The Golden Condom (8 page)

MURDER ON THEIR MINDS

Heav'n has no Rage, like Love to Hatred turn'd,

Nor Hell a Fury, like a Woman scorn'd.

—WILLIAM CONGREVE, 1697

Humiliation inflames many victims of betrayal, and some it unhinges. Most get over it or perform nonlethal acts of revenge that get it out of their systems. Then they lick their wounds and go on with their lives. But the truly vulnerable of both sexes become obsessed with vengeance and hell-bent on evening the score. The compulsion to undo a sense of personal annihilation by annihilating the perpetrator (or the perpetrator's paramour) underlies every crime of passion.

The sorceress Medea, heroine of Euripides's tragedy, is the archetypal passionate-lover-turned-avenger that Congreve had in mind. Her retribution against Jason, her unfaithful husband, was horrifyingly complete. Medea's advice and magic arts allowed Jason to obtain the coveted Golden Fleece and had saved his life on numerous occasions. He pledged eternal love to her, married her, and had two sons with her but then deserted her for a more politically useful bride. Medea, deranged with jealous rage, wreaked a memorable and torturous vengeance on him. First she sent his new love a wedding present of a dress that burned her alive when she put it on, and then she murdered her own children and served them to their father. So intent was Medea to punish Jason by obliterating everything he loved—and leaving him alive to suffer the anguish of these losses—that she destroyed even the most beloved parts of herself. Her overpowering love became relentless hatred.
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The two most noteworthy modern-day Medeas were considerably less noble than the original, and the men in their lives behaved no better than Jason. The cases of Amy Fisher (whom the tabloids christened “the Long Island Lolita”) and Jean Harris (the spurned mistress of the cardiologist known as “the Scarsdale Diet Doctor”)—Fisher attempted murder, and Harris actually committed it—still resonate in the imagination. Their stories were told in screaming headlines and trashy made-for-TV movies
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(and, in the second case, also serious books
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) rather than in immortal poetry, but the same tumultuous emotions compelled them, and the same personality traits underlay their violent behavior. Their trials saturated the media; the Harris case was front-page news for a year, and the Fisher case never seemed to go away. Both became household words, and there was an unquenchable public appetite for details of both affairs.

The sordid saga of Amy Fisher, the adolescent girl gone murderously amuck, galvanized national attention. At age seventeen, she shot Mary Jo Buttafuoco, her thirty-five-year-old lover Joey Buttafuoco's wife, in the head and nearly killed her. Incensed that Joey had not left Mary Jo, she was determined to eliminate her rival and almost succeeded. She served a seven-year sentence for a plea-bargained first-degree aggravated assault charge and never expressed a moment's remorse. After her release, she capitalized on her notoriety by becoming a porn star.

The ambiance of the Harris affair was more elegant, but the circumstances were no less sordid. Harris, the proper and accomplished fifty-six-year-old headmistress of a girls' school, murdered sixty-seven-year-old Dr. Herman Tarnower, her philandering lover of fourteen years. He had long been flagrantly and unapologetically unfaithful to her, but this was the first time he had chosen a woman thirty years his junior. Harris ostensibly went to Tarnower's house to commit suicide but instead shot him four times at point-blank range when she saw the lingerie of her much-younger replacement in his bedroom. Despite her protestations of innocence and of abiding love for her victim, Harris was convicted of second-degree murder; hoping to be exonerated, she had refused to plea-bargain. Her fifteen-year sentence was commuted after she served twelve years. The case was the subject of two books, and Harris herself wrote two others. Although she made significant efforts to redeem her life—while in prison, she started a center for inmates' children and a foundation that provided scholarships for them—she felt like the victim herself until her death at eighty-nine and never faced the hatred that underlay her love. She could never admit that she had bound herself to an unworthy man—even after she killed him.

AN EYE FOR AN EYE

The motives and psychodynamics of Amy Fisher and Jean Harris are similar to those of their mythic predecessor: none of the three could endure her own helplessness or tolerate that her rejection and shame should go unpunished. How and why does love get converted to hate and the compulsion to destroy, and why are some people more susceptible to this transformation than others?

Intimate betrayal causes what Freud called “narcissistic injury”—a grievous wound to a person's sense of self-esteem and potency in the world. For those with certain fault lines in their personalities caused by early trauma, narcissistic injury easily morphs into what Heinz Kohut
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later labeled “narcissistic rage,” a far more poisonous emotion that frequently culminates in violence.
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At the extreme, bloodlust overrides everything else, and the rejected lover is consumed by it; he or she comes to embody it. The only means of undoing the shame and impotence that engulf the self is to destroy those who caused it.

Nobody is exempt from experiencing narcissistic injury in childhood, because nobody is the exclusive object of a parent's love, and no parent is always perfectly attuned or needs to be. But children whose parents cannot empathize with them and whose needs are regularly ignored can develop a type of character pathology in which intense aggression is easily aroused and difficult to modulate. Such people—the psychiatric diagnostic terms for their condition are “pathological narcissism” or “narcissistic personality disorder”—are cold and self-involved even when they love, and they also suffer from inner emptiness and an inability to regulate their emotions. They lack the resources to withstand the inevitable traumas of life. These are the people who become compulsively vengeful. The shocking behaviors of these avengers fascinate the more restrained among us even as they horrify us; they act out what we hardly dare to imagine.

Most people do not become criminals when they are betrayed; religious scruples—they take seriously God's biblical pronouncement that “Vengeance is Mine,” even when sorely tempted to make it theirs—a sense of personal morality, self-awareness, or good counsel restrain them. Those who are lucky or wise have other internal resources that survive even betrayal.

HIS MOTHER'S SON

Cedric Walker is a forty-six-year-old massage therapist—barrel-chested and powerful, with extravagant dreadlocks, a softly lilting voice, and a laid-back manner. A childhood injury left him with a pronounced limp, for which he compensates with his upper-body strength. He takes his vocation seriously and becomes so absorbed when he is working that he hardly speaks. He is the last person you would imagine capable of seriously contemplating violence against anybody, and it seems inconceivable that he could ever harbor thoughts of hurting a woman under any circumstances, let alone of devising the perfect torture for an unfaithful wife. But he comes from a West Indian culture where violence is considered the natural and proper punishment for adultery—particularly when it takes place in the marital bed—and where there is no dearth of enforcers standing ready to either murder the culprits or curse them should you be unwilling to do either job yourself; in his country, he assured me, the law looks the other way. This was the environment in which he had to struggle against the siren call to vengeance.

Cedric was forty-four and his wife was thirty-seven, and they had been married five years when she betrayed him. At the time, he had a job at a resort that took him away from his hometown for three weeks out of every month. Supporting his wife was a masculine point of honor for him. “She was living in the house we owned, so I was paying the mortgage—I didn't let her do it,” he told me. “I said, ‘Keep your money.'” One night, Cedric got a call from his best friend at four o'clock in the morning, informing him that a flashy black SUV was parked in his garage. This had aroused his friend's suspicions since he knew that Cedric didn't own a car. The friend also knew that the car belonged to a locally famous musician and deduced that the musician was in bed with Cedric's wife. “He asked me, ‘Do you want me to take care of it?'” Cedric said, “I told him, ‘Just take a photo of the car and the license plate, and I'll deal with him when I get back'”—a conversation that in this context would be universally understood as an offer by the friend to commit vengeance by proxy and a statement by the cuckold that he intended to do the deed himself. I asked him how you find somebody to “take care of it” if no friend is there to volunteer and you yourself are unable or unwilling to carry it out. “You know people,” he said with intentionally vague certainty. He explained what he himself might be able to do. “A relative of mine is an undercover cop. If I killed somebody, he would do what he has to do to make it work—to overlook certain situations. People have affairs, but if you bring it home, vengeance comes in.”

But Cedric neither used the services of his friend or his other resources nor acted on his own behalf. “All I had to say to my friend was ‘It's okay,' and it would have been done, but that's not who I am,” he told me. Why, then, did he ask for photographs? “I wanted them for the divorce hearing. If I have proof, she can't get alimony from me.” It was one thing to pay her expenses if she were honorable, but quite another if she was not.

Honor killing may have been his first impulse when he got the news, but his plans evolved into something more effective than murder, something that felt entirely justified as well as morally acceptable. “I'm not a killer,” he said. “I don't think killing somebody solves anything—if she dies, it's over.” Expressing the same sentiments as the car saboteur and her friend, he said, “You want to wound, make her pay attention.” I wondered why he thought only his wife should pay. “That man couldn't do anything to her if she didn't allow it—she's the guilty one,” he said, and I had to agree.

Since black magic was a readily available and undetectable option, had he considered using it against her? He had clearly entertained the idea. “I know about it because I grew up in a place with that,” he said. “My grandfather was a voodoo priest, and I know a woman who had someone send a demon to make a woman rival's husband crazy.” But he dismissed it on moral grounds, even though he didn't doubt its horrifying efficacy. “My father would have nothing to do with it; if you dabble your hands in it, there's no coming back.” Black magic was a real option in Cedric's world, and rejecting it took a level of self-control that was far from universal in his culture. In doing so, he emulated his father, whom he revered for his good sense and good example.

Then Cedric told me what he had planned to do to his wife while she was still unaware that she had been found out. It was a punishment that was dark, but very much of this world rather than the diabolical one. “I thought about lacing a condom with hot pepper and having sex with her, so she would feel extreme pain and evil like I was feeling.” To inflict genital torture that paralleled the mental torture she had inflicted on him seemed only just. That his rival was able-bodied added to his humiliation and stoked his hate and outrage. “She knew I was crippled when she married me. If she didn't want to be married to me anymore, she could have said so, but she didn't. She betrayed me and was still taking my money,” he explained. From the satisfaction with which he described his sadistic plan, it was clear that he had seriously considered acting on it.

However, his work as a healer came to his rescue, and he decided not to act on his plan. “I'm a massage therapist,” he explained. “How could I touch someone's body to heal them if I harbored violence in my mind? You are a vessel. You can't hold anger for a female, because that anger is going to trigger when you're touching a female, and she would feel it. You've got to keep your vessel clean. Otherwise, spite will come around back to you and destroy you. Massage is my true love. She chose me, I didn't choose her, and I'm happy that she did.” As if in explanation for his steadfast tenderness toward women, despite how one had treated him, he added proudly, “My mother raised a good son.”

How did Cedric acquire his enlightened self-control? “Ego strength” is the term from classical Freudian theory that describes the capacity of a person to call on emotional restraint in a crisis—in this case, to override hate and the desire to wreak vengeance. It is the antidote to narcissistic rage. This ability to resist acting out and to maintain one's identity under duress is not based on fear of punishment—going to hell or going to jail—but on the self-esteem engendered by empathic parents who prize their child and instill discipline lovingly. Even if parents fail to provide it, a person can acquire ego strength later in life though self-awareness.
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Empathic love and the inspiring example of both his parents protected Cedric and kept him from acting out his rage on his unfaithful wife. He identified with his father and turned his back on black magic because his father had done so, but in this crisis, brought about by a woman betraying him, the forces of restraint that most helped him were the two women—one real and the other symbolic—whom he loved and who loved him. One was his revered mother; the other was his vocation, which he envisioned as a beloved woman who could never betray him, to whom he had pledged inviolable fidelity. These two feminine ideals consoled him and inspired him to act honorably. Their presence within him neutralized the harm his wife had done him and allowed him to overcome his hunger for vengeance. Together they provided inner sustenance deeper than the hurt he suffered; they bolstered him when he needed them most. He had so deep a reservoir to draw on that nothing could destroy his sense of self. The thoughtful, passionate self-restraint that these two abiding loves engendered salved his wounds and stayed his hand.