Month: September 2015

I never talked to the Surgeon about Jeff, but he knew something was going on because I was gradually withdrawing from him emotionally and I was out of touch for hours or days at a time.  He knew.

He put his foot down.

“Whatever you have going on, you need to end it.  Now,” he said.  We were in a hotel suite in Midtown and he was sitting on the sofa next to me, dressed in his suit.  He voice and tone and face were serious.  Serious as a heart attack.   He could be so intimidating.

For a few minutes I tried to deny it and feign ignorance, but it was no use.  He knew me too well, and even if he didn’t, when he turned the full force of his scrutiny upon me (or anyone)…he could tell.  The Surgeon had a surgeon’s eye.  He sees everything, when he bothers to look.

I started to cry.  And, readers, you know I never cry.

“It’s not fair!  It’s not fair to me!  You don’t want me to have anyone in my life but you!”

He paused, considering.  Then: “You’re right, Margo.  It’s not fair to you, and you put up with a lot.  But that’s the way it is.  I happened to your life, and that’s just the way it is.”

“Why don’t you want me to be happy?  Surgeon, this can’t go on!”  I was sobbing and so humiliated, to be crying in front of him.

If this man really loved me, this man who was old enough to be my father, who could never offer me a family or a normal future, he would say something along the lines of: This relationship has been very dear to me and I will cherish it forever, and I will always be your friend and be there for you, and I will miss you, but if you think you can find happiness with this man, you need to move on.

He said nothing of the sort, of course.  What he said was: “I need you and we need each other.  You are not going anywhere.  The sooner you accept that, the easier it will be for you.  I’m sorry that you’re crying, darling, but that’s life, and you brought this on yourself when you decided to get involved (with another relationship).”

Sobbing sobbing sobbing, just sobbing on the couch.  He passed me a kleenex.

“Look, Margo, you are never going to better-deal me.  Nobody else will give you what you need, or understand what you need like me.

Nobody else will ever love you like I do.”

At that, I felt a flash of rage cutting through the grief.

“I sure as hell hope not!” I screamed at him.

His face got tense and I wondered if he was going to punish me for that.  By this point in our relationship, insubordination was a capital offense as far as he was concerned.

He said, in a low soft voice, “I know you’re in pain right now, so I’ll let you get away with that one.”

“It’s not fair!” I whispered, hitching in breath.

“I know.  But that’s the way it is.  Whatever you have going on, you end it now, or else I’ll end it for you.”

I understood this to be the truth.  He would find Jeff, and confront him somehow, call him at home or even at his work.  He would confront him, and God knows what he’d say…tell him about my history of sex work, working in the dungeon?  Tell him where all those bruises really came from?  Tell him the truth about the bracelet? Tell him that I was a masochist who craved, and accepted, awful violence?

I knew that the Surgeon would do it.  He was absolutely unafraid of confrontation and he was not afraid to violate boundaries.

I went home and wrote Jeff an email.  I don’t remember what I wrote word-for-word, but it was something like: I am so sorry, I think you are a wonderful man, but I have an ex-boyfriend who has been contacting me again and my feelings for him and that relationship are still unresolved.  I am unable to give you the complete attention and devotion that you so richly deserve.  From the bottom of my heart, I am sorry for the pain this may cause you, and I am sorry that I wasted your time.  Jeff, I am grateful for how you treated me and our time together.

Yeah, it was not the real/whole truth.  But how could I tell him the whole truth…?

He wrote back: Margo, my affection for you is well known, and I do not want to lose you.  I want you in my life.  But you need to be straight with me.  

I did not respond.  That was our final communication.

The Surgeon took me to Boston the next day and kept me there for a little while so that he could keep an eye on me and refresh my programming.

That’s all.  I’m ashamed that when the Surgeon put pressure on me I folded like a cheap card table.  I was a coward.  I guess all I can say, in my defense, is that it is very difficult to defy or resist the man….and I would not be the only person in his orbit to say so.  In my entire life, I have never met anyone with such a will to power.

Eventually, I started to date other men again, from time to time.  The relationships were all strictly recreational–get dinner, hang out, maybe have sex.  Friendly but superficial.  I didn’t let any of them get close to me (and, if I may add, I never misled any of them.  I was very careful about that, because, after Jeff, I felt very guilty)….

….until the Mathematician, when I decided to make a break for it.  We all know how that turned out.   I lost that “relationship,” but at least I got my freedom.

And now, to wrap this up, I’ll tell you the dream I had about Jeff:

I dreamed that I was at this restaurant we liked to go to, close to Tompkins Square Park, in my neighborhood.  It was crowded in there, as it often was, and I was standing in the bar area.

I was looking around, and I saw Jeff seated at one of the tables in the dining area, across from a brunette woman who I immediately assumed was his new girlfriend.

I wanted to approach him and tell him how sorry I was, and that I hoped he was doing well, and was happy, but I felt self-conscious.  So, instead, I waited until they were done with their meal, and then they parted ways and I followed him to the train station (just as I’d followed him OUT of the train station the first time I met him).

(Interesting note: in my dream, the car looked like an NJ Transit train car, and not like a PATH train car.)

He took a seat and started to read from his magazine.  I approached him and told him that I was sorry.

He ignored me, like he couldn’t hear me.  As if I was a ghost.

Maybe I was.

Note:  I know I don’t come off very well in this story.  I had no right to get so close to Jeff when the Surgeon was in my life.   I feel awful about it and always have, though I know that does not absolve me of responsibility or ameliorate the confusion I caused this decent man, who treated me with nothing but respect and kindness.

*                             *                            *

Last night I had a dream about Jeff.

It was a complete surprise.  I haven’t had a dream about Jeff in a long, long time.  Several years.

I feel it’s time to talk about Jeff, and what happened to that relationship.  I wrote a little about him when I started this blog, but I never wrote about what happened…its conclusion.

I picked up Jeff on the PATH train.  The car was mostly empty, and I noticed him sitting there reading The New Yorker.  I liked the way that he looked.  I can’t tell you why, exactly…he wasn’t ugly by any means, but he was not a very conventionally handsome man.  He was my height, lean and wirey, my favorite body type (the Surgeon’s body type).  His face was angular and he had a slightly crooked nose and big eyes and glasses.  His clothes weren’t flashy, but he was very neat and put-together and fastidious-looking.  His hands were big for a man of his size, with long, spindly fingers, and downed with brown hair.

I thought he was cute.  I was attracted to him.  I hoped that he would look up, so that I could catch his eye, but he was absorbed in his reading.

Well, he stood up to leave at the 9th Street PATH station, and I decided “Fuck it!  Approach him!” and I followed him out of the car and up the hall and onto the street.

I plucked at his sleeve and said something along the lines of: Excuse me, my name is Margo, I don’t mean to bother you but I was watching you on the train and I like your magazine and I thought you were really cute and if you’re not busy or married I was wondering if you’d like to get some coffee or lunch.

We exchanged numbers and went out for lunch the next day.

And we hit it off, right away.  I liked the way he spoke, his mannerisms, his understated-yet-confident bearing.  He was courteous.  This is what I wrote about him on my blog, shortly after we’d met:

We shared a meal together and I liked him right away.  I talked quite a bit, which is unusual for me on the first date—I usually encourage the other person to do most of the talking, so that I can learn about them.  Jeff was very easy to talk to.  I felt comfortable with him. Warmth came naturally.  He was polite, unaffected, knowledgeable.  He made sense to me.  I felt like I understood his disposition, his temperament.  I enjoyed watching him—his gestures, the way he ate his food, the way he carried himself.  And I liked the way he treated me.  Present and engaging, without radiating expectation.  After we left the restaurant, I told him that I found him attractive and I would like to see him again (again, that look of pleased surprise!).  I was confident that he would like to meet me again; I knew intuitively that I had charmed him. 

And so began our relationship, which lasted about four or five months.

He had an ex-wife with whom he shared custody of their five-year-old daughter.  He had an apartment in a nice part of Jersey City and a modest-but-comfortable middle-class job.  He commuted into Manhattan every morning for work.  He had a college degree, and he wasn’t a super-cerebral nerd like me, but he read, and was plenty intelligent, and when I was discussing something obscure he could totally keep up with me.

There were so many things I appreciated about him!  He never said anything derogatory about his ex-wife.  He didn’t try to have sex with me right away–he had healthy, mature boundaries.  He didn’t introduce me to his kid (and, for that matter, he always prioritized his time with his daughter above spending time with me, which is EXACTLY AS IT SHOULD BE, and which I really respected.  It meant that his priorities were right, and his daughter was more important than his fun date/sex with a new woman, and that he was vetting me before he let me around her.  It meant that he placed his responsibilities to loved ones above his personal desires, which is wonderful and a very good sign!).

The sex was vanilla, but good.  I really liked his body, and we had chemistry.  He wasn’t a sadomasochist.  His sexuality was robust but…I dunno….”normal”?

He was very cautious with me as the relationship progressed.  Cautious, but not paranoid or neurotic.  Letting me into his life, step by step, slowly sharing more intimate things about his family, his childhood, his successes and frustrations at work, his dreams for the future.  His feelings.  He was methodical.  Boundaries, like I said.  Even though he really, really liked me, he didn’t ask for instant intimacy.

He was kind and funny, but there was a (very slight) edge to him that turned me on: I understood, intuitively, that I could not walk all over this man.  He did not let anyone take advantage of him.  He was modest, but confident and secure.

At the time, I wasn’t working in a dungeon, though I’d worked in one for 6 months previous.  I was in my PhD program and tutoring.  I did not tell Jeff about my history of sex work, but that was the only secret that I had…

….except for the Surgeon.

I was seeing the Surgeon the entire time.  I was never monogamous with the Surgeon, and he tolerated me seeing other men as long as I didn’t get too close to them, and my relationships with them did not impede, in any way, upon his relationship and intentions with me.

I told myself that I wasn’t being dishonest with Jeff because we were still getting-to-know-you dating, and we’d never asked each other if we were seeing other people, and we never discussed monogamy or had the DTR (the “Defining the Relationship” discussion, where you agree to be boyfriend and girlfriend, and make it formal).  We weren’t at that stage of the relationship yet.

But, of course…things started to come up.  I’d be at Jeff’s, and the Surgeon would text me and, when I didn’t respond, he’d blow up my phone, and I’d have to turn it off.

I was wearing a gold bracelet (a slave bracelet, I guess) that I could not take off, because it was soldered closed.  The Surgeon did that.

I’d go away for the weekend a few times and essentially be out of touch while I was gone, some texts, but not available to talk.

Jeff was not an idiot.  I felt that he was making mental notes about these things.  He was not suspicious of me, he never confronted me about any of it, but I knew he was storing all this away.

(Sometimes I would also show up with bruises on my ass or my back, from the Surgeon’s beatings, and I’d have to make up excuses about where they came from.  Those are the only lies I think Jeff accepted completely, in his heart…because who thinks the girl they are dating is a masochist willfully getting strapped?)

After four or five months, I was spending a lot of time with Jeff: weekends at his place in Jersey City when he didn’t have his daughter there, and at least one or two nights per week at my East Village apartment.   We emailed.  We Skyped.  He met my mother when she flew to the City for my birthday.

The relationship was ready to…evolve.   It was reaching the tipping point.  Where you start to say, “I love you,” and commit, at least somewhat, to the other person and the relationship.

And that’s when the Surgeon landed on it.  With both feet.

(will continue after my alcohol rehab support group meeting)