“I first met Ben a couple years ago,” I start. “I was doing made-for-TV movies and he was the first guy I met in a bar who’d actually seen one of them. That was a pretty big deal for me at the time.”
The audience laughs.
“So, you met him in a bar?” Ida asks, and it’s really difficult to tell through all that makeup if she’s being judgmental or not.
“Yeah,” I tell her. “I was there for a wrap party with the cast of one of my movies and he recognized me. We started talking and one thing led to another—”
“So, how long into the relationship was it before you knew that Ben had this side?” Ida asks.
I want to scream.
“It’s not a side,” I tell her. “It’s him. The abuse, the whole nightmare, that’s just who he is. He’s a person that enjoys hurting people. The charming guy I met in the bar—it wasn’t a side. It was an act.”
“So, it happened pretty quickly then?” Ida asks. She’s pushing for more information, and she’s trying to do it in a way that nobody but me knows just what a bitch she’s being.
“The formal abuse or whatever you want to call it,” I tell her, “that took a couple of months, but the warning signs were all there from the start. He’d get really upset over the smallest things, things that didn’t even make sense to get upset about, you know? At first, he would stay quiet about it, but you could just see him shaking from the anger.”
“When did it finally take that turn for the worse?” Ida asks.
The audience is silent. Nobody’s so much as wiping their nose.
This is the money shot. This is why everyone’s here today.
“I think it really took a turn after we got back from visiting his parents,” I tell her. “We got home, and as soon as the door was closed, he was in my face, screaming at me about how I had been impolite to his mother by not taking a piece of pie that she offered—it was always over the stupidest things…”
“Did he hit you?” Ida asks, and I can almost hear her getting wet between the legs thinking about the ratings bump she’s about to get.
“That was the first night he hit me,” I tell her. “I told him that he was being stupid and he slapped me across the face. When I tried to leave, he grabbed me and pulled me to the ground, and that’s when he just started hitting me. I tried to fight him off, but he was too strong. All I could do was curl up and hope that maybe he’d find it in his heart to stop.”
I can actually see a tiny smile flash across Ida’s mouth, but it’s gone so quickly, I doubt the cameras really caught it.
“What happened next?” she asks.
“He was yelling at me while he was hitting me,” I tell her. “He was saying that he’d been so patient with me, but that he’d had enough of my…well, I can’t say the word on TV, but you get the idea. I don’t remember when he stopped hitting me, how long it was, but I do remember that he was out the door and his car was peeling out almost as soon as he did.”
“The pictures of you with the bruises…” she says. “Those were from another time?”
“Yeah,” I tell her. “After that first night, I never knew what was going to set him off. Sometimes, he’d let things that would make a normal person angry go completely, saying they didn’t bother him, while other times, he’d fly off the handle about absolutely nothing, although I do think the pie incident was the most ridiculous reason he ever hit me. Not that there were any good ones.”
A few of the misery junkies in the audience applaud, and within a second or two, the whole crowd is applauding. The funny thing is, I’m not quite sure what it is I said they’re showing their approval for—maybe the “no good reason to hit me” thing?
The crowd calms down again and Ida leans toward me, saying, “Did you try to leave?”
“That kind of depends on your definition of the word ‘try,’” I tell her. “I convinced myself a few hundred times—that’s actually not hyperbole—to leave him, but every time I got close to doing it, I just felt this huge wave of fear rolling through me. I just imagined him tracking me down and what he would do if he caught me trying to leave him. It really wasn’t very easy. Luckily, though, I got—”
“You know,” Ida says, “I hear that so much, that women in these relationships often do want to leave their abusers, but that fear keeps them from doing it.”
“You feel like your life isn’t yours,” I tell her. “You feel like you’re a possession of this person who’s just as likely to put your head through a wall as he is to hold a door open for you. After that first time, he was so apologetic…” I sigh. “You know, before I was with Ben, I used to look at women whose boyfriends or husbands treated them like crap and I used to think they were so weak for going back to them time and time again, but it’s not weakness. You literally feel like you do not have the option to leave until that day comes when you finally decide that enough is enough, and even then, you’re still scared for your life. If anything, you feel like you’re deciding whether you’d rather stop living like you’re living or whether you’d like to keep living. That’s really how it feels and too much of the time, that’s really how it is.”
“What happened that weekend he took those pictures of you?” Ida asks, and it feels like she’s completely ignoring everything I just said.
I try to move my hands out of camera frame because they’re clenched into fists.
“It was a few days before we were supposed to get away and I had just gotten a callback about this role I really wanted,” I answer. “The problem was, the callback was on the same day we were supposed to leave for our vacation. I knew it was a mistake before I did it, but I asked him if he’d be willing to leave a little bit later than we’d planned so that I could make it to my callback.”
“And that’s what led to…?” she says.
“Yeah,” I tell her. “After I asked the question, I could see that change come over him and I tried to walk it back, tell him that I’d call back and see if I could get in on an earlier day or just skip the callback altogether so we could go on our trip, but I’d already committed the chief sin in his eyes. I questioned what he’d already decided. Those pictures,” I sigh, “those, I think he just took so he’d have something to remind me what happens when I…”