Losing It
Infidelity Inc.
Love and reading
Passionate and penniless in Paris
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BY BARRY YOURGRAU | It's the season of Valentines, and a lot of us are toasting what a grand kid Cupid is, puckering up all-smiles to celebrate that winsome cherub and his bright bow and arrow. A lot of us; but not me. Not because I'm a misanthrope, not because I'm a wet blanket at the love party. Call me just a bit shaken and sober. Call me "wiser." Friend, I'm one of those who've come to know firsthand that Cupid is, at times, just a wayward brat running amok with an extremely dangerous weapon. That silvery arrow is tipped with one of the most calamitous of psychotropic toxins known to mankind -- capable of jolting leaders of state, like you-know-who, and sensitive and refined fellows, like myself, into reckless, sordid and shameful chaos. You yawn. You scratch. So what else is new? Well ... nothing. I just wanted to make my own plea for perspective. I just wanted to testify, warts and all. I just wanted you -- when you get dewy for Cupid -- to bear in mind the image of sensitive-and-refined me straddling a woman on a kitchen floor with my hands around her throat. Or myself being chased down five flights of stairs and out onto a populated street by this same woman, barefoot in her T-shirt and panties, in order to slap me in the face. Or the two of us -- I'm warming up -- cowering, hoarse and shaking, by the bed, while the police pound on the door, called by the neighbors. If you've never had to open up for the cops at midday because of "domestic" dissonance, you've saved yourself a lot of shame and panic. You've saved yourself squatting trembling and aghast on a cold curb with your companion, bleating, "We can't go on like this!" Ah, Cupid's little jingle. I met Suzie (as I'll call her) when I was in the last dismal stretch of a foundering live-in relationship of many years. My girlfriend and I loved each other, but we were deeply ill-fitted and very miserable, with ourselves and with life. I took to little dalliances on the side. I felt innocent about them, believe it or not. I felt, at least there, alive. Then I got tangled up in something not "little," which ended quickly and very badly. I kept it quiet. Half a year later Cupid trotted out Suzie, in an East Village hole in the wall, and my heart went molten. She was hefty, carnal in a Mediterranean-Semitic way: A friend of mine long afterward appraised her as "a dog" (friends are great, aren't they?), whereas a stranger once jumped out of his car in traffic and chased her down the street. That kind of "dog." She had big brown flashing eyes, chubby pink cheeks, and a mass of almost jet hair. To me, she was like a downtown version of matured Egyptian jailbait (if you know what I mean). So we got drunk that night -- those were boozy times -- went back to her place, where I told her my girlfriend was away, and after a lot of cajoling, we did it. And that was that, I thought, jauntily. But of course it wasn't. Cupid knows a patsy when he sees one.
N E X T+P A G E: Cupid laughs and laughs
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