There was so much buried in that bald summary. When she first met Marc, she had still been the guitarist in a band called the Sideways Smile. They were only starting out, working bars and student venues, and music was much more of a hobby for her than a career, but still it had been a really important part of her life. Guernica, the band’s lead singer, had been Liz’s first and only girlfriend, an experiment that hadn’t worked out at all but had still been earthshaking at the time. She was also the friend who had given Liz that piece of wisdom about owning the odds.
Marc didn’t get punk rock, and he didn’t like the rest of the band. Guernica, Villette and Jo hadn’t liked him much either, and somehow between their strong antagonisms Liz had lost track of what she herself wanted and settled for what seemed to be the lesser evil. She had stopped doing gigs.
It wasn’t the first surrender, or the last, but somehow it was the one that stood out. It was the first time Liz gave up something that turned out to have been a part of her own identity. A lot of surprising things faded away along with that punk rock persona: her self-confidence, her sense of humor, even part of her sex drive. The aggressive, unruly part.
On the other hand … the day she hocked her Fender American Standard with its customized V-shaped headstock so she could buy a crib and a playpen for her soon-to-be-incoming son, she realized that her center of gravity had shifted in any case. She hoped she would play again someday: she had kept her battered amp (nobody would have bought it anyway), her crappy little electronic tuner and the embroidered strap Guernica had made for her. But her attention for the time being was with the little jelly bean growing inside her. The jelly bean needed her in a way that rock and roll probably didn’t.
“So your husband was psychologically abusive,” Beebee summed up. “Did that ever turn physical?”
“Not then,” Liz said. “But when we’d been together about five years—after I had Zac—he lost his job at Westinghouse. That was when the rot set in, I guess. He had this idea about setting up his own business. Kind of a courier thing, with bikes. Only you could also rent the bikes, so even if he wasn’t carrying a lot of messages he could still make money. But he never managed to get a start-up loan. He’d spend weeks and weeks doing a business plan, then take it into a bank without an appointment and just sit there all day, asking if one of the managers would talk to him. Then he’d bring all the papers home again, burn them in the back yard and start over. It all … everything … just made him madder and madder.”
It wasn’t even close to being an adequate explanation. But even if she had a million words, Liz knew she still wouldn’t be able to fill in the blanks. In the end there was no explanation. No way to build a bridge between the good times and the bad.
In the good times, they had sat curled up together on a secondhand sofa, watching old movies and inventing new dialogue for them, giggling like kids. Before that, when he was still a secret from Liz’s parents, they met up at cheap motels (the cheapest they could find) for sex that felt thrillingly illicit rather than grubbily compromised. God, she had been so horny that first year—and before it, come to that. But never after.
Later on, it was Marc who cut Zac’s cord, at the midwife’s invitation, and laid his newborn son reverently on Liz’s chest to take his first meal.
After Molly was born, all four of them would spend Sunday mornings at their tiny garden plot next to the urban farm. Until she could walk, Molly sat in a papoose strapped to Marc’s back, good as gold while they worked. When she could walk and talk, she joined them, singing “I help you!” as she waddled around the tiny plot of ground with a tablespoon to use as a trowel.
The change was probably gradual, but it seemed in retrospect to have hit as suddenly as a traffic accident. Marc stopped playing with the kids. Embargoed the garden plot. Had no time for movie nights. He would spend his evenings sitting and staring at nothing, his head tilted back as though all his failures were piled up in front of him so high he couldn’t see over the top of them. Liz couldn’t bear to see him like that. She had tried to help, to comfort him, and that had been the wrong move. So, so wrong. It gave him something closer to concentrate his bitterness on: something he could actually reach out and touch.
He had reached out and touched her in ways she had not seen coming.
In their last months together, things had got to the point where just seeing her, just having her be in the same room with him, was a trigger. There was enough anger there to keep him filled up constantly: every outburst emptied him, exhausted him, but only for a little while. He’d cry and say he was sorry, and Liz would cry and forgive him. And then he’d start building up to the next one.
And at the same time, Liz had been reaching a point where all her arguments for staying with him failed her, one by one.
He’ll come out on the other side of this. But he never would. Once you give yourself permission to treat the person you’re supposed to love like shit on your shoe, you don’t ever rescind that permission. The more you do it, the more momentum you seem to get from having done it before. The benchmark keeps moving further and further, and there isn’t any end point except the obvious one.
If you love him, you’ve got to see him through the bad times. But the bad times were bad for both of them, and part of Marc’s sickness was claiming all the grievance for himself. That didn’t leave a role for her except as one of the things that were turning out bad.
We’ve got to stay together for the children’s sake. That one was the last to go, but it went at last on the night when he dragged Molly upstairs by her arm and shut her in her room because she was playing too loud and he couldn’t think straight. Liz could have borne anything if the kids were okay, but the kids needed to be saved from Marc too. Zac in particular needed to be saved from his influence, from having that poisonous macho pantomime in his line of sight every day of his life until it sank into his soul and curdled him like milk.
“Did you file for full custody?” Beebee asked. She was sticking to the procedural stuff, steering clear of the barbed wire entanglements of old feelings.
“I did,” Liz said. “Yeah. And there was sort of a history. Hospital visits. Times when neighbors called 911. Times when he’d left marks on me. There was an evidence trail, you know? But Marc is … He’s plausible. Likeable, even. And his sister paid for him to get a decent lawyer whereas I had court-appointed counsel and he didn’t read up on anything before the day. A lot of the statements and evidence I’d collected got disallowed, and the judge decided that the kids needed a dad as well as a mom. So …”
“So you’ve lived with this bullshit ever since.”
“Exactly. Well, no, it’s mostly been okay. He gets Zac and Molly two weekends a month, and he seems to try his best to give them a good time when they’re with him. And he met someone, a woman named Jamie Langdon. I think she’s been good for him. She makes jewelry. And she’s studying web development at CCAC. She’s in her second year.”
“That’s great,” said Beebee noncommittally. Liz realized she had gone without a break from talking about her own life to talking about Marc’s. When they were together she had done that all the time, as though she was the starting act and he was the main event. This wasn’t something she could blame Marc for, it was a fault line in her—an instinct for surrendering to a more powerful personality that was probably part of what had drawn her to him in the first place.