The Golden Condom (28 page)

Before the marriage took place, Ted had a dream of extraordinary power and beauty:

I was going into a neutral country. The border guards wouldn't let me in, but marched me instead into the customs house, marching me back through a series of rooms until I got to one without a window. It was completely black in there except for a light shining on a table. A guy motioned me to the table, where I saw a violin. He gestured to me to pick it up—and on the back was the image of a small boy crying.

“Before I had language, the violin was the way of giving voice to a part of myself, the vehicle I had created,” Ted observed about his dream.

The “neutral country” he was about to enter was marriage—a clean slate, ready for his imprint, like a canvas prepared for a painting. The “border” guards—his defenses of his boundaries that had kept him from passionate intimacy—did not give him immediate permission to enter this strange new land without first stopping at the “customs house”—the repository of his past. In the dark, windowless room in its deepest recesses, the place inside him where the light of the outside world could not penetrate and only inner light illuminated, the “guy”—his beloved analyst—pointed out the precious, lifesaving violin embodying the disconsolate child he had been. He had to take it with him to the place he was going, where he could speak as well as play and laugh as well as cry, no longer alone. Naturally, there was lots of violin music at their wedding, and his analyst was present to share their joy.

Secure attachment has brought Ted both joy and ease. “I can relax at a much deeper level,” he said. “I had stress constantly eating away at me in different ways; now I've let go of it.”

Ted and his wife, who have two children, perform together in the multigenerational string orchestra he founded in 1986. The ensemble plays instruments Ted has handcrafted.

“Being able to create a family together is a spectacular, amazing gift,” he told me exuberantly. “It represents commitment in an even bigger way than marriage alone.” Watching his children grow up from the beginning in the stable home he made for them has repaired many wounds. “Not only did I get to see what the early years were like, but that connection with a child is amazing; it feels eternal.” As Tom Robbins said, “It's never too late to have a happy childhood.”

“I've always been caring,” Ted said, “but the depths of my caring now, having the trust of a partner and having children, make me freer to give of myself. This was the gift of marriage.”

*   *   *

The world is full of men and women; why is it so hard to find one to love later in life? There are fewer effortless opportunities, to be sure, no constant supply of new prospects as in college or your twenties when most people cycle through jobs and friends; you have to actively seek them at a time when your character and habits have become entrenched and accommodation to another person is hard work. It is easy to lose heart and become convinced that, because of your looks or your personality or a lack of opportunity, there is no one in the world who will want you. Yet these four people, with their assorted pathologies, prejudices, and imperfections, defied the odds and married. How did they do it? Anna was lucky and ready; Lisa and Wendy resolved enough of their problems and made finding husbands literally their business; and Ted knew what he was up against in himself and went to extraordinary lengths to change it.

One element that their stories have in common is that soul mates come in more different sizes and shapes than you imagine. They often bear little resemblance to the numbingly upbeat self-promotions, complete with lists of beguiling but entirely external and often irrelevant qualifications that fill dating Web sites and personal ads. They can be divorced—sometimes multiple times—considerably older or younger, inconveniently located. They can have a different religion (or none at all) or vote for the other political party. Each of these people learned to overlook what looked like compelling disqualifications that became unimportant when they fell in love. They each knew enough to realize that what matters most is tenderness and steadfastness.

Despite what Maestro Horszowski said, the “right girl” does not just come along. You have to be able to recognize her in whatever guise she presents herself. You have to tolerate the embarrassment of being on the market at this late date, acknowledge that you want someone, let the world know it, and kiss a lot of frogs. Clearing out the detritus of the past, with or without the help of a therapist, makes all the difference. You can't find love if you don't look for it—or at the very least know how to recognize it when you see it.

Happiness is earned.

 

10

LOVE IS STRONGER THAN THE GRAVE

The self-contained, austerely elegant woman who walked into my office certainly didn't look like a prostitute. Her manner was so self-effacing that she hardly seemed to be present. Her voice was so quiet that she was almost inaudible, like someone unused to conversation, and yet there was a held-in intensity about her. She had come, she said, because she was so shy that she could hardly utter a word.

It wasn't until our second session that she told me about her past. She had grown up in a family with parents who were professionally successful but silent and strange, incapable of giving attention or the most rudimentary sense of direction to any of their six children, of whom she was the eldest. Their world was virtually mute; family members barely spoke to one another. Their self-containment was so extreme that when a brain tumor caused her mother to lose the ability to speak, the level of conversation in the household barely changed at all.

My patient felt so deprived of emotional sustenance that she fled across the country at twenty with a much older man, the first person to take an interest in her. Like many self-absorbed people with artistic aspirations ungrounded in actual talent, he felt that working for a living was beneath his dignity; pimping struck him as an ideal occupation, and he readily recognized that his attractive, compliant new girlfriend would provide a convenient source of income. “I could walk into any hotel at any hour, and nobody would stop me,” she explained. She longed for even a perverse facsimile of relatedness so intensely that she forced herself to comply. “For the first time in my life,” she said, “someone was telling me what to do, even if it was to jump off a cliff.” All her johns quickly became regulars because she seemed so hungry for love and so eager to mold herself to their desires.

After two years of self-abasement, she could take no more and packed a suitcase and fled, leaving her master no forwarding address. Within ten years, she was working successfully as an assistant to an interior designer and was living with a man who genuinely cared for her but knew nothing of her former profession; I was the only one who did.

I told her that if she wanted a future with this man—which she longed for—she had to reveal her past to him. With surprisingly little hesitation, she did so (it must have been a burden to harbor such a secret), and his response proved him worthy: he hated what her life had been, but he knew she was a different person now and that she was his.

They lived together for five more years when she finally admitted to herself that being his companion wasn't enough to satisfy her; she wanted to be his wife. The sanctity and legitimacy of marriage were essential for her in order to neutralize the furtive unreality she had once vanished into. She had never before recognized, let alone verbalized, that she wanted to be uniquely special to anybody—you have to have a sense of self to do that—but she wanted it now, even though she was deathly afraid to reveal her desire. I told her she had to inform him, directly and unequivocally; she had to feel she deserved and then to hear herself ask for him to make a lifelong commitment to her. Just as her first act of selfhood was to flee one man, her second would be to embrace another. And to do that, she had to speak.

Ironically, it was far more torturous for her to tell him that she wanted to marry him than it had been to reveal her shame. She was giving him power over her fate and opening herself to the possibility of being rejected. He had been unhappily married before and was reluctant to go through the formalities again, but after a two-year struggle, she managed through force of will to make herself clear. Finally, he bought her a ring—she proudly showed me the sleek and unusual one that she had selected—and they set a date.

Her success had an unexpected consequence. To my astonishment, she came to her next session in a state of terror, weeping, almost hiding, and more silent than I had seen her in all the years I had known her. She was getting the thing that mattered most to her: being seen, heard, and chosen. She was loved and honored for the first time in her life—why was she quaking? She looked at me with frightened eyes and said in a passionate whisper, as if saying it any louder would make it magically come true, “What if he dies?”

I told her that loss is built into love. When someone becomes precious and you let yourself need him and tell him you want him, there is no way to avoid this eventuality. You are putting yourself in his hands, and he becomes irreplaceable. When you give yourself that way, the real way—neither embodying another's fantasy nor disconnected from your authentic self—an essential part of yourself is forever bound up with the other's fragile life. You merge your destinies. Only the whole person she had now become could join her beloved so completely. When you have someone, you have someone to lose.

Since risk hangs over shared lives, ardor and anxiety are inextricable. You never know how the loss will come—whether he will lose you or you him, but it is a certainty that there will be a shattering involuntary separation. Death is the abandonment caused not by betrayal but by fidelity. Even so, a relationship this deep lives on as part of you. It becomes inextricable from your identity; it cannot be wrested from you utterly. Could she dare to take the chance? She steadied herself and proclaimed, “I will.”

*   *   *

Half a century earlier, another young woman was also paralyzed by shyness and unable to speak. Since she lived in Vienna in Freud's heyday, she decided to seek therapy after more than one young man bewitched by her soulful beauty but put off by her silence had declared, “For such a pretty girl, why are you so arrogant?”

She told me this anecdote as a seventy-five-year-old matron the first time she invited me to a dinner of wiener schnitzel and apple strudel in her rambling apartment on Central Park West when I was a twenty-six-year-old graduate student. We had met working in the research department of a psychoanalytic institute, where she, a social worker in her youth, edited a newsletter.

All I really knew about her then was that she was the widow of a psychiatrist and founder of the institute (its library was named for him), who had been the protégé of Wilhelm Stekel, one of Freud's earliest and most radical adherents,
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and that he had died years earlier. But the real story went far deeper.

I had never been anywhere like Lilly's apartment. The place was a time warp, furnished entirely with perfectly preserved artifacts from the late 1930s. The old concert grand was in the living room, where the couple and their musical friends had played quintets on Sundays, with Lilly on piano and her husband, Emil, on viola, which his mentor had decreed that he had to learn so they would always have the requisite string parts. She had lost him suddenly from a heart attack when she was sixty-three and he was seventy, but his consulting room, a book-filled oval space behind the living room—complete with an archetypical oriental carpet–draped analytic couch and walls covered with old photographs of the Freudian elite—seemed untouched and still ready to hear secrets. She showed me a calling card of Freud's and the handwritten file where Emil had transcribed and organized by theme all the dreams of his patients, which became the basis for his book on the subject. There was an entire shelf of copies of this book—one of many he wrote—in numerous languages, and she gave it to me. That night, she also opened her wardrobe and displayed the hand-embroidered linens from her trousseau, carefully folded and perfumed, which her mother had begun stitching at her birth.

I asked her the identity of the ravishing woman whose full-length portrait hung in her dining room, and she replied with downcast eyes, “It is myself.” Her husband, she said, had accepted it in lieu of payment from the artist, who had been his patient—one of his countless acts of generosity. Her admiration of him was boundless; it was because of his clearheaded judgment that her entire family had escaped to America before the Anschluss.

I was curious to know how they had met. Only then she told me that at the end of her last session, her analysis successfully concluded by mutual consent, she sat up on the couch to bid a grateful farewell to the compelling young psychiatrist who had helped her overcome her anxiety and find her voice. But instead of showing her to the door, he turned to face her and asked a question engraved on her memory: “And when may I see you?” They married within the year. “He was my analyst. Now it can be told,” she said shyly, almost blushing to reveal at last what had been a transgressive secret, a taboo-breaking risk, for decades; sexual relationships—even marital ones—between therapists and their erstwhile patients were then considered verboten because of the Oedipal implications and boundary violations involved.

Soon after her revelation, we went to a concert of chamber music together. It was a program of string quartets by Schubert, her favorite composer, and she idolized the dashing young first violinist. At the end, moved to tears, she said with quiet intensity, “That was too beautiful to bear. It was like analysis”—an analogy that would be absurd uttered by anyone else, but was the simple truth from her. Analysis, music, and falling in love were ecstatically intermingled for her in an inimitable way. No ordinary suitor could compare, then or now.