“How do your preferences work with your relationship with your wife? You said you met at the society and she was a member?”
“She was. And then we broke one of the society’s rules and saw each other outside of the playrooms. That’s what we call the apartment where the society meets-the playrooms.”
I nodded. “And how was the sex outside?”
“We didn’t do it outside until eight or nine weeks before we got married. We met to do all the things that we weren’t allowed to do at the society. Talk. Go to dinner. To the movies. Hold hands. Sit in the park at twilight and discuss what we’d done that day. Daphne is a painter. Very successful. I posed for her during that time. Naked. She loved to paint me. And that was very erotic. It was as close as we came to having sex. But we saved that for the club. We were living these two lives-three really-and no one knew.”
“Can you tell me about the three lives?”
“In one life each of us was just as we appeared to the world. A wine merchant and a painter. Then there was the secret life we shared at the club. Doubly secret because the society is secret to begin with, and when we were there no one knew that Daphne and I were breaking the rules. The sex during that time was better than ever-with her and with the other women, too. And there was our third life- the two of us together, dating.” His tone of voice was wistful.
Even though I can explain to patients that nothing is a more powerful aphrodisiac than illicit love or illicit sex, I haven’t always been able to extricate them from its grip. Once, a woman whose life was coming apart while she carried on a passionate affair asked me if what she was feeling was real. If that insane high she and her lover experienced when they were with each other was going to last. If the intensity of colors, tastes, sights and sounds she experienced during those first six months they were together was genuine.
It was real in that it was her reality. But no, it could not be sustained. The high thrived on its very impermanence. It was fueled by its own secrecy.
We want what we cannot have. Not because we cannot have it so much as because longing works like an opiate. It magnifies our lives and heightens our senses. Yearning has propelled artists to paint, sculpt, write and compose. Cities have been built out of desire, and governments have been toppled.
Some argue that nothing except the will to survive is as powerful as early secret passion. I don’t know. But listening to patients, I have come to believe it is possible. The sexual union becomes almost mystical in these relationships. The connections that we make in the dark of clandestine assignations are elevated beyond other experiences. Men and women become gods when they steal away to luxuriate in each other. They talk and touch as if they’ve never done either before.
Longing has made this so. For many people, pent-up passion incites the most ardent encounter they’ve ever had.
“Why did you want to get married?” I asked Nicky.
“We figured that there couldn’t be a better match for either of us. Daphne is very strong and verbal. She likes being in control. I need to be dominated. Plus, we shared a love of art, good food and wine. Everything fit. And we knew each other’s secrets. We accepted them.” He didn’t say it, but in his tone I heard the “I thought.” The doubt.
“What happened?”
Nicky looked away from me again and out the window. There were only ten minutes left, according to the clock on the end table next to the agate ashtray. We’d covered a lot of ground in the past thirty-five minutes. If he couldn’t go further, I wouldn’t be surprised.
At that point my phone rang. I glanced at the caller ID. I only took calls during sessions if they were related to my daughter. This one wasn’t. I gave Nicky a few more seconds. If he hadn’t responded, I wouldn’t have pushed him. But he began talking.
“Daphne got pregnant three months after we married. It was planned. Then she lost the baby. About a month and a half in. She barely mourned. She wasn’t depressed. Or so she said. But she started working harder than ever, preparing for her next show. She threw herself into painting with a crazy energy. Day by day she became more and more fanatical about perfecting her paintings. Even though she said she wasn’t mourning the baby, and that early miscarriages were easy enough to get over, I could see how upset she was in the paintings. They were dark-black, blood-red paintings of bundles of torn and ragged bunting. At that point she became preoccupied with death and started going to the temple. She’s Jewish. We both are. Both nonpracticing. Suddenly she was intensely religious. Even studying Kabbalah. Soon she was talking about how we had to rethink our lifestyle. She wanted to try to have a baby again. But first we had to stop acting out sexually and give up the games, and she wanted me to quit going to the society.”
“I don’t understand. You’d broken the rules and you were still going to meetings?”
“No one had found out. Daphne just dropped out without giving any reason. No one even knew I’d gotten married.”
“When did she stop going?”
“When we decided to get married.”
“Whose idea was that?”
“Hers. She said that as much as she had enjoyed it, she didn’t need it anymore. At that point she said she thought that she could handle me going. At least, before we got married, she thought that.” A thick layer of resentment underscored his words now. “She claimed that it was okay for me to have different needs than she did.”
“So she stopped going and you kept going?”
“Until she lost the baby. To placate her, I stopped, too. I had to. I couldn’t stand how she was changing. I wanted the woman I was in love with back. And I wanted to start a family with her. I’d lived without the society before. I’d had traditional sex for years before I finally figured out what it was I enjoyed the most. I could make a sacrifice, couldn’t I? A simple sacrifice. Not that hard, right?”
His eyes were filled with pain and anger.
“But you couldn’t?”
He shook his head.
“Did you try?”
He nodded. “Like hell. I stayed away for six weeks.”
“What happened?”
He shrugged.
“Can you connect going back to something that happened in your life?”
He shrugged again, but this time he followed the gesture with words. “I’d been traveling. Went to a large wine auction in England and made a killing. Had one of the most successful trips of my career, came back, got in from the airport and didn’t even go home. Went straight to the society and spent three hours there.”
“Did Daphne find out or did you tell her?”
“I told her,” he said.
I wasn’t surprised. You cannot be punished if you don’t get caught. After his success, he needed to be reminded that, despite his power, he was powerless. If he stayed in therapy with me, with or without his wife, we’d work on his need for punishment-but only when he was ready.
“And now?”
“Daphne wants me back. I want to go. But she’s given me an ultimatum. I have to give up the society. Except I can’t. I need help to do that. And she has to be one of the people to help me. She has to go back to treating me the way she used to sexually. She doesn’t want to. Sex with her is deadly serious now.”
“Is she willing to join you in therapy?”
He nodded.
“That’s good.”
His forty-five minutes were over. I leaned forward, just a little, to be inclusive at the very moment when I had to tell him our time was up.
“Nicky, I think you’ve been brave to come here. And very forthcoming. I also think you’re smart and intuitive. So if you want to work on this-with or without your wife-I’d be happy to help you.”
As he stood, he became the calm, successful man who had walked into my office almost an hour earlier. His armor was back on. He’d lost the scared look he’d had only minutes before.