I Love You and I'm Leaving You Anyway

by Tracy McMillan

  She motions to the couch, and I sit, prattling on a little about the plane ride. I’m both remarkably comfortable and terribly uneasy at the same time.

  The kids are checking me out. One girl is draped on the end of the sofa, the other, smaller one clutching her leg. Another plays with a doll on the floor, not making eye contact. They’re making me a little nervous. “Kids, this is your sister Tracy,” Linda says. They look at me like I’m some kind of alien princess.

  She continues, “They know all about you. We even drove by that place you used to live in with Yvonne a couple of times…” She struggles to recall. “Where was it you were living?”

  Let’s see, that could have been any one of a number of locations. I give her the name of the street we lived on the longest.

  “Was that the big place over near Lake Harriet?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That was it.” She nods, impressed, and I know why. The area is one of the best in Minneapolis. To them, it must have looked like we were rich. “Yvonne had you living in that fancy neighborhood. She always was like that,” Linda snipes.

  In her eyes is the glint of the love triangle between them, and it strikes me how dramatic it must have been for Linda to give her firstborn child to Yvonne, who stole her man.

  I glance over at Freddie, who wears a relaxed smile, as if he doesn’t know what Linda’s talking about, as if he had nothing to do with any of this. I’m sure in his mind, these particular ladies, like ladies in general, just naturally found themselves competing for his affections.

  God, these people are crazy. I need a cigarette.

  “Meet your sisters, Gina and Carrie.” Linda points at a ten-year-old girl who looks to be half–something ethnic and a three-year-old who’s all white. “And that’s your other sister, Kayla.” The sullen-looking girl with dark hair has already got reform school written all over her.

  My dad makes some conversation. “Tracy just got off the plane from Salt Lake City.”

  “Salt Lake City?!” Linda hollers. “Is that where you’re living now?”

  I nod my head. “I moved there with my husband, Kenny.”

  “And you’re married? Wow.” She’s staring at me again, and when I take notice, she doesn’t even bother to look away. “You really are stunning,” she repeats. She’s really annoying, but I kind of like her, too.

  It hits me then, about this feeling I’m getting from her. It’s novel and warm and familiar and nice and trusting. I know her, that’s what it is, I know her. Shit.

  It’s mother love.

  I’ve never felt that before. Actual love from your actual mother. Not a foster mother or a mother substitute, but the real live woman who carried you in her womb. The voice you heard in utero. The vadge you squeezed out of. My mind struggles to calculate the seven hundred and one permutations of meaning here. She loves me. She still loves me? She always did love me. She never didn’t love me. She…

  Oh. I get it.

  She loved me, and she left me anyway.

  MY DAD AND I DON’T say another word about visiting Linda. There is nothing really to say. It happened; end of story. The key to being in a superdysfunctional family is that everybody acts like everything is normal. Because, in this paradoxical way, everything is normal. Which is to say, nothing is abnormal. Nothing. Even when your dad the former pimp takes you to see your mom the former prostitute whom you haven’t seen since she gave you away to your other mom, the one who is barrels of fun except for when she isn’t. Not even that.

  Which is also why it isn’t too strange when, later that night, my dad and I do some cocaine together.

  It happens innocently enough. I inform my dad that I have a big party to go to, and I will be partaking in some, um, extracurriculars, and that if he could, well, hook me up, I would greatly appreciate it. No big deal.

  He gives me that amused look he gives me sometimes. Like he thinks I’m cute and he thinks I’m outrageous at the same time. “Do you use drugs?” There’s no judgment. He’s asking the same way you’d ask, “Do you like apples?” Like, just curious.

  “Yeah. Of course.”

  “Really? Which ones?”

  “Cocaine, ecstasy, and marijuana. A lot of marijuana.” He doesn’t react, so I blather on about the party. “It’s in a big warehouse downtown. And it would be extra-fun if there was something…extra.” I give him my best version of winsome.

  I can see from his face that he’s actually considering helping me out. Which emboldens me further. “You must know where to get some coke. Don’t you?”

  “I do.”

  “So, will you help me?”

  There’s no answer, which I immediately construe as a maybe. Time to take my arguments to the next, unassailable, level. I appeal to his logic, and naturally, his fatherly concern.

  “Besides, if you don’t help me, I’ll just end up going to a guy on the street, or buy it at the party, and you know it would be all stepped-on with baby laxative or god knows what.”

  Bam!

  Two hours later, I’m waiting in the car. I’m already dressed for the party, in my favorite black vintage minidress with the rhinestone “diamond” trim. With my post–Purple Rain haircut, my eggplant lipstick, and my arm full of bangles, I’m feeling ready to get my velvet rope on. When my dad comes out the back door of the small suburban house where we’re scoring, I know my night is complete.

  “Let’s see it,” I demand excitedly even before he’s started the car.

  “Gyurl! You can wait a minute.” He bats my hands away like so many mosquitoes. We decide to drive a couple of blocks away so we don’t make it so screamingly obvious that we just bought some drugs by looking at them right there in the guy’s driveway.

  We pull over in a small empty parking lot down by the Mississippi River. I’m trying to contain my glee, and doing a pretty good job of it, too. I don’t want my dad to suddenly change his mind because he thinks my desire for it goes beyond recreational. He pulls out a small two-inch-square bundle. “Now you’re sure you can handle this?” he asks.

  “Of course, I’ve done it millions of times.” Which is true. I’ve been doing coke since I was eighteen. It hasn’t gotten out of control—yet—but it certainly could. And probably will.

  “Millions of times? With who?” It occurs to me that this type of questioning is routine in most parent-child relationships, but it centers on things like driving the car, not doing drugs.

  I’m impatient. “All kinds of people,” I argue. “Friends. People. Kenny. Everybody.”

  “Kenny does cocaine?” My husband Kenny is the picture of law-abiding, rule-following good sense. Especially compared to Freddie. From looking at him, you’d never think Kenny would do drugs or cheat on his taxes. And he never would cheat on his taxes.

  “Not like I do, but he has,” I say. Which is true. However, Kenny is just a tourist in the party world, always with a round-trip ticket. Me, my mom, my dad—we’re more like one-way people. We go there and have to hitchhike back. If we make it back at all.

  “Let’s just have a look at this,” Freddie says, retrieving the small white packet from his coat pocket.

  “How much is there?” I’m wondering exactly how much fun is on offer tonight. Freddie opens it and I lean in to get a better look. “It looks like a lot.”

  “A gram,” he says. “And it looks good, too. Quality. Not like that bad shit you’da probably gotten off the street.”

  “See, I told you.” I want him to know what a good dad he was to make sure I didn’t get the crap coke.

  We peer at the tablespoon or so of white powder gathered at the bottom of the shiny paper envelope, then look at each other. No one has to say a word.

  He goes first.

  So maybe it isn’t exactly a normal thing to do, but it doesn’t seem like that big a deal, either. After all, it’s been a really eventful day. And besides, normal is relative.

  IT IS CHRISTMAS EVE, and I’m back in Salt Lake City. I have a terrible cold, my nose i
s stuffy, and I’m achy and feverish. I rarely get sick, but I think all the partying I’ve been doing lately has finally taken its toll.

  Or maybe it’s because I am driving to the airport to pick up Kenny, whose wife I have been for 2.5 years now. He is coming to take me “home” to San Antonio, Texas, where he has been living for the past two months, since his job with the big Fortune 500 company transferred him again. I have managed to stay in Salt Lake by giving the excuse that I really wanted to finish my term at the university. Which I did, barely.

  I’ve been pursuing a very busy nightclub schedule in Kenny’s absence. Between Tuesday nights at the gay bar, Thursdays and Saturdays at the Twelve Oaks, and Fridays at the Dead Goat, I haven’t had a lot of time for such diversions as Print Reporting 201 and Principles of Mass Communication 206. I even got some B’s. And that’s not like me.

  But that’s not my real problem. My real problem is that I am clutching the steering wheel so hard my knuckles are white. Repeating over and over to myself: You can do it—stay married—you said you would. You can do it—stay married—you said you would. You can do it—stay married—you said you would.

  Obviously, I don’t really think I can do it, or I wouldn’t even say this to myself once, much less a hundred times over and over, the whole way to Salt Lake International.

  Making things much worse is the fact that last night, I had sex with someone else. This is the first time I’ve ever cheated on Kenny, though I’ve been obsessing about it for a while and have come very close a number of times. I knew I was in trouble when I started to get insane crushes on every Spanish TA I had. How many Mormon returned missionaries can I get the hots for? Apparently one every quarter. Something about their super-repressed sexuality is wildly attractive to me. Probably because it’s a lot like my own.

  The guy I had sex with isn’t a Mormon. But he probably used to be. He’s the lead singer and guitarist in a band that plays at this bar I frequent. His name is JT and his band plays old Stones covers, like “Under My Thumb.” I wish I could say JT’s band is good, but they’re really only average or slightly below average. Still, even though JT will come to have a potbelly and (yes!) drive a Salt Lake City bus before the eighties are out, at the moment, I think he’s unbelievably hot.

  In my defense, I had sex with JT for a very specific reason. I wanted to find out if there was something wrong with me, sexually. (For the record, I’m still unsure.) In the four and a half years I have been with Kenny, I have had an orgasm just once. Right at the very beginning of the relationship, by accident. Since Kenny and I got married, we have averaged sex about once a month. I’m obsessed with sex, but only with men other than my husband. With Kenny, I only do it when I can’t take the guilt of not doing it anymore.

  You’d think maybe I was just a person with a low sex drive, but ever since we moved to Salt Lake, I can’t stop fantasizing about guys. Besides the Spanish TAs, there is the guy in my anthropology class; there is a guy named William, who took my name and number down on his driver’s license; and there is the platinum blond Depeche Mode type I fell in love-at-first-sight with at Anthropology Guy’s wedding. Which I actually took Kenny to. Then there was JT. And we’ve only been here a year and two months.

  I didn’t have all these crushes in San Francisco. Which, on second thought, shouldn’t surprise me.

  Then there’s my sex life with myself, which is very, very active. I’ve been masturbating ever since I can remember—from at least the age of three. But despite being supercharged on the inside, I am apparently frigid on the outside. Kenny, being a very kind and considerate Minnesotan, has never mentioned this to me. I, having been raised pretty much in a barn, would like to talk about it all the time. The conversations always go something like this:

  ME (lying in bed, staring at the ceiling):

  Don’t you think it’s weird that we don’t have sex?

  HIM: Not really.

  ME: Why not?!! [Or more accurately, “WHY NOT???!!!”]

  HIM: Because. I don’t. I’m tired. Let’s go to sleep.

  [Long pause while I can’t let it go]

  ME: I think there’s something wrong with me.

  HIM: You’re fine. You think too much.

  ME: But I want to have sex. Don’t you want to want to have sex?

  HIM: Go to sleep.

  What I don’t say is that not only do I want to want to have sex but I eventually will, whether it’s with Kenny or someone else.

  JT was just in the wrong place at the right time.

  And now, the time is up. I have arrived at the airport, and Kenny is standing there, waiting at the curb. In his grown-up man coat, holding his briefcase. With his thinning hair and his full lips and his soft eyes. He is the smartest man I have ever met, funny and wry, and he is a great, great friend. I could never, ever be bored talking to him.

  You can do it—stay married. You said you would.

  IT IS SURPRISINGLY EASY to live in denial. All you really need is a good imagination and a compulsive behavior to practice, something you can do over and over again that serves as the shortcut, like the ladders in Chutes and Ladders—something that skips you right past the truth whenever it vexingly pops up.

  For Paul and me, that thing is sex. Every day.

  Rain, shine, at home, away—I could count on one hand the days we have missed—sex is the thing that smooths over every rough edge, metabolizes every fight, and contains our every lie, self-delusion, shadow, fear, and hope.

  There is nothing too fancy about it, either, and that is part of the appeal. We do it in bed, almost always, and in pretty much exactly the same sequence—him on top, me on top, I come, he comes, and then we both immediately fall asleep. There is a ritualistic quality to it, not like devil worship, but like the British take tea or the Chinese do dim sum. I find it a relief that we know exactly what we like and that we do that; there is no need to perform, no demonstrations of prowess, no sexual equivalent of ordering the sea urchin just to prove how adventurous we are.

  It is the antithesis of sex between brand-new partners, who run through a repertoire of moves hoping to find a winner or two in there somewhere. Something that will bring the new partner back for more, if you want them to, or at least make you feel like you could pass for second runner-up in a Megan Fox pageant.

  Sometimes I wonder what will happen when we move to the next stage of our relationship, the stage where we no longer have sex every twenty-four hours, but so far, at least, that hasn’t happened. To be honest, I’m scared the whole thing will fall apart. Couples don’t have to run out of sexual desire for each other, do they?

  But that thought is subsumed into the moment it becomes nine thirty and I crawl into our huge four-poster California king–size bed, and before I even have my contact lenses out of my eyes he is reaching for me. There is a comfort, a security, in being wanted like this: so durably, so regularly.

  I can almost convince myself it will last forever.

  But not quite.

  Because trying to hold the whole truth and nothing but the truth from one’s awareness is sort of like trying to hold a (very large) beach ball underwater. It seems easy at first—see, nothing to it!—but soon it becomes clear that the air inside the ball is exerting a pressure every second of every day and I, being only human, cannot do anything every second of every day, much less apply constant counterpressure to a very large beach ball. Invariably I become hungry, or bored, or angry, or tired, and the next thing I know—pop!—the beach ball is right up in my face.

  Then I do the “chutes” part of Chutes and Ladders.

  Chutes suck.

  KENNY WOULD NEVER LEAVE ME. Never. This unspeakable truth is the central fact of our relationship. It’s the reason we don’t have sex but stay married. It’s the reason I smoke pot from the moment I wake up until the hour before bedtime. It is, if I am honest, the reason I chose him.

  What it means, of course, is that it will be I who must leave him.

  When we get home fro
m the airport, Kenny gives me my Christmas present, a Pentax single-lens reflex camera. It is one of the most expensive gifts I have ever been given. Until I married Kenny I was poor, working three jobs; I was so scared about money. That’s how it is when you don’t have parents. You start to think like Evel Knievel. Any slight miscalculation could lead to dire consequences. Kenny took me away from all that.

  But I still didn’t have a gift for him. All I had were excuses:

  I had my finals up until the day before yesterday.

  I had to work.

  I didn’t know what you wanted.

  I figured I would get something in San Antonio.

  It’s not that I am thoughtless and heartless and selfish. (Although I am certainly self-centered.) It’s more that I have always had trouble with gift giving in general. It just requires a level of planning and execution that I am rarely capable of.

  The only time I am able to successfully gift-give is if I have just fallen in love with you, say, sometime in the last six months. Then my need to ensure that you will continue to love me will supersede my inability to think much past this afternoon.

  But what I really can’t handle about giving gifts is the emotional part. If I bought Kenny a gift, it would mean that I wanted Kenny. That I was loving Kenny. But I can’t stop wanting to leave Kenny. How could I leave Kenny and buy him a Christmas gift at the same time? Wouldn’t that be, like, lying? Somewhere in my distorted sense of integrity, I know I can’t give Kenny the impression that he can expect another year out of me when I’m having trouble coming up with another week.

  The moving to San Antonio “plan” included us spending the night in the apartment where I’ve been subletting a room (now there’s a story—involving doing lines in a nightclub bathroom with a crazy chick who needed a roommate), then getting in the car the next morning and starting the 1,438-mile drive to San Antonio. But after I open the camera it somehow seems more right to just pack my stuff into the car and take off now.