Helen Zuman - Mating in Captivity - A Memoir

I could have been a battered woman, defending her man: He hits me because I’ve done wrong. I deserve his blows. He knows what I need better than I do; pain helps me grow.

The longer I spent at Zendik, the surer I grew that corruption lurked in my core, like a deeply rooted plantar wart. I had to gouge it out—even if my surgeon’s kit comprised only scissors and a safety pin.

Dymion had been at the Farm for almost eighteen years. He’d worn a purple wristband before the meeting that had healed so little and hurt so much. At thirty-nine (to my twenty-four), he was lean and muscular. He ran, lifted weights, and played bass with Arol in the Zendik band. Only a receding hairline betrayed his age.

When Dymion had moved to the Farm, in the early eighties, drug use and shoplifting had both been common. Stories I heard about this time seeded images of roles he might have played before I arrived:

A man crouches in a curtained room and pulls a shoe-box out from under a low, homemade, plywood bed. From a neat array of pills, powders, and paraphernalia, he selects a few items. He doesn’t rush, though the door might open at any moment. Everyone knows he’s the Farm’s source for drugs.

A man stands in the produce aisle of a supermarket, harshly lit by overhead fluorescence. He wears a tentlike black trench coat, lined with satchel-size pockets. Shifting a concealed maple syrup jug so it won’t poke his ribs, he pretends to inspect the lettuce.

What strikes me now about these vignettes is the lack of malice or calculation in the man’s face. He’s a dealer, a thief—where’s the curled lip, the chill squint? In scenes both real and conjured, I see the same kind eyes behind round lenses, the same raised brows, the same faint grin. I see a man swept along, surprised but willing.

It was this man I enlisted, in February 2001, to help me enact a rape fantasy.

Whose rape fantasy?

Mine?

Or Zendik’s?

Before Zendik, I’d imagined being guided through sex by a man who knew, without asking, precisely how to pleasure me. I see now this scenario involved neither attack nor indifference: How could a man bring me to bliss without learning me intimately?

But when Cayta had charged me with attracting sexual violence, I hadn’t fought back. Further, I’d adopted the Zendik conviction that the first step in cleansing a Deathculture taint was digging all the way into it. And I’d read a play by Wulf, The Oraculum Interrogations , in which a character named Girl, hitchhiking cross-country, is raped repeatedly by a pair of truck drivers. She is puzzled because she loves it. (Cayta would later suggest that I audition for the role of Girl, in a never-completed film version of the play. I would demur and be cast as an entranced soothsayer instead.)

Rather than depict the rape of Girl in sensual detail—which would have required him to show how a woman might be aroused by force, without foreplay—Wulf had her describe it afterward, in the language of pleasure, thereby claiming that rape and rapture belong together.

As a young Zendik who’d been having sex for less than a year—and had never had sex beyond Zendik—I was primed to believe Wulf’s claim. I didn’t know my sexual self well enough to ask how I could expect to reach orgasm without so much as a chance to get wet.

Maybe I credited Dymion with magical powers. He did live in the Addition—where, I imagined, sexual prowess seeped through your skin while you slept. The first date we’d gone on, in late January 2001, had been my first with an erstwhile member of the Family.

At that moment, we’d matched: I was still aching for Owen, in the wake of a split forced by Swan’s condemnation of our relationship during a full-group meeting. Dymion, under duress, had recently made a final break with his on-again, off-again girlfriend of the past few years. Had we been left to our other loves, I would not have sought him out. He would not have heard my call.

Dymion had been at Zendik long enough not to be fazed by strange sexual propositions. He was used to the idea of the date space as laboratory for therapeutic experiment. Shure was, too. So when I asked her to hit Dymion up for a date—our third—involving simulated rape, she did not try to dissuade me. Nor did she mention that he—alone among the handful of Zendiks with herpes—was known to manifest instant outbreaks during dates that made him nervous. (Those who had herpes could get together with those who didn’t, so long as they showed no symptoms that day. Usually sores bloomed slowly.) She nodded, shrugged, agreed.

Dymion, it turned out, had played the rapist before. After accepting my request through Shure, he approached me in person to tell me this and convey his excitement. Years earlier, in Texas, when he and Toba had been together, they’d tried something similar: She’d gone for a run on a deserted road. He’d pulled her into the woods and mock-raped her. They’d both enjoyed the transgressive story line. They’d been lovers for a few years by then.

The night of our date, I dressed up in a newish pair of blue jeans and a royal-purple button-down shirt. I was sitting cross-legged on the double bed in the date space by the Old Music Room when Dymion arrived. He stood facing me, filling the narrow strip of floor separating bed from door. He wore tight black jeans and a thin, sleeveless shirt, unbuttoned to show his hard pecs and taut stomach. A fat candle in a dusty dish flickered on the night table, next to a roll of toilet paper. I imagine the candle casting a dull glow over a smudged copy of The Psychic Compass (Zendik’s answer to the I Ching or tarot), opened to the oracle I seemed to choose with unusual frequency: “Your Lie Equals Your Pain.”

“So, how should we do this?” he asked. “We could role-play—I’m the lecherous teacher, you’re the innocent schoolgirl.”

I’d yet to accept that stories turn me on, that I’m likely to get wetter when staging erotic dramas in my head. I’d heard Arol ream other Zendiks for being “in fantasy” during sex. It was disrespectful to your partner, she’d said—a hedge against intimacy. Anyhow, what Dymion was suggesting sounded more like seduction than rape.

“No, I don’t wanna role-play. I just wanna do it. You come at me, I’ll fight, you overpower me and fuck me anyway.”

“Okay.”

He threw me down on the bed. I lay back, looking up at him. He ripped the buttons off my shirt, ripping it open. I pushed against his chest—playing my part, even as I began to sense that speed, the speed of force, was the enemy. No heat, no wetness, rose between my legs.

He grabbed my wrists, pressed my arms against the bed. Undid the button at my waist, unzipped my pants, yanked them down.

There was still time. I could have screamed. I could have pushed back again, I could have said, “Look, I know I was supposed to pretend to resist. But I’m not acting now. Stop.” I think he would have listened. I think he would have quit.

He unzipped his own jeans, shoved them down enough to free his cock. It was hard. He closed his eyes and forced it into my dry vagina. I flinched in pain. I clenched my teeth. Each thrust felt like a fresh sprawl against asphalt, a fresh scrape to flesh—except this was not the flesh of a knee, but the flesh inside me.

Even then—I could have stopped him. I could have shrieked and clawed.

Why didn’t I?

Because something burned more than the sting in my groin: my need to complete the ritual. Cauterize my desire for violence. Force this weakness I’d been charged with to leave my body.

I lay still, aflame with pain. I ached for him to come, so it would end.

For me, the trance—the story of arousal by force—had broken with Dymion’s first thrust. For him, it lasted till he withdrew his cock and saw that it was raw and bloody. I was bleeding, too, from a rip in my perineum.