Chapter 2, Section1 (excerpt)

My heart was somewhere else, even two years later no man compared to Mats, a criteria I resented and protected, as if I expected him to come back any minute so I could crown him king of my bed and heart, even though the bed part still needed work. My cozy, mental relationship with Mats was alive and well and there was no need to replace him.  His memory was so rich, I didn’t feel the need to Google him any longer, so I was surprised to receive an invite on instant messenger from the woman he was seeing, the same woman I found on my Google search of him the year before.  I now stayed away from internet information because it disproved my delusion about our non-existent relationship and broke my heart again and again, but this time, it seemed the information was in search of me, as if it knew I secretly craved it, even though I wasn’t actively in pursuit of it.

I immediately accepted Sonia’s “friend” request” and chatted with her that evening when we both showed up as “Available,” on our computer screens. She started the conversation without introduction or formalities, as if she knew that I knew about her connection to Mats.

“He left me,” she typed.

“He leaves everybody,” I responded

“How do you know me?”

“I’ve seen pictures of you on his Facebook page, or rather on your page. How do you know me?”

He spoke of you, sometimes kindly.

When he wasn’t kind, what did he say?

That he flew you from America to a five-star hotel in Amsterdam, and you did not have sex with him.

“We had sex, but it was awkward and uncomfortable. I’m sorry he left you.”

I’m heartbroken, and the doctors just told me I have breast cancer. Why would he leave me now?

Because he can’t stay with anyone. 

He promised to marry me. I went to his country and stayed in his house. He met my friends and family. I met his sons. He said I was his soulmate.

You got a lot further than I did. To be honest, I find his constant claim that he’s found his soulmate repulsive. Did he tell you about his other women?

I was fine with it. What am I going to do now?

You are going to figure out what deep, dark secret he uncovered in you and let it free you. That was his gift to you.  His gift to all his women is to discover that secret, the one they they can’t see for themselves.

What was your secret?

I don’t know yet.  I’m still too heartbroken to care. It’s coming, though. I feel it.

I just want to be with him.

You’re going through a lot now, but you met him so he could free you from something that’s holding you back from being whole.  He’s attracted to our darkest flaw, yet he sees our potential and “hunts” what impedes it. Once he finds it, he gets bored.

 I do not care about this secret.

You will, and then you will be able to fight your cancer and win.

I will not contact you again.

I know.

Thank you for talking with me tonight.

She immediately deleted me from her friend page on her Instant Messenger on which there was no one else. I never heard from her again. For a moment after our chat, I got angry with Mats for what he said about sex with me in Amsterdam. How dare he? He was as much to blame as I was, not that I didn’t expect him to make himself a victim of the situation as he did in all his relationship endings.

Hi judgment wasn’t fair. The night in Amsterdam long ago, he wasn’t even curious about my body (we had sex with my chamosille on). There was no kissing or foreplay, just dry, painful, brutal intercourse, as if he was a john and I was a prostitute.  Maybe, that was my dark secret: I was “innocent,” like he once said I was. Maybe, my innocence was my inexperience with sex and men (I never told him that he was the second man I slept with; my ex-husband was my first). But that information was obvious.

What he knew was darker, and its revelation was trickling down to me; Sonia heralded a new knowing, yet I was exhausted of clues.  “Enough already!” I screamed to the gods above. Stop playing! But they knew best about divine timing and coaxing the players into the mysterious game of knowledge—and playing was one of the ways it was done. Anyway, Mats’s women had to be initiated into the club of wizened crows that circled and fed each other morsels of liberating insights, even if they played unawares. As I kept running into woman after woman in Mat’s past and present, they each left behind a clue to more insight about myself.  At least, I knew and now accepted that my relationship with Mat’s had also included his relationship with others.

It’s no wonder he confessed to me of one day wanting to kill himself.  He was exhausted of the game ordered from above. Woman after woman! Thrill after thrill! Hunt after hunt! Heartbreak after heartbreak!  No eternal, enticing, mysterious human goddess to coax him into old age and eternity. His fate was sealed and his relationships solely for the purpose of providing the insight that liberated his women.  His merry-go-round of damning, dooming love endless.  He must have messed with the wrong goddess in the afterlife, after spending time there after one of his former lives. 

I set to work again. Researched the hell out of Mats on the internet, my only source of information on him. What was I supposed to know now? What was I looking for? Sonia provided a crumb on the path to more insight, so I Googled him with relish, hoping to find the information to turn my heartbreak into a distant memory.  

But the information I found was familiar and old: pictures of his farmlands in Denmark, pictures of his conservation efforts, and pictures taken at work in his pilot uniform. I went back to the internet day after day. Played with his name, included his middle and last. Added the name of the company he worked for and then I added his hobbies.  When I Googled him using the abbreviations for his country, I found the boon I was I was waiting for posted to the internet six months after we stopped communicating. He had held a talk at a conference for aviation industry professionals, and in a transcript of his lecture he compared aircraft engines to a couple of women he had dated (a comparison which in American would be considered unprofessional, chauvinistic, and downright inappropriate but in Scandinavia was deemed an honest and straight-forward account of a man’s life and its ever entwined private, public, and professional truths). And here was what I had been looking for::

“… was like dating an older but very beautiful and stylish woman with lots of character and heart, who always treats you well and makes you happy, if you do the same to her, but she can really bite off if you mistreat her and… was like dating a very intelligent but emotionally restrained, academic style woman who always knows best. If you try to tell her something, she will always correct you and respond with an even more intelligent or eloquent answer”.
Quite a different experience!

I was the second woman he described (I felt sorry for the first one being “older and biting off,” which probably meant she was hag-like and shrill), even thought I had always wanted to be the beautiful, stylish one who made him happy. But she came after me. Regardless, I felt the thick lies of his words (the forte in our relationship was out mutual ability to decode each other in the nuances, style, tone, and inflection of our written communication).  Mats hid behind language—he was a master at it--coding his emotional life with innuendoes, pretty words, and clean lines because it was more important that others believe his reductions instead of the truth about his simmering little boy heartbreaks and fears, and middle-age regrets and angsts.  

I was the “intelligent, emotionally restrained, academic, and eloquent one.  On its face, the description was nice enough, but where were the hours of mystical, magical chatting that broke the barriers between us and elevated our conversations to the divine?  Where was his confession that on a return trip to Amsterdam, he stared from the street at our hotel room until so overcome by memory he feared falling into a canal while walking dazed around the city. His ultimate judgment was that I had been a Nazi-like intellectual who questioned, corrected, and flung back at him his ideas with razor-sharp precision and grounded intelligence.

Fuck you! I said out loud.  Who gets to tell you that your darkness simmers a millimeter beneath your façade of a man? Who gets to tell you that your chomping at the bit, fighting off Bluebeard/ Dark Vader tendencies that could easily make you a serial killer with your obsessive, scientific inch reconnaissance of women’s hips, thighs, breast, and space between their eyes. Fuck you!  I screamed, cried, and fell asleep overcome by emotion. The next day, I called sick to work, dropped my kids at school, and came home to reread his words, bawl, and sleep some more. For three days, I followed the same routine of rereading, crying, and sleeping, allowing a fresh, raw heartbreak to tear me up from the inside out.

When a friend called to invite me to the bathhouse that Sunday I accepted, printed his words, and carried them with me to the spa like a big open bleeding wound that needed more tending...

“Look what that mother fucker said about me,” I said Martina who was changing into her bathing suit in the small dark locker room. I had highlighted his words in a yellow marker.  

“I’m the second woman he’s describing,” I continued holding out the evidence, expecting her to drop everything she was doing, and read my paper, even though she was half naked and focused on adjusting her black maillot. She had a beautiful, big body and slow languid movement like a beast enjoying a frolic in the fields. Her deliberate gestures made her seem calm and easy to talk to, which she was.

“Give me a minute,” Martina said, continuing to face her locker while she changed. She turned around to face me after she grabbed her water, towel, and the homemade beauty products. In small bottles and    she had prepared for our day at the spa.

I sat on the wood bench between the narrows lockers and waited, dejected, heartbroken, and once again unable to get past what I had learned four days ago.

 “Read the highlighted part,” I said when she took the paper I held out. “Read that,” I repeated still in shock.”

“It’s seems nice,” she said.

“It’s not nice. It’ mean, resentful, reductive. He means something else. I just don’t know what it is yet.”

“Okay, just take a deep breath and change. We’ll talk about it inside.”

I changed into my suit and followed Martina through the opaque glass doors into a playground of water in all its forms. Steaming, gushing, dripping, whirling, pounding, raining, misting, spraying. There was a cold dip pool with freezing water to energize the body, a whirlpool with water gushing from the ceiling to massage it, a shower that poured hot water to bathe it, and a sitting area that dripped rain to relax it. There was also a room with a firehose to pound the body and another room with a misty cool spray to evoke a day strolling in the Amazon.

The bath house was in an older hotel in Miami Beach and few knew about it. Tourists, models, and faithful customers, like Martina and me, made a point to visit it weekly or monthly (Martina and I came on one Sunday a month, and I never told her about my weekly Saturday visits to the spa for fear of affecting the dynamics of our monthly visits).  Sometimes new visitors expecting a glamorous experience complained online that the place was outdated and dirty. They failed to see its old-world European charms and to surrender to its mode of relaxation. There were no pretentions to the place with small locker room and its mixed used of concrete, marble, wood, tile in the hot rooms and water areas. It had depiction of goddesses in concrete relief hanging on the walls and statutes of Russian bears posing all over the place.

Martina and I started in the infrared red sauna with the caged red lights, a room intended to detoxify from the inside out.  Considered a “heat therapy room,” it was based on body heat rather than air heating. We sat on the wooden benches while others came in and out complaining of the temperatures.

“So, why don’t you know what Mats meant?” Martina asked.

“I have to decode it,” I said, pausing. “The other day, I chatted online with his last ex, and she said he told her that we had bad sex in Amsterdam.”

“Did you have bad sex?” Martina asked surprised

“Yes! I was humiliated.  I didn’t cum. He didn’t cum. But, I’ve never cum with man before.

“What? Never?”

“I thought it would happen with him. I thought he could do it for me because I loved him.”

“A man can’t give you that. You got to figure it out yourself. Then you tell him what to do to make you cum.”

We walked out of the room and stepped into the polar one with the cool temperatures emitted by the air conditioning ducts before returning to the infrared red sauna (we usually did each room three times before moving on to the next one, but we always did the infrared red and polar rooms as a pair)..

 We were quiet in the Finnish sauna, and we bent our backs and put our heads between our legs to longer withstand the heat from the wood burned in a large stove of which its smoke had been ventilated. The room was dark with pretty cedar walls and benches.  I was processing what Martina said about sex. I’d never thought about it that way, believing that one day a man would find the magic formula to make me orgasm with him even though it didn’t happen with the very passionate and satisfying sex I had with Badal.

When we exited the sauna, we stepped into the cold plunge pool with 50-degree Fahrenheit to stimulate our circulation before going back for more heat.  Four years of visiting the spa had improved our ability to take heat for much longer. We both raved about feeling healthier and happier, even at our jobs (we met at the career college where Martina taught massage, and I taught American Literature) with it all its administrative and beaurocratic nonsense.

In the Russian Radiant room, we held pails filled with cold water from the running tap located in the same room and poured it over our heads when the steam in the cavernous sauna with the grey stone walls became too much to handle.

By the time we sat in the small cafeteria, which also offered perogies, to have our herbal tea of lavender, chamomile, and hibiscus, we were flushed with a pretty glow and content enough to gaze quietly out the window at the hotel pool with its happy guests. I no longer thought about Mats, even though I knew my anger would return later on.

After tea, we put on Martina’s homemade exfoliants and masks made of Jamaican coconut, Turkish rose, Lebanese Tumeric, raw Florida honey, and Egyptian clay. We were like two lusty heathens slathering, rubbing, slapping, the products all over our legs, arms, face. We rubbed the stuff on each other’s backs and hosed it off one another when it dried.

In the Turkish Hammam, a room with blue titled benches, blue light, and a statute of a Russian bear, a room that hissed steam like a locomotive, we resumed our conversation.

“Did you pick a goddess for today?”  Martina asked. She usually themed our spa days with topics revolving around particular subjects like love, family, friends… A month ago, she mentioned dedicating this get together to a goddess who would provide more insight into our personal journeys. “Pick carefully,” she had warned, a goddess represents myths that reflect your own life lessons.  I never understood goddess worship and did not fully appreciate what Martina had said about choosing a deity that could enhance a lesson I needed to learn or master. Two days before we got together I heard a radio interview with an all-female folk group named after the Goddess Innana, and I went with that selection never giving the subject much thought..

“Innana,” I blurted.

“Inanna’s a good one.  Do you know much about her?” Martina asked.

“I like that she’s ancient Sumerian and a goddesses of transformation,” I said because that’s what I heard in the radio interview, even though I didn’t tell Martina of the source of my selection.

“Your goddess’s story abandoned everything she knew of heaven and earth to go to hell for her spiritual initiation,” Martina continued.

“Who did you pick?” I asked Martina, changing the subject and not caring to hear anything more about a goddess I had selected haphazardly.

“Aphrodite. I’m ready for some beauty in my life. Don’t forget to light a candle to your goddess and let her do her magic.”

Then Martina grabbed my hand and stood in the center of the empty room and dedicated our day of pleasure to our goddesses, Aphrodite and Inanna. “May they bring us the insight we need to live our most complete lives,” she said before bowing her head, and I followed.

At work the next day, Martina gave me a wink when she saw me walking down the hallway to my class as if confirming our secret day of the most amazing pleasure at the spa, was enough to last the entire month of responsibilities and stress. I was usually in cloud nine after a day at the bathhouse, but today I was once again filled with agitation over what Mats had said.

When I ran into Nicky in the teacher’s lounge, I showed her the words I carried around and explained how unjust it all seemed two years after my breakup with Mats. I had spoken to her often about my relationship, and she had always given practical, common sense advise rooted in the Buddhist principles she espoused. She even shared those principles with the students she taught in her surgical technology classes.

She put her coffee on the counter, took the paper from me, and read what I had marked. Then she took several seconds before responding.

“It’s all about you,” she said with her pretty fawn-like brown eyes as clear and calm as usual.

“What do you mean?” I asked agitated. “He’s at fault here. He accused me of being a cold, hard bitch with all that intellectual nonsense.  It was a lot more than that, but that is all he got.”

“It’s what you perceived, felt, learned…”

I cut her off and dismissed what she said and listened quietly as I went on in my emotional distress. She was 22 and more of another world than this one with her crew cut and slow graceful plodding gestures and walk.  She was also in her own dilemma about love and was undecided about whether or not to pursue her dreams of becoming a Buddhist monk or marrying a man she just met and fallen in love with.

“Here read this, she said handing me the “Tibetan Book of the Dead,” which she grabbed from the pocket of her white medical teaching coat. “I just finished it and think you will enjoy it.” We had shared books before and I appreciated the spiritual and philosophical themed material she recommended

“It’s about the states of mind in the afterlife also reflecting the states of mind in real-time and life,” she continued, “and the key to liberation is knowing and constantly seeking an understanding about those states and your reactions to them.”. I have to run to class now. Tell me what you think when you finish the book,” she said before emptying her cup of coffee in the sink and leaving the lounge.

I opened up the book to give it a cursory and dismissive look and read a commentary by a Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche who introduced the material and explained the realm of Hell as intense emotions that take us out of control.  “One of those realms is the experience of intense cold and snow, an icy world in which everything is completely frozen. This is another type of aggression, the aggression which refuses to communicate at all. It’s a kind of indignation which usually comes from intense pride, and the pride turn into a cold environment which reinforced by self-satisfaction begins to get into the system. It does not allow us to dance or smile or hear the music”

I closed the book shocked and unable to move when I made the connection between what Mats had said about me and what I could not decipher for myself—MY DEEP DARK SECRET. “Oh my god! Oh my god! Oh my god!” I said out loud in the empty lounge area (the teachers had now returned to their classrooms to start the day).   Oh my god! Oh my god! Oh my god., I repeated, as the sudden epiphany sunk into more of my understanding.

My indignation at the world and at my abusive parents, an uncle who violated me, and ex-husband who continued to victimize me was buried in my unwillingness to communicate real needs, heartbreak, brokenness, and even in my inability to orgasm with a man.  My secret, most protective armor was a subtle and hardened aggression, conveyed as intense pride I nurtured in the icy hell of my most inner landscape: I had to be right. I had to be in control. I had to know. I had to have the upper-hand—always.

Mats was right.  He uncovered my darkest secret, the one I never dare see or dig up for myself: I was sexually and emotionally frigid.  My one great talent was masking pain in a brilliant display of intellectual bullshit. OH MY GOD! I said and sunk down into a chair in the lounge.