by Liz Phair
There are several prominent churches in our neighborhood—big, impressive places of worship representing a range of Christian denominations. I push Nick past them in his stroller on our way to the zoo, but what invariably grabs his attention are the decorative gargoyles on several nearby houses. “Look!” He points up at the miniature monsters under the eaves. “Look, Mommy!”
“Yeah.” I don’t really know how to contextualize their frightening appearance. “Look at that, honey.”
One of my closest friends in the neighborhood is devoutly Christian. We moved to this area because of the architecture and its proximity to the lake, but a lot of religious families are attracted to this district because it offers them the opportunity to enjoy the fellowship of their churches. They can walk to daily services. They can volunteer to teach on Sundays and sing in their local choirs. Jane, my Christian friend, came out on tour with me as my backup singer at Lilith Fair when she was six months pregnant. God is everywhere. Which makes the Devil thirsty.
I say I’m going out. My husband trusts me. When you’re a trustworthy person, you tend to trust other people. At the age of thirty-one, I’m diligent, but I don’t deserve the blind faith he has in me. I’m ten years younger than he is, and immature; I’m used to getting my own way. I feel isolated as a young mother, sidelined in my career, and I’m not handling it well. In the midst of all the sunshine, sandboxes, playdates, and Teletubbies, a darker force is taking over.
When the nanny comes to take care of Nick for a few hours, I go visit some old acquaintances over on Belmont Avenue. It’s an odd choice for a social call. We have nothing in common apart from working in music. They’re on the Goth spectrum—sweet, smart, but much younger than I am. I honestly don’t know what I’m doing here. They don’t, either. It’s awkward. I feel self-conscious, like my being here at all broadcasts that something is wrong in my marriage. Moms aren’t supposed to get high in the afternoon. But I’m starved for artistic company. It’s a relief to feel as far away from my normal life as possible.
I journal in notebooks. I buy self-help tapes. I exercise. But none of it works. Sometimes I talk to my friends down by the duck pond while we watch our kids feed the birds and chase one another around the jungle gym. I say things out loud, to test the shock value, but underneath it all, I mean every word. I don’t like dinner parties, I say. I think I’d fit in better in Los Angeles. Aren’t you bored staying at home with the kids? There’s a ghost in my house. There’s a ghost in my head. I miss the person I was before all this.
There are homeless people everywhere on Clark Street near the park. They stay in this area because one of the churches runs a shelter. When my friends decide they want a bagel and coffee, we all have to push our strollers down the busy thoroughfare. The vagrants’ hollow faces and haunted expressions make me embarrassed to dwell on my relatively minor problems. But I don’t feel like there is that much that separates them from me. I can see how a mistake or two could compound and then snowball into disaster. I can see the rejection I will face if I keep recklessly testing boundaries.
“Jesus saves! God punishes sinners! The Devil’s got his eye on you, pretty lady!” Those aren’t the words the homeless guy ranting and raving on a street corner is saying, but that’s what I hear when we pass him. He points his bony finger at me. “Beware! Turn the tide! The end is nigh!”
* * *
—
My neighbors Rob and Arlene have just stepped out onto their front porch. They’re on their way to dinner in matching wool overcoats. I don’t know what it is about our body language, Ethan’s and mine, that tips him off—maybe we are laughing too loudly, or maybe we step back abruptly from standing too close—but I see a flash of recognition cross Rob’s face. He swiftly suppresses it, hiding it well, but he knows I see. We say hello, and I introduce them to my new manager. We make innocuous jokes about the weather. But Ethan and I have been clocked. Nothing has happened between us yet. All that is still a long way off. But the fact that Rob notices—Rob, whom I barely speak to—is my first inkling that our chemistry is something I need to watch out for.
Rob is a born-again Christian. I’m sure he’s highly attuned to any type of temptation. But we don’t have a lot in common apart from the fact that we live next door. He doesn’t have children, and he’s never been onstage. He doesn’t know what it’s like to be famous, or female. People don’t realize what a huge transition I’ve gone through in the space of a single year. I’m trying to fit in with folks in the neighborhood, trying to follow their habits and adopt their schedules. Sometimes I think I will never belong here. My friends are all straight; none of them are artists. I don’t know why I’m afraid to embrace my true nature. But I know that repressing my feelings like this is only going to make the pendulum swing back hard the other way.
Gardening is one of the things I do lately that makes me feel like part of the community. Every Saturday, a few of us homeowners in this row of townhouses don our work clothes and get down to business with rakes and trowels, learning to make art with greenery and flowers. We have an unusually high percentage of green thumbs in this area. It feels like a form of creativity to be outside and up to my elbows in the rich, loamy soil. I plant my wishes, and I bury my sins.
I’m at a restaurant with my girlfriends on a ladies’ night out. Ethan sends a very expensive bottle of wine to our table, even though he’s currently at his apartment in New York. My blushing pleasure is a dead giveaway, and an uncomfortable glance passes among my friends. I wave it off as “an industry thing,” but that’s a lie. I know what it means. I can’t help softening to this treatment. It’s exciting. It makes me feel special. For the first time in ages, I feel like a rock star.
* * *
—
Ethan and I say goodbye at an airport after a gig. I get on the escalator to go up to my gate. He waves at me from the ground floor. We stare at each other as the conveyor rises, taking me farther away. All of a sudden he leaps onto the descending escalator and runs all the way up to the top just to make me laugh. I watch him ride all the way back down again, pleased with himself, never breaking eye contact.
* * *
—
We’re shooting an album cover in a rocky arroyo. It’s been a long, hot day. Ethan climbs seventy-five feet up the side of a cliff to get cellular service. It is nerve-racking to watch his progress until, finally, he summits. He stands triumphantly atop the mountain, phone in hand, pacing back and forth while he talks to my label in Los Angeles. He is a ham, and everybody loves it. When he comes back down again, he whispers in my ear, “I knew you wanted to see me do that.” At first I’m surprised, thinking, No I didn’t. But then I realize he’s right. I like watching Ethan’s feats of daring. I love that he’ll do crazy shit like that. It reminds me of my brother.
* * *
—
I’m calling Ethan to tell him what’s happening in my day instead of saving the news for my husband. I know I’ve strolled too far down the wrong path, but I’m addicted to the attention. It makes all the ordinary things I have to do seem colorful and interesting when he listens to me. He puts a funny spin on it, and I feel like a star in a movie he’s directing. He’s great with my son, too. He’s such a kid himself, and he likes to clown around when I bring Nick to work with me. I am living dangerously off-balance, topsy-turvy with my priorities. It’s like I’ve floated out to sea and there’s no land in sight. What ought to be a big fat red flag feels like nothing. What shouldn’t matter at all feels like everything. Then one day I realize it. I need him.
My husband and I have a fight. I’m arguing with the man I’m married to, but I’m looking at him from the point of view of someone whose allegiance has switched. Jim can feel it. He doesn’t know Ethan is pulling the strings, but he knows we’re no longer equally invested in our relationship. I’m acting more and more like I could take it or leave it, and Jim is scared by what he sees in me.
He’s losing his grip on his wife, and he doesn’t know why.
My husband has less and less interest in participating in the fanfare around my career. His withdrawal from my world is in exact proportion to my withdrawal from his. I become jealous, irrationally so, of the women he works with. My burgeoning feelings for Ethan and my guilt for wanting to sleep with him make me project the same motivations onto Jim. I’m sure something illicit is going on when he works late, because that’s the case with me. Jim is bewildered, wondering where his mature and loving partner went. We no longer sleep in the same bed.
The nanny notices the strain. Her last job was a nightmare, with her trying to take care of a young boy Nick’s age during his wealthy parents’ bitter divorce. The ensuing custody battle made the boy’s life a misery. She shares her story with me in great detail, and it brings us both to tears. I think she’s trying to save me, or more indirectly, warn me. I’m paranoid that she thinks I’m already unfaithful. One day I catch her praying over my son’s crib. I don’t say anything. I slip quietly down the hall, back to my bedroom, but it disturbs me. She is protecting him from dangers that I myself am inviting in. I keep thinking about the line she always says when we’re cleaning: “Idle hands are the Devil’s playthings.”
It’s a gorgeous day outside. I’m talking to another neighbor, a single, middle-aged businesswoman whose house is just south of mine. When she puts makeup on, she’s really quite beautiful, but truthfully, I feel sorry for her. She lives alone, is unmarried, with no kids. She tells me about the previous owners of my home on Geneva Terrace, a story I never heard from the realtor. All I knew was that an architect had gutted and modernized our townhouse for his own blended family. But before they moved in, his wife had an affair, and he sold it because he couldn’t stand to live with the painful memories. It sends a shiver down my spine as I realize that I am more than halfway there myself.
But what my neighbor tells me next about the original owners is even creepier. My house originally belonged to four siblings who’d grown up there and continued to live there as adults. It had a dark, shabby Victorian interior, she said. They never socialized. They were religious and kept to themselves. They grew old together in the very rooms we’re living in, and two of them died there. The others might have gone to a retirement facility; she doesn’t remember. They were aloof figures in the neighborhood. They hated change and followed a strict routine. I don’t know if what she’s saying is true or just rumor and inference, but what isn’t in dispute is that one brother and three sisters lived together in an unusual arrangement for decades.
I think about the evil entity in my dream. What if one of the dead siblings is angry about the remodeling and likes to get rid of new owners by making the wife cheat? It’s hard to imagine any kind of dark energy in our house. It’s too bright, white, modern, and airy. I love how the sun pours down from the skylights and refracts through the glass-block hallway. But what you can’t see can hurt you; this much I’m learning. I go back inside and play with Nick for a while. We run up and down the floating staircase, dangling a fishing-rod cat toy for Shasta to chase. He pounces, shooting out a paw while hanging from the underside of a step, sending my son into peals of laughter. It’s amazing how life can seem so sweet when, really, you’re dancing on the edge of a precipice.
My husband is out of town, and Ethan flies in to see me. The question of whether or not we will sleep together hangs over us. It feels, simultaneously, exciting and as evil a thing as I’ve ever contemplated. In order to rationalize my behavior, I’ve started bargaining. Touching is not kissing. Kissing is not fingering. Fingering is not fucking. Pretty soon we’re all over each other in my foyer, but I refuse to let him come upstairs. The nanny will be back from the duck pond with Nick soon, and he will want to tell me everything about his midday adventure.
“Come on.” I grab Ethan by the hand and drag him out the front door. “We can’t stay in there!” We’re loud. We are not discreet. I explicitly like the recklessness of it. I’m not myself when I’m around Ethan, and that feels liberating. I think if he said “Flap your wings” I would fly right up to the top of the trees and dive down again like a sparrow, swooping along the telephone lines. When we come back from lunch, Ethan drops me off and continues on in the cab. I’m planning to see him later that night.
My neighbor Rob has been surreptitiously waiting for the opportunity to speak with me. He comes out of his house and makes chitchat at first, but then it turns serious. “You know me as the man I am now,” he says. “But I wasn’t always this way. Ten years ago I partied, I slept around, I did all kinds of bad things. Everything you can think of. I drank, I fought, I stole money from the company I worked for. I reached as low a point as it’s possible for a person to go. I hated myself, and I’d hurt or alienated everyone around me who I loved.”
I’m taken aback, uncomfortable with this sudden intimacy. But Rob reassures me that he has only the best of intentions.
“One day this old man, this stranger, gave me a Bible. He told me what I’m telling you now. He’d been through the same thing I was going through, had done all the same shameful things I was doing, but he looked respectable and wealthy. I was embarrassed by my state of affairs and envious of all that he had. At first I tossed the book in the back of my car and forgot about it. But I never threw it away. One day, in desperation, I started reading it. I leafed through and let the words penetrate my drunken fog. I found stories in the Bible of wretched men just like me who, with God’s help, transformed themselves. I tried every self-help program you can think of, but only Jesus can make a miracle.
“Eventually it led me to Alcoholics Anonymous and, from there, to attending church. I got sober, turned my life around, and met Arlene. It didn’t happen right away; I made a lot more mistakes. But when God acts in your life, He calls you to Him through other people—through me, right now, with you. God loves you, Liz, or He wouldn’t prompt me to do this. He loves you even in your sin, even in your deepest, darkest secrets.
“I want you to have this Bible. I’ve signed it with a dedication, just like that man signed his for me. Let God work in you, Liz. Let yourself find the path, and I promise that once you start walking, it will get easier. You’ll never walk alone.”
I take the Bible from Rob and thank him. It is very awkward. I don’t know what to say. It’s one of the most profound and undefinable interactions I’ve ever had with another human being. I walk back up my front stairs and shut the door behind me, sit down on the couch, and just stay there with the Bible in my lap for a few minutes. I’m mortified that my neighbor knows so much about me, about what is going on in my life. I start crying, because he knows, and yet he still sees me as a good person. Suddenly, all the times I’ve lied or been selfish or deceived people come flooding over me, the memories engulfing me like I’m standing under a waterfall, trying to catch my breath. So many, many bad things.
I skim through the Bible for a couple of days. I enjoy reading the red parts in particular, where Jesus is quoted directly. But for the most part, I try to put my strange encounter with Rob out of my mind. I make sure I won’t run into him when I leave the house. I tell myself he’s a weird guy, that this is a weird neighborhood, and decide that eventually I want to move away. But I can’t forget it entirely. I used to attend church. I was baptized and confirmed. I sang in the choir, for fuck’s sake. At one time in my life, I believed in God and thought that when I talked to myself, He was listening. He was like a playmate or an imaginary friend. It rings true to me that the divine being I knew would reach out after a while and just casually get in touch. Like, I’m here for you if you need me. My God was never pushy. He hung back and waited until you were ready for a hug. And I’m not ready.
* * *
—
I’m planning a trip to Miami to oversee a mastering session. My parents are going to stay with the baby, and my husband is going on a weekend getaway with his friends.
We’ve been getting along better, because we accept our estrangement. We’ve fallen into a rhythm of Don’t ask, don’t tell. I’ve even started sleeping in our bed again sometimes, and we’re having sex occasionally. I’m also sleeping with Ethan. It started a week ago, and it is incredible. In an odd way, things are better for everyone now that the tension isn’t at such a frenzied pitch. I’m having a run-of-the-mill affair. All that waiting was worse than the actual betrayal. Maybe this is how human beings are meant to be, I think, as I get ready for bed. Maybe if everyone were doing it, more marriages would turn out well.
I look at myself in the bathroom mirror, massaging cleansing emulsion into my skin. I’m a real grown-up lady, a sophisticated woman of the world. I’ve always loved how the warm marble in the bathroom casts a pink glow on my skin. I feel relaxed and loving, in control. I can’t wait to get down to Miami and lie out in the sun next to Ethan. Do a little day-drinking by the pool. Jim will have fun doing whatever he’s doing, Nick will get spoiled by his grandparents, and everything is going to be perfect. I don’t know what I was so worried about before. I bet all the couples around here have the same arrangement. It just makes sense. It’s better for everybody.
I rinse my face, dry off with a towel, and turn the lights off in the bathroom. Jim is already fast asleep when I crawl under the covers. I make sure I can hear the baby through the monitor, then settle down next to my husband. My breathing slows. My muscles slacken. I drift off, and my eyes roll back in my head.
