And so to bed.
Now, the media have portrayed me as such a withered puritanical moralist that I suppose I ought to say right up front: I have no qualms whatsoever about the games lovers play, and may God bless you all in your variety. But this is my story, so I can only tell you about the things I did and how they affected me.
Anyway, Lauren and I didn't get up to anything too grotesque or dangerous, not at first. We just tied each other up with belts and bathrobe ties and slapped each other's butts and pretended to choke each other, snarling nasty words and so on. All in good fun, you know. And I mean, I liked Lauren well enough. I liked the fragility and the longing I sensed under her sullen, cynical hide. We had, I guess, a relationship of sorts. Pasta and philosophy in the wine cellars of Alphabet City. Wrist-bound, red-bottomed nights in her apartment-because her apartment was nicer than mine, a sparkly brick-walled wood-floored studio in Chelsea her father helped her rent.
Then, of course, after a while, I grew bored with her. Nothing surprising there. The urge to sexual variety in men is just as strong as the urge to bear young in women. And since our relationship was based mostly on sex, I saw no reason to draw things out. No hypocrisy, remember. I simply broke the news to her: I wanted to see other people. To my surprise, she eagerly agreed: Yes, yes, we should. In fact, through her photography contacts, she knew some other couples who were into what she called The Scene. Maybe we should get together with them. Well, yeah! I said.
I didn't understand, you see, that Lauren likely would've done anything to stop me from going, to win my love, to be the girl she thought I wanted her to be. To my idiot mind, we were just a couple of free spirits exploring the dangerous boundaries of our desires. It never occurred to me until it was too late that I was the natural leader of us, that I was in charge of her and therefore responsible for her welfare.
So we entered The Scene, becoming part of a loose company of people who enjoyed rough sex and other shenanigans. We would get together, two or sometimes three couples at a time, play out roles and scenarios, expose our most secret, most violent hungers and proceed to satisfy them on each other.
If you are wondering what that feels like-what it feels like to hurt other people for your sexual pleasure-I mean, to really bind them hard and hurt them cruelly-I will tell you: It feels good. At least it did to me. There was a dull-minded, feverish heat to having sex that way. No, it was not like lovemaking exactly. There were no deep draughts of pleasure from someone else's pleasure, no long, slow immersion in another's face, another's body, beautiful because they were her face and body, exciting because they were hers. Acting out the universal male fantasies of rape and conquest and domination had instead a childishly gluttonous quality. It was like sitting cross-legged on the floor and stuffing chocolate cake into your mouth until the whole cake was gone. It was just like that, in fact: delicious-then compulsive-and finally sickening.
Sickening, yes. Because when it was over-never mind the morning after, I mean the second it was over-I felt my spirit-that spirit I did not believe existed-flooded with moral revulsion as if a bubbling tarlike substance was rising into my throat and choking me. But here was the funny thing-the strange thing. I somehow managed to hide this feeling from myself. It's odd, I know. I meant to be so honest about everything, to expose my deepest nature, to act upon my most primal instincts without restraint-no hypocrisy. And yet about this-this most basic fact of the experience-I lied shamelessly. I told myself I felt deliciously wicked. I told myself I felt a free man who had broken the bonds of moral conformity. Oh God-my God, my God-the things I told myself. Anything to hide the truth of my moral revulsion.
Finally, when the lies were not enough, I used drugs. Well, we all used drugs, all of us in The Scene. They were to heighten the sensation, we said-without considering that the sensation needed heightening only so that the urges of our desire would continue to outstrip the commandments of our self-disgust. We started with cocaine and later added Ecstasy, which was just beginning to make the rounds in a big way. Before long, I was using something almost daily.
And yet I still had my theories-and according to my theories, everything was going great! I had the joys of honest sensuality to set against the lies that mask society's emptiness and corruption. I had the bulwark of philosophical truth to protect me against the oppressive meaninglessness of existence. I had the satisfaction of answering ever-present Death with Physical Pleasure, the only thing that was both good and real.
That was how it was, according to my theories.
In practice, my personality was disintegrating and I was plunging into a dull fog of depression, illuminated by sharp flashes of suicidal despair. Go figure.
It happened slowly at first, then it happened fast, like a child going down a playground slide, push, push, then picking up speed, then falling finally plump into the sandpit below. That was how I fell-plump-into That Night in Bedford.
That's what we always called it, Lauren and I: That Night in Bedford. As in "I can't stop thinking about That Night in Bedford." Or: "After That Night in Bedford, nothing was the same."
That Night in Bedford, we rented a car and drove up to Westchester to meet a new couple involved in The Scene. He was some kind of Wall Street guy, maybe forty, hopped-up, snappy. She was his wife, a Realtor, a little younger but not much. She was brimming with forced sophistication, broad, limp-wristed gestures, loud laughter. She actually said, That's just delightful, darling. She said it several times, in fact, during the course of the evening.
They had a spectacular sprawling farmhouse off a wooded lane. She called it that when she gave us the directions: "It's a sprawling farmhouse off a wooded lane." They invited Lauren and me to stay with them for the weekend.
I won't pretend I don't remember what happened. That would be nice, but I remember only too well, in spite of the chemical fog that was curling through the twisted byways of my brain at the time. The blow-by-blow of it doesn't matter much anymore. The point is: It ended with the woman sobbing. The wife, the Realtor. All her pretense at sophistication gone. Curled naked on the floor in a corner of the master bedroom, weirdly small-looking under the ceiling's enormous, exposed wooden beams. Her hand was wedged between her legs, and she was sobbing so convulsively, I thought she might rupture something. Lauren was in the master bathroom puking up pills. And me, I was holding my head in one hand and trying to find my clothes with the other.
The husband, the Wall Street guy-he was worse even than the rest of us. If there were some sort of award for this kind of thing he would've won it: Most Disgraceful Behavior in a Disgraceful Situation or something like that. The clown was actually screaming at his wife. Standing over her in his ridiculous bikini briefs, his bland face scarlet, his pearly hands flying every which way. Screaming at her: "You always do this! You always goddamn find a way to pull this fucking shit on me!" With the poor woman curled up at his feet, convulsing, sobbing so that a stone would've pitied her: "I didn't want to. I told you I didn't want to."
After that, after That Night in Bedford-that's when I cracked. It was the disgust, you know, the moral disgust. And yet, I had worked so hard at hiding it from myself that it could only reveal itself to me in other forms and symptoms.
So I would wake up in the predawn dark or just go still, staring at my desk in daylight. My skin would suddenly turn clammy, my heart suddenly flutter and race. I would think about the sobbing Bedford woman. And outlandish fears would swim into my mind: What if she accuses me of rape? Or: What if she dies of internal injuries and I'm arrested for murder? I laughed these worries off at first. They were nonsense. She'd agreed to everything and I knew she hadn't been hurt in any serious way. And yet the fears kept coming back. And then other fears came, too, small emberlike worries that had been smoldering in me a long time but now suddenly burst into larger flame. What if I got sick? Having sex with so many strangers, careless because of the drugs. What if I had syphilis and didn't know it? What if I had AIDS? What if I got cancer of some kind? Cancer of the penis? Cancer of the balls?