Wrecked (23 page)

I kept making visits to prostitutes until it was all good. At first I understood only rationally that they didn’t want and weren’t going to take away my husband. Little by little I came to realize that in my gut, too. And now I am free. At least in that area. Jealousy has never been entirely licked. In the truest sense of the word. They lick me, too, though not as well as my husband does. But still. Through repeated exposure, I’m not frightened of them anymore. I’ve worked through that. And nowadays I even send him to the brothel alone. I’m certain that
you can apply the same principle to swinger clubs, having sex with other people, partner swapping, anything: if you just try it a few times together with your partner, later on you’ll be relaxed enough to send your partner off to fuck someone else on his or her own. I realized it’s not good that he always wants me there to offer him absolution. Of course, he is treated better when his wife is with him. Then it’s not the typical sad relationship between the john and the hooker. They’re not such mercenaries, the way they are when men show up on their own. But at some stage I had an epiphany and thought,
I’m fine with letting him go there alone
. And I no longer felt any pressure to screw up my courage to go every time.

To remove the pressure on me, I had to conquer my jealousy and send him there alone. Afterward I felt a strong sense of desire for him for the first time in a while. Really strong, and right between my legs. I was throbbing down there when he came home from the brothel in broad daylight. I was all lovey-dovey and horny. I tried to analyze it later with my therapist so I could get that immaculate sensation between my legs more often. And it goes a little something like this: because I was able to let go, because I didn’t need to worry anymore about what happened, because I gave him freedom to sleep with someone else, I felt more free myself. I highly recommend it. Afterward we had the hottest sex of all time. Open, free, wild. I had to stake out my territory again. Poor guy—he had to deliver again immediately.

Something happened in my head that I hadn’t anticipated. I started a virtual scorecard for sexual favors. As in, I did this and this for you, so now you’ll do this and this for me. I hadn’t realized at first that I wanted these things. And
suddenly, after eight years, I had to admit Frau Drescher was right about the fact that I wanted something different. He always set things up for his own desires. And I never put any stock in any of my own. And suddenly,
boom
, there they were. My own cravings and desires. Things that I had suppressed for so long without even realizing what they were or that I was suppressing them.

I would like to sleep with other men. Lately I think,
Why should he constantly get to feel other bodies, have sex with other women, but I don’t get to be with other men?
The problem is that he lives out his fantasies with prostitutes, in part because the situation can be controlled. Generally speaking, nobody is going to fall in love with anybody else in that situation. When I say I want to sleep with other men, he suggests male prostitutes. We’ve researched it online. But that’s just not an option for me. They all look too gay. They wear it on their sleeves. Whether the prostitutes are male or female, the market is for male customers. Meaning the male prostitutes are probably gay. It’s hard to imagine a heterosexual man having sex with another man for money. It’s improbable. Unless he needed money badly. Really badly.

So I refuse to do the same thing my husband does. And as brave as I am, I’ve revealed to him that I also want to have sex with other men now. And—I really dropped a bomb with this part—with real men, men we know. That’s my fantasy—to sleep with friends of ours. Preferably with men from our immediate circle of friends, married men with children. Now my husband just has to agree to it. It’s obvious that he won’t go with me for these affairs. He refuses to touch other men. I think it’s funny, since I touch other women to fulfill his fantasies. But, oh well.
It’s also nice to keep things uncomplicated, at least in this one small way.

Earlier, in other relationships, I often cheated on my partners. Because it’s such a rush to let someone else see you naked and touch your naked body and all that. Otherwise you just don’t feel anything anymore. I’d love to have another cock in my mouth, just for the hell of it. A little variation is good. Without it everything goes to pieces. And even though I felt guilty about it back then, the feeling I got was stronger than the guilt—the feeling that I was attractive, I was desired. And you immediately put more effort into things with your own partner afterward. Out of guilt. Your partner benefits from the feelings of guilt.

And now, since this epiphany, I am attempting the impossible. I want my husband to allow me to sleep with other men. I will convince him, I’m sure of it. I’ll pull it off. After all, at the moment, the score is eighteen to nothing. And my husband is smart enough to realize that, too.

Georg is still shuffling around in the laundry room. He always insists on doing things right, whether he’s working on my vagina or the dirty laundry. It’s nice to lie here and think. I think about our life. Our life together. All the things he has to deal with because of me. I always let everything out. I can’t hide anything from him. Whenever I’m feeling bad, which is often, he must think I always try to restrain myself so I don’t burden him with my problems. I’m getting better at it, but everything that’s already happened can’t be undone. It’s there between us. He has to think about all of it when he looks at me, when he sleeps with me. All of that goes with me, I’m afraid. Awful.

Suddenly I think of an embarrassing thing I did to him once.

Once I found a sock in the laundry basket that was full of sperm. I’m sure it was sperm—I can detect it from ten meters away. And without thinking about it I went straight to him and started complaining. I must surely have been possessed by my mother. She spoke out of my mouth and wanted to destroy the relationship between me and this fantastic, sock-fucking man. I had no idea how embarrassing it would be to him to have to talk about it. I learned only years later. Now I’m embarrassed I brought it up, too, but I just couldn’t help laying landmines at our feet back then. Without any regard for the damage they might do. The sperm-filled sock landmine sits beneath our relationship and I can’t figure out a way to go back and erase the tantrum that put it there.

That is in fact the biggest problem in our relationship. All the psychological problems I bring to it. I wanted him to have superhuman strength. I wanted him to be above all the dirty things other people did. I thought that if he was going to replace my parents, he would have to be perfect. If I keep tabs on him, he’ll stay with me, I thought. And then he goes and cheats on me with a sock. Jacks off into it instead of into me. Why wouldn’t he just ask me if I felt like having sex? I know why he didn’t ask. Because I’m always depressed. And when I’m not depressed, I’m aggressive. Nobody wants to seduce a woman like that. A stinky sock is more attractive than that. It was one of his socks, not mine. He didn’t even want to fuck one of my socks.

The worst thing is that I understand. I’ve made so many mistakes in our love life. In my desperate fight to hold on to him, I almost destroyed everything, time and time again. Then
in couples therapy he learned that I am the problem, not him—that I am the source of all the problems in our relationship. That I need to give him some peace. That he can’t make me happy. That he needs to step back from my problems as much as possible. Which is difficult to do when I’m standing in front of him with a sock full of his sperm that his wife and worst enemy has dug out from the depths of the dirty laundry pile. Is that borderline? When you kick mercilessly at the one thing you care most about, namely your relationship with your husband? When you can’t think of anything worse than him leaving you and yet you constantly do things, day after day, to make him want to leave? Make him
have
to leave, just to save his life from my twisted soul.

Why does he stay with me? Why does he let me treat him that way? How can he sleep with me after that kind of thing? We’re head over heels in love with each other, that much is clear. Most importantly he adores me, because he’s still with me despite the fact that I’ve shown my ugly side over the years. My therapist has now managed to get me to fight my wars internally rather than taking them out on those around me. To get me to that point, though, things first got much worse. But my husband has his peace now. He didn’t deserve all the tantrums, the hatred, the rage, the disappointment over things he couldn’t control. My parents are the only ones who are to blame. And the truck driver. And the newspapers.

Up until recently I opened up so many wounds with my behavior that he still looks at me distrustfully sometimes and expects a tantrum when we discuss certain things. He’s totally afraid of me. It will take years before this fear dissipates. My therapist knew that right away. She said that you can’t just undo
things. She basically issued a gag order for all my problematic topics at home.

I think it must be quite impressive when I throw a fit. I’ve poured boiling milk on him, lifted a one-hundred-kilo table and tried to throw it at him. I’ve thrown everything at him and inflicted bodily pain on him.

In the movies it’s often portrayed as evidence of a passionate relationship when a woman throws things around. But in reality it’s evidence that a woman is psychologically damaged.

One day, not long after the sock incident, my husband and I rented six porn films. It’s always embarrassing to me as a woman to go into the porn section of the video shop. Though I do feel very powerful. If I said “Boo!” the uptight men standing around in there trying to act normal would all run away. At the same time I hear my mother, who is sitting on my shoulder and bothering me.
Aha, look at this, the poor oppressed woman has to go with her oppressor to rent films of oppression or else he will leave her
. All of that goes through my head when I wander around looking for a movie with a good cover. Many of the fetish films are out of the question for us. We’re not into eighties stuff or porn with heavily pregnant women; no violence, no Lolitas. No amateur stuff where the razor burn is clearly visible on all the ass cheeks. What we like best are things stylistically similar to Andrew Blake films. On that day we rented six of his movies:
Water, Aria, Girlfriends, Playthings, Wild
, and
Wet
. He seems to have a thing for the letter
W
.

That night we managed to watch only one. We watch porn films to get ourselves into a kind of flushed state. We forget everything around us—it’s like taking some sort of sex drug. There’s something very relaxing about lying around watching
other people have sex—as long as you manage to turn off your jealousy, as I was able to that night. We have wilder sex than usual either during or after watching porn. That’s why we watch it.

I had to be away the next night for work, and my jealousy bug kicked back in. I thought, damn, he’s going to watch the other films alone and lie to me about it when I come home. And then he’ll watch one of them a second time with me even though he’s already watched it without me. And while we’re watching together, and having sex together, he’ll have to be careful what he says to avoid spilling the beans. This was during a period when, because of low self-confidence, I couldn’t stand the idea of him watching porn movies alone. That’s the way the stupid, narrowly defined rules that I established for us as a couple worked. I tried to establish rules to make things better than they’d been in previous relationships. I thought at the time that if he jerked himself off, with or without a movie, it was the beginning of the end. I was like a member of the Taliban, and he still sees me that way to this day. I put so much energy into it back then that he may not lose that image of me for a long time. Maybe he never will.

I had a devilish plan. I casually got him to promise to wait until I got back before watching the other five movies. That he wouldn’t watch them without me. That was the first step. Then, I waited until he left the apartment in the morning. I plucked six hairs from my head and put them on a white piece of paper. I have long dark hair that’s easy to see against white paper. Then I checked the order the movies were stacked in. I felt like a secret agent out of a movie. I opened one DVD cover after the next and stuck in a strand of hair. I lifted each disc off the plastic
star in the middle and ran the hair underneath the disc. Then I pulled the tip of the hair through the middle of the disc and created a loop, which I clamped by putting the disc back onto the star-shaped holder. If he took out a DVD, the hair would definitely fall out. I tried it out to make sure. Took out a DVD, put it back in, and looked for the hair. It was gone. I was proud of myself even though I knew what I was doing was wrong. I think I also realized it could just lead to chaos and despair if I confirmed my suspicions—my suspicions that behind my back he would break my iron-fisted rule. I probably got that from my mother, too—no idea why I thought it would be a betrayal for him to shoot some sperm when I wasn’t anywhere nearby. It’s nearly a Catholic stance, this rule of mine! Terrible. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Leaving porn films lying around in a man’s apartment seems to me now, in retrospect, like leaving a bone in a wolf’s den and telling the wolf not to chew it. Obviously it’s not going to work. Maybe I didn’t want it to work. I wanted to test whether I could trust him until the end of my life, whether he was a liar or coward, whether he had the strength and will to tell the truth later if the hairs were missing.

I stacked the DVDs back up on the floor and wrote down the order. Actually the order of the movies on the stack should have been enough of an indicator—if they were in a different order when I got back, I would know what that meant. There were three different checks: the order the DVDs were stacked in, the hairs, and the confrontation. I would carry out my mission with ice in my veins, like an avenging angel, with no mercy for the love of my life.