The Rabbit hole of domestic violence… and how a woman gets trapped.
I guess no one starts out looking for a psychopath to marry. I thought I’d found this great guy. And then things just went terribly sour.
I was surely seduced by his sophistication, money and power… But I was especially charmed by his humor and I found him the sexiest man alive. So I backed myself, without hesitation, straight into his financial corner.
At his suggestion, I invested my only spare money in our secondary home which generated no income and thus no profit for me… because Theodore had made it seem like we were bonding.
He worked in another town all week, so my kids and I lived without him, in his family home with his two adult sons who hated me and I hated back, because we had to. I, by then, had no other option.
I stopped working little by little to take care of « our » lives and homes and families because if things were not absolutely perfect, Ted would bitch and complain.
I tried to « calm » his mood swings and make myself useful by helping him curate his english speaking clientele and fructify his business, for his profit though, never for mine own.
I concentrated on creating and decorating our homes to make him appear as cool as he wanted to be. I let him dress me the way he liked because he was looking at me more than I was looking at myself. And I let him buy me jewelry and cars to quench his own ego.
I went with him to designer shops, too expensive for the income he declared, because if we were not seen buying things and coming home with shopping bags, he would get edgy and angry.
Then, I began agreeing to his heavy demands for more and more and more group sex. I took drugs to hide my feelings about his acts and his attitudes and I made excuses about how I had to avoid making him mad. Mostly though, I was afraid and felt trapped, like I’d lost myself, completely.
By that May night, when Ted took me up to Paris for a « date » with a couple he had found on the internet, I was already no longer questioning him at all.
I’d booked at the Raphael because I didn’t want to go to our regular hotel : The Amour, in the 9th, since that time last March when he’d asked for sex so heavy handedly that we’d called a single guy, fucked and taken drugs until 5am and then, when the guy and I couldn’t sleep because we were so loaded, Ted had gone wild with rage.
I guess he’d forgotten who’d invited the guy in the first place and who’d demanded we all take one more line so Ted could fuck again. Nor did he wonder why his wife was so strung out, although he knew full well that this was not the lifestyle I fancied. He’d just wanted more sex.
So I no longer wanted to go to the Amour. And the Raphael was just around the corner from our date.
As soon as we arrived at the hotel we called Mike, who came immediately.
3 or 5 grams? 5.
The Mike left, I took a huge line to calm down and Sara arrived soon thereafter. I think she’d come with some clothes to give Ted that she’d gotten from her luxury clothing company for half off. He paid her. She looked at me and told me I seemed tired, a mess, that I shouldn’t drink anymore because it wasn’t cool to get to « our date » already drunk. Yeah! I remember saying to her rolling my eyes, taking another swig and a line.
I don’t know how many hours went by between Sara’s departure and our rendez-vous. I got dressed in something slutty but nice of course, because it came from Colette, and we walked around the corner to our appointment. I remember holding Ted’s arm.
We buzzed at an ugly modern building near the Arc de Triumph. The couple was called The Chirurgiens on their group-sex profile. My husband, had expected them and their 8th Arrondissement address, near the Champs Elysées, to be chic but they weren’t. They were sitting on a clic-clac* couch in a living room with white tile floors. The lights were off except for the one bulb hanging from the ceiling in the kitchenette-entry way where we stood.
We went in anyway.
The « Chirurgiens » offered us a drink. There was no music. I asked them if they could alter or improve the lighting in someway to make it seem less sleazy. They looked at me inquisitively. Why? They were there to fuck, not be cozy. What the fuck was I there for, they wondered?
I had long since stopped scrutinizing Ted’s choices for sexual partners. His clamoring had become too oppressive by then and there would have been too many people to vet. I had gone to this rdv eyes closed, so he’d let up on his harking demands. But I knew that if things hadn’t gone right… that is, if I hadn’t agreed to fuck the couple… he would have been furious.
He wouldn’t have talked to me for days. He would have throw his credit card at me and called me a whore, leaving me alone in our Raphael room. He would have shouted about how much he worked and how little time he had for pleasure compared to me, a mom without a real, paying job. He would have threatened to leave me or would have made my life hell.
So I just turned to the Chirurgiens and I asked if they wanted a line. They refused. They didn’t do drugs.
Then I suggested we get to it. So we all went from the cheap, sleazy living room into the equally tacky bedroom. The four of us, on a mattress with an industrially made pine-wood frame and poor quality bedding, fondling each other and taking off our clothes. I started to fuck the guy. The girl was with my husband… and then she wasn’t. He’d left. So I finished with the guy.
I remember getting up and going out to the living room where there was now only the sickly white street light saturating the room through uncovered windows. My husband was sitting at the table snorting line after line and trying to wank off. He violently shook his small penis in his fist… but nothing happened.
« Hey, » I said, « Let’s go. That’s enough. Stop. » I remember having to tell him this several times.
We dressed and left. Certainly without saying goodbye to our hosts.
Outside on the street where it was cold, I was wearing one of Ted’s mother’s fur coats. He loved women to dress in his mother’s furs. I was not holding his arm this time and as we walked around the edge of the Arc, a huge, simple-looking man came toward us. He wanted to talk to me or touch me. My husband didn’t say anything. Perhaps the coke had his tongue.
I told the man to get away. We only had 2 blocks to walk, but I was scared. I didn’t know if it was fear of the big, strange man or of my own husband, until back at the hotel, when it finally began to sink in.
Ted had not taken care of me that night, nor in fact had he ever. Perhaps he hadn’t been able to, but he’d most obviously never wanted to. I’d always thought he would be by my side. He was my own husband and a lawyer, after all, but I was suddenly getting an inkling of how alone I’d been the whole time… all those years, when we were supposed to have been together.
The next morning when we woke, in haste or angst or just pretending to keep the confetti pieces of our story from falling completely apart, and in spite of the previous night’s fiasco, of which we had barely spoken and never did again, we decided to go for lunch at The Cherche Midi.
The Parisian sky threatened rain, like usual, and I wore my cool transparent raincoat over dark clothes. My husband loved seeing me dressed up in the city, and I was somehow still entrenched in trying to make him happy and pretending I was happy too.
At the restaurant, where the people knew us, we sat outside so we could smoke and ordered a bottle of wine in continuation of the previous night’s « party ». The people across from us were speaking English — no American? Artists from NYC? Fashion? Photography? Gay? Rich? Connected? Someone? They loved my raincoat.
« Who’s the designer? »
« A small, cool new French brand » I bragged.
« Oh my God! It looks like a…. vintage Cardin or something. »
« I know. It is so cool, right! »
I loved the attention and I loved my coat that my husband had purchased for me. He loved that it was transparent. And he mostly loved watching me wear it naked with heals and friends and drugs that would help him try to get a hard on.
After our meal, when I had to go to the restroom, Ted came too. It was so tiny but we could get in together and be cool and trashy and do a line on the toilet seat, in this funky neighborhood restaurant at daytime. It felt good and rock n’roll. And our new complicity somehow calmed me down from the night before.
When we went back to our table, the neighbors were preparing to leave. They addressed us again about my coat. So we asked them to sit for a last drink and a cigarette.
We talked about fashion and photography and art and Paris and NYC… and stuff. And then my husband said something weird he’d never said before. I didn’t know if it was a compliment or a reproach. He said he thought I could have done anything… but hadn’t.
The others were curious to know what I would have done. What would I have done? I didn’t know. Hadn’t thought about myself or what I wanted for so many, many years, I was realizing through the haze.
I tried to think of a book or an article I’d read, or even a documentary I’d watched, but couldn’t. Ted’s lifestyle, Ted’s demands, Ted’s desires… had so filled my brain, so completely infested my life, that I had nothing at all to say to our new friends.
I had no idea what I would have done in life, because I had no idea what I did do. I was so unconsciousness that I could barely even recognize myself.
That lunch, that apartment, that big scary man in the street, my husband sitting at that table taking his umpteenth line of coke and wanking off… scrambled with the vision of me the night before compromising my own self worth for Ted’s pleasure in a quest to avoid his angry reprisals… brought me to understand though, what a scam he’d had me agreeing to for all those years.
