by Liz Phair
“Well, that explains a lot,” I quip. I’m in shock. I get off the phone and start laughing. Catastrophes this big unfold in slow motion. Kim keeps asking me if I need to pull over, but I want to get back to Los Angeles. I have to see him in person. This whole thing feels totally insane.
As we drive back through the cactus-dotted mesas of the Mojave Desert, I keep thinking about what Rory knew and when he’d known it. I pry open all our old memories to see what’s really going on below the surface. Beneath our picturesque life together, a separate timeline has been running. Two realities, parallel but distinct. I will admit that, for one surreal moment, it feels electrifying to be a part of something so fiendish, so calculatingly dishonest. I could book a spot on a daytime TV talk show, with his baby mama and his ex-wife and me pouring our hearts out to Maury Povich. It’s tabloid-level awful, but it’s happening to me.
I go straight to his apartment. He looks terrible, really bad. He seems to be expecting me to rage, but I feel strangely compassionate. I’m numb, as though I were going through some kind of dissociative episode. How can the person standing in front of me, whom I trust and admire, be a liar and a common cheat? I struggle to connect the dots. It seems clear that no matter what he’s done, it’s worse to be him than me. A person would have to be really broken to run a game like this; to deceive himself and everybody else so effectively.
He’s despondent. He says he’ll do anything I want. He tells me how much he loves me, and he begs me to forgive him. He says we can do everything my way from now on, that he will be completely honest. Inexplicably, I’m entertaining the idea. This is surreal, and I’m not thinking rationally. My reality has been blown apart, and all the pieces are flying around everywhere. I’m lost in the middle of the chaos, floating in the eye of a storm. I’m also really, really calm. I know one thing: I want to have sex with him.
His face is open and hopeful as we lie on his bed together. The shades are drawn, and the room is filled with that soft blue light that only happens on certain stately afternoons. He looks so vulnerable as he fucks me, so real and present. I really feel him this time, after months of us being disconnected from each other, and I’m grateful to have this experience again. There are no more secrets poisoning the space between us.
I lie across his back afterward, breathing in the scent of his skin. I curl my finger around the soft tendrils of hair at the nape of his neck, whispering that I want to do it again. “This could be the last time I ever get to touch you,” I tell him, and I mean it. I get choked up when I hear myself say it out loud. He flips over, and we have sex again. We get up and shower.
Things get hazy after that. There’s some missing time. Looking back, I can only recall the two most traumatic incidents before I get out of there for good.
We’re sitting in his living room talking. I’m listening to him tell me more lies about his affair. My plan is to ask him every question I can think of, because I’ll never have the chance again, and I’m going to need some kind of narrative to try to make sense of our relationship. I stand up at one point to go to the bathroom, and while I’m gone he apparently checks my phone, because when I get back, he says, “Who’s this?” He’s pointing to a text I just received from a man I recently had coffee with.
“Is this a date?” He’s accusing me.
“It was coffee, in the daytime, and we were broken up, remember?”
His demeanor has changed completely. He’s irate, seething with jealousy. He’s so upset that he’s visibly shaking. “I can’t believe you would do this. I’m not even ready to start dating yet,” he says, drawing himself up to his full height. His tone is imperious. “You need to leave now.” His eyes flash as he points toward the door.
I can’t believe what I’m hearing. I look closely at his expression to make sure he’s serious. The man who’s just told me he’s had a baby with another woman while we were together is furious that I’d go for coffee with another man. Suddenly, I’m not looking at my shitty boyfriend anymore; I’m scanning the situation through the lens of vital statistics. I’m alone in an apartment with a six-foot, two-inch male weighing approximately 220 pounds who has lightning reflexes and is enraged, and possibly crazy. At least crazy enough to scare the hell out of me.
Again, the event path goes haywire. I have no idea what happens next, or why I choose to stay in his apartment. I wish I could tell you now that I laughed in his face and walked out the door. I wish there’d been a limo waiting to take me back to my fabulous life and skyrocketing career. I hate letting you see how much I needed him, how invested I’d become in a person who didn’t even exist, really. There’s no good explanation. It’s Twilight Zone all the way.
Somehow we get it together enough to function, and the girls come back from their mother’s house. I’m trying to act normally, for their sakes, but I’m shattered inside, because I know I’ll never see them again. They’ll never understand why I left, because the person responsible for this tragedy will never admit his guilt to that extent. He lies. That’s been demonstrated. Hadley and Avery will think I abandoned them. In my heart, they’re my daughters, and hurting them like this is unbearable. I want to die, and that feeling will last for a very, very long time. But I can’t keep seeing them right now. I can’t walk through the fire of Rory’s new circumstances with them. We’re not getting out of the stairwell this time. We’re not going to reach that exit. It’s going to stay dark for a very, very long while. I know what it’s going to do to them psychologically, after I leave, when they realize I’m gone for good.
Believe it or not, that fucker isn’t even finished yet. He drops one last bomb, just to make sure every part of me is dead. His mom and sister are arriving in twenty minutes to meet the new member of the family. They’re bringing gifts and rallying around the new mother. I’ve been cut cleanly out of the picture. The ramifications are starting to pile up around me until I think I’m going to suffocate. The numbness has worn off, and I am sobbing as I get into my car and drive home. I don’t stop crying, in reality, for six months straight.
I try to stay sober for my son, but it doesn’t always work. It’s December now, the festive season, and everyone I run in to who hasn’t seen me for a while asks me when we’re getting engaged. I’m unable to date. I’ll be unable to date for the next year, and—if you want to know the truth—for the next ten. I don’t trust my judgment anymore, and I’m afraid of being manipulated. I’ll miss my innocence, but I’ve come to terms with the reason that this was my fate. There was a time when I didn’t care how my actions affected other people. I was unhappy, and I didn’t let myself feel enough to connect with anyone else’s pain. Everybody has to pay for their sins, and Rory will, too—eventually. The scales of justice have a funny way of balancing.
The winter drags on. And then it’s spring. I don’t rebound as well as expected. There are days when I sit in my living room and look out at the sea until the sun goes down, nursing a drink, letting the house go dark around me. I feel so worthless. The man I loved has stabbed me in the back, pushed me out of a moving car and left me in a ditch by the side of the road.
I can’t go back to therapy after this. I can’t talk about it. I feel hollow, emotionally vacant. My therapist is worried. He calls every couple of weeks to check in. I keep putting him off, saying I’m not ready to see him yet, but I’m scaring myself. I’m behaving recklessly, taking unnecessary risks—indifferent to my personal safety. Making my adrenaline spike is the only way I can feel anything. I know my therapist is training for the Catalina Classic paddleboard race, so the next time he calls, I sarcastically suggest, “I’m not coming back to therapy, but you can teach me how to surf if you want to.”
I never dreamed he would take me up on it. But that fine man, that therapeutic pioneer, says, “Sure.”
“I can’t charge you for it,” he clarifies, “but if that will help, I’d be happy to do it.”
Within a
week, I’m back out in the waves, this time straddling a big, buoyant foam board, my therapist treading water beside me. Part of me wants to give up. Depression has sapped my will to try. But the physics of the sport won’t let me. I’m on the board, and the waves are coming in. A surfboard is designed to catch the column of water, whether you’re on it or not. Your weight is what drives you forward—faster, if you lean into the momentum. Sometimes I crouch, wobbling to keep my balance, and sometimes I kneel, like I’m proposing to the shore. Learning to surf is hard work, and I have to actively participate.
He teaches me how to count waves in sets. He shows me how to turtle under a crumbling crest. He moves my board into position and pushes me forward until I drop down into the wall of the wave. If I’m lucky enough to catch a ride all the way in, I scream like a lottery winner, trust-falling into the foaming white water while my board shoots up onto the beach. Given what I’ve been through, I refuse to wear a leash. He doesn’t cringe when our fellow surfers smirk at my antics. He stays right beside me, and he never leaves.
One time, during our lesson, I look over at him and feel a shiver of recognition. My therapist is the one submerged up to his neck in deep water, waves threatening to break over his shoulder, nothing to hold on to. As soon as he thrusts me forward, I will be leaving him behind. He will wait out there alone as I barrel in toward the shore. This is the sacrifice he makes to try to heal me, to fix the pain that can’t be stitched up with words.
He brings his own board, eventually. Some mornings we just sit out there, stroking the glassy surface with our hands, our feet pickling in the brine. I see dads I know from Nick’s school paddle by, and we say hello. Slowly, my confidence returns—simply by getting up early and getting into water that’s unpredictable and much too cold. At work, when I’m composing music for television shows, seawater trapped in my sinuses suddenly pours out my nose and splashes onto the keyboard. It’s pretty funny, and I’m able to laugh at my own foibles again. I no longer feel like an exposed nerve everywhere I go.
Being in nature is a gift. The dawns we witness are so heavenly, so pastel and peaceful, that the sky and the sea appear to merge. It’s just layers of pink and purple, smoke and orange, blue and gold. Even when it’s overcast and drizzly, the water turns this velvety, viscous green that is indescribably luxurious. There’s a zen to surfing that comes from the environment itself. You’re betwixt worlds, removed from the hustle and bustle of civilization but not so far out of your element as to be in danger. You exist in this narrow zone of grace that feels ephemeral and ancient.
The rhythm of the waves crashing on the beach is hypnotic. You watch shorebirds flock in great wheeling arcs across the sky. Pelicans skim the shoals in a single-file line, coasting on their gargantuan wings. Occasionally, a pod of dolphins cruises through the surf break, so close you can almost touch their silken gray backs, their placid, piston-puffing exhalations just another sound in one big glorious symphony.
Sometimes we talk about how I’m doing, but mostly we just bob in the water, intermittently catching waves. There’s an unspoken affirmation in our surf sessions that I desperately need. He isn’t my doctor in these moments; he’s my friend. I don’t know what an ethics board would make of his decision to help me, but I know that, through his willingness to climb into my nightmare and take that risk, he’s showing me how to trust men again.
My eyes still occasionally drift over to that mansion Rory and I wanted to buy, only now I see it very differently. It’s just a box of metal and concrete with a couple of well-placed windows. There’s no dream, no future in it. The people who own those big houses on the strand never live in them anyway. They stand empty and dark eleven months out of the year, a stage set for tourists to gawk at. The owners come back and throw extravagant parties during the holidays, but it’s all for show. A poignant reminder that a house is not the same thing as a home.
Imagine for a second that you’re standing inside one of those rooms right now, looking out at me through the UV-tinted windows. The sea sparkles, distant and flat, like an image on the screen of a muted television. Feel the silence, the stillness around you. Taste the stifling air that’s been circulating for months without a breeze in this four-story mausoleum. Inhale that factory-floor new-carpet smell. Pass by the beds that are never slept in, the chairs that are never used, the dishes that are never set around a table. Hear the dampened tick, tock of a mantelpiece clock. You’re alone, where furtive ghosts like to dwell. It’s a monument to life abandoned, to purpose thwarted. How could anything that toxic be dazzling?
I unzip my shorty wetsuit and strip off down to my waist. The sun is rising, and it’s getting hotter. I adjust the straps on my bikini top and make sure that my baseball hat’s on tight. I’ve dipped it in the water to keep it cool, and now my eyes are stinging as I squint into the light. My wet thighs squeak against the epoxy resin as I shift my weight on the board. The sun’s rays pierce the surface of the water, splaying out like shimmering searchlights. I catch a flash of silver swimming three feet down, possibly a perch or a California halibut. I would love to know what kind of fish are around here. Maybe I’ll buy a snorkel mask and come out here next week.
“Liz!”
“Huh?” I snap out of my daydream.
“See that next set coming in? That second wave looks pretty good.”
“I’m ready. Let’s go.”
Holy shit. It’s happening. I sit up in bed, wiping the sleep out of my eyes as I scroll through headlines on my phone. An exposé on the rock star who was supposed to produce my next album finally broke this morning. My manager warned me several weeks ago to expect something damaging to come out in the press, but our conversation didn’t prepare me for the gravity of the charges leveled against him, or for the extent of the coverage in the media. Every news site, from obscure indie music blogs to Time magazine, is running the story. Multiple women have come forward claiming sexual harassment and emotional abuse, including his ex-wife and several well-known singer-songwriters. My producer apparently has a big #MeToo problem on his hands.
This is the kind of takedown that ruins careers. Knowing his predilections as I do, the allegations sound credible. Beyond the unsavory practice of luring female artists into a work situation, pressuring them for sex, then withholding support when rebuffed, he also reportedly exchanged explicit text messages and skyped with an underage girl for more than a year. The FBI is investigating the matter and may prosecute. The implications are devastating. This is what put Anthony Weiner behind bars. It’s slowly dawning on me that he could go to jail.
The evidence is damning. The video chats with the young girl involved nudity and intimate acts, and as the published transcripts of their communication make clear, he repeatedly cautioned her not to tell anybody about their relationship, because it could get him in “a lot of trouble.”
When I read this particular section of the article, my emotional needle swings hard into the red. Telling her to keep their interchanges a secret, making her responsible for his criminality when he doesn’t seem concerned about her welfare, reminds me of the numerous times I have been cowed into silence, forced to ignore or shrug off inappropriate and offensive behavior from men.
Being female in the entertainment industry can sometimes feel like running a never-ending gauntlet of horny dudes. But it was happening to me long before I had a music career. If you think I invited that kind of interest after I published sexually frank lyrics, you’d have gotten the cause and effect flipped. When I recorded the provocative song “Flower” on my first album, a deliberately bluer-than-blue love song, I was letting everybody know that I wasn’t going to be a victim anymore.
At the age of twenty-three, I was sick and tired of feeling like a prey animal. By the time I recorded Exile in Guyville I had been fending off disturbing and unwanted attention for almost two decades already. Like far too many young girls, I’d been exposed to predatory male behav
ior from an early age. It was enough. I stopped running and instead turned the tables and charged right back at the predators. They can’t make you an object, I reasoned, if you are adamantly and vociferously the subject of your own sexuality. I needed a chance to develop naturally. If I didn’t scare them off before they could approach, I was dangerously close to being angry at men forever.
* * *
—
On a trip to visit Skidmore College as prospective freshmen, my friend Meghan and I got drunk with our student tour guides. I must have passed out at some point, because when I came to, I was in a strange boy’s dorm room, lying on his bed while he went down on me and his semihard erection was dangling in my face. I gathered my clothes as he cowered guiltily in the corner, and I ran out of the building. But I had no idea where I was. It was the middle of the night, and I couldn’t find my friend. It was springtime, but still very cold. I crouched down on the stoop of a dorm for six hours, shivering, until it got light enough for me to find my way to an administration building.
Years later, while awaiting voir dire as a potential juror in a trial involving an accused home invader and rapist, I suddenly remembered the old incident and had a full-blown panic attack. I had to go to therapy for several months after that. I was still a virgin when the incident at Skidmore happened, and had I not awoken in time, my first experience of penetrative sex would have been rape. I never reported it, and I never told anyone—apart from Meghan, when I finally reunited with her for our long bus ride home. I’d been drinking. Somehow, in my mind, that made what happened my fault.
When I was just entering the adult world, I didn’t know anything about how to navigate the workplace or what the rules between men and women were. My first real office experience was as an intern at a prominent Chicago advertising agency. I was thrilled to get the position, and when one of the executives asked me to pose for photographs while he scouted locations for a commercial shoot, I jumped at the chance. We went to a pizza parlor off Wacker Drive. To get the right angle for the pictures, he had me lean over one of the little tables, essentially positioning me so my skirt rode up the back of my legs and my ass was on display. While I sweated to get the right shot, he stood behind me and ran his hand over my body, saying he was wiping flour off my clothes. When I felt him patting my ass, I immediately stood up. I was upset, but I didn’t know how to show it. I was going to be working under this man’s supervision all summer. He acted like everything was fine and kept directing me toward new and awkward poses—“to get the right shot,” he kept insisting. It was humiliating. When we got back to the office, I was stone-faced and silent. It was my first day.