The chimera is a fantasy or illusion that often starts out as a small thing but grows inside our imagination until it has a powerful hold on us, consuming all our thoughts and energies. What's amazing about the chimera is that all the power comes from the person who thinks about the chimera, not the chimera itself. In fact, the chimera, as the case study shows below, is a hollow cipher, a nonentity that is dependent on our needy imaginations for its survival. Here, then, is a case study of a man whose life was destroyed by his chimera:
THE CURSE OF THE CHIMERA
Graham had been married briefly to Linda, a beautiful Mediterranean woman. She was a splendor to behold, voluptuous, large-lipped, blessed with long curly brown hair. She reminded Graham of Anita Ekberg in Federico Fellini’s famous fountain scene in La Dolce Vita. Linda possessed what many might call that larger-than-life kind of beauty, the kind that is so powerful and delectable that Graham enjoyed, in the public arena, the assurance and satisfaction that other men seethed with envy and admiration whenever they saw him with her.
But not all was well. Linda was often awakened at night by Graham crying out the name of another woman, Tatiana, someone he had not seen in over ten years. After hearing Graham uttering Tatiana’s name, Linda would leave the bed and weep downstairs. It had reached the point that Graham could no longer comfort her, for he had learned that in these moments she was inconsolable and that his words, no matter how kind and sincere, only tormented her all the more. Worse, Graham was repulsed by Linda’s peasant-like sobs and the hideous drink she had resorted to taking—a vermilion green chalky substance that her doctor prescribed for her upset stomach, which no doubt was the result of Graham’s nocturnal obsession with Tatiana. Whenever Graham contemplated Linda’s gaseous condition, he flared his nostrils in disgust and imagined his lovely Tatiana, so full of grace, sophistication, and splendor. Tatiana would never suffer such an unwomanly affliction that would require the consumption of a bitter-tasting noxious beverage. Nor would she ever cry like that. No indeed. Tatiana, Graham was sure, would weep in silence and her tears, running down her velvety cheeks, would only enhance her already sublime beauty.
Who was this woman who had gotten under Graham’s skin and had consumed his imagination? The funny thing was he barely knew her. His encounter with her had occurred over ten years earlier. Scheduled to enter Mr. Teenage Golden State in a couple of weeks, Graham was tanning himself at Cull Canyon Lake, when he noticed that an olive-skinned girl had thrown down her towel close to him and had plopped herself down on the sand. This was no ordinary girl. This was a sixteen-year-old goddess, the fabled Tatiana Minero. Her body slathered in a deliquescing, zero-sun protection tropical banana-coconut tanning oil, she was soon stretched out in the supine position, revealing her smooth, willowy body in a tiny green chambray bikini, the material so scanty that both top and bottom could easily fit inside a robin’s egg. Her straight, dark, silken brown hair flowed down the length of her sleek, reticulated back. Her diminutive ankles were adorned with little shimmering bracelets of tiny silver, almond-shaped bells that jingled when she walked, emitting a sort of siren’s call so that every time she stood up to walk toward the drinking fountains, all of the men at the lake, overcome with a sort of smoldering, glandular itch, abruptly stopped what they were doing to observe what was no doubt the most cataclysmic event of the day, the witnessing of Tatiana Minero strolling toward the drinking fountains to take a sip of water. To see Tatiana Minero get up from her towel, amble imperiously toward the fountains, wet her parched mouth, and return to her spot on the sand was to be keenly aware of a palpable change in the atmosphere. Male hormonal levels, tensions, and anxieties immediately began to rise and seethe as all men’s eyes were glued to Tatiana’s trajectory to and from the drinking fountains. It was as if her mere act of walking was a rare phenomenon, one of the great Wonders and Mysteries of the world, so that all the men at Cull Canyon Lake, not wanting to miss a second of this breathtaking spectacle, became completely fixated and motionless in a sort of bizarre time warp whereby Planet Earth seemed to have, in deference to Tatiana, stopped rotating. Graham could still see the men frozen between the apex of their leap off the diving board and the water below them; he could still see them stuck in mid-air as they lunge for a Frisbee or a football; he could still see them unable to clamp their teeth down on the mouth-watering poor boy sandwich they were eager to bite into just a moment before Tatiana Minero stood up and, like the Priestess of Planetary Rotation, halted the Earth’s revolution around the Sun. All of the men at the lake, their conversations and antics interrupted, their lives put on hold, their very thoughts jammed, were noticeably agape, their eyes burning with torment and insanity, as they beheld this sylphlike teenage girl walk ever so slowly toward the drinking fountains.
To add to the men’s misery, occasional breezes wafted Tatiana’s sweet-smelling tanning oil into their direction, affording them a redolent reminder of her presence so that, like dogs in some cruel Pavlovian experiment, the men shuddered with violent paroxysms as they inhaled her potent, ambrosial cocktail.
But the torment didn’t stop there. As if Tatiana wasn’t already unbearably irresistible, she also enjoyed the cachet and supernatural aura of belonging to a prized progeny of sisters, aunts, and cousins, who, known simply as The Minero Sisters, were legendary throughout the San Francisco East Bay for their beauty, the kind that aroused such passion that men squandered entire fortunes, warred and conspired against each other, and plotted diabolical schemes into the deep of the night for the privilege of being one of their suitors.
As Graham tried to relax on his pale orange Charlie Brown bedspread, he had heard some guys nearby whispering to each other, with the kind of conspiratorial glee reserved for surprise movie star appearances, about how this gorgeous girl lying on the sand next to him was one of the Minero Sisters. To merely utter the words “Minero Sisters” elicited an immediate smile and understanding and sometimes caused the hairs behind a man’s neck to bristle, for the words had the same kind of power and brand recognition as the words BMW, Mercedes Benz and Lexus.
A boy from Graham’s school had introduced him to Tatiana as she was lying on her beach towel just a few feet away from him. To Graham’s surprise, upon meeting him, her ears perked up and her dark saucer eyes seemed to greedily soak in her view of him as she sat upright, supported by her long, slender arms, their sleek shape and cocoa butter tan highlighted by gold arm bracelets coiled around her delicate wrists like writhing snakes. With a coquettish giggle, she outstretched her legs in front of her while her high-arched feet circled playfully, causing her ankle bells to jingle. Then turning her head toward Graham in a way that caused her long dark brown hair to whip around her body like a matador’s cape, she stared at him, asked him who he was and why she had never seen him before. The tone of her voice was downright domineering. She sounded like a mildly irritated queen who would have her informants beheaded for having failed to apprise her of Graham’s very existence. “How come I’ve never seen you before?” she asked again. Graham told her he attended Castro Valley High. No wonder, she said, she had never seen him; she was a student at Hayward High School. Then out of the blue, she asked him a question that caught him completely off guard:
“Are you a good kisser? Cause with a body like that, boy, it would be a real shame if you weren’t a good kisser.”
In shock, dumbed by her beauty, and paralyzed by such a brazen proposal, his bowels loosened, and he found himself unable to speak. He tried and tried with all his will to say something in response to her audacious remark but his lips were pressed shut. He would have been happy merely spitting out some incoherent gibberish, but his brain synapses were apparently short-circuited rendering his jaw locked and he was revealed for who he truly was, a helpless mute, a dumbfounded ninny, an inexperienced awkward-handed Billy goat, unworthy of holding court with the great Tatiana Minero.
His failure to respond to her scintillating offer seemed to tell her all she needed to know about him, which was, of course, that for all his tanned, sculpted muscles, he was in fact not a good kisser, not just in the literal sense of not being able to kiss, that is, the mechanical act of caressing her lips with his own, but in the fuller, broader, more devastating sense of not having the confidence, the moxie, and the élan, to express passion toward her. Her question about his kissing was in a way an ingenious work of espionage: She had sent a reconnaissance team, a sort of Geek Patrol, into his psyche to see just what he was made of and found, rather quickly, that he was indeed a geek, so that, armed with this information, she supremely turned around and did not speak to him again.
Ever.
It was not just that she did not speak to him, but on a more traumatic scale that she actually seemed to recede from his universe, fade, and disappear, forever out of his grasp so that now, over ten years later, he still reconstructed the event and imagined how rapturous it would have been had he had it within himself to respond to her question with something charming, assured, and sophisticated, something that would let her know that he was indeed the great kisser she had been looking for.
Ten years later after hearing Graham scream Tatiana’s name during his sleep one too many times, Linda finally left her husband and the divorce papers were signed soon after. Even after the divorce, Graham continued to dream of Tatiana. Sometimes she’d laugh at him. Sometimes she’d say she still wanted that kiss from him. Sometimes she’d cry because, she’d say, he had betrayed her for having never kissed her. Sometimes she did not even appear beautiful but looked decrepit, hollow, and reptilian. Graham knew Tatiana was not the same girl who had spoken to him at the lake over ten years ago. She had become something else entirely, a demon, a succubus, an unclean spirit that was rotting his soul, eating away at his relationships with other women, and showing no mercy on him. As the years passed, Tatiana’s image did not weaken. To the contrary, it grew and grew and became a potent drug for which an idiot like Graham was willing to throw away his entire life.
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