Resilience

by Jessie Close

  “I hate waking up without you next to me,” he said.

  She glanced at him, the bulb from above the bathroom sink lending the bedroom a small glimmer of light. He sat up in bed, his thin chest sunken to the contour of his spine, his neck hidden by a scraggly beard. She wished she wasn’t naked; her skin crawled at the sight of him.

  “Come here,” he commanded, looking up at her, a small pout pushing out his lower lip. His small, round stomach bulged against the covers.

  “I got up to pee…” she mumbled.

  She crawled under the covers and lay on her stomach, as close to the edge of the mattress and as far from him as possible. She kept her face turned to the wall away from him.

  “I’ll make you feel better,” he said. “Come here.”

  He reached out, putting his moist palm on the small of her back. She shrank from the touch, her skin turning to gooseflesh, her nipples hardening, not from excitement but from fear.

  “Come here,” he said again. She felt him move closer to her, felt his beard on her shoulder. Slipping an arm around her waist, he rolled her over onto her back. His beard covered her mouth—she could taste the stench of beer and cigarettes. His hand slid to her belly and down, between her legs.

  “Relax,” he whispered into her ear.

  “I’m not really awake,” she told him and grasped the covers with the hand that wasn’t trapped next to his side.

  “But your nipples are hard,” he said and took one in his teeth. “Touch me,” he ordered, his tone urgent.

  She let go of the covers and found him, biting her lip so she wouldn’t scream. He pushed his fingers into her, painfully. She tried to will her body to respond to him and lessen the punishment, but couldn’t. She clenched her jaws tight when he shoved himself inside her.

  “See?” he said. “You ALWAYS want me, DON’T YOU?”

  In pain, she nodded, her cheek rubbing against his ear.

  “I can’t hear you,” he said, stabbing into her hard, before pulling back for another thrust. He grabbed a handful of her hair, pulled her head back, and raised himself to look into her eyes, his chest hurting her breasts.

  “You ALWAYS want me, don’t you?” he demanded, his yellow-brown eyes boring into hers.

  “Yes,” she whispered, squeezing her eyes shut. She was lying, but knew what was required—and what she needed to do. She lifted herself against his pounding, knowing he’d finish sooner that way.

  “Yes,” she said, feigning, feeling him move faster. “YES!”

  A series of grunts escaped from his throat, and he collapsed, his body pressing her into the mattress, making it difficult for her to breathe. Her eyes remained closed.

  She heard her dog in the living room bark and thought she heard footsteps outside their apartment window. She opened her eyes to glance at the window to the right of their bed. She heard footsteps again—she was sure of it; they were behind the apartment building. Someone was walking in the alley.

  She lay still, her small body suffering under her husband’s, and pretended she was making the footsteps… pretended she was the one escaping.

  I didn’t want Brad reading what I’d written in my journal. I doubted he realized how disgusted I felt whenever he had sex with me. We didn’t make love. In my mind, it was rape. I wrote about it in my journals to release the frustration and anger swelling up in me. We had been married three years by 1970, and whatever love there was—if there ever had been any—had died.

  We could no longer live and broadcast our cable station from our tiny apartment, so Brad and I moved into a unit upstairs and had a home without volunteer DJs, singers, record salesmen, and assorted other hangers-on traipsing through. We were alone again. And that was the horrible part: we were alone again.

  The only bright spot for me was when the postman arrived one day with a filthy kitten who, he explained, had been used as a baseball in a game of catch by some teenagers outside our building. He was delivering him to me because he knew I loved animals. When I put the kitten on our rug the sun was shining behind him and his orange fur lit up, suspending him in light. I decided to name him Ziggy Stardust and fed him baby food, cottage cheese, and gave him, of course, a much-needed bath. Ziggy soon grew into a plump, long-haired orange cat who liked to sleep on our dinner plates in an open cupboard. Thankfully, House Mouse stayed downstairs in the studio.

  I knew Brad was having sex with other women because he didn’t try to hide it; he used our downstairs station headquarters for his trysts. A year earlier, Nena and George O’Neill had published a national bestseller called Open Marriage, which had sold more than 1.5 million copies. It promoted the idea that adulterous sex without jealousy was possible—and desirable. It was the talk of our nation in that time of experimentation.

  Brad began showing me magazine photos of women having sex with each other. They turned him on. He started talking about a threesome. The more I resisted, the more determined he became. We were in our new bedroom one night when he grabbed me by the back of my head, twisting his hand in my hair, and forced me to look at graphic photos of lesbians.

  “Look at them!” he screamed. “Look at them!”

  “I don’t want to,” I said, closing my eyes.

  “Look!” he yelled. “Open your eyes and look!” He twisted my hair more tightly in his fist and pushed my face against the page, bending my neck until it hurt.

  I was embarrassed by what I saw. Sex with a man was one thing, but I couldn’t imagine having sex with another woman. The thought terrified me.

  Not long after that encounter, I was painting a mural on our new apartment’s living room wall with another teenager who liked hanging around the studio and was a friend of mine. I’ll call her Alice. She was sweet, innocent, and cute. We decided to drop acid, and when we were high Brad suggested that Alice and I strip down and paint in the nude. Before I realized it, the two of us were naked, holding paintbrushes, giggling, and laughing. Brad sat back and watched.

  A few nights later, Brad fed me downers, and when Alice arrived he maneuvered both of us into our bedroom. He got what he wanted. I was shocked at how gentle and tender Alice was when we embraced. My only sexual experiences had been my rather clumsy first sexual outing, when I’d lost my virginity to Greg at age fifteen, followed by my rushed marriage to Brad.

  In the coming weeks, Alice visited our bed several times, and I began to wonder if I was a lesbian because I enjoyed being with her more than I enjoyed being with my husband.

  At about this same time, I walked out of our bedroom one afternoon naked and found Brad and one of his friends in our living room. Eyeing me closely, his friend announced, “Now, that’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen!”

  Brad replied, “She’s my wife. You’re not sleeping with her.”

  I realized that Brad considered me to be his personal property. What I said or thought didn’t matter. If I had any doubts about this, what happened next proved it.

  Another young woman named Grace became a regular at our station, and Brad wanted desperately to screw her. She wasn’t interested. Brad began scheming. He soon became obsessed with her.

  “I want you to seduce Grace’s husband,” he announced one night.

  “What are you talking about?” I replied.

  “Go over to their apartment and have sex with him,” he said. “You can do that, and when Grace finds out, she’ll sleep with me.”

  Brad was now trying to pimp me out. I felt degraded. I also felt helpless. Brad had become physically abusive. It had started with a slap about two years earlier and had escalated quickly. My husband would become enraged, grab me by my long hair, and knock me to the floor, where he would punch and kick me. One night he beat me and then poured his beer over me; he might as well have been urinating on me for the shame I felt. During another argument, I went for a butcher knife; he stayed away, but it just made him angrier.

  The next time we got into an argument, we were standing outside our apartment, and he began slapping me.
I fell down, so he began pulling me by my hair along the concrete. A man saw us, and I screamed, “Call the police!” The man paused, looked at Brad, and then kept on walking. That was how it was.

  After that beating, I decided to tell Brad’s parents about their son. I waited until he was asleep, then began walking to Brentwood, where they lived. I chose to walk because I didn’t want to risk starting our car and waking him. I’d gone about two miles on the three-mile journey when I decided to lie down on a stranger’s lawn for a few minutes to catch my breath. I looked up at a tall palm tree. The scent of the flowers and the cool grass reminded me of Grandmother Moore’s lawn in Greenwich. I began to cry, but soon gathered myself and pushed on. Why was my life so difficult?

  I woke up Brad’s parents, and when we were all seated in their living room, I blurted out that Brad was physically abusive. I asked for help. I didn’t know what to do.

  “You just need to be patient with him,” his mother said.

  My father-in-law stayed silent.

  I could tell from the tone of Brad’s mother’s voice that she felt abuse was something women were simply expected to endure. Cindy, the DJ whom I’d hired, had told me that she was living in an abusive marriage. It’s just how some men are, I was told.

  I walked home feeling completely overwhelmed.

  The term “domestic violence” hadn’t yet become part of society’s vernacular. A year earlier, in 1972, the Ninety-Second Congress had approved the Equal Rights Amendment, but before it could become law, it had to be ratified by thirty-eight states, and Phyllis Schlafly was leading a highly publicized fight against its passage. Women were still second-class citizens when I turned twenty, in July of 1973, and I was clearly one of them.

  Brad had taken control of me mentally, too. He’d undercut what little confidence I had and slowly stripped me of my dignity. I was afraid to challenge him, to argue with him, or disobey him. I didn’t think anyone would want me if he abandoned me. I felt like my own parents hadn’t wanted me. I felt ashamed, and I certainly didn’t want Glenn or any of my other siblings to know that our marriage was a sham. Once again I felt trapped. Where would I go? I had worked hard to make our radio station successful, and I didn’t want to turn my back on that. My animals and the station were the only good things that I could claim in my life.

  After several days of unrelenting pressure from Brad, I drove to Grace’s apartment when I knew she was at the station with Brad. Her husband answered and proved easy prey. He was older, and I was struck by how gentle he was when we had sex. I also realized that I was not a lesbian; maybe I was bisexual. I could enjoy making love to a man, even an older stranger. It was Brad who repulsed me.

  Brad was waiting like a dog on a stoop when I returned to our apartment. I thought he would feel triumphant, but he was furious. He’d told Grace that I was seducing her husband, but rather than expressing a desire to get even, she had gotten upset with Brad and fled the station.

  “Did you do it?” he snarled.

  He asked me for details, and when he realized that I had actually enjoyed myself, we got into a bitter argument. I vowed to never let Brad do that to me again.

  And then things got even worse.

  I woke up feeling sick. The next morning, it happened again. A doctor confirmed I was pregnant. The same mothering feelings that I’d had when I was fifteen and had fantasized about having a baby swept over me. I would have someone I could take care of and who would love me. I wouldn’t need Brad.

  I told Brad, and he called his parents. None of them was happy. Neither of us had a paying job. We smoked pot every day, and I was taking more and more pills to make my marriage to Brad tolerable. Brad’s parents said they didn’t think I should have the baby. We were too young and irresponsible. Besides, it might be born with a defect because of all the illegal drugs that I was consuming.

  Brad agreed. He didn’t want a baby. Our priority had to remain the radio station. He had plans to expand and eventually make it profitable. What had happened, I silently wondered, to all his bluster about not giving a damn about money?

  Brad’s father was a medical doctor, and he spoke to a physician friend of his who was a gynecologist. Abortions were still illegal, but the gynecologist agreed to give me a D & C—a dilation and curettage—which all of us knew would accomplish the same goal. Brad’s father drove me to the office to make certain I went through with it. I cried after it was over. Brad assumed it was because the D & C was painful. But it was the loss of the baby I had been speaking to in secret—the child whose tiny presence in my body had given me hope for myself and my future—that made me cry.

  Every time I thought I’d hit rock bottom, I fell down deeper.

  I’d not seen Valli Quinn for months when she stopped by our apartment one night. She was still studying acting, but she confided in me that she had been hospitalized for depression. She talked about her famous father, who had left her mother for his new wife, sired three more children, and recently had fathered another child outside his marriage. What was it with men and infidelity? Valli was estranged from her dad. I understood. Although my dad would write long letters from Africa, the opening was always “Dear Kids,” and his notes were filled with news about what he was doing. He didn’t have a clue about what my life was like. He signed his letters “Love, Dad,” but I considered him a stranger.

  Valli began stopping by more and more, and one night when she showed up, I was stoned in the living room. I watched as Brad led her into our bedroom. Valli had always found him attractive, and Brad would screw any woman who was breathing. I didn’t care.

  Valli disappeared from my life after that. She vanished. We would not become reacquainted until three decades later, and when we talked about that night, she apologized. Going to bed with Brad had made her feel cheap, she said. What she had no way of knowing was that I felt cheap with him too; dirty and worthless is how I felt with him.

  Our emotions have a way of blindsiding us no matter how hard we might try to keep them tamped down. One morning, after Brad had humiliated me again by having sex in our bedroom with yet another woman, I found myself standing in our apartment kitchen feeling as if time were slowing down.

  Brad was broadcasting from our studio downstairs. Our monitor was on upstairs. He had just started playing the Rolling Stones’ new song “Angie” when I decided to kill myself.

  “Angie” had been written mostly by Keith Richards, and it hit the Billboard Hot 100 list in 1973. It was about a dying romance, which is probably why it seemed so poignant to me. Much later Richards would reveal that Angie had not been a woman at all. It had been a pseudonym for his addiction to heroin.

  Listening to it that morning, I began to cry. I dropped down onto the tile floor, raised my knees up against my chest, and began rocking back and forth. Ziggy Stardust pushed against me, purring loudly. I clung to my cat like a lost child, crying so hard that Poo, my dog, came over and nuzzled me, clearly worried. I had to escape from—what? Brad? No. More than Brad. Reality. My life.

  When “Angie” finished, I heard Brad’s voice return to the radio. I climbed to my feet and took out a large plastic bag of cross whites. I scooped up a handful and stuffed them into my mouth. I kept swallowing until the entire bag was empty. I’d downed at least fifty pills—more than enough to do the trick, or so I thought.

  With the plastic bag still in my hand, I walked downstairs to the studio, where Brad was on the air. I wanted him to know what I had done and that he was the reason why. I wanted him to know my death was his fault.

  He did a double take. “What did you do?”

  With tears wetting my cheeks, I replied, “I’ve taken them. All of them. I can’t stand living like this anymore; I want to die.”

  A look of disgust mixed with fear washed over his face as he flipped the switches to put our station on autopilot.

  “You stupid bitch,” he snapped, coming toward me. “I can’t take you to the hospital. They’ll call the cops. You’ll be arrested and
sent to a loony bin. Which is where you belong! As your husband, I could have you committed!”

  He shoved me into a nearby chair.

  “Stay here and don’t do anything stupid,” he said.

  Cross whites dissolve quickly, and I was beginning to feel pain in my head as they hit my brain. Suddenly I felt intense physical pain, and I got scared. I was actually going to die.

  Brad came back in with a neighbor who was an RN. She took one look at me and hurried into the kitchen, emerging with a chalky, thick concoction in a glass.

  “Drink this!” she ordered.

  I drank, and by the time I made it to the toilet, I was heaving up the pills. She forced me to drink another glass of whatever it was. There was nothing left in my stomach, but I still kept retching. My body was covered with sweat, my throat burned from vomit, and my head felt as though it would burst open. The nurse took my blood pressure every few minutes at first, then once every half hour. She stayed all night with me.

  That night I made myself two promises. I would never attempt suicide again by taking drugs, and the next time I tried it, I wasn’t going to tell anyone.

  I looked a mess. My hair was falling out because of the diet of uppers and downers that I was taking daily and my poor nutrition. The only food I ate, when I ate, was junk food. I was emaciated, barely weighing a hundred pounds, and my eyes were withdrawing into my skull. There were scabs on my head, and I kept myself so stoned that days were beginning to blend together in an endless, meaningless blur.

  Glenn telephoned to check in on me. I hadn’t told her about any of my problems—my suicide attempt, the abortion, Brad’s physical abuse, our failed marriage, or my growing dependence on drugs. I’d not told her because I didn’t want to be the problem child anymore. What was the point? What could she do to help me? She was finishing her final year at college, where she was acting in plays and would be elected to the Phi Beta Kappa honor society upon graduation.

  Our lives were opposites. I was trapped in an abusive marriage, wanting to kill myself. I was afraid to leave Brad because he’d told me numerous times that if I tried, he would track me down and kill me. I believed him. During our call, Glenn sensed something was wrong, and after she hung up she called my mom and they agreed to fly to Los Angeles to check on me.