Empire of Lies (3 page)

We met at a poetry reading held in a church. We drank wine out of plastic cups and talked, standing close to each other in the corner under a station of the cross. She agreed with me—or at least nodded eagerly—when I expounded on what a con job, what a lie it all was. Society, I mean, Western culture: all just a disguise for the will to power and money and sex. She nodded and said in a scintillating tone of admiration, "That is incredibly true."

And so to bed.

Now, the media have portrayed me as such a withered puritanical moralist that I suppose I ought to say right up front: I have no qualms whatsoever about the games lovers play, and may God
bless you all in your variety. But this is my story, so I can only tell you about the things I did and how they affected me.

Anyway, Lauren and I didn't get up to anything too grotesque or dangerous, not at first. We just tied each other up with belts and bathrobe ties and slapped each other's butts and pretended to choke each other, snarling nasty words and so on. All in good fun, you know. And I mean, I liked Lauren well enough. I liked the fragility and the longing I sensed under her sullen, cynical hide. We had, I guess, a relationship of sorts. Pasta and philosophy in the wine cellars of Alphabet City. Wrist-bound, red-bottomed nights in her apartment—because her apartment was nicer than mine, a sparkly brick-walled wood-floored studio in Chelsea her father helped her rent.

Then, of course, after a while, I grew bored with her. Nothing surprising there. The urge to sexual variety in men is just as strong as the urge to bear young in women. And since our relationship was based mostly on sex, I saw no reason to draw things out. No hypocrisy, remember. I simply broke the news to her: I wanted to see other people. To my surprise, she eagerly agreed: Yes, yes, we should. In fact, through her photography contacts, she knew some other couples who were into what she called The Scene. Maybe we should get together with them. Well, yeah! I said.

I didn't understand, you see, that Lauren likely would've done anything to stop me from going, to win my love, to be the girl she thought I wanted her to be. To my idiot mind, we were just a couple of free spirits exploring the dangerous boundaries of our desires. It never occurred to me until it was too late that I was the natural leader of us, that I was in charge of her and therefore responsible for her welfare.

So we entered The Scene, becoming part of a loose company of people who enjoyed rough sex and other shenanigans. We would get together, two or sometimes three couples at a time, play out
roles and scenarios, expose our most secret, most violent hungers and proceed to satisfy them on each other.

If you are wondering what that feels like—what it feels like to hurt other people for your sexual pleasure—I mean, to really bind them hard and hurt them cruelly—I will tell you: It feels good. At least it did to me. There was a dull-minded, feverish heat to having sex that way. No, it was not like lovemaking exactly. There were no deep draughts of pleasure from someone else's pleasure, no long, slow immersion in another's face, another's body, beautiful because they were
her
face and body, exciting because they were hers. Acting out the universal male fantasies of rape and conquest and domination had instead a childishly gluttonous quality. It was like sitting cross-legged on the floor and stuffing chocolate cake into your mouth until the whole cake was gone. It was just like that, in fact: delicious—then compulsive—and finally sickening.

Sickening, yes. Because when it was over—never mind the morning after, I mean the second it was over—I felt my spirit—that spirit I did not believe existed—flooded with moral revulsion as if a bubbling tarlike substance was rising into my throat and choking me. But here was the funny thing—the strange thing. I somehow managed to hide this feeling from myself. It's odd, I know. I meant to be so honest about everything, to expose my deepest nature, to act upon my most primal instincts without restraint—no hypocrisy. And yet about this—this most basic fact of the experience—I lied shamelessly. I told myself I felt deliciously wicked. I told myself I felt a free man who had broken the bonds of moral conformity. Oh God—my God, my God—the things I told myself. Anything to hide the truth of my moral revulsion.

Finally, when the lies were not enough, I used drugs. Well, we all used drugs, all of us in The Scene. They were to heighten the sensation, we said—without considering that the sensation
needed heightening only so that the urges of our desire would continue to outstrip the commandments of our self-disgust. We started with cocaine and later added Ecstasy, which was just beginning to make the rounds in a big way. Before long, I was using something almost daily.

And yet I still had my theories—and according to my theories, everything was going great! I had the joys of honest sensuality to set against the lies that mask society's emptiness and corruption. I had the bulwark of philosophical truth to protect me against the oppressive meaninglessness of existence. I had the satisfaction of answering ever-present Death with Physical Pleasure, the only thing that was both good and real.

That was how it was, according to my theories.

In practice, my personality was disintegrating and I was plunging into a dull fog of depression, illuminated by sharp flashes of suicidal despair. Go figure.

It happened slowly at first, then it happened fast, like a child going down a playground slide, push, push, then picking up speed, then falling finally plump into the sandpit below. That was how I fell—plump—into That Night in Bedford.

That's what we always called it, Lauren and I: That Night in Bedford. As in "I can't stop thinking about That Night in Bedford." Or: "After That Night in Bedford, nothing was the same."

That Night in Bedford, we rented a car and drove up to Westchester to meet a new couple involved in The Scene. He was some kind of Wall Street guy, maybe forty, hopped-up, snappy. She was his wife, a Realtor, a little younger but not much. She was brimming with forced sophistication, broad, limp-wristed gestures, loud laughter. She actually said,
That's just delightful, darling.
She said it several times, in fact, during the course of the evening.

They had a spectacular sprawling farmhouse off a wooded lane. She called it that when she gave us the directions: "It's a
sprawling farmhouse off a wooded lane." They invited Lauren and me to stay with them for the weekend.

I won't pretend I don't remember what happened. That would be nice, but I remember only too well, in spite of the chemical fog that was curling through the twisted byways of my brain at the time. The blow-by-blow of it doesn't matter much anymore. The point is: It ended with the woman sobbing. The wife, the Realtor. All her pretense at sophistication gone. Curled naked on the floor in a corner of the master bedroom, weirdly small-looking under the ceiling's enormous, exposed wooden beams. Her hand was wedged between her legs, and she was sobbing so convulsively, I thought she might rupture something. Lauren was in the master bathroom puking up pills. And me, I was holding my head in one hand and trying to find my clothes with the other.

The husband, the Wall Street guy—he was worse even than the rest of us. If there were some sort of award for this kind of thing he would've won it: Most Disgraceful Behavior in a Disgraceful Situation or something like that. The clown was actually screaming at his wife. Standing over her in his ridiculous bikini briefs, his bland face scarlet, his pearly hands flying every which way. Screaming at her: "You always do this! You always goddamn find a way to pull this fucking shit on me!" With the poor woman curled up at his feet, convulsing, sobbing so that a stone would've pitied her: "I didn't want to. I told you I didn't want to."

After that, after That Night in Bedford—that's when I cracked. It was the disgust, you know, the moral disgust. And yet, I had worked so hard at hiding it from myself that it could only reveal itself to me in other forms and symptoms.

So I would wake up in the predawn dark or just go still, staring at my desk in daylight. My skin would suddenly turn clammy, my heart suddenly flutter and race. I would think about the sobbing Bedford woman. And outlandish fears would swim into my mind:
What if she accuses me of rape?
Or:
What if she dies of internal injuries and I'm arrested for murder?
I laughed these worries off at first. They were nonsense. She'd agreed to everything and I knew she hadn't been hurt in any serious way. And yet the fears kept coming back. And then other fears came, too, small emberlike worries that had been smoldering in me a long time but now suddenly burst into larger flame. What if I got sick? Having sex with so many strangers, careless because of the drugs. What if I had syphilis and didn't know it? What if I had AIDS? What if I got cancer of some kind? Cancer of the penis? Cancer of the balls?

I grew sick with fear. I grew small and hunched and sallow, worrying. There were days when I thought about it every hour, hours when I thought about it every minute. What if she accuses me of rape? What if she dies? What if I get a venereal disease? What if I get cancer? I went to the library and pored over legal books. I pored over medical articles, looking for symptoms. I checked my body constantly and panicked at every pimple and rash. I turned my face away whenever police cars went by. I was in an agony of terror: the symptom of my buried revulsion.

Lauren tried to help, but she only made things worse. She would lay her fingertips gently on my chest in the darkness and whisper to me with impatient tenderness: "Look, you didn't mean it. She said she wanted to. She did."

She didn't understand. How could she? She was part of my guilt. I saw that finally. I could tell myself that she had brought me into The Scene, that she'd suggested it and made the introductions. But I knew the truth. She had followed my lead. She had admired me, had wanted to please and impress me. She had shaped herself to my desires.

And now here she lay, whispering comforts into my sleepless ear, while another voice—my own voice—was whispering: "Look at you! Sniveling, fearful, sweating in the dark. Where're your
theories now, Philosophy Boy? Where's the great enlightenment, the freedom and liberation you promised? You scuzzy shithead. Look at what you are."

So much for sex as a path to the good life. So much for power, too, when you came to think of it. So much for Freud and Nietzsche as guides to happiness. And as for Marx? Well, Marx, it turned out, was done for, too. It was not so very long before that I had watched the Berlin Wall come tumbling down, watched that signature monstrosity of a monstrous century die its miniature death on the piece-of-paper…sized TV on Lauren's kitchenette counter. I had seen Marx's children come blinking out of the pit of tyranny into the bright, gaudy light of the big, beautiful market-driven world, seen them lift their grateful hands to that glad radiance where it reflected blindingly off the teeth of movie stars and the fenders of Corvettes and the bare skin of Western women, hot and spoiled and blessedly free. The hard-hearted, war-mongering, greed-is-good troglodytes of conservatism had prophesied it would be so, those suit-and-tie defenders of old truths and old religions and the silly, old, outmoded American way. They had predicted it would be like this and we—we the fine, sophisticated, enlightened, chattering self-certain of the left—we had called them every name we could think of, anything we could think of that might intimidate them into silence. And now look. Look. It was no good denying it, though all my radical friends made haste to: They had been right, those conservatives—they had been right and we had been wrong. The truths we'd held to be self-evident were nothing more than a comfortable climate of opinion, self-congratulatory certainties that made us feel righteous and progressive and bold and yet had nothing to do with facts. This, too, I understood now. We had been wrong. I had been wrong.

I had been wrong about everything.

What an awful thing to discover. My whole sense of myself was shattered. I felt as if I were falling apart. I had to do something.

I don't know why I went to the Church of the Incarnation. I had been raised without religion, mostly. I had certainly never been baptized or anything like that. My father, the child of a sometimes-radical academic, always swatted away my metaphysical questions as if they were mosquitoes. My mother, who'd been brought up Catholic, retained some vague notion of a gentle infant deity as long as her mind held out, but for the most part the Christ she knew was a figment of her later madness. For myself, I was an atheist, tolerant of faith only in the form of that vague Western version of Eastern mysticism so popular among my colleagues and friends.

Still, one afternoon, I was walking along Madison Avenue, and there was the church and I stopped in front of it. It was a beautiful old place, an old Gothic Revival brownstone sitting on the banks of the avenue almost defiantly serene as the flood of nervy pedestrians and deafening traffic went rushing past. Dwarfed by the towering modern apartment buildings all around it, it seemed to me a thing of more human dimensions than they somehow, aspiring skyward in this sort of small, hopeful way, peak to peak, pediment to gable to steepled tower, each crowned with a finial cross. I seized on it as if it were a piece of driftwood in the boiling sea. I went inside.

The traffic noise died away as the big wooden door swung shut behind me. I stepped across the tiled vestibule to the head of the nave. The light in here seemed white and golden, the effect of its play on the marble altar and its gilded cross. Lancets and quatrefoils of vivid stained glass ran along the walls to either side of me. Christ enthroned, Lazarus risen, Virgin with child all flamed into relief or drew back into shadow as the sun shone through them or moved past.

There was no service going on, but a few people were bowed prayerfully in the pews here and there. I didn't want them to see me, so I retreated into the vestibule and stepped into an empty side chapel.

I took a seat at the front before a small altar, also of marble. There was a wooden crucifix on it, framed against a multicolored triptych on the wall behind. Jesus hung wracked and mournful on the cross, his dying eyes turned up to heaven, the thorns carved into his head, the blood carved onto his brow.