The Golden Condom

by Jeanne Safer

  Although my elusive beloved often behaved coldly toward me, he never struck me as an inherently cruel man. He seemed motivated by self-protection rather than perverse pleasure in causing pain. However, as a teacher of mine when I was in analytic training years later said, “You don’t need a sadist to have a sadomasochistic relationship.”

  * * *

  My Golden One vanished once again after our first night together. I couldn’t conceal my tension when I saw him later on. “There’s been a lack of humor lately,” he chided me. It is a reflection of my emotional state that I took this not as a failure of empathy on his part but as a legitimate criticism of me.

  Michael wanted to keep things between us in a major key at all times. Light banter was his preferred form of expression, and it had to become mine if I wanted to avoid estranging him. Cultivating irony, what he approvingly called “our wit and repartee,” became my main task. I felt as though I were playing a role in a surreal comedy of manners in which I had been cast against type. Only he had the script, and I had to improvise my lines.

  My subservience—being on call and amusing on demand—took a toll on me because it was so unnatural. I wasn’t a passive or compliant person even then; in fact, I was the opposite—strong willed, opinionated, outspoken and direct to a fault. That I suppressed my real personality so dramatically reflected my urgent mission to keep the relationship afloat.

  Michael eventually explained the reason for his increasing aloofness; there was “a conflict about another relationship” with a former girlfriend in another city. He did not elaborate, and I asked no questions, such as why this conflict had not kept him from me in the first place or why, since full disclosure seemed so important to him, he had not told me up front. I also didn’t let myself consider what it said about his character that he was being unfaithful to her, as well. Having a shadowy rival made me even more insecure than before.

  Why did I remain silent? Contemporary psychoanalytic attachment theory and trauma studies provide clues.1 It has long been known that creatures in danger can defend themselves by fighting, fleeing, or freezing. Freezing is a radical self-protective state caused by shock, the psychic equivalent of playing dead in the face of an existential threat. In my case, the threat was not being devoured by a predator but being abandoned by someone I needed and dared not risk displeasing, who also left me feeling helpless and alienated (the technical term is “dissociated”) from my authentic self. I performed a desperate act of emotional survival by putting my intolerable feelings away in cold storage.

  My performance must have improved subsequently, because he became my lover two weeks later. For a moment, I was happy.

  He had shown up at a dance and taken me home with him. “Never have I felt so abandoned, so possessed,” my diary says. “I spent much of the night watching him sleep beside me, hardly believing I was with him.”

  This magical interlude was immediately sullied by doubts. I urgently wanted reassurance that I meant something to him beyond our second “glad night” but never dared to ask. Why, I wondered, did he turn away from me when he slept? Why did he never call me just to talk? Why did I know nothing about his past? I never pressed these questions in the interest of not rocking a very leaky boat.

  I could not understand how a man could be passionate and sensually connected but then wake up in the morning eager to separate and go about his business, the openness fleeting and confined to the darkness. I didn’t have enough experience to know that this wasn’t the case with every man.

  I waited by the phone—these were the days before cell phones and texting, but I’m sure the state of mind hasn’t changed materially since then—afraid to do anything or go anywhere in case he called. Every once in a while he did, and we would share another unbridled night, the illusion of connection revived once more. “When I am with him I feel, ‘Love is embodied in you,’” I wrote. I would endure anything for this.

  Right before spring break, when we had spent a rare day together as though we were a normal couple, he told me he was flying to Philadelphia to see an old friend. For romantic atmosphere and to combat his fear of the dark, he lit candles in the bedroom at dusk. He was unusually tender and expressive, emerging smiling from the shower to lay his damp golden head on my breast, only blowing out the flames at daybreak.

  When we woke voluptuously at noon, he told me, obliquely, the real reason he was going—“to see the dog” that his not-so-former girlfriend had inherited from him. He would not be coming back for several weeks.

  I was crushed rather than outraged. What did I do with my anger at him for tantalizing me and then treating me so callously? I had a dream of being fondled by a man with green-and-blue hair whom I was trying to kick. While I couldn’t express it in waking life, my rage seeped into my dreams.

  Every once in a while, I wrote something in my diary that was not about Michael. I had deep conversations with other people, sang and played my guitar, wrote poetry, and learned ancient Greek. I also forged a close friendship with a man whom I did not desire, who would remain an integral part of my adult life for many years. My most encouraging observation, because it became the foundation for my future vocation, was “How I love to see words balance and sing. Writing does more for my ego than making love.” An obsession with a problematic lover, as intense and disabling as it seems and as much as it colonizes one’s consciousness, often coexists with normal life.

  * * *

  I assumed Michael had left me for good, and I felt desolate, but after he returned from Philadelphia, he came to see me again. “I’m not ready for intense monogamy,” he told me. “I can’t split my personality, and I don’t want to lie.” I asked whether he had told his old girlfriend about me. He had not; telling the truth in matters of the heart seemed reserved for my ears only.

  Then I asked something I never should have asked. “But what about our last night together—wasn’t that good?”

  “Good,” he said, “but not good enough.” He added, as if to soften the blow, “It’s not as fatal as you seem to think. I’m simply asking for my freedom.”

  Even after such an insult, I never considered leaving him.

  As our remaining time together grew short, I kept trying to reach him. I said it grieved me to part from anything that mattered to me, yet I welcomed the grief because it meant I had felt deeply and needed to express it. “I even had trouble leaving the Parthenon,” I told him—another object that was golden in the sunlight—“because it was so beautiful and I knew I’d never see it again.” He made a joke out of this, grinning, bowing, and pretending to shake hands with an imaginary building. Grieving was not in his repertoire.

  Finally, I said the naked truth. “I just want you to hold me. I want your physical presence, because soon there will be nothing.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I’m going home alone to sleep and think, and I’ll call you later.” When I went home alone, I felt inconsolable.

  He surprised me once more when he eventually called, days later, to ask if I wanted to see his tabla (an Indian drum; the vogue for Indian music was in full swing); it was in his hometown several hours away, in his bedroom in the house where he had grown up. He was going there on the motorcycle to plant some trees for his mother. I took along a paper to work on while he dug the holes.

  It was a little frame house on a street of nearly identical houses with neat but barren yards separated by chain-link fences. The interior was dark. There were heavy curtains on the windows and Catholic devotional art on the walls (he had never mentioned that he was Catholic) as if from another era, another world. His mother was due home from work in a couple of hours, and we were staying for lunch. He was greeted by a big shaggy dog who was overjoyed to see him.

  He took me upstairs to his tiny bedroom, unchanged since his high school years. I admired the tabla—he put Ravi Shankar on his old record player—and I was fascinated to see photographs of him as a crew-cut teenager, looking anything but cool. Everything there was a windo
w into a past he had never mentioned—that he had been a runner, played various wind instruments in the school orchestra, won various academic honors, read Stendhal’s On Love. Then we spent a ravenous hour in the bed where he had slept in the years before he turned into the striking, graceful, seemingly insouciant man I knew. The combination of physical and emotional intimacy before parting was the consolation I had longed for.

  But then, to regain a sense of control and put some distance between us, he mentioned a girl he wanted to seduce when he returned to graduate school, and he warned me not to interrupt him while he was working in the yard; clearly, he had done enough relating for one day.

  His mother arrived, a plainly dressed woman who seemed much older than my own mother, although they were contemporaries. He kissed her forehead with real tenderness. It was clear that she adored him and that the feeling was mutual. Then she proceeded, over a lunch of Spam and watermelon, to regale me with stories about her Mikey—how he charmed everyone, what a wonderful son he was, how he took care of her. It was almost an infomercial for my benefit. For the rest of the afternoon, I lay writing in the grass in the backyard and watching him happily working. I felt no need to interrupt.

  That night when we returned to the university, he took me dancing. Afterward, we had what I had hungered for more than anything, a serious conversation about our pasts. Unprompted, he spoke at length and with feeling, telling me that he was six months old when his father had died, that his mother had been left destitute. She had “a bleak life as a clerk” and had devoted herself to raising him, sacrificing everything for him, never remarrying. They lived just above the poverty line, and—this was the only moment that bitterness over an old humiliation crept into his voice—his clothes came from a low-end mail-order catalog. No wonder he became such a good cook and a stylish dresser, and no wonder he couldn’t bear to get too involved or to say good-bye; he’d endured but never fully processed more than one devastating loss—his father’s death, his mother’s depression, his straitened childhood. He had reason to be afraid of the dark side of life.

  This was the only time Michael ever opened himself to me unsparingly. Although I didn’t know it, the whole day was his unspoken farewell.

  * * *

  His actual leaving town a week later was, to borrow Michael’s way of putting things, “rather different” from our last, moving idyll together. On the day before his departure, I hadn’t heard a word from him and did not move from my room to make sure I didn’t miss his call—but every hour passed in silence. Was he really not going to come and say good-bye? I typed ten pages about my feelings in the third person to get some perspective and stayed up all night waiting for him.

  The phone finally rang at 10:00 A.M. the next day. He was coming over, stopping by on his way out of town, on his motorcycle. He had arranged that our last moments together would be in public, at the front door of my dorm. I put myself together and greeted him without complaint. He seemed remote. I tried to set his image in my mind.

  Then he told me where he had been, even though I hadn’t asked. He had spent the night “consoling” a woman who was “broken up” about his leaving, one of the legion he had told me he was attracted to. “She was just released from a mental hospital,” he added by way of explanation, “and she’s even crazier than you.” With that, he put his arms around me, kissed me, and said, “We won’t lose touch.” As he rode away, I stood riveted to the spot in shock.

  “How long before I can read this and look back without the pain stifling me?” I wrote afterward. It was to take another forty-eight years.

  My dear friend, the man who had stood helplessly by while the awful endgame unfolded, fed me and took me downtown to the symphony that night for a performance of the Bach Double Violin Concerto. During the slow movement, one of the most tender and passionately entwining pieces of music every written, the sonic equivalent of fulfilled love, all my pent-up shame and rage and grief and longing overwhelmed me, and I sat there sobbing in my seat. It was the only time I have ever openly wept at a concert and the only time until now that I wept over him.

  THE GOLDEN CONDOM: REVENGE, SWEET AND BITTER

  I had no faith at all that Michael meant what he said about staying in touch; I thought it was a getaway line, not a promise. Once again, I was wrong. Soon I got a letter from him, printed in red ink. He referred to things we had said and done but omitted any mention of, let alone any apology for, his brutal exit. I was intensely agitated to receive it but responded in an arch style as close to his as I could manage. My hunger to maintain a connection with him, no matter how meager and unsatisfying, had not changed.

  He proved more faithful as a correspondent than he had been as a lover. Every few weeks, I received a couple of pages precisely printed in red ink. Every time, I strained to find the right tone in which to craft a reply.

  This odd, taxing correspondence had been going on for several months when I received a letter from him that was not quite as chatty or nonchalant as the others. It was a request for advice. He wrote to ask me, since he knew I knew about such things, how he might go about sexually satisfying the girl he had mentioned to me the day I met his mother. She was timid and naive, and he wasn’t sure how to put her at ease. Could I make any recommendations based on experiences we had had together?

  Nothing he had ever said or done held a candle to this. Did he really consider me a female Playboy Advisor? Then, an idea burst upon me fully formed of how to reply to what I came to call “The Sex Tips Letter”: I would send him, anonymously, a golden condom, which I would create for the occasion. This would be my way to say “Fuck you” to him for behaving as though we weren’t lovers but rather partners in the seduction of an innocent girl like the sophisticated, ice-cold, coconspirators Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil in the scandalous French novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses. I meant it as an insult in kind, my attempt to humiliate and ridicule him for making such a sordid, selfish request of me. My implicit message was “Maybe wearing this will impress her and turn her on, since you can’t seem to do it on your own.” The gilding, a reference to his coloring and his narcissism, made it even more preposterous. I was so outraged that I didn’t care how he felt about it, or me, and I expected no answer. I intended it as an exorcism of his hold over me.

  There were some logistical problems to work out before I could implement my plan. How would I acquire the raw materials? In the first place, in that era of the Pill, I had never even seen a condom, much less purchased one. An older friend of mine came to the rescue and provided several specimens, since it might take some practice to perfect the gilding technique. She also offered to be present when I produced the glittering item I envisioned. I bought a can of gold spray paint at a local art supply store.

  Then there was the problem of finding a suitable venue in which to fabricate the object. I had just moved out of the dorm and into an apartment with a light fixture in my bedroom ceiling. Heeding the warning on the can to “use only in a well-ventilated space,” I raised the window sash and covered the floor and the nearest wall with newspaper. Then I opened the foil packet, unrolled the unfamiliar contents, attached the open end with paper clips and string to the chandelier, and began spraying. Having never done anything remotely resembling this before, I had no idea what to expect—certainly not what actually happened: the chemicals in the paint made the latex expand at least thrice its normal size and length. Here was a condom to reckon with, one as big as his ego. After my coconspirator and I laughed heartily at what I had wrought, I let my eloquent creation dry for the rest of the day, folded it up, and sent it off to him in an envelope marked “Fragile,” with no return address.

  In record time, I got a call from him, the only one since he had left town. There was a hint of chagrin as well as eagerness in his voice; now that I had called his bluff, he was dying to talk to me. He saw at once that I must have been the source. He seemed abashed, but mostly he thought it was hilarious; I had exceeded even his high standards f
or wit and repartee. So thoroughly delighted was he that he told me he was coming back to the city at Christmas and wanted to see me. Concealing my astonishment, I replied, truthfully, that I wasn’t going to be in town when he planned to be there; for once, I had no intention of changing my own schedule to suit his. Then he said words I never imagined I would hear him say, the sweetest words in the world, an unimagined triumph: “I’ll wait for you.”

  I had unwittingly discovered—when I was done trying—the way to his heart, at least temporarily. I had evened the score with my cheeky art project. He felt compelled to pursue me because, at long last, I had rejected him. I should have enjoyed my moment of glory, written him off, and moved on, but I wanted him even more since I had gotten him to admire my gumption.

  Right around the time that “The Sex Tips Letter” from Michael arrived, Jonathan, another dancer—also a tall motorcyclist-scientist who played the oboe—took me out on a real date. I had no idea how I was going to negotiate the surfeit of suitors, with Michael waiting for me to return after Christmas and Jonathan in residence. Fate, however, intervened to prevent me from enjoying my triumph as planned. Another of Michael’s red letters arrived. It was brief, sober, and terrible. He had not only succeeded in seducing the young woman in question even without the benefit of advice from me but had also gotten her pregnant. He wouldn’t be coming to town for Christmas because he had to take her to Mexico for an illegal abortion, the only kind available at the time.

  The news made me sick. His selfishness and his carelessness did more harm to this poor woman than anything he had ever done to me. I got away with nothing damaged but my self-esteem; she risked dying.

  He called me, unexpectedly, late one night in early January. I could feel the urgency in his voice; the veneer of nonchalance was gone. “You know you’re the first person I turn to when I want to talk,” he said by way of explanation. I had never imagined anything of the sort, yet here he was, seeking me out when he was in trouble. This was the fulfillment of the fantasy of everybody who has ever loved an unresponsive person.