Dreamgirl Chapter 5: “I can’t say whose exorcism is greater”

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I have been endlessly in a threesome I don’t want to be in with married couples, psychological ones where I feel oppressed by the conventions of their marriage. It is them against me. My landlords, who are a married couple. My former closest friends of the school parent group. When, after holidaying together, the wife wrote me a letter about no longer wanting to be friends with me she made a point to say it included her husband. It was so shocking and bewildering, I wondered if I had slept with him behind my own back. 

Being triangulated in this way makes me feel unanchored and out of control - like I’m close to losing it at the school gates, or that I may draw on the walls of the rental. As a single mother I feel pressure - as a sex worker is pressured - to behave in a certain way so as not to threaten nuclear families.

A major porn sub-genre is punishment sex. For example, “after the divorce is settled the aggrieved ex-husband fucks his former wife on the desk where the judge made his decision”. Or “a female comedienne steals a male comedian’s best punchline so he punishes her - with his dick!” I think of punishing the husband and wife sexually, this school couple with him I am so upset. All sex is, it might be argued, score settling, though it’s usually a score with your own past. I’ve carried hurt and shame forever, as all of us have. It is to my benefit that I can always go into a room and write. I do not need a partner to do so. But I have moments of envying that Casey uses this pain and shame for her work in a far more literal sense than I do as an author. I can’t say whose exorcism is greater. My public reward is greater, but she has brought the world more release. 

When Casey agreed to visit me in London over the Autumn, I didn’t invite her to stay in my home, in case it’s something my ex-husband could use against me if there were ever a child custody issue. Could it be? She is a sex worker but also a human. I imagined her up in my loft bed and how well she might rest there. It isn’t lost on me that this new friend who lives outside conventional societal parameters is L.A based, drawing me back to the city I had to leave because of the breakdown of the nuclear family. That I failed utterly, said my ex-husband, at being a wife and running a home. 

My husband said the clothes I’d been wearing the night he’d met me were deceptive advertising. That, in my vintage A-line dress and angora cardigan, I looked like a 50’s housewife, but did not turn out to be domestic. That I had confused him with my appearance. 

I book Casey’s London hotel, and, to do so, she must tell me her real name, the one she was born with. It is so Jewish, I just have more questions to ask about the places our upbringings merge and diverge. I feel like neither of us acknowledge out loud what a big deal it is for this “secret” name to be spoken, almost a Torah passage itself "And then the name of the porn star was spoken and the name was...” 

Or, if not Old Testament exactly, I know that this reaching out through the screen to each other seems to hold a mystical power. This is something new. A portal has been opened between us, performer and consumer, sex worker and ex-girlfriend of a porn addict. Casey posts on instagram that day: “Many relationships that are worthy of repair are discarded because we have poor modelling of true love”. 

I tell her it hit me hard. She says she’s “still in her feels” if I want to talk. I am making dinner for my daughter so we text. She is herself, feeling deep heartache about the end of one of her primary relationships. The pain seems not at all diffuse for her just because it is one of several. I was quite wrong there. 

“My husband said the clothes I’d been wearing the night he’d met me were deceptive advertising. That, in my vintage A-line dress and angora cardigan, I looked like a 50’s housewife, but did not turn out to be domestic.”

It sounds incredibly complex to have a relationship finish with someone who you still have to be on camera with. 

“It is complicated. The whole thing's very complex. But he wants to make it work. It’s...Yeah, I think a lot of people in the real world, like an average family who has like a husband and a wife, and they go off to their jobs and they do their 9 to 5 and then they come home and cook dinner - I don't know. That’s not my life”. 

Visiting my parents house for dinner, I admire, on their wall, a Victorian engraving I hope will get passed down to me: it is a picture of a weeping young woman being led away by a police man and it says “She’s only a lassie who ventured on life’s stormy path, ill advised. Engraved by John Held jar with a heart full of pity.” Ever since I was a little girl, before I was let out in the world way too young, I felt it was about me. I’d like to invite Casey to Shabbat when she’s here. But would I tell them what she does for a living or not? She asks this same question of herself, more than ever of late, in social settings. It is the thing that causes her the most internal struggle, the fissure between pride in her work and fear of judgment. 

I have the urge to tell my ex boyfriend’s favourite porn star that my heart hurts some nights with longing for him and I just, I just loved him. That’s all. So I tell her. And she says the right thing to soothe me. This reaching across the divide towards a woman I should have been afraid of - the porn star your partner wants so much they no longer want you! - is helping me more than any other friendship. It’s very strange. It’s very lovely, as mysterious as what particular visuals and sounds make a viewer climax.

Read past Dreamgirl instalments here: Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4