Liz would never have guessed that any marriage of hers would end with anything but the natural death of either partner. “Til death do us part,” notwithstanding the fact of her parents’ acrimonious divorce, seemed to her like an acceptable proposition. In fact it was because of her experience of the havoc that divorce wreaks that she remained resolutely guarded about who she let into her life and what they did there, on the inside. This, in the end, meant that she rarely let anyone in, preferring to keep her own confidences lest her psyche become irrevocable churned in with that of someone else. Regardless of the example of catastrophic failure that her parents’ marriage represented, and regardless of her stiff resolution to maintain her independence, Liz had somehow managed to reach adulthood with the belief that two humans could theoretically cohabit, to their mutual satisfaction, for the entirety of their adult life, and that rather than being the exception, this condition was the default against which all other eventualities should be considered anomalous. But this was only a theory, and she had no real-life experience to back it up, and it was, perhaps, this very lack of experience which enabled her to maintain her belief in the possibility of togetherness.

She had attended the wedding of a college friend. The ceremony had been full of playful irony, subversive in its attitude to the traditional norms, in which the couple made up frivolous and “whacky” vows, such as: “I promise not to get mad when he doesn’t do the dishes”, or “I promise not to steal all the covers at night.” This was cute, alluding as it did to a kind of love-struck imbecility, obsessing on domestic trivia, blind to the deeper currents of companionship and fidelity which really drive a marriage, and revealing of how unaware of these currents the happy couple were. But what struck Liz most was when they said: “…in sickness and in health, until circumstance do us part”.

Circumstance. The word stuck in her mind for a long while after that breezy ceremony, conducted under the arbor of a San Francisco community center. What did it mean that circumstance could part a couple, not death? (Assuming, of course, that the particular circumstance was not, in fact, death). If you were parted by circumstance it meant that you had choice in the matter, that your marriage—which you had entered into voluntarily—was vulnerable to the vicissitudes of experience, could be broken apart by a stormy night, by an argument or two, by the sheer, unremitting frustration brought about by constant niggardly sheet-stealing or by an insufferable aversion to the kitchen sink. To be able to be parted by circumstance was to be a flimsy excuse for a marriage in the first place, something entered into which should never have been entered into. To be parted by death, on the other hand—that was a serious proposition, one that meant that you were immune from repercussions of all human activity, and that it took the intervention of otherworldly forces over which you had no control to separate you. And although she was only mildly conservative in her views of love and marriage, she increasingly felt that in order to avoid her parents’ misery, a couple bound—slavishly— together by holy matrimony, it took a certain kind of acceptance of the need to endure.

And Liz had never imagined, either, that such an unsuspecting end to her marriage would take place in so unfamiliar a location—in a foreign country, in a situation of complete and utter isolation.

Apart from a Junior Year Abroad program, which she had spent in Paris, Liz had never left the States. That Parisian year had been a trial for her, and had made her reevaluate her emotional needs. Although she felt like a bad fit in Connecticut, where she grew up, and New York exhausted her, she suffered a kind of homesickness during that year abroad which depressed her more than anything she had experienced. This surprised her because she had considered herself hardy and adventurous; she had even felt an urge to escape from her own country and travel to a place where she could see herself anew, where she could mix with entirely different people, people who would not be able to place her in a way that Americans could, thus allowing her a certain kind of freedom to be what she wanted to be. That year did allow her some of that. But it also revealed that she needed her own culture and its easy familiarity more than she knew, in the same way that an animal prefers the safe environment of its natural habitat to the riskier outside world.

It was not as if she had a close family that she missed terribly. There was Charlie, her younger brother who, after their parents’ divorce, became increasingly her charge, in direct relation to their mother’s disintegration. Charlie was only eleven when their father became irrevocably involved with his secretary, Janice, to the extent that he divorced their mother and married Janice and swiftly produced a couple of competing dependents, but owing to her father’s distance, his guilt at the abandonment and Janice’s outright hostility towards his old family, she never got to see them.

Walking around the Marais in the late fall of that year abroad, Liz had felt like a piece of driftwood floating on an unfamiliar ocean. The feeling of rootlessness terrified her—the sense that no one for thousands of miles knew or cared about her was unpleasant. She grappled with the unfamiliar rasps and tongue twisting dipthongs of French, finding that she felt at another remove from herself when speaking the language, and feeling like a child in her incomplete mastery of it. While at first the city’s grand boulevards and teeming neighborhoods had excited her and transported her to a place outside herself which was at times a relief, the long-term effect of this was exhausting. By the winter of that year she found that she had little in common with the other Americans on the program; for their part they had all evaporated anyway, vanished into the dusty corners and underground passages of the city, each one pursuing their own private ends and their own intention to learn by going native.

Her own attempts to do the same did not meet with great success. She moved out of the apartment she had shared with two other Americans because none of them could tolerate each other, and she moved in with a friend of her French professor, a young woman who taught French at a private language school near Place de la Concorde. The apartment they shared was in Neuilly, which all the other students considered too upper crust and suburban to be of interest. They preferred the Bohemian élan of Montmartre, or the hip centrality of the Marais, or the cheaper, grittier areas around the Gare Du Nord. For Liz, Neuilly provided the perfect compromise, being rich enough to be safe, yet just French enough to be different. When she walked to the train in the mornings she passed well-dressed mothers buckling toddlers into their high-end Peugeots and Citroens to take them to the primary school several blocks away, businessmen in neatly pressed suits marching to the nearest Metro stop, or student types, adolescent children of the wealthy home owners, on their infernal mopeds going to the lycee. Thus she passed the year living amongst Paris’ haute bourgeoisie, and one way or another learning French, but never feeling that she had made Paris a home-from-home. At the end of the year she was relieved to board the plane and, lifting off from Charles de Gaulle airport and seeing the ancient city sprawling below her with all its traffic and fumes and the oily Seine snaking through the middle of it, she realized that she should not feel bad about not taking to a new environment like a fish to water; she was no fish, and the water did not suit her, not because it was oily and contaminated, but simply because it was not her natural environment, and there was no shame in that.

The day that she realized her parents would have to divorce came as a surprise, not that she thought they got along well—there was no doubt that they didn’t—but it all happened so quickly, and was so brutally irrevocable. She was thirteen. She had come home from school to find her mother drinking at four in the afternoon. This, while not incredible, was nonetheless a bad sign. Liz went to her room until around six, called some of her friends, read a book, and toyed with her homework. When her mother was drinking she had learnt not to provoke her, and so on that particular night, she didn’t bother her after shouting hello to her as she walked through the front door.

Charlie, barely eleven at the time, had been at a friend’s house until he was supposed to be dropped off at seven. Her father came home at six, looking weary. He hung his jacket over the back of a chair in the hall and put down his briefcase. From the kitchen Liz watched her dad climb the stairs to the master bedroom. She focused on the crease that his pants made when he bent his knees, his long legs flexing in the middle like a marionette on a string. She knew something bad was going to happen; the house had been tense for several days now, and her parents had a kind of pressure-cooker relationship in which things steamed along for a few days then the pressure had to be let out in one gigantic thunderstorm of an argument which, temporarily at least, cleared the atmosphere.

She had suspected her dad of having an affair—for some time now—and the thought induced a kind of constant low-level nausea in her. Affairs, after all, were the meat of most of the romance novels she was devouring at that stage of her life, obsessing about the intimate and complex relationship between the sexes. Some of them were written from the perspective of the woman-cum-home-wrecker, who had lured the man away from his wife. These ones tended to focus on the predicament of loving a married man, reveling in the pain of longing, the foreshortened visits, the feeling of being a concubine. Some took the point of view of the jilted wife, the woman who struggled with the challenge of how to keep her husband—providing a better home, tastier food, better parenting, and usually, in the end, and treated with taste and subtlety, providing certain physical benefits that were just becoming a subject of great interest to Liz. When she thought about her dad, however, she found it hard to imagine another woman chasing him, waiting for him in a lonely apartment in the city, pining for him when he was away. He did not strike her as a romantic figure, or a man about whom a woman would be passionate. But in the end she reasoned that it was enough that he was a man and as such he was a potential candidate for an affair. Other novels still, took the point of view of the man, sometimes representing him as someone caught between desire and obligation, wrong-footed by an unexpected urge for another woman, the intoxicating biological imperative he is unable to resist. Others presented them as more blameworthy and cynical, motivated by a sociopathic heedlessness of others, ready to trample feelings in the dirt, disregard the ultimate consequences, and take what they wanted.

But when it came to her father, she had no way of accessing his psyche to determine his motivations. Unlike the protagonists in books, she was unable to read his mind and therefore he remained to her a figure of mystery, a man who was obviously possessed of deep under-currents, who was driven to certain things by certain forces and these forces existed underneath the surface, in a place inaccessible to all and possibly as deep as time: a caveman following his primal urges.

She had harbored these suspicions about him on several different occasions. For a while she had been sure that he was sleeping with a friend of the family, Brenda Tillman. Brenda was herself divorced; she and her ex-husband had been friends of her parents since Liz could remember, but after her divorce Brenda had remained on good terms with Liz’s parents, while her ex-husband had gone to California. She noticed that her father spent a lot of time going to her house, “to check on Brenda.” After a while his visits began to appear unjustified on those particular grounds. She had seen them together often, as well, and they seemed to have a very jocular, chummy relationship, from which her mother often seemed excluded. Whether Liz was a very prescient teenager or merely a paranoid one, she never found out.

Liz had watched the front drive through the window as she listened to the choreography of her parents’ final argument. The occasional car passed on the road outside, sending leaves twisting in the air behind; the floorboards at the foot of the marital bed squeaked as her father shifted his weight uncomfortably. Her mother was no doubt seated at her dressing table facing the same road that Liz was watching, although her mother was not watching the road; her eyes were flickering back and forth between her own visage in the mirror in front of her and, shifting their focus, her husband standing behind her. Liz’s father’s monotone drone was followed by her mother’s acerbic crackle. They traded back and forth—barb for barb, question for answer, allegation for excuse, accusation for defense, assertion for counter-assertion, both sets of vocal chords retreating further into their own particular set of characteristics, one deep and flat, the other sharp and high, speeding towards opposite ends of a sound spectrum yet the same ultimate conclusion. A small flock of sparrows had settled on the carefully maintained lawn in front of the kitchen window. Her mother would not have noticed them. She was seeing her husband, the adulterer, the philanderer, the betrayer, flailing now in his homemade sea of guilt, awash in—what? Regret? She listened to the registers of their voices. No, not regret—too angry for regret, which was bad, because when he went up against his wife then they really came to blows, neither one knowing when to back down, like a pair of stubborn bull moose locking antlers and bashing each other’s brains out. No his tone was one of anger, defiance, a fighting tone, a tone from which you don’t climb down, a tone which must be followed by flight, a tone which brooks no compromise, offers no hand in peace, a tone which forces you to grab your suitcase and head for the door. But before the tone forced him to do that, it forced her mother to pick up something from the selection of objects on her dressing table—probably one of her many Chanel bottles, judging from the particular timbre it made upon making contact with the wall—and hurl it across the room, probably at her father.

The high, soft noise of shattering glass filtered through the ceiling plaster. It seemed to Liz to be a perfect musical conclusion to their ugly duet—the word timpani coming to her mind. The breaking bottle, whatever is was, a fitting statement, one that she would always remember—the violent, yet somehow beautiful act which sealed her parents’ relationship, and after which there would not be, perhaps could not be, any more words.

The divorce had been like a tremendous earthquake within the family, with aftershocks and tremors continuing for years, not allowing the dust to settle, keeping people’s nerves on edge and forever changing their lives. Although her parents’ relationship had been stormy, the very existence of their family unit had provided Liz and Charlie with a sense of stability, a sense that their home was a rock, of sorts, and that one could always count on it. When this myth was suddenly and brutally destroyed the world looked like a far more fragile place, a place of scant sanctuary in which individuals had nothing but themselves upon which to rely, in which they were ultimately alone.