Empty state highway north of Boston, marshes spreading along either side. I, thirty-six years old, drive with Marek alongside me in a battered, pale-yellow VW that has besottedly traveled many roads. Gently pressing the brakes, I steer the car toward the shoulder. Marek’s left arm, raised above my head, terminates in fisted hand. That’s going right into the back of my head, I predict, and stop the car.

He does not hit me. Instead, he slumps into his seat, defeated, again, by his own drunkenness. Silence.

Then: “What are you doing!” he erupts in Polish-accented English. “What are you FUCKING DOING? Move the car!” Riling himself up, close to yelling: “Why did you stop!? Stopping means only that I have to spend more time looking at your ugly yellow face. START THE CAR.”

Numbly– watching myself in someone else’s remake of Pulp Fiction– I stare straight ahead through the windshield while evenly explaining that it’s unsafe to drive a car, especially on an icy road, when someone is trying to, or even threatening to hit that vehicle’s driver in the head.

My adored father is dying. Now, this.

“TURN ON THE CAR! If you don’t turn on the car and start moving,” he spits in fury, “then I’m getting out.” Panicked, I try to stop him– “Marek! Marek!”– as he opens the door and staggers onto the pavement. He looks back over his shoulder with childish, watery-eyed glee and threatens in a sing-songy voice, “I’m getting as far away from you as I can!”

The throughway crosses wetlands and is hiked up on a Netherlandish dyke-like embankment, seven or eight feet high. “Wait,” I shout. “Marek! You can’t do that. You’ll fall! MAREK!”

The marsh, covered in snow-dusted cattails, frozen into crackly green. Marek tumbles into brackish waters laced with ice doilies. Shouts obscenities. I am to blame for this calamity! Only me. And there he is, ditch-drunk, unable to get up.

Grateful for the sneakers I tied on that morning, I edge myself slowly, carefully down the steep, mud-and-frost-covered slope. At least it’s mostly frozen. Ordinarily athletic, I now am negotiating not only me but a ridiculously enormous belly – six months pregnant – which would degrade my balance even in non-icy-embankment scenarios.

Maternal Stress Affects Fetal Brain Development, the headline I found last week blared. Fetal brain development. Brain development. That’s my kid, I worry, helplessly.

With the adrenalinized determination of a first responder, I make it, feet sloshing, to the ground plane, breaking up doilies of ice. And commence the ungainly process of hauling my husband of ten years up the embankment and into our car. Soaking wet, covered in muddy clumps, he passes out.

*

Ten years earlier. Like many an aimless, literary-minded woman, I cram into a cubbyholed warren blazing fluorescent, working for a midtown book publisher, collecting a scandalous pittance of a salary. The “list” features many leading intellects of the age. Christopher Lasch. Robert Nozick. Douglas Hofstadter. Jean Piaget. Michael Walzer. Claude Levi-Strauss! Ferociously I read them all, training my attention on Big Questions.

I’ve laurel-graduated from a prestigious college where I plowed through Victorian novels and Greek tragedies; memorized hundreds of renaissance and baroque and rococo and modern paintings and sculptures and buildings; elementarily imbued the elementary principles of macroeconomics. Yet the battle regalia I possess feels unequal to the high-stakes skirmishes in the social microcosmoses of New York’s intelligentsia. Glittery young writer-things teeter champagne flutes while cozying up to fame.

Terror-struck anxiety debilitates glamour out of my Manhattan. I don’t know that what I suffer bears diagnosing and draw the indomitable conclusion that I must be stupid. Or muddled. Or flighty, or — as Marek, later, with his limited English vocabulary, would inveigh – messy. Not physically but ideationally messy. I flounder from incandescent volubility to being struck dumb and mute; I careen from walking on refulgent clouds to crawling in leaden horror at my overweening aspirations.

Adrift. I am looking for a savior.

*

Phyllis, a poet, rings, asking if she can share my phone number with a friend who’s invited her to accompany him to an event, and she can’t join. A wonderful artist! So talented! Wide-eyed Phillis possesses at once the joyful innocence of a six-year-old and the gravitas of a sage Greek goddess. She is disposed to effusions of breathless enthusiasm.

“He immigrated from Poland. We met at Yaddo.”

Poland, I hear, holding the receiver to my year, with dawning awareness that my cultivated, summer-trips-to-Europe worldliness crashes to a halt at the eastern edge of the Germano-Austrian border. Poland, in the Soviet Bloc. Poland, Solidarity. What else? I rustle around the distant territories of my mind. All I come up with is a cantankerous country behind that Iron Curtain which spits out blonde women wearing powdered blue eye shadow, and polyester-clad men, portly, dusty, and sullen.

“Sure,” I say to Phillis, congratulating myself on my largesse.

When the intercom sounds, I am ready, but only just; expecting a Slavic-accented schlub, I’d not even bothered to dress up. I clod toward the apartment’s front door in heavy, lace-up boots and corduroy capris. I buzz the intercom, wait unexpectantly as he climbs the two short flights. A knock. Opening the heavy black door, I catch my first glimpse of this mercy date.

Lightning strikes.

Across the threshold stands a slight, determined man neither much older nor much taller than me. Clear, porcelain skin. Cherubic mouth. Eyes so green you can see clear through them from New York all the way to Poland. Curly black hair. Not polyester: cotton and wool. Neither dusty nor portly. Thrilling.

Earlier when he calls to arrange our meeting, Marek says in accented English that he will “up pick” me late that afternoon so we can drive together to the opening of his solo exhibition at a small college gallery in Wayne, New Jersey. Hanging out with an artist could be kinda cool, I unthinkingly think; or maybe what I think is, hanging out with an artist might make me seem kinda cool. That this particular artist escaped Warsaw in 1982, at the height of the martial law that followed Solidarity’s strikes, compounds his mysterious aura: he incarnates brazen defiance of an evil, oppressive regime. Only years later do I learn that Marek secured a US visa the ordinary communist way: he bribed every official who stood in the path of his expatriation.

The gloaming winter afternoon darkens into night. Marek and I get lost. We laugh a lot, arrive an hour late. Buried somewhere in my consciousness is the recognition that being tardy to what Marek calls the vernissage of one’s own exhibition is irresponsible, not to mention rude.

The paintings, with their dark umbers and peaches and turquoises and whispered naked women, soft faces and lithe bodies, look nothing like work I see on my Saturday gallery rounds downtown. Just by laying pigmented oil on linen canvas Marek sucks in the world’s pathos; his art is leagues above and continents apart from Julian Schnabel’s crude porcelain shards, from David Salle’s empty oppositions, from Peter Halley’s glib machine dreams. Marek steeps his life in beauty. Seeking its gravitational pull, plunging into its deep kettle ponds. Its bracing, ephemeral truth.

Over the following days and weeks, we spend time together, mostly in galleries and museums. With a coruscating eye for color, he, off-the-cuff, delivers trenchant analyses of compositional form more insightful than anything I’ve heard in college lectures, or read. Sometimes, as we walk around the East Village or Greenpoint or wherever, Marek stops, suddenly, frames with encircled fingers, hand up to his eye, the view of paint peeling off a door and says: “Actually, that’s a pretty nice composition.”

He hunts for beauty –Leonard Cohen’s broken kind – everywhere. It makes me realize that I do, too.

*

I first see Marek drunk a few months later. We’ve already decided to stay together. He is a fellow at Altos de Chavón, a resort posturing as an Artist Colony in the Dominican Republic. I am taking a break before returning to New York to start an Art History doctoral program at Columbia in the fall. Altos de Chavón’s open-air bar serves all day long. One late afternoon I watch, baffled, as Marek downs shot after shot of vodka until he can barely sustain his position on the bar stool. When I help him rise, his body heaves toward mine; he staggers, I steady him. Step-by-step we lurch along rock-cobbled paths, past gardenia, past yucca plants, past palm trees, back to our room. He passes out sooner than I can turn my back on him to lock the door.

The next morning at breakfast when I raise the subject, he makes light of my concern. “That’s how Poles drink, Sarah,” he says. “Really, it’s nothing.” Seated on a veranda in the clear yellow sun, surrounded by manicured lawns and fuchsia bougainvillea, overlooking the ocean’s restless eternity, I will myself into believing him. You’re making a big deal out of nothing. Stop it. He’s right. You are an alcohol-proof-prude.

*

Through eleven years of marriage Marek and I fight. Fighting is what married people do, I believe, summoning up the familiar example of my parents, whose contempt for each other seeped beneath the very floorboards of our home. As far as I know, no other sort of marital union exists.

Even so, Marek’s biliousness differs from what I’ve known. He angers unpredictably. He deploys verbal switchblades. He hurls insults regardless of whether they are true; regardless, even, of whether he believes them. As the years pass, during the ever-less frequent stretches of peace and reconciliation, Marek continues to sing arias to the legendary durability of our partnership. But when locked inside the furnace of his rage, he fights as though nothing about our union has ever been precious and each bitter exchange will be our last.

I implore him to behave with civility.

“Marek,” I say, “don’t you understand that when you’re married to someone, there are boundaries you just can’t cross? No matter how angry you are? Don’t you understand that there are rules?”

“Just don’t make me angry,” he replies.

*

One lighthearted afternoon when I am in graduate school, Marek pulls out a heap of my clothes from the closet and suggests we play around, putting together outfits. In my feminist opinion fashion equals frivolity, but here is my husband, approaching clothing as a painterly composition.

Hmmmm.

Ease up, Sarah.

We pair a short hot pink plaid skirt with a flowy green top. When I emerge from the bedroom, Marek, leaning on his heels and hands on his hips, scrutinizes me as if I might a bowl of fruit in some intriguing Chardin. Excellent! he declares. The way I dress, like much else, testifies to our radiant creativity.

Six months later I, remembering how much he’d praised it, don the same outfit. Yet when I walk into his studio before heading off to teach, Marek guffaws, cruelly derides my sartorial choice. How could I consider venturing outdoors clad in such a vulgar display? He derogates my “eye” – painter’s language for visual acumen.

I change clothes. Misery draining into every pore as I walk to class, I wonder: how exactly, am I to forfend this man’s anger? What makes Marek angry, what he likes or doesn’t, it’s unpredictable, with the exception of nearly everything about the wretched envelope of my being: my “green” skin, my cracked lips, my large pores, my ill-kempt hair, the flat arch of my eyebrows– you look ugly, he’d spit, you look like an ugly man. The way I drive infuriates him. My appreciation for the artist Tony Oursler, contemptible. The way I speak in public, laughable. That I wear a black blouse. That I don’t wear a black blouse. Nothing about who I am or what I say or how I do what I do is immune from his ire.

*

Only years after I broke free does the obvious dawn: the point had never been the eyebrows or clothes, the taste in art, the way I greeted strangers. All of it was a strategy, forged from well-honed tactical tools, designed to pulverize whatever self-confidence the evidence of the world was offering me. Marek’s end game was simple: establishing, then sustaining dominance over me.

*

One day, after having taught as a guest at a colleague’s seminar at MIT, I traverse a dingy endless corridor as I phone Marek. The previous morning I’d visited the ob-gyn for an ultrasound and am calling with the results before I go to seminar. Marek answers in a voice so flat you could slide it down a grassy hill: “The doctor’s office called,” I say. “The baby is a girl.”

“A girl. A girl!”

Why does he sound upset?

Suddenly I feel myself walking with a retinue of sad faces, as downcast as a mourner in Gustave Courbet’s A Burial at Ornans. Dirges murmuring in Beaux-Arts Halls.

“I don’t know,” Marek says, “if I want a girl. With a boy, I can kick a soccer ball around, teach him to dribble.” It dawns: Marek had just been assuming that our child would be a boy. “What will I do with a girl?” he asks, before getting off the phone.

*

Light delivers its cornucopian display to her cone of vision. Veronica’s little eyes wander. I watch her scan the room and wonder, what is she looking at? What do those now-unblinkered eyes actually see? What sense is she making of what she sees? With my n-of-one I muse about human cognitive development– not just any one, the one of my beloved baby.

Dad’s dead. Gone two months before she arrived, before he could meet his granddaughter. My only option is to live in my honorable father’s honor.

Does Veronica recognize that I am an object, just one object among other objects?

What can this creature be thinking?

Thinking with no words, is that even thinking?

What is it like to see a tree for the first time? A pot on the stove? What can it feel like to inhabit a body the side of a doll?
On one short, silent stroll, we walk to the bridge above the commuter rail and stop, gazing down. Her eyes fix on the prospect before us as I softly explain what a train is: a big machine that takes the people who live and work in separate places to their jobs in the morning, then home at the end of the day.

Too complicated.

Those steel beams converge into a vanishing point in the distance, but they are actually parallel, never touching.

Too complicated.

There is so much to explain! Can my baby girl even see depth yet?

What is it like to encounter every one of this earth’s ten thousand things as new? Like those perspectival camera lenses you point at tall buildings and crank the knob until you’ve parallelled the lines. Motherhood is like that. Perspectival shift.

*

Marek and I sit facing each other on the living room couch, arguing. “You are drinking too much,” I say. He laughs. Thirteen pounds and six ounces of our two-month-old, our daughter, sleeps in my lap. I press my hopeless case. Then– in a sudden, single movement– Marek draws his knees up to his chest and, with both feet, jettisons Veronica and me off the couch.

No utterance in the million words of the English language captures the effect of that moment.

Staggering.

Incomprehensible.

The fabric of the universe ripped apart.

Terror.

As in Mad Libs, plug in whatever horrifying descriptor, whatever cliché you want: It fits.

Cradling our daughter, I tear upstairs, terrified, shutting the bedroom door behind us to collapse on our bed.

*

What am I supposed to do? I just want someone to just tell me. I can’t, simply can’t summon the mental clarity to think this through on my own. Three months ago I might have called Dad, confessed all, asked for help. Dad’s dead. Veronica’s age is still counted in weeks. Whatever Mom might say will be worse than useless if not deliberately hurtful. I already know what my siblings think. No friends to call– Marek set every friendship I’d had ablaze ages ago.

What am I supposed to do?

*

At work, now, in Cambridge, teaching, I joke that motherhood involves learning how to do a lot of things badly and being okay with that. The work I scheduled myself to complete is not getting done. I have classes to teach, lectures that need preparation. Editors are demanding essays. My book manuscript lies threateningly dormant.

I decide to work at home where I can also help with the baby. Life becomes a Bosch grotesque. Once, upstairs at my desk, I hear crying in the living room. I fling my study door open, shuttle down the staircase, and come upon Marek crouching over our tiny child, his face up not one inch from hers, screaming “SHUT UP! SHUT UP!”

*

I return home from the market. Marek, drunk, sitting at his desk in the living room. Half-finished bottle of Scotch is on his desk. His right hand clasps Veronica’s left ankle and he is swinging our upside-down infant from side to side, like a pendulum. At the lowest point of each arc, Veronica’s head is inches from the floor. “I’ve found a way to quiet the colicky baby,” he slurrily, proudly announces.

Time muffles. I am surrounded by wool batting. Beneath my rib cage a knot squeezes out from my heart until my entire body is clenched. Milliseconds pass before I erupt from the paralysis and wordlessly, thoughtlessly, snatch Veronica from him and enfold her in my embrace, running up the stairs to our bedroom. He doesn’t follow.

*

Standing in our living room, I issue the ultimatum I hadn’t even realized that I was formulating unconsciously for what materializes as a dystopic eternity. “Stop drinking. Stop drinking, or Veronica and I will leave.” Wordlessly, Marek shoves the two of us across the room with such violence that we are catapulted across the room, landing on the carpeted floor.

If I leave this baby alone with him, Marek will, one way or another, kill her.

Driving from our house in Somerville into Cambridge, to school, I look at a peeling, neglected mural advertising cigarettes painted on the side of a building and realize what I’m thinking. I wish he were dead. I wish my husband were dead.

*

In eleven years, I have given no one a single hint of our marital discord. Marek brags that we are the perfect couple. I play along with the lie. What’s happening to me doesn’t happen to people like me.

Now I phone Marek’s and my one close, mutual friend and – finally – confess.

“Marek’s drinking has spun out of control,” I say. “He is endangering our child. I think I need to leave. What do you think?” Our friend pauses, collects himself carefully. Then says in measured tones: “Sarah. I cannot think of a single way in which you would not be better off without Marek.”

Despite proliferating evidence that I should have terminated the relationship long before, I did not do it until Dad died, until I bore a child, then realized that Marek would eventually kill her.

Watching how Marek treats Veronica makes me realize: What he is doing to her is not so different from what he has been doing to me. The word abuse floats into my mind, accompanied by the image of that wiry, coke-fueled wife batterer I saw in court, in chains, on TV, with his vacant-eyed wife sitting behind. Is that what we are? Is that what he is?

*

“Take the baby right now,” the divorce attorney instructs me as I sit at my office desk, Veronica sleeping in the baby carrier on the floor, not ten minutes into what is supposed to be an introductory phone conversation. She’s just heard me say that Marek earns nothing, never has. All the money in our checking account, all assets, all mine. “Get in the car, and drive to the bank. Open a checking account in your name only – you understand? In your name only. Transfer the entire balance of your joint checking account into your new one in your name only. Then find you and Veronica a place to live until we can work out a plan to get Marek out of the house.”

Where will he go? I wonder numbly as I back the VW into a parking spot not far from Harvard Square. Is this the right thing to do? Is this even an ethical way to proceed, leaving my husband, rendering Veronica’s father homeless? What would Dad say? Everyone in my family loathes Marek. Still. I care about him. Whatever fear, whatever anger I feel is, still, mixed with love.

*

Weeks later, she and I are back in the house. Marek is well and gone; a restraining order protects us from him indefinitely. One cool, steelgray afternoon, she is cantankerous, fussy, so I slip her into the dark blue snuggie and head outdoors. Her tiny hands reflexively clasp around my index fingers. We walk, she quiets. Eventually we end up in the town center, two miles from home, by which time she is asleep. I relish the silence, the opportunity to venture into the bookstores and browse around. In one clean, sun-filled store– empty of other biblioseekers—I chance upon a book entitled When Love Goes Wrong: What To Do When You Can’t Do Anything Right.

Hmmmm. What’s this about?

The introduction alone makes it plain. All the agony I’d endured for the past eleven years, all that terror . . . it isn’t even special. It happens far more frequently than anyone in polite, or more accurately in our case, elite, PhD-laureled society lets on. But people don’t talk about it, don’t know about it. Shame perpetuates the silence. The authors reassure me: this happens not only to poor and uneducated women living in housing projects or impoverished rural areas. Women of all classes, ethnicities, educational achievement, and professions are vulnerable.

The authors frame a familiar history. Like countless women dead and alive, I was steamrolled by a good-looking man’s charisma, sweettalking, and aura of exoticism into a controlling, abusive relationship. Veronica and I are lucky, I learn: We survived. Some don’t. I take small comfort in that I stood firm in my decision to flee, panicked, my heart in bloody shards. Despite Marek’s imprecations. The suicide threats. The harassment, stalking, day-and-night ringing of our home phone, restraining order be damned.

I buy When Love Goes Wrong, take it home, read it between feedings and dinners and baths, into the day and into the night, not stopping until I find the section my mind didn’t even know that my eyes were scanning for. It says: No identifiable character type predisposes women to subject their wills and bodies to batterers. Studies are clear. It happens to shy women and to gregarious ones, to educated ones and less educated ones, to rich ones and poor ones. The single identifiable character trait common to abused women is a wobbly sense of self.

Don’t a lot of women have a wobbly sense of self?

*

What to do when you can’t do anything right.

Now I know.

Sarah Williams Goldhagen, a former Harvard professor and architecture critic at The New Republic, writes nonfiction, creative and otherwise. Her prizewinning book Welcome to Your World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our Lives (HarperCollins, 2017) is widely considered foundational to the emerging movement in neuroarchitecture, and she has published essays in many national and international publications including the New York Times, Art in America, and Prospect Magazine (UK). Her current project, Mothers of Invention, is a memoir that explores how eight sequentially chosen mothers helped undo the damage wrought by the first. Goldhagen lives with her family in a converted church in East Harlem and writes the Substack Site Lines. Substack: Sarah Williams Goldhagen | Substack, Website: www.sarahwilliamsgoldhagen.com; email: swg609@gmail.com.