Chapter 4 - Conclusion
At the beginning, a break-up is almost like a relief. It feels good to be able to sever and excise those connections that have become diseased and gangrenous and have started choking you and kept you from breathing. A new honesty enters your dealings with your former lover, a new ease and openness, and there's almost a kind of delirium that seizes you and you run back and forth to her over bridges you don't realize are already crumbling beneath your feet. She's so much a part of you that you can't imagine life without her and so you don't, and at first you might find yourself eagerly discussing the break-up with her, as if it's something that's happening to someone else.
I'll be kind. No one wants to read about pain, and the pain I suffered losing Lexi was horrible, devastating, absolute. It turned out she was everything to me and I'd never known it: my reason for living, my reason for writing, for getting out of bed in the morning and for going to sleep at night. After that initial numb shock, I wanted to die, and wanted to die every day, every minute of every day. I'd lived for her eyes to see me and her ears to hear me and no one else would do, nothing else would substitute. I was used to the pain of losing women, but this was truly devastating. Lexi was the one I'd revealed myself to at great pain, and I thought that pain had purchased something. It hadn't. In the end your pain matters only to yourself.
And what made it all so much more incalculably worse than a normal break-up—what made it so insulting, so offensive and hurtful—was the fact that she had dropped me for someone new. She had someone new to love and be loved by; someone she loved better and more deeply than she'd loved me, someone who touched her in ways I'd never touched her, someone she gave herself to in ways she never gave herself to me. She was apparently his sub, his submissive. From the start, her stories about them involved him dominating her and her suddenly discovering this part of herself. All the months with me and she denied any connection to BDSM, but now, a matter of weeks with Cormac Grehan, and Lexi was deeply involved in it. It was incredibly painful. She told me all about it.
She meant well. I honestly think she meant well. She stood by me and never abandoned me even as she grew closer and closer to Cormac and more and more in love. She always wanted to remain my friend, and I, poor wretch, was desperate enough to want to keep what shreds of relationship with her that I could, my dignity be damned. But I think now there was some sadism on her part too, from the time she first told me she was his sub, that she "bent her knee" for him.
"What do you mean?" I'd asked.
"I mean that finally I've found a man I can bend my knee to. Who's worthy of my servitude."
I didn't have to ask her where this left me on the hierarchy of her status, but I did all the same. I did because already the problem of her being dommed by Cormac was becoming a separate problem, a problem apart from the pain of losing her, a problem of such excruciating pain to my ego and the very structure of my personality that I honestly feared for my sanity.
I tried to forget her and I couldn't. I tried to forget what they'd done to me, how they'd humiliated me, emasculated me. Her story was that I just wasn't the right type to bring out the submissive in her, and maybe that was true, but that's not what I heard. What I heard was a challenge to my manhood and masculinity, a threat to my very idea of who I was. I wasn't man enough, wasn't male enough. The very love I'd shown her had made me feminine and weak, cloying and indecisive. I couldn't live with myself, couldn't look at myself in the mirror. I loathed myself. My very work—my plays, my stories and poems—seemed effete, gutless, and unmanned.
I told April. Of course I told April, but there was little she could do, and how much sympathy can you expect from your lover when you break up with your wife? She was wonderful to give me what she did. Mostly she hated Lexi for what she'd done to me, for crushing my confidence in myself and utterly destroying my libido.
And yet somehow in this hell of feeling, April was able to touch me. April never abandoned me. She came and she sat with me in the empty apartment and she listened to me bitch. She walked with me down by the frozen docks under the leaden skies. She cooked for me and made me eat. She wouldn't hear me talk about being weak, about not being worthy, yet it was such a farce, to sit there and weep and have someone tell me how strong I was, how worthy of admiration.
I still talked to Lexi. I had no reason not to. There'd been no argument, no harsh words or recriminations. Besides, I couldn't help it. I honestly didn't think I could live without her, so we talked on computer and on the phone. She was concerned about me. I honestly believe she was.
I didn't beg. I didn't lower myself. I wanted to know what happened but she couldn't say for sure. She'd fallen in love with another man, that was all. It happened, and who could explain love? She still loved me but someone else had come along who touched her differently and more deeply. It seemed to make sense to her, or it seemed to make enough sense. He gave her something she needed. She was shocked too and terribly sorry, but there it was.
The best explanation I ever got from her was when she told me that she always felt like she was fooling everyone else. She felt like Cormac was the one person she couldn't fool, who saw her as she was, and somehow that was an immense relief to her. I'd just have to accept it.
And maybe it was the talk of seeing herself as she really was that got to me. Or maybe it was that April was off for a long weekend entertaining Brandon, or the stress of what had happened just got to me, but at a certain point I became convinced that I wasn't seeing myself as I really was either, that my failure to conquer Lexi and to win her allegiance meant that maybe I wasn't really the dominant that I'd thought. Seeing how I needed her now, seeing how completely I'd fallen apart, I became convinced that I must, in fact, actually be a submissive, a submissive who was so ashamed of his submissiveness and who worked so hard to suppress it that he hid it by playing a dominant.
I became convinced, in other words, that I was a massive fraud, and that I'd been unable to conquer Lexi because I wasn't capable of it. I was a submissive pretending to be a dominant.
What did I know about anything anymore? I still had the soliloquy to write for the play but that was out of the question now. I sat at my desk and hurt, physically hurt, watching the flat, bright sun on the shattered snow in the park, swollen with gin some mornings, the television on all the time, commercials droning for car insurance and long distance service, news, talk. I read about voudun—Voodoo—and the idea that we're all possessed by spirits, gangs of spirits, warring personalities inside us that battle for control, and I believed it. I saw my life as a parade of observers standing behind my eyes, a mob shoving and scuffling with each other for control, confused and selfish. I liked that image of myself, but it frightened me that I didn't know who was really in control. I began to list these observers:
Russell the Writer
Russell the Sexual Being
Russell the Sufferer
Russell, the Extension of Lexi
Russell, the Good Man, the one who tried hard.
Russell, confused, tormented, lost; abandoned and drowning, not worth saving, contemptible, incapable, weak and loathsome in my own eyes.
Even my own capacity for self-pity made me sick with revulsion. Even my grief was disgusting.
In such a state I became obsessed with this submissive idea. Stirred together in a seething mass with my heartbreak and the insanity of the Voudun mythology I was reading, the idea began to loom over me like some tidal wave of fate. Suddenly my salvation seemed to lead through the road of submission and it seemed to me that maybe what I'd wanted from Lexi was not her obedience to me, but her own engulfing presence, soaking me up, holding me inside herself. How else could I explain how low I'd sunk? What was I doing if not waiting for some mistress to come along and take hold of me?
I discussed it with April. She was angel enough to listen to me discuss my own hurt. I wasn't April's first D/s partner. She'd had a virtual master online, a much older man she called Master K, and she'd done such things with him as were possible on computer. He'd been a switch—dom most of the time but he taught her how to dom him too. She hadn't enjoyed that as much, but he'd taught her some tricks, she knew the idea. When I first told her I thought I might be a sub she just looked at me.
"You, Russell? Oh no. No. No way you could be a sub. Not even a switch. You just don't have it."
"How do you know? You don't know what I feel inside, April. How weak I am, how dependent, how uncertain. There's nothing I want more now than for someone to come along and take control of all this. Take control of my life and everything so I can have some peace."
"Yeah. I know what you want, and that's not what subbing is about. You think it's going to fix your broken heart but it's not. That's not how it works. Being a sub has to do with giving yourself away to someone, being willing to give your pleasure and sensation to them, of placing your soul in their hands and trusting them completely. It's not just 'take-care-of-me-I-can't-cope'. That has like nothing to do with it."
