When the Olympic Games were held in Mexico City in October, 1968, Carl announced that he was going to take a vacation by himself and go there. This time he went away for longer than usual. Before he left I vaguely recall casually mentioning that I had a light-skinned Indonesian girl friend named Penny, who was going to attend the Olympic games as a representative for our national airline, KLM. I thought nothing about it at the time.
I was very depressed while he was gone, and I had a longer than usual affair with a girl from the Dominican Republic whom I picked up at the gay bar. Even though it was only a woman I cheated with, I told Carl about it when he returned, and his pride was hurt. And, what is almost laughable; he said after that admission marriage would be impossible because he would never be able to trust his wife while he was away on a business trip.
What a hypocrite. I was sure he was doing something more in Mexico City for a month than just watching the hundred-meter dash. But I had no proof of anything, at least not at the time. In spite of his attitude, I couldn’t leave him. Love is blind! Stupid, also, when it blinds one to a mate’s cruelty.
Around the time Carl came back from Mexico City a strange change was occurring in his lovemaking, and he was becoming slightly freaky.
One night while we were making love he said to me, “Why don’t you pick up that antique clothes brush and just beat me up a little?”
That was just kid stuff compared to what he wanted later on. He would ask me to talk dirty about the girls I made it with and how I would suck their pussies and their tits. He also wanted me to dress up in slinky clothes and do a striptease for him while he lay around in his morning gown with the front open. He wanted me to brush against his arm with my sleeve or my scarf and jump away to tease him.
As he became kinkier, I went out and bought some sex-perversion books to learn new things to please him. I taught myself the Japanese trick of inserting a string of pearls in his back passage and removing them one at a time to excite him, and all at once to make him climax.
Then he started saying, “Xaviera, I want to be your whore. Make me your whore.” So I bought a dildo through a lesbian friend, and I would insert it, sit on his back like a jockey with a riding crop in my hand, and pretend I was riding him at Aqueduct. I would call the race as I whipped him along to the finish line, and each time, of course, I had to announce that he was the winner. I also remember giving seductive striptease performances while he lay on the couch, teasing him and teasing him and finally raping him.
Toward the end, the last thing he wanted was straight sex anymore, and I wondered where on earth this sick situation was going to end.
Soon after, Carl came up with the answer. One day he told me he was being transferred to Sao Paulo, Brazil.
“Don’t get upset, Xaviera,” he said. “This separation could be the best thing for us.” He was to leave in the middle of February, and suggested I plan to join him around May, and definitely we would be married. He promised.
The actual day he left was Valentine’s Day, and for a few days before that he became very secretive and would not let me clear the mailbox. Valentine’s Day does not mean much to me, but I started to suspect it meant something more to him.
There’s something he’s hiding, I thought, but I couldn’t figure out what. The night before his departure, we stayed together, and the next morning while he was taking one of those long baths in all the bubbles that he liked, I decided to find out.
I had an idea that the clue to our relationship now and in the future was inside his black attaché case, which he always kept locked and which was now lying on the sofa. The last thing I like to be is a snoop, but this action was justified because I could feel he was holding something very important from me.
Knowing the way Carl’s mind worked, I figured out that the combination on the attaché case had to be something obvious. I tried 353, 747, 636, 545, and was getting very nervous that he might come out and catch me, so I peeped in the door, and there he was lying in his bubbles and reading his paper.
The fourteenth combination, 242, opened it, and inside I found five Valentine cards from five different senders, and one registered letter. The letter was in a familiar handwriting, and the stamp was from Holland. My hands were shaking as I opened it.
“My dearest Mexican Globo,” it began. “I hope this letter gets into your hands safely, because I would hate Xaviera to read it, since we are still good friends. I can’t tell you how happy I am, and our Mexican love affair is still freshly printed on my mind. My darling, I am all excited. Your beautiful marriage proposal is the most fabulous present I have ever had. I am dying to depart from Holland. I could not think of a nicer person to spend the rest of my life with. I am jealous of Xaviera for every moment she has spent with you lately, and I count the days until we meet. See you in Sao Paulo. Your Indonesian Penny.’
5. WHAT’S A GIRL LIKE ME?
By that bleak February day in 1969 when Carl left for Brazil, my confidence in myself as a woman and a human being was at an all-time low.
I was battle-scarred from two whole years of being in love with and faithful to a man who cheated, humiliated, and finally abandoned me. And for the first time in my reasonably well-adjusted life I had an inferiority complex you could photograph. I was almost a candidate for suicide.
I desperately needed warmth and reassurance, and an obvious easy way was to hear men praise me as a lover. I had thrown Carl out of my house after showing him the letter from Indonesian Penny. He called several times to apologize but I hung up on him. His plane was to take off at 4 P.M. that same afternoon and by that time I was in bed screwing my brains out with a man I’d met in Maxwell’s Plum.
This was the first man I had been with since I first met my fiancé, and to tell you the truth, it was a dismal failure. We were both looking for something neither of us got. The baby-faced lawyer wanted a no-strings, uncomplicated roll in the feathers, and I wanted an escape from my misery. But instead of feeling elated with his loving, I burst into tears and sent him away.
Nevertheless, I decided my stolen self-esteem was in a bed somewhere in Manhattan, so for the next six months I cut a sexual swath a mile wide across the city.
After work each day I would go to the bars where the gray-flannel set hung out, like Ratazzi, P. J. Clarke’s, Ad Lib, Charley-O’s, or Maxwell’s Plum. Charley-O’s was downstairs in my building, and the junior-executive types would go there to get laid before the last train to Westport.
These men would all be full of promises about how they could introduce you to this job, or get you cut-rate travel or whatever it was they thought you might want. Meanwhile, you’d end up in bed with them, and when you’d call next day they were always out.
My roommate, Sonia, who knew me from the suffering days when I was living with Carl, took a genuine big-sisterly interest in me, but sometimes she would get angry enough to call me a nymphomaniac.
She was nine years older than me, unmarried, and disillusioned with life; her retreat from reality was the bottle, in the same way mine was sex. At night she would quietly drink herself into her happier world while I would screw myself into mine.
I would cruise the First Avenue singles bars where Brooklyn, Bronx, and Queens secretaries go looking for marriage and end up settling for a night in bed. My scene was to drag home any Tom, Harry, or Dick who had a pleasant face and a tolerable manner.
I went on that way until around August, when things got so depressingly repetitive and aimless I thought I would go around the bend. As providence had it, one of the junior execs actually came through with a round-trip ticket to Miami.