Let Sotomayor Be the Judge: Chapter 28

(Re)Making Love: a serial memoir

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor

Come in the middle? Here’re links to ➡️ Chapter One, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 9 , Chapter 10, Chapter 11, Chapter 12, Chapter 13, Chapter 14 , Chapter 15 , Chapter 16, Chapter 17, Chapter 18, Chapter 19, Chapter 20, Chapter 21, Chapter 22, Chapter 23, Chapter 24, Chapter 25 , Chapter 26, Chapter 27

Let Sotomayor Be the Judge

When Judge Sotomayor was about to be confirmed to the Supreme Court, I was more interested in her love life. She lives alone now.

The New York Times told me that some time ago, after her divorce (she married young), she “had fallen in love with the dapper and gray-bearded Peter White, a building contractor and that by 1998, they were engaged and living together, though they put off a wedding until after her Senate confirmation [to the Court of Appeals]. Her induction speech turned unexpectedly moving when she spoke of him. ‘Peter,’ she said, turning to her fiancé at the time, ‘you have made me a whole person, filling not just the voids of emptiness that existed before you, but making me a better, a more loving and a more generous person.’ … ‘Many of my closest friends,’ she added, ‘forget just how emotionally withdrawn I was before I met you.’ … With that, Mr. White helped her slip into a black appellate robe. … Less than two years later, she gave a party at their newly renovated apartment for his 50th birthday. And not long after that, their relationship ended. He returned to Westchester County, bought a small boat and married a woman who was an acquaintance of the judge and 14 years her junior.”

Bought a boat? Gimme a break.

Let Sotomayor be the judge:

Nietzsche asks, Can you give yourself your own evil and your own good and hang your own will over yourself as a law? Can you be your own judge and avenger of your law? Terrible it is to be alone with the judge and avenger of one’s own law. Thus is a star thrown out into the void and into the icy breath of solitude.

. . . There are feelings which want to kill the lonely; and if they do not succeed, well, then they themselves must die. But are you capable of this—to be a murderer?

It took more than three years for my separation agreement to be signed. I don’t fully understand the delay as not much money was at stake, and I did want it signed. D. says he did too, but I think the agreement presented a finality that I needed and he didn’t. I could be wrong. Ultimately, he saw that signing it would help me to believe in him—and it did.

At first while it was unsigned—even though we lived apart—I feared dating or, as it turns out, screwing around because I feared angering D. and because I believed if I were not legally separated, I committed adultery. That may in fact be true, based on the ten commandments, a pretty good source. Do we read them literally?

Thou shalt not kill.
Thou shalt not commit adultery.
Honor thy father and mother.

Nietzsche says, The worst enemy you can encounter will always be you, yourself; you lie in wait for yourself in caves and woods.

The first man I had sex with after D. left me was married and I knew it from the get-go. He knew me from my lecture work at the Smithsonian—took one of my classes there. I now wonder if I was giving off light the way a firefly flashes for sex.

Firelfly image via National Geographic Kids

This man, a.,  would assert that some of the females eat the males.

a. wrote down for me all the reasons I should not sleep with him. He was seeking a long-term, casual affair in the city: my new condo would be convenient.

You’ve got to admire the honesty of what he told me:

“Things a man seeking an affair but wishing to be honest might say. He entitled this Love’s Labour’s Lost:

“You do not want to be involved with someone like me. I could give you the Letterman 10 reasons but you don’t need that many. Did you know that I am:

“The grand wizard of the order of remorseless philanderers
“A love sucking leach
“One who likes to toy with women and words
“An emotional and melancholy romantic
“One who loves love
“Emotionally needy
“Unfaithful
“Surely that is more than enough to make any sane woman avoid me like the plague.”

a. also told me he had a long-term girlfriend whom he loved but couldn’t see anymore because he was ruining her life. He lives in D.C. She lives in one of those New England states: Vermont or New Hampshire or Maine where he bought some real estate that he, on occasion, “must manage on-site.”

He buys and sells large apartments, including tenements, and office buildings—this career after a long distinguished career in one of the sciences (vague on purpose here).

He pursued relentlessly once he knew “my story,” as if I knew “my story.” But I was good at the poor-little-me-husband-rejects-me story when a. invited me to lunch.

And I had all that La Perla underwear. And I owned a condo in D.C. that I never let real-estate-guy into it. Instead I did this:

I had unexpected—not excused—sex with him in a building he owned that was being changed over, for a new renter, offices being readied. He had taken me to lunch and said before he dropped me at the metro, might he make a quick stop? Come along. While he stood evaluating the progress of the renovation, he said he’d take me to his club (there are such clubs in D.C., once called men’s clubs: Who knew?) on Monday after the weekend that he’d spend with his wife, that he’d take me there in the late afternoon, to an elegant room where he would meet me again the next morning. It seemed so civilized, so genteel, so considerate, his proposal, his mannerly adultery. “That’s how it would be,” he said in the stripped-down office where we stripped down.

I removed my shirt after he kissed me. I removed my shoes and socks and trousers. My feet stuck to the floor because it had been treated with something that is done to floors before the final flooring is laid. He removed my panties that I’d chosen special to go with the bra even though they didn’t match. I wore the bra with the tiny pink ribbons, one on the edge of each strap, the black bra with pink-stitched quilting across my breasts. My panties were sheer pale cream with a scalloped edge of embroidered flowers. The flowers, rimmed with green embroidered leaves, were the same shade of pink as the tiny ribbons, so tiny one would think a fairy or an angel child had tied them. I thought, Angel fingers on my chest, where the thin black straps lay, where the ribbon barely touched my skin. I thought this some time after I’d gone into the ladies room to tidy up and to clean the bottoms of my shoes which were covered with the sticky stuff. At home I washed my feet because they were also covered with the pale cream residue of the floor that had lain under the wood-brown Formica table where I’d lain while he’d stood and fucked me.

And someone saw us. The renter perhaps? Whoever the suited man was, he walked away. But his shadow remains on the inside of my eyelids.

I sat alone that weekend while a. and his wife went out with friends and knew that my father was right, when my father lay in a state of anesthesia-induced schizophrenia after his hip had broken and been repaired, when he said, “You’re a whore.”

I refuse real-estate-guy: The Formica table and the dirt on the soles of my feet.

Real-estate-guy responds: “Mary, you are a ball buster!! I need to see a crack in your armour my dear sweet lovely lady—I think.” Was the “I think” a comment on what he needed or on the question of my sweetness?

Later he pursued on issues of faith? I never understood. Catholics help me with this one.

a. said, “I need to convert you to a Catholic for whom hope and faith are enduring.”

He wrote: “Tomorrow is Lent and I will abstain until Easter the most wonderful holy day in Christendom.” What was he abstaining from? Visiting the girlfriend in Vermont or New Hampshire? She was Catholic. That he’d told me. A single mother who worked two jobs: social worker and hotel housekeeper (how he met her: she carried his bags) and who raised one child, a daughter, alone.

During Lent, my separation agreement was finally signed. During Lent, I had lunch at Zaytinya, a tapas restaurant I love, with real-estate-guy a., who asked, “So, is your agreement signed?” And I answered, “Yes.” “Well then,” he said, “let’s go to your condo.”

I told him D. and I were seeing one another.

Yes, I have begun accepting dinner invitations, a movie. Sometimes strained, sometimes strange but familiar like dreaming.

a. said, “The only reason he would ever get back with you is to avoid paying you alimony.” I asked about the girlfriend. He told me that when her daughter had gone to college, she’d gone to an Ashram in India and when she returned, she broke off the affair for good.

That night I slept and dreamt: Heavy woman on road in Vermont, North Conway. She is outside and so is her refrigerator. My mother appears in the dream, leaves me to talk with the woman who tells her/me? that she must address the problem and the problem is that there is no sex in her marriage. So, I go with my mother to solve the problem. She and my father visit a whore. The bordello is across the street from a school in the middle of suburbia. The whore gives us each a set of picture frames with family pictures that are not our own; each of us has a picture of ourselves inside another family. The frames of the pictures are red. The whore dances with my father. I cannot bear to watch and take my pictures and leave. My mother finds me and tells me that all is well. I ask, How did that happen? She says, The whore danced with me. You can live here with us in this beautiful house.

Nineteen years ago my mother lay stroke-stricken and dying on the hospital bed where I’d come to see her in the part of the hospital where the dying are left to die. She was asleep and would die the next morning. The sheet was off, her nightgown, up around her waist, her hand on her clitoris. I covered her with the sheet. The memory lies on the insides of my eyelids.

If Nietzsche is right that we must murder the feelings that want to kill the lonely, I had not begun that conversation with myself. I had murdered my body instead.

Meanwhile D. tells me over dinner that he reads fiction in the solitude of his condo. I ask, “Why fiction?” He mumbles something about learning stuff. D. is a scientist and a financial guy. I want to know who he’s reading. He talks of Tom McGuane, José Saramago. He says he’s reading my unpublished novel (later published: Who by Fire). He says, “What you know. I want that.” I’m not sure what he means or what this has to do with me. I’m confused and moved.

Does he want me? I don’t ask that.

Let Sotomayor be the judge.

Love,

Coming next: Chapter 29 “Let the Chase Begin”

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