He sucked his thumb. 

His most encrusted secret, which I now betray.

 I, Sole Custodian Of The Vault of Him, witness, bearer of his shame, his rage—watching him breathe, soft, like a baby, next to me, lips pulsing full and round, his sculptor’s thumb—large, hairy—his hammer hands at rest, eyes cradled under his lids, looking in, where love could safely exist. Rage ignited by shame consumes. It was in our bed, in our clothes, our bodies, our breath. It grew in darkness, it grew in the glare.

I was born monogamous. From the first man I ever loved, my father, the likes of whom there was no other, how people worship God, how I loved every man I ever loved, mostly boys, the boy in the man, this man. 

I convinced him we should go to Europe. I’d gotten access to a stolen AMEX card that was circulating. We took a cheap Icelandic flight, rented a car in Amsterdam and drove through Luxembourg, Belgium, Holland, finally arriving in eastern France. We skirted Paris, circling in a westward arc, then circling south, agreeing to take our time, content in the countryside where for fifty cents a night we camped in farmers’ fields. In the morning, fresh croissants and heart-shaped Normandy cheese were delivered to our tent.

Young, provincial New Yorkers, afraid of disappointment, we questioned the romance of Paris, maybe just a fabrication of our shared mythology. How could it compare to this warm bucolic summer of food and wine, earthy sex in the unplowed fields of Burgundy, everything infused with the scent of farm animals, sweet hay and cow manure. We’d get there eventually. 

But right now we weren’t far from the Brittany coast. I had barely crossed the border between child and adult— still enchanted by storybook memories, a costumed doll my aunt gave when I was seven. I imagined people in clogs and starched white coiffes, apple crepes. He knew this. Who knew me better?

After pleading my case, and his finally relenting, we left Rouen and drove further west. Castles, rivers, cows, wine, cheese, sausage, bread, wine, churches, pastry, chateaux, wine, drifting backward into childhood, following animate shadows across soft hills into the perfume of the new, the ordinary beauty of other people’s lives. I was twenty-five. He was twenty-seven, behind the wheel of a rented Fiat, looking down the unknown road ahead. He really didn’t want to go to Brittany. He became a grumpy twelve-year-old who didn’t get his way. He suspected danger lurking at every turn. Driving through some town he’d marked on a map in red marker to document our journey, he had an epic freakout. Attempts to defuse his anxiety and paranoia backfired. He said he was going to crash into a tree if I didn’t stop talking. I stopped. Because fear. Because I believed love heals all wounds. I still believe, to some extent, that love heals most wounds. It isn’t love’s failure, it’s what it changes into. But, then, love was still in development.

We never got further west than Normandy. I don’t remember how we made our way to Paris. 

Paris did not disappoint. We arrived at dusk, l’heure bleue, before I knew its name, golden lights lining the bridges, shimmering on the Seine. We found a room on the Quai de la Tournelle for six dollars a night. A small, airy room with brown enamel walls. The shared toilet and shower were down the hall, but the room had a sink, so he peed in there. The bed sank in the middle, inscribed by ghosts of lovers long dead. Notre Dame Cathedral across the river filled the frame of huge open windows, big as doors. He photographed me in a ray of light, naked by the window, arms folded over breasts, gazing at the cathedral. The streets smelled of coffee and butter. We ate cheap Vietnamese food, street crepes, bakery sandwiches, bought cheese and sausage at the market. There was an organ grinder. Gypsy jazz in a flea market café. I was home.

Paris did not disappoint. We arrived at dusk, l’heure bleue, before I knew its name, golden lights lining the bridges, shimmering on the Seine.

He thought we were spending too much of our limited American Express checks. Six dollars a night vs fifty-cents/night, camping. So, back on the road with the tent. I’m foggy about where we ended up after that. The Val de Loire, I think. I remember fragmentary things in no logical order. Sacher Torte in Luxembourg. Driving through Burgundy, making up stupid songs about Bourgogne. Laughing. We settled for a few days at a campsite on the bank of the Loire in the shadow of the castle of Sully sur Loire. In the morning, for coffee, we’d walk into the village cafe where workers in blue coveralls stood chatting at the bar, drinking watered wine for breakfast. Like unsupervised children, we ate an assortment of miniature pastries and wine, for lunch. Heavy, lazy bees hovered over the sweets. We drank and ate, watching swans in the moat, pausing between bites to roll our eyes in ecstasy. 

One afternoon, arriving back at the campsite after breakfast, the owner, knowing we were Americans, informed us of Nixon’s resignation. He spoke in French, wildly gesticulating across the language barrier. At one point, he mimed holding a machine gun and made the sound of a barrage of bullets. In one last flourish, he shouted—Finis!—and drew his flattened hand across his throat. We got the message. We thanked him for the good news and went off to celebrate. 

Strengthening Our Bond.

One night back in New York, we were smoking a joint at the table, talking, laughing. He got all honest and vulnerable. He confessed. At art school he’d fucked a classmate, Berthegart, a creepy little monkey thing I’d met a couple of times at his school events—a stringy-haired, five-foot nothing with a sausage body. More than shock or rage, I was angry, hurt—diminished by the mediocrity of my…rival? Her? 

He confessed multiple orgasms, going down on her five times, over a span of time I found unnerving. What was he trying to prove by telling me this?

I became the priest inside the confessional, handed the burden of another’s sin with the expectation of mercy and forgiveness. I swallowed hard and took it in stride. Strengthening our bond. 

He said he’d always thought I’d fucked the director of the theater company I was in. 

That was two years ago. 

Did you? 

A deeper intimacy, a safe depository for my justifiable infidelity.

“I did. Yes—I did.” 

He came at me, throwing his full body behind his blows, bared teeth jutting from swollen gums, his dark eyes jaundiced and blood-glazed. My arms failed to defend my body, trying to reconcile the safety of the moment before, vanished with the press of imminent death.

I lived. Though lurid Rorschachs painted my face and arms and the roots of my hair were on fire. We didn’t see friends, certainly not parents, for a couple of weeks. He was always very sorry afterward, curled up in the corner on the floor. The florid beast on his face withdrew like an inhalation, then exhaled a grey pallor, deflated lips the color of dust. 

At twenty-five I learned two crucial things: First, it’s bullshit that stoned people aren’t capable of violence. Second, revenge is not always sweet.

But I stayed. Because love.

The Virus

In the months that followed, he set upon me more frequently, somehow making himself the victim. He suffered his secrets like a contagion. Slowly, I began to diminish, ever vigilant for signs of love, or signs of further betrayal. I died by nose too large, hair too thin, breasts too much or not enough, lack of imagination. Too broken for anyone to fix, unable to salvage the scraps, doomed to mediocrity for the rest of my days. Occasionally, I picked up barely formed signals, bursts of clarity that promised  better reception if only I could get a good signal on the antenna.

After a brief respite, with professional help, we decided to have a baby. 

Despite all the hours we spent, microscopically rummaging around our own and each other’s traumatic pasts, it turned out pregnancy was not a safe harbor. I was about eight months pregnant when he threw a Blue Willow coffee pot at me. It broke and I collapsed on the floor in tears. So much for his psychoanalysis. Mine was progressing.

His shapeshifting went underground when our son was born. He smiled more, in love with this perfect little version of himself. But this mother that I had now become was irreconcilable with the woman he’d fallen in love with. His temper, now somewhat restrained by the presence of this new, innocent life, made little tremors, but the earth held its ground. Rage lay dormant just below the surface like a tulip bulb. All around it, indifference pushed up through the dirt like a weed. He got himself a separate studio, spent long hours away. He began going to gallery openings without me, attended social events alone where he enjoyed the attention of adoring males and females. 

Of course, he bestowed love and attention to our son, though less physical now. He became instructive, a tender teacher. But two or three times a year, ignited by some hair-trigger, with his child beyond his sight, the father disappeared; and with it, the reality of his child. Though he never laid a hand on his son, his demons made him forget his child, how a child’s moments are delicate blossoms growing best in a balance of light and darkness, wilting with too much heat, blown away with too much wind. It was a blindness I, too, became infected with. We paid no mind to the acoustics. The words he spoke, my scary scream, the screaming of a terrified animal that hates your bloody guts, no-holds-barred, bounced against 25×100 square feet of walls, ceiling and floorboards. 

There were large gaps in the wide-planked floors, creating an involuntary two-way PA system between lofts when the volume was up. The uptight neighbor guy downstairs occasionally complained. He described the noise as, your son’s on roller skates, which didn’t happen. He was too uptight to complain about the other noises, so he made something up.

We all maintained a strained civility, which had settled into the usual passive-aggressive artist co-op, bullshit.

Red Lipstick

Then, for no apparent reason, he stopped speaking to me. We slept under the same roof, in the same bed. He vaporized into cold indifference. It was on the second or third night of this that I moved to a foam mattress on the other side of the loft. I couldn’t endure his sleeping next to me without word or touch. Months went by. People came over. He reveled in being the centerpiece of the usual lively conversation. He never addressed or looked at me.

But I stayed. 

One night, he invited my tall painter friend, Adrienne, to an exclusive artist’s dinner. She was happy to oblige. A double betrayal. 

Adrienne had a deep-throated, snarky charm. She was a six-foot, wiry, androgyne who never wore a bra. Her wardrobe mainly consisted of white Fruit of the Loom tee-shirts, whose only adornment were the protrusions of her tiny nipples, her long back ending at the waist of faded, paint-splattered, jeans, black loafers, no socks. This drove men wild. 

She made large 4’x6’ canvases, mixing lace and other textiles with layers of paint and epoxy resin. She loved big abusive lovers who loved fucking.

The next night she stood next to me while I washed dishes. She described, in great detail, their fancy, muckety-mucks dinner, laughing that people thought she was his wife. 

When was it enough? 

One night, he invited my tall painter friend, Adrienne, to an exclusive artist’s dinner. She was happy to oblige. A double betrayal.

It’s hard to pinpoint when I began to reintegrate the fragments of myself. I began to see more clearly how everything that was wrong could be made right. I was thirty-four. The mother of a four-year-old son. A functioning brain and body—thirty-four, when mortality is on the horizon—close enough to warrant urgency, but far enough to allow for adjustments. I began to own my well-earned flaws, mine to name, to each his own, every-man-for-himself. 

The mirror took his place. Thirty-four. I looked long and hard. My nose wasn’t too big for my face, my ass wasn’t too flat, I had assets. I began to inoculate myself by focusing on other things. Other things, I found, were quite compelling. Love may be perishable, but desire persists. I got an asymmetrical haircut and a rich mahogany rinse, bought a sheer ivory silk blouse at a boutique sale, a deep, ruby-red lipstick at the 99cent store. He hated red lipstick, his mother wore it. Funny, Hitler hated red lipstick too.

I began graduate school, spending long hours in the library—became the pride of my professors. I was writing poetry again, in a notebook I kept with me all the time.

One evening, getting ready to go out, I put on a new dress, a loose cotton weave of black and gray. It had a dropped waist with an attached sash that rested just below the hip, a graceful homage to the 1920’s that I loved. It completed the girl to woman thing I was going for. I had started wearing Chanel No.5 and drinking martinis. He stared at me for a moment. “You look like a doctor’s wife.”

I knew what he was getting at. We didn’t match anymore. I think he was getting scared. Even I was scared, watching myself come into focus. 

At some point, he told me he didn’t want me to go to the openings with him. You make me feel self-conscious. 

It’s not like I hover by your side—I go off by myself—talk to people.

He hesitantly agreed we’d meet later, after a carpentry job he was doing. 

It was a bleak Thursday evening in November. I arrived an hour early at Leo Castelli. Free champagne, good lighting, a dark-haired man with pale skin. 

He said he was a journalist, spoke in a soft voice, never taking his eyes off me. We talked about books, he asked for my number. I said, I’ll call you. 

We talked on the phone a couple of times. He suggested we meet behind the Prometheus statue at Rockefeller Center. It was very early when I got off the subway, so I stopped into St. Patrick’s for a walk-around, some warmth and peace. 

I walked from there to Rockefeller Center. It was the night they were lighting the Christmas tree. A mob of tourists and news cameras had encamped, filling every available space in full view of the TV cameras.  As backdrop, the gold Prometheus hovered above a golden fire, water gushing down below. Cheerful gawkers stood crushed together, excited they were present at something wonderful and famous. Being small in a crowd allows you to maneuver to the front without shoving, like a rodent. I slipped between bodies to claim a space. Finally penned in behind the statue, I needed to be enticingly visible to my date while remaining a dot in the crowd to the cameras. Spot-lit by thousand-watt bulbs, I embraced the challenge, a step toward something enticingly dangerous that I couldn’t yet identify. But in hindsight, it was the beginning of not giving a shit.

We managed to find each other. He suggested the Oak Room for drinks. We sat in a booth in the window and talked in low voices about our lives. We talked about the art world, literature, both leaving out our messes. I talked about my graduate studies, poetry, my four-year-old son, and—saying it out loud for the first time—a marriage maybe ready for history. He told me that, when he saw me coming down the stairs at Castelli’s, he bet his friend he could get my number. I was feeling it now. I wasn’t hungry. I’m never hungry when I’m horny. But I didn’t want to drink on an empty stomach so I ate a salad. Then I drank a lot of red wine. 

We were in anticipatory agreement about what would follow. He took me home in a cab to his East Third Street walk-up. We had sex. I went to the bathroom and noisily threw up. I squeezed some toothpaste onto my finger and rubbed it on my tongue and across my teeth. 

I returned to bed, hoping the toothpaste masked the odor of vomit on my breath.

He asked, Was it that bad?

I insisted it wasn’t, even though he hadn’t been fully erect the whole time and—though not bad enough to make me throw up—yes, it was that bad. 

He told me some woman had broken up with him. 

He looked up without making eye contact. His face lost some of its softness. He said she was a woman he’d been seeing for a couple of years, they’d met at work. She was the one who broke it off. I felt a mixture of admiration and inadequacy. She’d figured it out, probably still in her twenties.

I was boosted by my status as a revenge fuck.

“Well, maybe you’ll work it out,’ I said, not really caring one way or the other. I wasn’t looking for love. I was desired and that was enough. Besides, he wasn’t all that. I looked at him in the crumpled sheets, naked, his soft body made less appealing by the paleness that had seemed so attractive when he was clothed. He looked vulnerable, his penis lying against his thigh in resignation.

“What about your son?” he asked. “How does he figure into all of this?”

“If mommy’s happy, baby’s happy,” I smiled, trying to keep it flirtatious while I was looking around for my shoes. 

He walked me to the door and put his hand on my head in what felt like a kind of rejection letter that says, ‘Thank you for sending your work, but it’s not right for us.’

Call me, he said.

I walked back to Mercer, stopping in the empty street to upchuck a distilled version of what had just happened into my notebook: shadows of aspirational pleasure, eroticism poorly disguised in Greek mythology, metaphor that any intelligent paranoid could decode. Anyway, I had a lover. Sort of.

Arriving home, after a mostly unsatisfying attempt at cheating, I got off the freight elevator and walked the length of the loft, put my coat and bag down on a chair opposite where he sat smoking a cigarette, trying to read my face. I must have looked like I was swinging from a helium balloon with a slow leak. He definitely saw something.

I doubt he could discern the amalgam of triumphant high, disappointment, and the knowledge that salad and red wine don’t mix.

We were in bed, lights off, eyes closed, not yet asleep. I felt him slink out of bed and saw him walk over to the chair where I’d left the bag with my notebook containing the flimsily disguised poem. He was on his way to the bathroom with it when I jumped out of bed and began grabbing at it—

“Hey, what the fuck? Hey!” 

After a tug of war, I wrested it from his hands and threw it in the far back of the storage area among the confusion of boxes, broken chairs and cleaning implements, clothing piled chaotically on various surfaces. I convinced myself it would be impossible to find. Anyway, I really needed to lie down.

Later, when my pretend sleep finally took hold, he found it. Just what he was looking for—clearly, not about him. 

The next morning at breakfast he confronted me, disregarding our four-year-old, alone in the bath. I brought up Berthegart, his indifference, his popularity among the Thursday night free wine circuit.

The hairs on his back rose like bayonets, knuckles straining against the cracking surface of his skin. His slavering, inexhaustible rage. I ran to the exit door at the other end of the loft, my ghost hands reaching to turn the heavy police lock. He moved with unearthly speed, grabbed my hair and beat a murderous rhythm into the brick wall with my head, I’m screaming, afraid he’ll kill me—fifty feet away, our child is being quiet in the tub. I wanted it to stop.

Later, after a few hours, he said he loved me. 

The next day I changed the locks. 

Which is not the end of the story.