I had Lilianna read my previous post before I actually uploaded it (a courtesy I did not extend to Rick when I posted an overly-personal entry about him recently – perhaps because I didn't care overmuch about hurting his feelings at the time I wrote it, although I did feel a twinge of remorse when I found out that reading it had indeed upset him). She said she didn't have any issues with anything I'd said, so I went ahead and posted it.
This post is going to be about my relationship with Drew, an artist I dated from March to September/October of 2009. I'm not going to ask him to read it first. For one thing, he doesn't even know I'm writing a blog. For another, our entire relationship was a kind of game in which authenticity was subservient to creativity, and I'd like to be true to that memory of us.
We had a blast, Drew and I. We played our parts well. It would be a shame to ruin it now by letting him in on the secret, which is that the spectacle of our relationship became the mirror that gave me back to myself.
I don't think Drew has a clue what he really did for me, and I'd just as soon keep it that way. (However, on the off chance you ever read this: thank you, Drew, from the bottom of my heart. Don't let it go to your head, though.)
When I met Drew, things with Lilianna were at their nadir. It was March of 2009, and she had gotten back in touch with Parker after a silence of several months, but she wanted nothing to do with me. She didn't trust me. It was as if she'd turned me into someone else: a composite of all my worst qualities. The Viny she had created was a competitive, duplicitous, back-stabbing, cold-hearted, holier-than-thou snob. That Viny was a wearer of many hats, putting on whatever garb she thought would make her look best, forever obsessed with maintaining her image. She was seductive, manipulative – in short, an ice queen. Oh, pardon me: did I say ice queen? I meant cunt.
Of course, the Viny Lilianna created out of her own hurt feelings wasn't the real me, but neither was Lilianna making things up out of thin air. The Viny she doesn't like is certainly a part of me.
Drew, heaven help him, fell in love with that Viny.
Everything Lilianna rejected about me, everything I wished to disavow, I reclaimed in my relationship with Drew. I rolled all those nasty bits together and created one fantastic character – and then I played her to to hilt.
She wore slinky dresses and high heels all the time. She even spoke with an accent, something vaguely Ukrainian. And, believe it or not, she was outrageously funny.
Drew put her on a pedestal. He took hundreds of photographs of her. He brought his camera with him everywhere they went and filmed her every move. Then he posted the footage on youtube and watched it, over and over.
You see, the character Drew was playing and the character I was playing had collaborated to develop an entire fantasy script, a mockumentary of sorts, in which I appeared as a scheming, money-grubbing mail-order bride and he played the part of my clueless American husband.
In preparing to write this entry, I reviewed the footage from one of our early dates, and I was struck by the following interchange:
Drew (after I've just informed him that I will probably leave him in two or three months): “Can I get another one, or am I stuck with you?”
Viny (in accented, slightly incorrect English): “Can you get another one, what? Of me?”
Drew: “Well, another Eastern Bloc woman, when you leave --”
Viny (interrupting): “Oh, yes, but, you know, they are not so good.”
Drew (pretending to be disappointed): “Oh, they aren't.”
Viny (shaking her head dismissively): “No. No. I am best.”
And there you go: I finally got to be The Best. It felt so satisfying to say it, to utter those words – I am best – with absolute conviction, even though it was all just an act. And with that, a large part of my competitiveness simply evaporated. Call it drama therapy.
Of course, I wasn't completely cured. There was, after all, my very real attraction to Drew: before long, the line between fantasy and reality began to waver, and I couldn't always distinguish between the two. What began as an artistic collaboration (charged by a certain amount of mutual infatuation, it's true) became, over time, an actual romance. And that meant that I began to play our game in earnest: I was out to win. If someone's heart was going to be broken, it sure as hell wasn't going to be mine.
The more I interacted with him, the clearer it became that Drew was, in many ways, a male version of myself. However, I kept this thought to myself, which gave me the upper hand.
Since this entry is way too long already, I'll conclude with something I wrote about Drew in July of 2009, after I had determined that we weren't, after all, evenly matched – that, not to put too fine a point on it, I was going to get the best of him:
He's so self-conscious, so unaware! He shakes his curls, he parts his mouth, he tilts his head, male coquette that he is. And he's lovely, simply lovely; I want to clap my hands and say, Bravo!...I am so cursed to've met someone so like me in so many ways....[I want] to understand what it is about him that draws me, and what it is that repels....
Oh, he is so full of himself. He wants people to like him. He wants no one to be unhappy with him. He wants admiration, adoration. Oh, I know him intimately! I recognize him, I've got his number and I'll call his bluff. (He, alone, on the bluff, a figure against the sunset, waiting with phone in hand...)
I am torn between a desire to be kind to him (and thus to say it is right & meet for the universe to treat me kindly) and to be cruel, to teach him a lesson. Perhaps he fascinates me so because it is my karma, as a self-obsessed person, to become obsessed w/ a person like me (the mise en abime of narcissism!!). We're all looking into that pool: he and I, with our bright reflections, not knowing whom we see: ourselves (himself/myself) or (an)other.
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