often our fights led to bruises and broken furniture. (When I took the footboard of my maple bed in to be repaired for the second time, the carpenter was tactful enough not to ask how this had happened again.)
No longer being able to fuck around felt weird, like an infringement on my personal bill of rights. But, on the other hand, I was as jealous of him as he was of me. Later, when he was deployed to Germany for three years, my sister Anne—privy to my previous life—was amazed that I was faithful to him. She didn’t know that he called me every Saturday morning at 9 A.M. , undoubtedly thinking there was no way I was going to talk to him with another man in the room.
Then there was our mutual desire for sensation, even sleaze. When I visited him in Europe, we delighted in an uncensored exhibition of Mapplethorpe’s photographs, a live sex show in Hamburg, and visiting the red light district in Amsterdam, where he bought me a pair of red stilettos. Like me, he loved art, and we walked in awe through Käthe Kollwitz’s house in Berlin, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and the Musée D’Orsay in Paris.
And through it all we fought—on the Kurfurstendam in Berlin, on a street corner in Amsterdam, and on a boat ride up the Seine. Apparently, that night our eyes met in that bar we had seen the potential not only for great sex but also for venting the rage we had both brought into the relationship with us.
“If you ever want to marry again, you’d better do it before that book comes out,” a woman friend warned me in 1984, just before Sleeping with Soldiers, the story of my years of sexual freedom, was published. But Zane was unfazed, despite the fact that I had told the less-than-flattering truth about him and our relationship. Three years after the book came out, and six years into all this fun, like a snake coiled and ready to strike at the proper moment, he gave me the ultimatum: either marry or give up him, his beautiful body. So, despite my determination to remain free, I let him—after weeks of anxiety—put the ring on my finger. I even allowed him to lead me into a pretty little cottage no longer within walking distance of the bars where I once liked to hang out, and where I daily fought a losing battle against being domesticated. Soon I was thinking about what was in the refrigerator for dinner, looking out the window in amazement to see my sex objet mowing our lawn. I was losing every battle about visiting his blue-collar family in North Carolina, where the TVs in every room and the low ceilings made me realize almost to the point of nausea what I had gotten myself into.
Underlying all this—every argument, every separation—was the sex and rage to which we had both become addicted. Our relation-ship was like a postcard I had once read— Having you helps me deal with the problems you bring me . By then, I could no more think of doing without him or his passion for me, than cutting off my own hand.
Yet as all this was going on, another story was unfolding, one that, even more than our relationship, would wreak havoc on my treasured freedom: I discovered that my daughter Lily, living in New York, was addicted to heroin. A few years later I faced the fact that my son David was paranoid schizophrenic. For the next two decades—a period that will take another book to recount—not once did Zane protest my caring for them, taking them in when they needed us. A Taurus and a family animal, he became the one person in my family who supported my efforts to save them. Despite all, Zane had passed The Test, a test that was more important to me than any other.
Just when I thought I had a sex object for life—after all, he was fifteen years younger!—Zane’s hard-driving life began to take its toll. In 1991, he was an infantry platoon sergeant in Desert Storm, with friendly fire deaths and suicides in his unit. Back in Germany, he began the drinking unto oblivion that would lead to the first of four rehabs,
No longer being able to fuck around felt weird, like an infringement on my personal bill of rights. But, on the other hand, I was as jealous of him as he was of me. Later, when he was deployed to Germany for three years, my sister Anne—privy to my previous life—was amazed that I was faithful to him. She didn’t know that he called me every Saturday morning at 9 A.M. , undoubtedly thinking there was no way I was going to talk to him with another man in the room.
Then there was our mutual desire for sensation, even sleaze. When I visited him in Europe, we delighted in an uncensored exhibition of Mapplethorpe’s photographs, a live sex show in Hamburg, and visiting the red light district in Amsterdam, where he bought me a pair of red stilettos. Like me, he loved art, and we walked in awe through Käthe Kollwitz’s house in Berlin, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and the Musée D’Orsay in Paris.
And through it all we fought—on the Kurfurstendam in Berlin, on a street corner in Amsterdam, and on a boat ride up the Seine. Apparently, that night our eyes met in that bar we had seen the potential not only for great sex but also for venting the rage we had both brought into the relationship with us.
“If you ever want to marry again, you’d better do it before that book comes out,” a woman friend warned me in 1984, just before Sleeping with Soldiers, the story of my years of sexual freedom, was published. But Zane was unfazed, despite the fact that I had told the less-than-flattering truth about him and our relationship. Three years after the book came out, and six years into all this fun, like a snake coiled and ready to strike at the proper moment, he gave me the ultimatum: either marry or give up him, his beautiful body. So, despite my determination to remain free, I let him—after weeks of anxiety—put the ring on my finger. I even allowed him to lead me into a pretty little cottage no longer within walking distance of the bars where I once liked to hang out, and where I daily fought a losing battle against being domesticated. Soon I was thinking about what was in the refrigerator for dinner, looking out the window in amazement to see my sex objet mowing our lawn. I was losing every battle about visiting his blue-collar family in North Carolina, where the TVs in every room and the low ceilings made me realize almost to the point of nausea what I had gotten myself into.
Underlying all this—every argument, every separation—was the sex and rage to which we had both become addicted. Our relation-ship was like a postcard I had once read— Having you helps me deal with the problems you bring me . By then, I could no more think of doing without him or his passion for me, than cutting off my own hand.
Yet as all this was going on, another story was unfolding, one that, even more than our relationship, would wreak havoc on my treasured freedom: I discovered that my daughter Lily, living in New York, was addicted to heroin. A few years later I faced the fact that my son David was paranoid schizophrenic. For the next two decades—a period that will take another book to recount—not once did Zane protest my caring for them, taking them in when they needed us. A Taurus and a family animal, he became the one person in my family who supported my efforts to save them. Despite all, Zane had passed The Test, a test that was more important to me than any other.
Just when I thought I had a sex object for life—after all, he was fifteen years younger!—Zane’s hard-driving life began to take its toll. In 1991, he was an infantry platoon sergeant in Desert Storm, with friendly fire deaths and suicides in his unit. Back in Germany, he began the drinking unto oblivion that would lead to the first of four rehabs,
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