by Anna Berry
After a week of constant phone and e-mail harassment from Dieter, I give in. I empty out my savings account—all three hundred pathetic dollars of it—and turn it into a certified international money order. I send it registered airmail to Dieter’s apartment in Vienna, along with a five-page, rambling note telling him that although it’s three hundred dollars more than he deserves, and thousands of dollars less than he actually spent on me during our whirlwind relationship, it’s all he’s ever going to get. I tell him he is an asshole and a creep. I tell him I never, ever want to hear from him again—which, of course, is a lie. Even after all he’s done to me, if Dieter were to call me up tomorrow morning and tell me he’s sorry for everything, that he’s changed his mind and wants me to move to Vienna right away so we can get married, I’d still do it in a heartbeat.
I’m a masochist, sure. That goes without saying. But Dieter Franzl has the only ready supply of the love-drug I need to fill up my brain just so I can survive.
I’m a love-junkie, and junkies will do anything they have to do to get their next hit. We often don’t know why we torture ourselves, just that we need to numb some deep, nameless pain that comes from inside a part of ourselves we don’t want to acknowledge exists. Whatever our drug of choice is—booze, heroin, sex, or psycho rich ex-boyfriends who toy with us and give us a sick and twisted thrill—it helps keep our nasty, painful parts at bay. We fear that if we ever let those polluted, scary, deformed parts of our psyches out into the open, they’ll destroy us. So we just let our addictions destroy us instead. It’s less messy that way. Or so we think.
It makes no sense, of course. But nothing in my mind does at the time.
I suppose that if I can’t get any more love-drug on mail-order from Vienna, I can always go looking for it somewhere else.
So I do.
I’m back in Dr. Chatterjee’s office three weeks later. After skipping eight sessions with no explanation, I have to literally beg him to take me back into therapy. He finally gives in, but only at a price.
“Anna, you need to be forthright with me about what you’ve been up to the past couple of weeks,” he says, his voice harsh with disapproval. “Although I can probably well imagine.”
I’m too mortified to answer him. I just rub my sweaty palms up and down on my jeans, up and down, up and down, until I leave a dark trail on each thigh.
“Anna, remember our agreement. Either you show up to these sessions as scheduled and participate, or we terminate therapy. Those are the rules. Are you going to abide by them or not? If not, I’ll have to ask you to leave.”
I take a deep breath in and out. “I umm—well, I followed your advice, Dr. Chatterjee, and tried to cut off all contact with Dieter.”
Dr. Chatterjee smiles and rubs his palms together. “Good! That’s excellent! Excellent progress! When did this happen?”
“The day after our last session,” I mumble, blinking back tears.
“Ah. I take it things did not go well?”
“Uh, nope,” I scoff. “No thanks to you.”
Dr. Chatterjee doesn’t seem surprised. “I see. Dieter did not take well to you cutting him off, did he?”
“No. He went ballistic. He harassed me. He made me pay him money to leave me alone. I sent him three hundred bucks. He wanted more, but that’s all I had.”
Dr. Chatterjee strokes his chin. “He extorted money from you, eh?”
“Yeah.”
Dr. Chatterjee pulls my file from his desk and flips through it. “I expected he’d try something like that. Dieter’s reaction is typical narcissistic behavior. But based on what your intake form says that you earn working at the university, it doesn’t seem to me you can much afford to pay extortion to anyone. Why would you agree to do such a thing?”
I don’t answer.
“Did you think paying Dieter all the money you had in the world might get him to love you again? Or at the very least, keep him from abandoning you?”
I shrug.
“Anna, you’re a borderline. Which means you are naturally attracted to narcissists, and they to you. But just because you’re naturally attracted to narcissists doesn’t mean they’re good for you, as I’m sure you’ve seen with how Dieter treated you. Not to mention all the other old boyfriends you’ve told me about in therapy. You need to recognize these patterns of behavior in yourself so you can begin to change them.”
“Okay, sure, whatever.” I study the pattern in the carpet again.
Dr. Chatterjee sighs heavily. “Why don’t you spend some time telling me what else you’ve been up to for the past three weeks? Why have you been avoiding therapy?”
I bite my lip. “I’ve been, umm, busy.”
“Busy doing what?”
“Well, you know,” I stammer. “Just general stuff.”
Dr. Chatterjee frowns. “I highly doubt that. I suspect you’ve probably been acting out in any number of self-destructive ways. Am I right?”
I shrug, again.
“Anna, if you don’t start being honest with me right now, I’m terminating therapy with you. I’m preparing for my board exams and I don’t have time to waste with difficult patients.”
I fix my eyes on the now-familiar carpet pattern. “I ummm, I’ve been getting drunk and—umm, picking up a lot of guys in bars.”
Dr. Chatterjee smiles slightly. Now I’m giving him something juicy to work with. “I see. How many men have you picked up?”
I think back for a moment or two, then count on my fingers. “I dunno. Eight, that I remember. Maybe nine or ten. I was really drunk for a few of them and don’t remember everything.”
For the first time ever, Dr. Chatterjee seems shocked. “Nine or ten? In three weeks?”
“Yeah. I think that’s about right.”
“I see. You’ve been having intercourse with all these men?”
“Duh!” I say, as if it should be obvious. “Sometimes I just give them blowjobs, though. It depends.”
“On what?”
“I dunno. On how I feel at the time, I guess. Sometimes I’m too drunk to have sex, or I’m just not in the mood, so I give the guy a blowjob so he’ll leave me alone and let me get some sleep.”
Dr. Chatterjee is scribbling like mad in his notebook now. I’ve finally gotten his attention, and I’m enjoying the hell out of it. “So now that Dieter has abandoned you, you spend your evenings and weekends getting drunk and picking up strange men. Do you enjoy these sexual encounters?”
“Sometimes they’re okay.”
More scribbling. “What about when they’re not okay, Anna? Tell me about those.”
“You mean like, what happens with the bad ones?”
“Precisely.”
I take a deep breath. “Well, sometimes they get mad at me if I won’t do certain things with them.”
Dr. Chatterjee leans forward, his pen stuck in midair. “What kinds of things?”
“Well, this one guy last week, he was kind of into bondage-type stuff. He had one of those S&M chambers in his condo. A whole room of whips and chains and harnesses and shit. I’m really not into that kind of thing, so I wanted to leave as soon as he started showing the stuff to me. But he wouldn’t let me leave.”
“Why not?”
I sigh. “Well, he said that after he’d spent all that time and money at the bar sweet-talking me and buying me drinks, he needed to get his return on investment, or something like that. So when I tried to get out of there, he grabbed me before I could get to the door, and—” My mouth feels like it’s full of thorns.
“And what, Anna?”
“He umm, he tied me up in one of his S&M harness things, and, well, we ended up having sex like that.”
“You mean he raped you.”
I bite down on the inside of my cheeks until I taste blood. “I wouldn’t call it rape, exactly. I wanted to have sex with him, just not that kind of sex.”
“Then what would you call it?”
“I dunno. Rough sex, I guess. And me being stupid e
nough to go home with the guy. I should have known better than to do that. He was kind of funny-looking, with an eyebrow piercing and a bunch of weird tattoos—”
Dr. Chatterjee holds up his hand to stop me. “So you think it’s your fault he raped you?”
This catches me off-guard. “Yes. I mean, no. I mean—”
“Anna, do you have any idea what a healthy sexual relationship is like?”
“Sure I do.”
Dr. Chatterjee raises an eyebrow. “You and I both know that’s not true.”
I don’t say anything for a long time. I just kick my sneakered feet back and forth underneath my chair and watch the second hand on Dr. Chatterjee’s wall clock swoop around and around.
After several minutes, Dr. Chatterjee speaks. “Anna, perhaps I’m reaching a bit here, but I get the feeling that perhaps you grew up with very distorted notions of what healthy sexual relationships should be like. Am I right?”
I don’t answer. I just keep swinging my feet and staring at the clock.
“Were you ever sexually abused, Anna?”
“What? No!”
Dr. Chatterjee sets down his pad and pen. “All right, fair enough. Maybe you weren’t sexually abused yourself, but there are plenty of other things that can happen to a child sexually that while they don’t involve intercourse, can be just as damaging to a child’s psyche. Did anything happen in your home, or at school—did you see anything, or hear anything in your environment growing up that might have confused you sexually? A late-night cable movie? A porn magazine? Walking in on your parents having sex? Seeing someone masturbate in the bathroom? Anything out of the ordinary that you can remember at all? Take your time.”
I relax a bit. If that’s the kind of thing Dr. Chatterjee’s looking for, there are at least a hundred different examples I could give. “If you put it that way, yeah.”
“Go on.”
“Well, for one thing, my dad’s always been a sex maniac.”
Dr. Chatterjee blinks at this. “I see. Why don’t you tell me about that?”
Everything I ever need to know about sex I learn from watching my father.
When I am ten years old, I walk in on my father having sex with his new girlfriend Martha[6] at his new bachelor pad. I walk in on my father having sex with his new girlfriend at four o’clock in the afternoon, with their bedroom door wide open and a lot of screaming and thrusting and banging going on.
I walk into Dad’s wide-open sex chamber at four in the afternoon on a Saturday because it’s visitation weekend with Dad, and Mark and I haven’t had anything to eat since yesterday afternoon.
Dad’s been too busy having loud, sweaty sex with the door wide open for eighteen hours straight to bother with feeding his kids.
Dad and Martha don’t notice I’m there for several minutes. I stand beside Dad’s waterbed and watch them go at it. I can’t quite get a good look at their actual equipment or how it works, because they’re both too tangled up in Dad’s polyester velour bedspread. As far as I can tell, sex just seems to involve a lot of rubbing and banging and screaming and “yes, yes, yes.” I don’t understand what the big deal is.
Martha is fat. Her breasts are huge and pendulous. Whenever Dad pounds down on her, her dimpled thighs vibrate and her breasts jiggle. I find this fascinating. Whenever Dad’s hips thrust, he grunts in the same way I’ve heard him grunt in the bathroom when he’s taking a shit. I find this disgusting.
When they’re finished, I tap Dad on the shoulder. He looks up, startled. His mouth hangs open and he seems to be caught somewhere between panting and screaming.
“Yikes!” Martha screams, then wraps her jiggly, dimpled body in Dad’s velour bedspread. She slaps Dad’s bare behind hard enough to leave a mark. “I told you not to let your damn kids come over here!” She hurls a look at me that could fry an egg. “Little brat!”
Martha starts to cry and dashes off for the bathroom. I don’t know whether to laugh or throw up.
Dad finally finds his voice. “Anna, what the hell are you doing coming in here like that?”
“You left the door open, Dad. It’s not like we didn’t know what you’re doing. Besides, it’s four o’clock and Mark and I, we’re sort of hungry. There’s nothing to eat in the house. Don’t you ever go to the store?”
Dad and Martha never make any effort to hide what they’re doing during those weekend visits, when our total actual “quality time” with Dad often adds up to less than twenty-five minutes. It never once registers with Dad that his wild sex antics with his soon-to-be-new-wife Martha might bother Mark and me, might even have serious psychological consequences for both of us down the road.
Dad never gives these matters any thought. He never asks Mark and me if we can hear what he and Martha are doing to each other, if we know what it is, how we feel about it, whether it bothers or scares us.
Dad doesn’t ask us any of these things. Dad doesn’t do anything to hide what goes on in his bedroom (and on his bathroom floor, and in his den, and sometimes even on his kitchen counter) from his kids. And why would he? He doesn’t care.
I’m not sure what motivates Dad to put his sex life in a wide-open fishbowl right under his kids’ noses for years. And I also know for a fact that Dad knows it’s wrong. But Dad feels entitled to do it anyway. After all, he married Mom early, pretty much right out of high school. He missed the whole 60s sexual revolution, and when he was at his sexual peak to boot. He never had a chance to have the kind of variety- and experimentation-filled sex life most young men enjoy until he was well into his thirties. And with Mom heavily sedated, delusional, and searching for dead bodies for almost half of their marriage, I doubt Mom and Dad had a very healthy sex life. Dad probably figures he’s making up for lost time.
Mom is not the only addict in our family. Dad uses sex as a drug to survive just as much as Mom uses prescription drugs to keep from throwing herself off tall buildings.
When Mom is in lockdown on the psych ward, intubated with a half-dozen heavy meds, Dad hides behind a curtain of rampant womanizing. Never happy with just one woman, he cheats on my mother throughout their thirteen-year marriage with a series of younger women, the last of whom is Martha, who becomes his second wife. With her appetite for wild, in-the-open sex, Martha thinks she’ll be the one who makes him monogamous, but she is wrong. After he and Martha have been married less than a year, Dad is on the prowl again—this time, with Martha’s best friend. (The latter later becomes Dad’s third wife, and she agrees to have an open marriage.) Dad makes tasteless sex jokes in public, wears a “University for the Sexually Gifted” gag T-shirt on weekends, and leaves his copies of Jugs out in the garage for me to find. During his second and third marriages, after Mark and I move in with him because Mom can no longer care for us, he keeps a stash of hundreds of bootleg porno tapes in the basement, and teenaged Mark and I watch them out of curiosity. Sometimes we invite the neighborhood kids over to watch them with us, and even though they are more than willing to do so, we end up paying dearly for it in the cutthroat social game that is high school, like when a bunch of older boys ambush me in the hallway after gym class, demanding I flash them my breasts since they heard I live in the “house of porn.”
Dad is a sex addict. And like a dope-fiend junkie who will die when his stash runs out, Dad will die if he doesn’t have something to fuck.
Dr. Chatterjee doesn’t say anything for a long time. He seems antsy, in fact.
“Well?” I ask. “What do you think?”
Dr. Chatterjee rubs his earlobe and fidgets. “That’s—that’s—I don’t even know what to say.”
I roll my eyes. “Well, that’s just great,” I seethe. “I thought you were supposed to be my therapist here.”
Dr. Chatterjee sighs heavily, and fidgets some more. Finally, he speaks. “Anna, what you have told me is very, very tragic. Very sad and tragic indeed. Being exposed to graphic sex prematurely is very traumatic for any child, but even more so when the child’s father has abandoned th
e mother and is engaging in that sex with someone else. With the childhood you had, it was probably inevitable that you would develop some kind of personality disorder. It doesn’t make you crazy, per se—it’s just that all the defense mechanisms your brain had to concoct in order to survive your childhood have made you sick as an adult. You’d probably be sick even without being exposed to your father’s sex antics, but that certainly didn’t help.”
“Well, duh. Are you going to tell me anything I don’t already know?”
Dr. Chatterjee raises his hand. “Hear me out. Emotionally, Anna, you’re still a child. With as horrific a childhood as you had, not only did you never have the opportunity to mature into an emotionally balanced adult, you also have no idea what healthy, intimate sexual relationships should be like. You act out in sexually self-destructive ways to try to run away from all the years and years’ worth of pain you have pent up inside, but all that does is make you feel worse. You are stuck in a very destructive pattern of behavior, Anna, and unless you change it, you are never, ever going to get better. And the fact is, Anna, I don’t think you are ready to change. In fact, based on what I’ve seen from you in therapy, I highly doubt you ever will change. You’re what we psychiatrists call a hopeless case.[7] As far as I’m concerned, you’ll be sick like this for the rest of your life. And that’s really too bad.”
I’m stunned. Here I am, sitting in intensive, three-times-a-week therapy sessions with a psychiatrist-in-training, making what I think is my best effort to get well and lead a normal life, and this British quack is telling me I’m doomed to failure before I even start. What’s the point of trying? What’s the point of living? What’s the point of doing anything?