Bex O’Brian

Word Count 802

There’s a good possibility that I only exist on the page. Unfortunately, I didn’t write that page. I have been written about since I was a kid when I frequently appeared in mother‘s weekly column in a Montreal newspaper. The person she bashed out on her Selectric typewriter was lippy, bucking authority, weirdly world-wise. A few times when I was riding the bus to school, I would see someone reading her column, smiling and nodding at my antics. I knew then that I could never compete with the character on the page.

When I married my first husband, the author Francisco Goldman, he used his skills to create a persona for me. Though I was only twenty-one, barely formed, he proclaimed that I was going to be the next Joan Didion or, better yet, the next Jane Bowles. At that point, I hadn’t read Jane Bowles, but I knew without a doubt that I wasn’t going to be the next Joan Didion.

Once again, I felt someone wanting me to be more than I possibly could be. Unable to put this feeling into words, I must have lashed out a lot. Frank soon dubbed me “Venom head.”

Years after our divorce, when he wrote Say Her Name, a book about his second wife being killed by a rogue wave, I finally made an appearance. In the middle of the night, my husband and I had gotten a call that Frank had been hit by a car and rushed to the hospital. Over the next 24 hours, I was by his side in the emergency room. In the bed next to him, a man was recovering from an overdose. This is how Frank wrote the scene in his novel. (He called me Augusta.) “He was a drag performer, and when he told Gus she looked butch, she told him to fuck off.” Yes, it is a novel. But I would never tell someone lying in a hospital bed to fuck off. In truth, I think I blushed from head to toe. In my defense, after getting woken up at five in the morning by a phone call from the cops telling you your oldest friend had been hit by a car, and they don’t know what condition he is in, I put on whatever was at hand which happened to be my husband‘s jean shirt and sweatpants. So, yes, with no makeup, I was looking very butch. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s just not who I am. 

Since my marriage to my current husband, Charles, I have been on the page more often. In his book Wickerby, An Urban Pastoral, which he wrote a good ten years into our relationship, he described me like this. 

I remember telling her one day as we sat by the fire pit that she was behaving a bit like an earthquake victim—afraid to invest her emotions in any one place again, to put valuable objects back up on the shelves. She told me, I believe, to “fuck off.” She told me not to dare make her out to be some “poster child of divorce.” “Divorce,” she said, “happens,” and then she stormed away, went, as she would many times during that visit, up to Bex’s rock, a huge 10-foot-high boulder that she discovered as a child in the woods behind Blackberry field.

It is funny how both husbands have me lashing out and saying, “Fuck Off.” Is that how they both saw me? It’s not that I don’t see myself this way. I don’t see myself in any way. But there must have been something to it because soon afterward, my husband created the moniker Ball Turret Gunner of Bile.

Recently, after forty years of a marriage in which we rarely looked under the hood, we found ourselves in an intense conversation about our future. It was entirely a high-wire act because if one of us said the wrong thing, the whole edifice might have come tumbling down. As we stumbled forward, I was aware of the mountain of perceived betrayals and stewing resentments that had accumulated over such a long marriage. I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared in my life. And then he said to me, “Sometimes I wonder if I exist without being seen through your eyes.” I rocked back on my heels and answered, “I’m sure I don’t exist without being seen by you.”

Lying in bed that night, I began to wonder. Is how you are seen, what you become? Are we even able to see ourselves? Truthfully, I never understood what it meant to be one’s authentic self. Everything seems like an illusion to me.  And in the case of my marriage, it may be the biggest illusion of all. An illusion, nonetheless, that we have vowed to cling to.

Bex lives in France with her husband and their dog. She is the author of the novels (Under Bex Brian) Promiscuous Unbound and Radius. At present, she’s working on a new novel entitled, Finnick