Part 2

Mr. Wrong; Real-Life Stories About the Men We Used to Love
by Harriet Brown

(Page 2 of 2)

After I had gone through a month of tai chi classes, meditated with the group three times weekly, and paid five thousand dollars for a series of energizings to help clear my system of "bad vibes," Master Eknath was waiting outside the ABC studios in his black Mazda Miata to whisk me away for an energizing session-free of charge. "What an honor," I thought, innocently enough.

A CD of Louis Armstrong's What a Wonderful World was playing as he sped along the West Side Highway en route to a park underneath the George Washington Bridge. I sat bolt upright in the leather seat (trying to hold my meditation posture), staring unabashedly at my driver, utterly mesmerized by Eknath's huge stomach, the way his stubby fingers grabbed the gear shift, the snapping clack of his chewing gum. Everything about him felt irresistible, and by the time we reached the park, innocence had gone on a hike; my body was aching for the master's touch.

I didn't have to wait long. As Master Eknath led me along a steep path, he suddenly stopped and pulled me so close I could feel his breath against my neck. "You'll come deep and hard for the Universe," he whispered into my ear as his fingers deftly lifted my Prada shift. A few minutes later the Universe was vibrating. Eknath, it turned out, was also a master of clitoral massage, and my orgasm sprang from so deep inside me and traveled with such velocity through my body that it was as if a switch, one I never knew existed, had been flipped on: sexually charged-one thousand watts and burning.

For the past few months I had been futilely trying to ignite sparks under my coolly British Zeke. This was instantaneous combustion. Within a month of my first rendezvous with the Zen master, Zeke and I were splitting our joint possessions down the middle and I was leaving our spacious loft for a ground-floor hovel in the West Village.

Precious real estate-2,000 square feet of New York City rent-controlled loft-forfeited. But I was dazed by my sudden sexual connection to the Universe, as well as the spiritual practice at the tai chi studio where I attended classes now every night after work, and my devotion to the powerful Eknath and his ability to make me shudder and come with fingers, tongue, and his surprisingly puny but adept penis. I considered a lost loft worth the sacrifice.

Most women can recall at least one man who so meshed with their body's needs that sex became like a drug. But my connection with Eknath leapt to another dimension. Sex with him was exactly as Shelley Duvall described to Woody Allen in the classic film Annie Hall. It was transcendental. Yet this was no Hollywood yarn. It was real-life consumption.

We met each evening on the sly after the tai chi classes, unbeknownst to his other students. Sometimes Eknath came to the apartment where I lived sparingly with only a desk, two straight-backed chairs, a bureau, a bed, a meditation cushion, dinner service for two (guess who?), and a wok to stir-fry meals for Eknath.

But more often we went to his penthouse apartment for a five-star seduction. There Eknath would slowly pull off my clothes and then lower me into a sudsy warm bath. After caressing my body with a soft sponge, he would help me out of the water, tenderly wrap my relaxed-as-a-lemming body in a fluffy towel, oil me down with jasmine, and slide me between his silk sheets. Then he would slowly, very slowly, work to arouse me to such heights, I eventually, and quite literally, left my body. As crazy as this might sound, without the use of drugs, alcohol, or staged special effects, when Eknath was inside me I saw the constellations: stars and planets and lights whipping around like a strobe.

In a few months, I was as utterly lost to him as a dog devoted to her master. Eknath knew it. In fact, I was convinced he knew everything. He would often tell me where I went for lunch and what I ordered on those afternoons we hadn't met. Sometimes he read my thoughts and would repeat them aloud as though he had a direct line into my mind. He predicted news events before they happened, catastrophes years in advance (one time when we were walking through the World Trade Center he said, "These buildings are temporary"). He once bought me the very dress I had tried on during a lunch hour. And he was never, ever wrong about how to keep me yearning for his practiced touch.

As the months wore on, my life revolved around Eknath in smaller and tighter circles. No longer did I share any personal news with colleagues or get together with old friends. I spoke with other cult members only on the condition that gossip or negative talk was off-limits. Weekends were spent at the Westchester Zendo, a several-million-dollar estate-in-progress forty-five minutes north of the city.

Soon Eknath was extracting a price for his attention. He made demands.

"The only underwear you can wear is this," he said one night, handing over a tight black leather thong with a silver clamp by the crotch. "Now try it on and show me how it looks."

Self-consciously I changed out of my comfortable Fruit of the Loom into the groin-killing leather bondage panties and modeled them in front of him, my head hanging, shamed. Eknath grinned, then reached out and pulled them up by the thong straps until I felt bruising from the clamp. "You'll get used to this. But don't ever come here unless they're on you," he said, eyes glinting.

Eknath wasn't kidding. One time I showed up at his penthouse without underwear, thinking this would be a real turn-on. He opened the door, pulled up my skirt, and pushed me away, slamming the door in my face. I wept all the way home. Feeling lost, abandoned, unloved, and hopeless, I was near suicidal. What had become of the independent, career-driven woman, the one who dangled New York City hotshots like beads on a necklace?

As time moved along, Eknath's demands became harsher and more sinister. If he was in the mood, I had to feed him while I sat on my knees. Other times he humiliated me in front of the group by announcing, "No one talk to her. She has a bad vibe." Once, he stopped his car abruptly, reached over, opened the door, and pushed me out because I had worn a scent other than jasmine.

Our lovemaking, which I continued to crave, was now mixed with smarting smacks and contorted positions. I couldn't tell the pain from the pleasure. But the light show explosions were massive. When I left his place, I walked home like a zombie in a state of arousal and misery. I was Patty Hearst without the family bucks.

Who knows how long this might have gone on and where it would have led? But almost as easily as I'd slipped into the underbelly of Eknath's manipulative world, I snapped out of it when he commanded me to carry out a particularly heinous plan.

Eknath had told me to convince a cult member's father-an extremely wealthy elderly man with a somewhat public image as a successful financier-that his daughter had written an inflammatory book claiming he had sexually molested her. I was to call the father and set up a meeting at a restaurant under the pretense that I was writing a profile of him for a magazine. Once there, I was to tell him about the book and insist it was about to be published-that is, unless he paid for the manuscript with a hefty sum.

It was a convoluted plot that only someone who was comfortable with extortion would have thought up-or arranged. I was not that person.

Copyright © 2007 by Harriet Brown

About the Author

Harriet Brown is the award-winning author of The Promised Land, a collection of poetry, and The Good-bye Window: A Year in the Life of a Day-Care Center. Her poems have appeared in Poetry and Prairie Schooner, among other literary magazines. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Times and other national publications. She lives with her husband and two daughters in Madison, Wisconsin.