Amid the kisses, we had a brief exchange.
“Why did you walk into my cage?” asked Damon.
“I had an urge.”
“What brought it on?”
“I always had it, I think.”
“What made you act on it?”
“I’ll tell you one day.”
He kissed me again and slid his hand under the elastic waistband of my skirt. This was not tolerable. Our pitch of frustration became simply cruel. Halfway through the movie, we went to a nearby diner and locked ourselves in the ladies’ room. We did not let ourselves be influenced by movies: we did not make love standing up. We did it on the floor, which was more exciting. The floor of a public bathroom, just large enough to accommodate our horizontal bodies. It was not excessively dirty. It had just the right amount of dirt to add grit to our sex.
We spent a few more hours together that day, during which we mostly rode up and down the city on a bus, because a bus was warm, safely public, economical, and offered varied scenery. On that bus, Damon confessed to having been in love with me from the beginning, but having not wanted to tell me for fear of ruining the effectiveness of his training. I became gloomy at this reminder of my days as a kidnapped person.
He said, “I’m sorry I kidnapped you to make you happy. I know you feel it wasn’t worth it.”
“Even if it was worth it, you had no right to do it,” I said.
We spoke in earnest whispers, so as not to be overheard by the other passengers.
“I know,” he said. “But I wanted to make you happy in a completely selfless way. Beginning a romance with you would not have been selfless. It might have made you happy, but it would have made me happy too.”
“What about when you were in the cage? How did you feel about me then?”
“I loved you at all times. In the cage, I loved you. When I threw cans at you—” He lowered his voice, because an old woman who was within earshot was staring at us with what appeared to be either shock or disapproval. “I loved you.”
“Then why did you throw them at me?” I asked.
“To put on a good show of wanting to be let out. And because part of me did want to be let out.”
“Then why didn’t you just let me know how you felt about me?”
“I didn’t want to impose myself on you. I didn’t want to offer you anything that you didn’t want. On top of it, it’s hard to think of smooth moves to perform from behind bars.” He paused. “Remember, my plan had been to give you what you wanted; not my version of what I thought or hoped you wanted.”
When Damon and I parted that first night, he said he would be sleeping in a hotel, thinking of me, and that he would call me the next morning. We were still afraid of each other.
I hadn’t told him about my visit to his brother Philip’s or about Philip’s desire to see him again. I thought it might cause turmoil or agitation within him, and I didn’t want that to happen; not before finding out how this strange new twist in our relationship would evolve.
That night, it felt lonely to no longer have my pet in his cage. The sight of the empty cage was disturbing, like a fish tank whose occupant had passed away and been flushed down the toilet.
I walked into the cage and touched the things he had touched. I touched the edge of his bathtub. I used his toilet to see what it had been like for him, for weeks, to use that toilet. I took a bath in his tub. I turned on the TV and watched it while sitting on the floor, the way he had. I turned on his cherished cello music with the remote control, and I listened to my ex’s compositions, wondering if listening to them from behind the bars would help them move me the way they had moved Damon. Not really, as it turned out.
I slept in his bed that night.
Damon did call me the next day. We spent it together, again in the safety of publicness, and in bliss. We had sex in three different public places: a fitting room in the men’s section of a department store, a church, and, late at night, between two moving subway cars. A hotel room would have been too risky, not public enough: he could knock me unconscious and sneak me out in a big bag or something. And I could do the same to him, of course, from his point of view.
We saw each other again the next day, and for a while almost every day after that. Always in public. We were extremely demonstrative by necessity; the city was our bedroom.
He would watch me while I finished starring in the big-budget movie, whose last few scenes were being shot in town. We gazed at each other between takes, he standing a ways off, out of the way. It was unsettling to see Damon — my trainer — right there, watching what he had taught me, or rather, what he had forced me to teach myself.
After that first day, we never mentioned our imprisonment of each other. We acted as if it never happened. Understandably, it was a touchy subject.
When our lifestyle seemed too impractical, we tried to reason with each other about our mutual distrust. I tried to persuade him that he had nothing to fear from me.
“I’m the one who opened the door of your cage. Why would I now want to harm you or imprison you again?”
“I can say the same to you. I came into your apartment to find out why you were unhappy, yet knowing it was probably a trap. Why would I want to harm you or imprison you again?”
“Because it was a trap and you might want revenge.”
“Then why did I kiss you when you came in the cage? Why didn’t I just yank you in and lock the door?”
Sometimes we got to a stage in our convoluted conversations where the whole thing felt silly to both of us and it seemed obvious we could trust each other. We would then gingerly head for my apartment, with the intention of taming privacy, but as we got closer, we became more quiet, more anxious, and our steps slowed.
“It doesn’t feel okay,” I would finally say.
“I’m relieved you said it first.”
“The only way I can imagine myself feeling at ease alone with you in my apartment is if you’re in the cage.”
“And that is precisely why I don’t feel at ease going to your apartment.”
Our discussions on the topic went in infinite circles. And yet we kept having them every time it felt uncomfortable, or seemed like a shame, to lock ourselves in a rest room somewhere.
I still hadn’t told Damon that I knew about his past and had met his brother. I felt guilty about not having told him, and I often had the urge to tell him, and sometimes I was on the verge of my urge, but then I never did, always coming up with some excuse or other: the present excuse was that I wanted to wait until we’d figured out how to tolerate privacy together. Our relationship would then be more solid and more likely to withstand any damage my confession might cause. So I waited.
Progress on the privacy issue only really got going one day when I caught a cold from lying with Damon in the cool spring grass in Central Park. I decided the time had come for things to change.
While Damon was nursing my cold in a deli, making sure I drank my herb tea and ate my chicken soup, I said, “I wish you could nurse me in my apartment.”
“Me too.”
“It would be so nice. You could take care of me in my own bed. We could rent movies. You could take advantage of me while I have my fever.”
“Maybe we should try it again, try walking to your apartment and see if we can actually make it upstairs this time.”
“No, we won’t try, because when we try we don’t succeed. We will actually do it this time. But after some preparations. I’ll take down the cage; have it removed. I’ll take the lock off the door to my bedroom. And then we’ll force ourselves to go up, and we’ll stay there, no matter how unpleasant or scary it is to be alone with each other. We’ll stay there until the discomfort wears off. It’ll have to, eventually. Don’t you think?”