re Jewish, because you don’t look it.”
Other times, when people were coming for dinner, he would make me hide the thing I treasured most, a valuable copper menorah, which was a gift from my family, and the only possession of sentimental worth I had in this country.
The last thing he did before guests arrived was to check if the menorah was out of sight. “Put that candle in a drawer,” he would say, which to me was like burying your pride.
After six months in America the subject of marriage was being discussed less and less, and at this point I didn’t dare mention it for fear he would yell at me. I was getting very depressed at the way we were living, and I wanted to settle down.
In spring I remember walking through Central Park, seeing the pregnant women or the married couples with their children, and feeling jealous of them because they were living legitimately with their husbands and could raise a family the way it should be. And what was I doing? Living as Carl’s common-law wife.
I would love to have a baby with Carl. I was sure it would be beautiful, with lovely eyes and a strong body like his. I wanted a boy first, then a girl. Some nights in the heat of passion, Carl would even say, “Darling, don’t use your diaphragm tonight, I want to make you a baby.”
I wouldn’t obey him, because, as much as I wanted it, I did not want a baby without being married. And I would not use that as a weapon to get him to marry me, because whenever I mentioned marriage these days he would lash out at me and say, “Don’t push it.” Also, at that time I found out something I never knew before – that he had just gotten officially divorced from his first wife.
Carl’s passionate words were just words – empty of any real meaning – I found out one time when I was three weeks late with my period. I had not yet seen a doctor, but I told Carl I was feeling nauseous.
He went into a rage and started screaming that he didn’t want to be pushed into anything, and insisted on an abortion. That was the last thing I would do. I would never kill something inside me that was going to be a human being, especially when the father was the one and only man I loved and was supposed to be marrying.
Carl kept yelling words so humiliating and ugly that I slipped away into the bathroom and swallowed a handful of sleeping pills.
When I returned to the room he was still being cruel and abusive, but I could no longer reply because my mouth was going numb and my body limp. Then everything went fuzzy as I crawled out to the balcony and climbed up on the rail. Way beneath, the blur of Manhattan was beckoning like a sequined black velvet bed.
By now Carl realized what he had driven me to doing and started pleading with me not to jump. “Don’t let go, Xaviera,” he said. “I love you. We don’t want to have a scandal.”
As he was trying to pull me back, it occurred to me that if I died my poor mother would be left alone. “Your father could die at any moment,” I started telling myself, “and you don’t have any brothers or sisters to help her out and write to her. And she is the only person that really ever loved you. Don’t die, live, live, live…”
I woke up after it was dark next day, and Carl was there with red roses and gentle words, trying to be the old Carl.
In an effort to compensate, he suggested we spend a long weekend with his parents at their big house in the Hamptons. If he’d said let’s spend a weekend in the Women’s House of Detention, it couldn’t have been less appealing to me. But I went along with any effort he made to keep our engagement alive, even though by this time the thought of his mother made me choke, and I was sure the feelings were mutual.
The weekend came around, and his mother outdid herself in meanness. Even though she was aware we had now lived together for more than half a year and there was no reason to “keep up appearances,” she pointedly assigned me a bedroom on one floor and Carl a room at the other side of the house on a different floor. She even went as far as locking the freaky little dog in Carl’s room at night so that if I came in or he went out, the toothless little beast would bark. And she was not satisfied to stop there. This woman, who had lived in Manhattan all her life, went into his room at two in the morning to ask him the New York telephone area code.
Carl’s mother was so possessive about her son that if there were a law allowing her to marry him, she would have done so. He also had a mother complex, but not based on sentiment. She once threatened to disinherit him if he married me, and the thought of missing out on her money almost gave him a coronary.
The weekend was, as expected, thoroughly depressing, and I spent most of the time staying out of the way to avoid a scene. Her husband had not come along, preferring to go fishing and – I suspect – keep as far away as possible from his wife’s insane babble. So I spent most of my time at the piano because I had studied the classics for twelve years, and it always gives me great pleasure to play. And at least it gave me something to do.
When the last afternoon mercifully arrived, I was sitting, reading a book, in the room off the entrance hall when Mrs. Gordon came out to answer a ring at the doorbell.
From where I was sitting I could see that outside was a gorgeous seventeen-year-old boy with a suntan and shoulder-length blond hair.
Her hatchet expression immediately changed to her version of a smile. “Hi,” she croaked. “What can I do for you?”
“Is thi
s Dr. Johnson’s house?” the beautiful boy said.
“Why, no, I’m Dr. Stone.” She always preferred to be called by her professional name. “Will I do?”
“I’m looking for Dr. Johnson,” the boy said impatiently. “Isn’t this his house?”
“No, it’s not, but come in anyway and let me pour you a drink,” she giggled grotesquely.
“No, thank you, ma’am, this is an emergency,” he said, and hurried away.
Mrs. Gordon shut the door, smiled at herself in the hall mirror, and adjusted her bow, and for the first time noticed me sitting there.
“Why, Xaviera,” she said, blushing and flushing, “you’re there!” Then she added: “Did you see that? What was it, a boy or a girl?”
“If that was a girl,” I said, “you would not have been jumping up and down like some jack-in-the-box.” At that moment the phone rang and she answered it and was grateful for the interruption. But I had already said too much, and I knew the old harridan would not rest until she had my scalp on her belt. In the car on the way back to New York she went after it.
As usual, Mrs. Gordon was sitting up front beside her darling son, Carl, and I, the fiancée, was banished by myself in the back. Her incessant chatter got onto the subject of housing in general, and, at her engineering, in Holland in particular.
“I guess the rentals for apartments must be very high in Amsterdam,” she said.
“Oh, why?”
“Because it seems to me Dutch girls have the habit of moving in with their boyfriends without marrying them, and there has to be a reason.”
To me, this was the last drop in the bucket. I couldn’t keep quiet anymore.
“Mrs. Gordon,” I began, “it is not from choice that I live in an unmarried state with your son… If you can stretch your little brain and recall, your son officially proposed to me through my parents, brought me here on a false promise of marriage, set me up in his home on a temporary arrangement, which has now been going on for nine months.
“What’s more, I paid my own fare and I am now working to support myself in order to get a place of my own. So altogether the Dutch treat has been on me!”
But I didn’t stop there. All my pent-up anger had to be released on this dreadful woman.
“I have put up with a lot of nonsense from you, too. Your trite phone calls in the middle of the night. The inhospitable atmosphere in your funeral parlor of a house, where, if there is no maid around, you would not be gracious enough to extend your arm to pass around a drink or put some peanuts on the table.
“What a difference from my own mother, who is a darling and can’t do enough to make sure her guests are happy.
“No wonder your husband can’t stand you and has not even slept with you for over ten years – and that interesting little piece of information was told me by your own dear son, Carl.
“Yes, your own family smiles about you behind your back, and your only real friend is the freaky dog, and he won’t be around much longer, because, like you, he is falling apart.
“You have the hide to criticize my background. Let me remind you that I come from a similar background to Carl, and my father was an even more famous doctor than your husband.
“But we Jews lost what we had while you just sat back and read about it. And we don’t deny being Jewish and have been proud to suffer for it.
“You, Mrs. Gordon, might be a happier person if you would stop your futile efforts to stay a teen-ager and relax and learn to live with the half-century that you are.”
With that she whirled around and slapped me hard across the face.
Carl never said a word during the whole tirade, nor did he speak now, even though I had hoped he would come to my defense. And the rest of the trip was spent in agonized silence.
I knew that Mrs. Gordon would be determined, however, to have a final word, and as we dropped her off on Sutton Place, she hissed, “I’ll see you on a plane back to Holland. I’ll get you deported. Who are you, anyway, you’re nothing, not even an immigrant.” She stalked into the house and slammed the door.
Back at our apartment, as Carl and I undressed to take a shower, nothing had been said, because I was waiting for him to break the silence with an apology to me.
Instead he started yelling. “Don’t you ever address my mother like that again,” he raged. “Now you have absolutely wrecked all our marriage plans.” As if he had any intention anyway.
Then he grabbed a heavy coat hanger and raised it to hit me. A man striking a woman is the last thing I can stand. It’s cowardly and animalistic.
“How dare your mother hit me with her hand,” I screamed back. “And how dare you threaten to hit me now, bastard!” I was so furious that if I had had a knife I would have stabbed him. But the closest weapon was a heavy antique clothes brush his grandfather had bequeathed him, and I grabbed it and started thrashing him wildly. I also used my nails to tear at his flesh, and he was getting black and blue and bleeding when all of a sudden I saw in his eyes the same weird erotic look he had the night Rona threatened to kill him.
I glanced down, and he’d got this huge erection. By now I was all confused, but the erotic moment quickly passed, and we got into a real fist fight, which, for us, was the beginning of the end.
From that lousy Sunday we took turns sleeping on the living-room sofa until I found a place to share with another Dutch girl named Sonia, who worked on my floor at Rockefeller Plaza.
Her apartment was only a few blocks from Carl, and I still kept most of my things there and stayed with him several nights a week.
But moving out, I thought, was the only way I might ingratiate myself slightly with his parents and redeem our turbulent romance. It sounds crazy, but I still loved the man despite everything, and we were still slaves to each other’s bodies.
Carl went away frequently on trips during that period, and there were times I would be so hurt and lonely I would have to sooth my bruised emotions with some gay girl I met in a bar around the corner called the Three.
When the Olympic Games were held in Mexico City in October, 1968, Carl announced that he was going to take a vacation by himself and go there. This time he went away for longer than usual. Before he left I vaguely recall casually mentioning that I had a light-skinned Indonesian girl friend named Penny, who was going to attend the Olympic games as a representative for our national airline, KLM. I thought nothing about it at the time.
I was very depressed while he was gone, and I had a longer than usual affair with a girl from the Dominican Republic whom I picked up at the gay bar. Even though it was only a woman I cheated with, I told Carl about it when he returned, and his pride was hurt. And, what is almost laughable; he said after that admission marriage would be impossible because he would never be able to trust his wife while he was away on a business trip.
What a hypocrite. I was sure he was doing something more in Mexico City for a month than just watching the hundred-meter dash. But I had no proof of anything, at least not at the time. In spite of his attitude, I couldn’t leave him. Love is blind! Stupid, also, when it blinds one to a mate’s cruelty.
Around the time Carl came back from Mexico City a strange change was occurring in his lovemaking, and he was becoming slightly freaky.
One night while we were making love he said to me, “Why don’t you pick up that antique clothes brush and just beat me up a little?”
That was just kid stuff compared to what he wanted later on. He would ask me to talk dirty about the girls I made it with and how I would suck their pussies and their tits. He also wanted me to dress up in slinky clothes and do a striptease for him while he lay around in his morning gown with the front open. He wanted me to brush against his arm with my sleeve or my scarf and jump away to tease him.
As he became kinkier, I went out and bought some sex-perversion books to learn new things to please him. I taught myself the Japanese trick of inserting a string of pearls in his back passage and removing them one at a time to excite him, and all at
once to make him climax.
Then he started saying, “Xaviera, I want to be your whore. Make me your whore.” So I bought a dildo through a lesbian friend, and I would insert it, sit on his back like a jockey with a riding crop in my hand, and pretend I was riding him at Aqueduct. I would call the race as I whipped him along to the finish line, and each time, of course, I had to announce that he was the winner. I also remember giving seductive striptease performances while he lay on the couch, teasing him and teasing him and finally raping him.
Toward the end, the last thing he wanted was straight sex anymore, and I wondered where on earth this sick situation was going to end.
Soon after, Carl came up with the answer. One day he told me he was being transferred to Sao Paulo, Brazil.
“Don’t get upset, Xaviera,” he said. “This separation could be the best thing for us.” He was to leave in the middle of February, and suggested I plan to join him around May, and definitely we would be married. He promised.
The actual day he left was Valentine’s Day, and for a few days before that he became very secretive and would not let me clear the mailbox. Valentine’s Day does not mean much to me, but I started to suspect it meant something more to him.
There’s something he’s hiding, I thought, but I couldn’t figure out what. The night before his departure, we stayed together, and the next morning while he was taking one of those long baths in all the bubbles that he liked, I decided to find out.
I had an idea that the clue to our relationship now and in the future was inside his black attaché case, which he always kept locked and which was now lying on the sofa. The last thing I like to be is a snoop, but this action was justified because I could feel he was holding something very important from me.
Knowing the way Carl’s mind worked, I figured out that the combination on the attaché case had to be something obvious. I tried 353, 747, 636, 545, and was getting very nervous that he might come out and catch me, so I peeped in the door, and there he was lying in his bubbles and reading his paper.
The Happy Hooker: My Own Story Page 6