However, since arriving all she had had from Carl were promises, promises, and more of the same.
“Carl keeps postponing the wedding date, and I have no money, and being an alien, I am not allowed to work,” she said, and started to cry.
Distressed though I was at her call, I felt kind of sorry for her – and also a little curious as to what my rival looked like – so I agreed to come down to her place.
The address she gave was Sutton Place, not far from where his parents lived, and if hearing her story surprised me, seeing the woman at her door really amazed me.
Carl had been among the biggest racists I knew in South Africa, yet this woman I was now confronting – who claimed to be his fiancée – was a black Oriental!
Not only that, she had protruding teeth, dumpy legs, and bushy-kinky hair. Some kind of competition I had.
Inside I admired a potted poinsettia plant. “Thank you,” she said. “Carl gave it to me yesterday.”
So this was the “mother” he had to neglect his fiancée to see? The more I heard, the more urgent it seemed to demand an explanation from Carl. So Rona and I decided to phone and ask him over.
Carl answered the phone when I called the house and said he’d been worrying about where I could be.
“I’m in the Sutton Place area,” I said. “But not at your parents’ home.” And he guessed right away where I was. There was nothing he could do but come down there and face the music.
As soon as he walked in the door, Rona, who was clearly a very emotional person, started firing questions and hurling accusations, finally demanding he decide which of us was his fiancée.
“Xaviera is my only fiancée,” Carl declared. At that she became hysterical, picked up a heavy stone ashtray, and aimed it at his head.
Luckily I was close enough to prevent her from throwing it, but in that critical moment I thought I saw something that I hoped I had mistaken. As my fiancé was threatened with danger, a look of erotic pleasure flashed in his eyes!
The moment quickly passed, and we left. I felt sorry for Rona, but I was very much in love with Carl and so glad he had chosen me in her presence that I accepted his mumbled explanation and agreed not to bring up the matter again. I can easily forgive when I’m in love. And what else could I do? I knew no one else in New York. I was also broke and didn’t have the fare to go back home.
Two days after that Sutton Place drama I was in for another interesting introduction into Carl’s intimate life – his family.
Carl’s parents were both doctors and owned a beautiful duplex cooperative apartment. The inside of the apartment was truly magnificent, and huge enough to have a Japanese and a Greek maid to run it.
Carl’s father was a psychiatrist, and quite a charming man. His mother was something else again. She was a dermatologist, and from the moment we met, she made me itch to be somewhere else. She was a typical all-American bitch in her middle fifties, with tons of makeup and mini-skirts, a cracked gin voice, and lots of gossipy talk.
My impression of New York women, which I mistakenly thought were typically American, was not very favorable in those days. I detested the way those in their forties and fifties dressed in those ridiculous cutie-pie clothes, with wigs, bows, and triple rows of eyelashes, trying to compete with their daughters. In the afternoons you would see them walking into Bonwit Teller with all those loud colors, and from the back you sometimes couldn’t tell who was mother and who was daughter. Unlike Europe, you rarely see a warm, motherly type because the Manhattan woman refuses to grow old with grace. Carl’s mother was one of them.
A fourth member of the Gordon household was Dudley, the toothless little Worcester terrier that Carl’s mother fed like a baby and talked to like a human.
From our first introduction I don’t think that woman cared for me. I tried to be natural and spontaneous with her, and she was insecure and phony with me. And, to be candid, I didn’t endear myself when I replied to her bad French the way the language is spoken in France.
However, I had to try to get along with them because I was going to be their daughter-in-law if, indeed, the day ever came.
It was three months after I arrived in America, and I was still not married. I was living with Carl, and my visa was expiring. I pointed out that if we weren’t married soon I would have to leave the country, but this didn’t hurry him up. “Get a job at a consulate and get a diplomatic visa,” he said.
So I took a job in a foreign consulate, and just as well, because I started needing money.
Soon after I arrived here I learned that the free-spending Carl in South Africa was a man very much on an expense account: In New York there were no lavish meals or any presents. Carl was even so stingy that he wouldn’t pay my dry-cleaning bill. He paid the food and the rent, but everything else was at my expense. He even got mad at me one time when he saw me sending money home to my family.
“Carl, I have been educated by my parents in a good way,” I reminded him. “I studied music, speak seven languages, and have traveled all over Europe with them. They have given me the best they could, so why should I neglect them now after my father’s long illness that left him in bad financial shape?” And I sent them something from my salary every week.
Another thing I was disturbed to find out about Carl was his anti-Semitism. I knew his mother had changed her religion to Presbyterian, and Carl, it seemed, also did everything he could to conceal his Jewish origins.
He was even a member of the supposedly anti-Semitic New York Athletic Club, and once, when he took me there for a fencing competition, he made me conceal my Star of David pendant. “Hide it in your sweater,” he whispered, “and they’ll never know you’re Jewish, because you don’t look it.”
Other times, when people were coming for dinner, he would make me hide the thing I treasured most, a valuable copper menorah, which was a gift from my family, and the only possession of sentimental worth I had in this country.
The last thing he did before guests arrived was to check if the menorah was out of sight. “Put that candle in a drawer,” he would say, which to me was like burying your pride.
After six months in America the subject of marriage was being discussed less and less, and at this point I didn’t dare mention it for fear he would yell at me. I was getting very depressed at the way we were living, and I wanted to settle down.
In spring I remember walking through Central Park, seeing the pregnant women or the married couples with their children, and feeling jealous of them because they were living legitimately with their husbands and could raise a family the way it should be. And what was I doing? Living as Carl’s common-law wife.
I would love to have a baby with Carl. I was sure it would be beautiful, with lovely eyes and a strong body like his. I wanted a boy first, then a girl. Some nights in the heat of passion, Carl would even say, “Darling, don’t use your diaphragm tonight, I want to make you a baby.”
I wouldn’t obey him, because, as much as I wanted it, I did not want a baby without being married. And I would not use that as a weapon to get him to marry me, because whenever I mentioned marriage these days he would lash out at me and say, “Don’t push it.” Also, at that time I found out something I never knew before – that he had just gotten officially divorced from his first wife.
Carl’s passionate words were just words – empty of any real meaning – I found out one time when I was three weeks late with my period. I had not yet seen a doctor, but I told Carl I was feeling nauseous.
He went into a rage and started screaming that he didn’t want to be pushed into anything, and insisted on an abortion. That was the last thing I would do. I would never kill something inside me that was going to be a human being, especially when the father was the one and only man I loved and was supposed to be marrying.