Boston

REVENGE

      The black cloth voodoo doll doesn’t even have a prick left. It’s a simple form no larger than the size of my hand; small head, stubby arms, short torso, cookie-cutter shaped legs the color of a blackened gingerbread man kept too long in the oven. A small rip in the inseam where the male organ had been stitched now exposes loose white rag stuffing and ratty newspaper scraps.
      But what would you expect? The doll’s been through hell over the past ten years.
      The voodoo doll is a present from a Haitian piano-mover friend who searches the entire island to find just the right magic to help me through the winter of my first serious breakup with the Captain. I know it’s authentic because it works. Why shouldn’t it? All the fine points are there: one angry woman, one angry, hurt woman, one box of straight pins, one anatomically correct male voodoo doll.
      Two years later, long after that first powerful stab, after the Captain and I kiss and make up, he tells me, he confesses, his in-between girlfriend always had a headache when it came right down to close contact.
      I told you it works.

TAKE ONE
       I don't know if I explain myself adequately: the man that I love is not the man that I love sailing.
       When I first meet the Captain, he is not a captain. He is a hot advertising film director. His reputation for shooting the best sixty-second commercial spots runs after him not only in Boston but also up and down the East Coast. He is very talented, very successful. He directs a busy studio with scads of adoring assistants, big-name agencies, bigger-named clients. He makes a lot of money. Later I find out it's a good thing, because he spends a lot of money supporting two ex-wives, two divorce lawyers, a strike-it-rich stockbroker, and a pricey Cape Cod yacht marina. He has everybody eating out of the palm of his wallet. He never stops moving. He works twenty-four-hour days six days a week for thirty years. Then it's five days a week. Then once he gets this retirement notion, only whenever he's booked a year in advance for a month at a time.
       In the beginning of his career, he fathers two sets of twins, all boys, then one more son, one year immediately after another, who see about as much of him as does his first wife which is much less than his clients. He is so exhausted he naps when the traffic light turns red. He is born competitive, relentless. He is fiercely independent yet demands a lot of attention. Because he is charming, he gets it. He propels himself with enormous determination into the center of the sixty-second-spot-commercial world despite an Ivy League degree in economics he uses for supply-and-demand billing and how to get paid in less than sixty days.
       He needs to be important without anyone knowing who his father is (a foreign diplomat), the pedigree of his mother (a Southern debutante), where he went to school (an upper-class English public school), where he grew up (Washington, D.C., the French Belgian Congo, London, Berlin).
       But that's a pinch of the whole story.
       I first hire him for a commercial shoot I'm art-directing with a big budget that can support his ego, and am annoyed when he throws all his attention to my junior assistant, who happens to be a male. He doesn't look at me, acknowledge me, consult with me, even though I'm buying. By the end of the shoot, he tells my male assistant he'll call him sometime for lunch. I see him take out my assistant within the week, with a brief nod to me as we pass in the reception area of the agency. I always wonder why he is barking up the wrong tree. I shrug my shoulders and buy my own lunch at the take-out deli on the corner. But I'm hurt.
       Six months go by.
       I am on another location shoot in Tucson, Arizona, with a different crew. At the end of the long workday, a Navajo stuntman hands me a brightly feathered kachina doll and tells me it's a powerful Native American symbol for fertility. "Touch the doll and soon there'll be a lover," he predicts.
       Startled, I drop the doll from my hands into my lap, then as quickly toss the hot-potato fertility kachina back to the stuntman.
       "No thanks," I blush.
       The next day I fly back to my steady life as a single mother.
       And to a phone call.
       The Captain is on the line.
       "My assistant's out today," I tell him when the receptionist buzzes him through to me, I think, by mistake.
       "How about lunch?" he invites with great charm, ignoring my brush off.
       "Busy," I say.
       And I am. I have a client meeting at noon.
       "How about dinner?"
       "Tonight?" I am surprised.
       "Yes."
       "Sorry, I can't," I answer. And I really can't. "I have to be somewhere at eight o'clock."
       "I'll buy you a drink at seven. Tell me where."
       He is persuasive, persistent, polite. I am thinking he is thinking I have some imminent work project for him. But I don't. I feel guilty for wasting his time. What I do have is a standing Tuesday-evening therapy appointment to discuss the hardships of single parenting. I don't tell him this, yet. I'm also wondering what he's not telling me.
       "Okay," I relent. "Just for a quick drink. How about the Rover Café?"
       "See you," he says. "Gotta run."
       Click. The conversation is over.
But I can hear him smiling.