I watch my husband. He’s very organized, much more so than I am. He learned that from his mother. Even though she hates women, she taught her son how to run a household—probably so he’d never have to be dependent on a woman. So he can do everything better than I can. My mother didn’t teach me how to be a housewife, so no man would ever want to be with me for my domestic abilities. It worked. He’s with me because he loves me, not because of anything I can do—except maybe blowing him. That probably plays a role. Definitely, in fact. But that’s the only thing.
It’s a constant theme of discussion between us: cleaning up. For the sake of love he tries to accommodate me and I try to accommodate him. Meaning I try to be less messy and he tries to put up with more messiness. We try to work at every aspect of our relationship in order to make the impossible possible: staying together forever. We both put in an insane amount of effort to get each other to come. He always makes sure I come multiple times almost every time we have sex. I can only ensure that he comes once because then it’s done—men have somewhat diminished abilities when it comes to orgasms, after all.
He looks a lot like my father. He looks like an old man, which is the beauty of him. I buy him things that make him
look even older because I think at this point it wouldn’t be bad if he were a bit older than he actually is. Frau Drescher says I should stop further indulging my father complex. When I look at my husband, I should see my husband and not my lost father. But I can’t, at least not yet. I’ve already thought about the idea of taking a much, much older lover in order to free my husband from my father complex. That way we could simply be man and wife instead of father and daughter. It sounds like a good plan to me, and I’m sure it would sound good to my husband and to Frau Drescher. Even if it would take my husband a long time to accept. But he would eventually. Sometime.
I have a lot of problems, but one thing that isn’t a problem: I am perfectly comfortable sitting around while someone else cleans up around me.
My husband wears good 1960s old-man clothes and has a big cock that is visible through his pants—just like my father’s was. It makes him very comfortable in his own skin, the way my father always was. Being rich and well endowed makes a man extremely laid-back. No neuroses about your image. You don’t have to pretend to be something you’re not. Don’t have to posture. Don’t have to shift attention by fighting, like Sarkozy, for instance. My husband is a genuinely strong character. Even when he’s taking care of all the household chores. I love him madly. I would do anything for him. Except be faithful, of course.
He’s in the kitchen now, emptying the dishwasher. This is one of the things he always handles. I almost never do it. It’s always been taken care of on the few occasions I go to do it. Now that I think about it, there’s no way I could have known when we got together that his cock would fit so perfectly inside me. But then again, who knows? I trust our animal instincts—maybe
I could smell it? How well he’d fit inside me and hit my G-spot every time with the crook in his cock. It couldn’t be just blind luck. I believe in coincidence and animal instincts—it had to be one or the other. Frau Drescher thinks the existence of the G-spot is a question of faith. There are many contradictory theories about it and there’s been no conclusive research to show where or even whether it exists. Fine. At least there’s one thing I am happy to believe in that is impossible to prove.
The biggest challenge for me when we got together was the stepchild. I had nothing but bad experiences with stepparents. For the sake of my mother, and at the flip of a switch, I either had to love them or, when she fell for someone else, act as if they were dead. My challenge with my stepson, Max, who is the same age as Liza, was to do things better than my stepfathers and my awful stepmother had done. It quickly became apparent that it wouldn’t be so easy. Right from the start I was mean to the child and jealous of the unconditional love his father had for him. I kept thinking: he doesn’t love
me
that way. Not that way at all. Suddenly I understood how my hated stepmother had felt. I was like a man who beats his wife. I don’t want to do it, and I apologize every time it happens, and promise to change my ways. But I never manage to change. Because my emotions, my complexes, my feeling of being small, my fear of loss, my hate, rage, and grief are much greater than my ability to change or stop.
All of this hit me when I saw my stepson. I vowed to try to stop. I knew that the great love of my life would leave me sooner or later if I couldn’t stop. But for years I still couldn’t
control myself. I was inhumanely hard on my stepson. Because I’d never experienced it any other way. I can clearly remember that thought going through my head:
Why should he have it any better than I did?
Why? I was always friendly and forgiving with my own daughter, the way you are with your own child, your own genes. But with Max I set completely different standards. He could never please me. I was cold and mean and snippy to him. It was so bad over the years that the little guy became scared of me. When his father had to go away for work and he had to stay with me, he looked at me with panic in his eyes and started to cry. He clung to his father and didn’t want him to go. I could tell something was wrong, really wrong, but I couldn’t suppress it for longer than a couple of days. Then the evil welled up in me again. I didn’t enjoy being like that, but I was good at it. Mental cruelty. If there’s anything I’m good at, that’s it.
We had a set of stacking cardboard building blocks, each block open on one side so it could be slotted into the next. The size difference between the blocks was minimal, so that if you didn’t insert them in order there would be some left over that wouldn’t fit. They were very difficult for a small child to stack together correctly. He couldn’t concentrate on the game out of fear. I would say to him, “You can’t do it anyway.” And he couldn’t. Ever. He fumbled around with the blocks and looked at me, totally panicked. I never had to do anything physical to him. A look was enough. I stood over him as he knelt with the blocks on the floor. I glared at him. For an eternity. It was horrible. He would cry, snot and tears running down his face. I just had to stop the game early enough so that his eyes weren’t red from crying when my husband got home. When Georg was back, Max and I acted as if nothing had happened. “I played
with him and tried to keep him busy. But he wasn’t so good at the game.” That was the explanation I had at the ready. But I never had to explain anything. My husband had an idea that something was wrong, but he could never have imagined how awful his beloved wife was. The only thing he knew was that his son didn’t like to be left alone with me. But Georg never asked anything. He probably did everything possible to avoid leaving me and my stepson alone in the house, though.
Still, I couldn’t stop. I saw the stepson as a foreign body. He was the product of Georg’s love for another woman. That alone drove me crazy. Not only that. Why did I have to have an abortion despite the fact that not long before he had wanted to have a child—with her? He wanted to have a child with her and did have one. Like a gorilla, I wanted to kill the child from the previous relationship. This child bothered me, made our life more complicated—just the fact that I couldn’t keep a lid on my hatred for the child had a detrimental effect on our love.
My husband cautiously suggested going to therapy together, instead of me just going on my own. He saw it as a chance for our love to survive my hatred for his son. We fought constantly over questions of how to bring the children up. I wanted him to be harder on his son. Naturally I thought he spoiled Max. And (attention!) I also thought the boy ate too much. In total seriousness, I tried to convince my husband that his son ate too much when he stayed with us. I was a menace to society. This child needed to be protected from me. We were in therapy together for years as a result. So my husband could understand why I constantly wanted his son’s head on a platter.
Why did he stay with me and put up with it all? I still can’t believe it, as I don’t seem to myself to be very worthy of love. In
fact, I’m truly not worthy of love in many clearly demonstrable ways. Until the therapist was able to cut some of those traits right out of me. Regardless of the specific problem, the process is always the same: talk, talk, talk, mercilessly, primarily with me. I confess to my therapist how bad I am. I beg her to get it out of me so it won’t destroy our love. Implore her to help me to protect this dear, pretty, innocent child—from me. It took years. But then suddenly—from one day to the next—I was cured. The evil-stepmother-demon had been cast out. I paid a lot of money to make that happen and ran my mouth for years, railing against myself and my own stepmother. And throughout all that time, my stepson kept trying to build bridges to me. I never wanted it, but he kept offering his hand, opening his arms. That just made it worse. Didn’t he have a memory? Couldn’t he notice that I hated him? Max, I’m sure, was thinking,
If my dear father loves this woman so much, there must be something to it
. He loves me and wants me to love him back.
My therapist always said Max could see the emotional distress behind my lashing out at him—that he could tell I didn’t want to do it. That I just didn’t want to admit to myself that I love him. I really thought there was room in my heart for only one child. For my child. And that this little man-creature was going to take away my husband or create a situation that would lead to his parents getting back together. As a child of divorce myself, I know how strong the desire is to reunite your parents.
Since I got over this problem with Max, I’m even more upset at my own father and stepmother. They never tried to seek help for the situation. To this day he lets my stepmother treat me badly because of her complexes, because she’s jealous of me. And she tries, as I tried to do with my husband, to get
my father on her side. Yes. Except that my father, unlike Georg, never issued an ultimatum: either you change and conquer your problem, or I’m leaving you. No, he has stayed with her and allowed her—for nearly thirty fucking years—to continue to drive a wedge between us.
I did that for only three or four years. Four too many. Especially for my little stepson. And for my husband. My therapist killed me for it, too, because in order to help her be effective as quickly as possible, I told her every bad thing I did without sparing a thing.
When you are in therapy for a long time, you start to recognize things about people that they don’t notice about themselves. You can’t say anything, though. You can’t just go around analyzing people. You haven’t studied it; you’re just being treated. Frau Drescher says my soon-to-be-ex-best friend has to realize on her own that she is repeating her mother’s history and decide on her own to get help. Her mother was beaten by her husband, and so my friend saw women in the victim role. Now, as an adult, she keeps seeking this role out in her own relationships with men. And then she frets over each new outbreak of violence as if it were just a big coincidence that she’s always with men like that. As if she weren’t actively seeking out the wrong men out of masochism. Every time. In her view, all men hit. No, baby, only in your world—a world you create. There are women who seek out men who help them, who make them stronger and build them up. But you don’t know what that’s like. You’d only be able to find out if you did a lot of work on yourself. You think you’re not as crazy as I am and don’t need therapy. But if you ask those around you how much they suffer from your complexes, your rage,
your aggression—they maintain goodwill toward you for now, but how long will it last?
Georg comes in smiling. He appears to be finished.
“So, what shall we do now? We’re on our own—let’s come up with something nice.”
“I don’t know. What do you feel like doing?”
I always do that. I don’t like to decide on that kind of thing. Where to go to eat or for an outing or whatever—those are his areas. It gets on his nerves that I never want to suggest anything, that he always has to make the decisions. Yeah, well, that’s the way it is. Though I am trying to work on it.
“No, you decide what you feel like doing, Elizabeth.”
I knew that would be the response. Now I have to rack my brain to come up with something. Oh, man, it’s just like in bed, when I have to pretend to come up with things I want done to me just so he’ll shut up.
I pull an idea out of thin air. “Let’s look at the Internet to see who is working at the brothel tomorrow for our adventure.” Very courageous of you, Elizabeth, to bring it up on your own. “We can stay in tonight, figure things out for tomorrow, then order Indian and a movie.”
“Perfect. That’s what we’ll do.”
He sits down next to me on our designer couples therapy couch and puts his head in my lap. I think he, too, misses the good mother he never had. It’s just that not having one didn’t inflict as much damage on him as it did on me. Or perhaps he just doesn’t make as much fuss about it. That’s also possible.
I run my fingers through his thin hair and then softly knead his earlobes. I always do this when the opportunity presents
itself. I can feel in my gut that I’m anxious about tomorrow’s sex outing.
Pfff
.
We used to go to prostitutes only when we were abroad. At home we always felt as though we were being watched as a result of my being in the papers all those years ago. My life was dictated by whether they—my biggest enemy—would be able to dig anything up on me. Every day in front of the bathroom mirror I’d imagine that they’d offered our cleaning woman money—a lot of money, or else she wouldn’t do it—for naked photos of us. Not to publish, just to laugh about in the newspaper’s editorial offices. I still have the same feeling that I can’t do what I want, can’t freely decide, because they’ll steal the moment from me with a camera. The most personal moment.
But we got braver and braver in picking brothels. Until we ended up in our own city. You can get used to anything. Our favorite spot is called Lulu, right downtown. The atmosphere is very intimate there. We know all the women. And female customers—whether for sex or just for a drink at the bar—are welcome. When we sit there it feels as if we are back in the 1920s. Like real bohemians. At Lulu we had a beautiful experience with a brunette. The women there always use moisturizer on their entire bodies. They have softer skin than women who don’t have to earn their living with their bodies, like me. I have rough spots here and there. On my knees, my elbows, even beneath my ass—the area that gets sat upon. But not the women at Lulu. They smell great, all over, and moisturize like crazy. Our beautiful experience was with a woman named Grace. She
was funny, which for us is important. And she spoke pretty good German. She was smart and, also important, nice to me. That was psychologically clever of her because I’ve often put the brakes on out of desperate, crazed jealousy. She reassured me, and after that she could do whatever she wanted with my husband—or rather whatever he wanted. Once she had me on her side both of them could do whatever they wanted. I was totally relaxed for once, staying above it all rather than suspiciously keeping track of every finger, what it went into and for how long.