Madam. Jenny Angell

tapping, complaining, anything to keep from thinking, from dwelling on that narcissistic disappointment.

      I still am amazed at how forceful and strong I was with my clients, my drivers, my girls; and yet I lost all that strength and confidence when I was around Jesse. I spent month after month with this man – if you can call our loose liaison being together – and hated myself the entire time for not standing up to him.

      When I finally did, I learned another of life’s lessons: let someone into your life, and you’re handing them the means to hurt you on a silver platter.

      And he did.

      We had a fight, a dazzling, brilliant fight, with objects hurled and broken and the downstairs tenant pounding angrily on the door. The names Jesse called me were bad enough. The sneering references to my sexual preferences and performances were pretty awful. But the things that he said about me in the clubs, to other people, to people who mattered – I couldn’t understand how he could hate me so much to want to destroy me like that. I just didn’t get it.

      And it was humiliating, embarrassing in a way that I’d never been embarrassed before. I thought about wearing sunglasses all the time. I thought about not going out. I tried not to think about any of it.

      So he left, came back, left again, and came back again. My business and my popularity were growing, but here I was emotionally ensnared by a man with the temperament of a spoiled child.

      The irony is that I knew what I was doing. I could see it, I didn’t like it, and yet I kept doing it.

      And the whole time we were together, I can’t ever remember Jesse calling me Abby.

      That should have said it all.