And after four months living out of a suitcase, we are now in New York, with plans to go to Minneapolis at the end of the week to see my dad.
It’s not quite as free-spirited as it sounds, though. At least not for me. Because a few days before Brandon and I made our pact to run away together I’d been called into the assistant news director’s office at work.
“Tracy, I’ve called you in here to talk about a story you wrote for the six,” Gil Hartsook says, wearing a serious expression. Not that he has any other kind.
I sit listening to him drone on, the fear needle buried so deep in my brain it’s past the red even, into the sliver of white.
“It was about the Christmas Lights Festival at the convention center,” Gil says, jogging my memory.
“Mm-hmm. What about it?” I’m wincing. Television news is like surgery—having to go back and revisit something you’ve already done is usually a bad sign.
“Well, you wrote that the Lights Festival was taking place at the Civic Center. It wasn’t. It was held at the convention center.”
Shit. Convention center, Civic Center. How the fuck am I supposed to know the difference? I haven’t lived in Portland all that long.
“That’s the third mistake you’ve made in the past two months,” Gil says, tilting his head just a bit to emphasize the point. You can tell it hurts him to say this. He’s a nice man, in his midthirties—the personification of a nice house in a new subdivision in a new suburb where nice people with good jobs move to raise their good children so that their nice wives can stay home instead of having to go to some stupid job just to overpay for an old house with outrageous heating bills in a hip neighborhood. In other words, Gil’s life is my worst nightmare.
“I know this is your first job,” he continues. “Mistakes are part of it. But not this many in this short of a time.”
He’s right. My love affair with Brandon has definitely had a negative impact on my job performance. I was much better when I had a gay boyfriend I didn’t really want to fuck. I had a lot more energy left over for work.
“I’m sorry.” I don’t know what else to say. I really hope this little talk is over.
But it’s not.
“You know, not everyone is cut out for this job,” Gil says. “Sometimes you just have to say, ‘Maybe I’m not cut out for this job.’ That’s what I had to do when I was a reporter.” Gil looks at me earnestly and I can tell that the reporter moment was a really big deal for him. No one gets into TV news because they dream of being an assistant news director. Just like no one gets into a band to be the bassist. They all want to be Mick Jagger.
At the moment, however, it looks like I’m going to be more like the fifth Beatle.
“I’m sorry to say it, but if you make one more mistake”—he’s saying this as gently as he possibly can—“we’re going to have to let you go.” He frowns in a kindly way.
This is the moment I decide to leave for real. I don’t try to improve my performance or wait to see if I am going to make another mistake. I just start making plans.
And now we are in New York.
We are staying with (and by “staying with,” I mean sleeping on the floor of) Brandon’s best friend Richie, a dissolute “artist” in his thirties who left Portland a couple of months before we did.
Actually, I was staying at Richie’s. I’ve just been asked to leave.
Richie and I have always had an uneasy truce in our ongoing power struggle over which of us is more important to Brandon. And being that I have a vagina and Richie does not, I win. But still, Richie maintains a certain power over Brandon, the exact nature of which I can’t quite understand.
The night we got here, Brandon, Richie, and Richie’s friend Allison (a girl about my age whom Brandon has always crushed out on) went out for drinks. I stayed home, not at all eager to spend the evening watching Brandon moon over Allison. I’ve tried to point out to him how pathetic his crush is, in the hopes of getting him to stop, but he’s like a goldfish in a bowl swimming around going, “What water?” To him, trying to get a woman to approve of him is like breathing. He doesn’t even know he’s doing it. Ninety-five percent of the time, there’s no woman he wants to approve of him more than me. But that other 5 percent of the time…is torture for me. I figured it would be better to just let them go out, have a drink, come home, and save myself the anxiety attack.
They stayed out until four thirty in the morning. Talk about anxiety attack! I spent the hours between twelve thirty and four thirty obsessing about Brandon’s whereabouts, imagining him leaving me and never coming back, and doing what I do when faced with a situation (like my third mistake on my job) I can’t handle: planning my escape.
I have an overriding survival mechanism that kicks in when I need it, and it is formidable. It’s like Ripley in Alien. Or Sarah Connor in The Terminator. A powerful warrior-bitch-goddess who is going to kick in doors and mow down the monsters in order to make sure Little Me is safe and sound with a roof over her head, food to eat, and something adorable to wear from Bloomingdale’s.
Nothing gets in my way. Not even Richie, Allison, and Brandon.
I wake up the next day emotionally hungover and in a fury. I have one—one—contact for work in New York, and I call her at eight thirty in the morning to see if she can help me get a job. She agrees to make a call to the CBS station on my behalf.
“Oh, thank you!” I say in that superbright way I have sometimes when I’m all fired up. I’m proud of myself. Usually, I have a hard time asking for help.
“Can you shut the fuck up?” Richie says from his “bedroom,” a loft bed over the stove.
I don’t answer. Did you give a fuck about me last night? When you were keeping my boyfriend out until all hours without even thinking about how that would make me feel? I didn’t think so.
Instead, I go outside and smoke a cigarette. While I puff, I fantasize about living in New York. It’s been a dream of mine since I was thirteen. I’ve always imagined myself hanging out with the beautiful people, having an amazing career, and getting my picture taken for the cool-people pages in Interview magazine. Now it’s all going to happen.
A few minutes later the phone rings. It’s my contact, calling me back to say she spoke to the executive producer in charge of hiring writers at WCBS and he is expecting my call.
“Thank you! Oh, my god, thank you so much!” I am very, very excited. Which means my voice is very, very loud. And since the telephone is mounted to the wall right under Richie’s bed…
“Shut the fuck up, Tracy,” he booms.
God, Richie’s an asshole.
I have to call the executive producer right now, even if it pisses Richie off. I pick up the phone and start dialing. I couldn’t give a shit if he’s mad. It’s nine thirty in the morning. Only losers are still asleep. Richie can kiss my sweet number-one-market newswriter ass.
The phone call goes great. I thought Richie was going to interrupt, but he didn’t, which I thank him for after I hang up. The executive producer guy offered to meet me on Friday afternoon. That’s the day Brandon and I are supposed to go to Minneapolis to visit my dad. But my dad’s just going to have to wait.
That night I’m getting ready to go for dinner with my one “friend” in New York, a woman in her late forties who is really just a phone pal I made while at my old station in Portland. We’ve never actually met, but we always said if I ever came to New York we would. When I got here, I called her and she invited me to her place for dinner. She also said I could stay with her if I needed to, but we both knew she was just being polite.
I’m sitting on the stoop, smoking a cigarette before heading over to her place in the West Village, when Brandon comes out and sits next to me.
“Um, you know that, um, friend of, um, yours?” Brandon says “um” a lot when he’s nervous. “The one you’re, um, going to have dinner with?”
“Yeah…?” I take a long pull off my menthol. “What about her?” I exhale a thick stream of smoke.<
br />
“Richie was wondering if you could go stay with her.”
I blink at Brandon slowly. I’m not sure what he’s saying. “You want me to go stay with this woman I’ve never even met in person?”
“I don’t.” Brandon does this thing with his lips when he’s freaking out. He rolls them over and over. He’s doing that now. “It was Richie’s idea. He wanted to know if…um…maybe you could ask her if you could stay with her.”
“Me? Alone?” I really don’t know what he means. He can’t possibly mean what he’s saying. “By myself?”
“Yeah…”
My stomach is quaking. I think maybe Brandon is asking me to leave. But he’s going to stay…with Richie.
“But I’ve never even met her face to face!”
“Richie just feels like…there’s too many people here.” I hate Brandon right now for not knowing how to conjugate the verb “to be.” “You mentioned that lady said you could stay at her place if you needed to, and Richie thought it would be a good idea.”
He’s right. I did mention that she’d said that. But she didn’t fucking mean it!
If I hadn’t spent half my life up to age ten in foster care, I probably would have told Brandon to just go fuck himself right then and there. But way down deep I’m so used to being the one to leave, this just feels weirdly normal, in a time-travelly kind of way. Like I just woke up and now it’s 1972. Except I’m in New York. I feel sad and sick, but mostly, I’m wondering exactly how I’m going to ask this woman if I can stay with her when I haven’t even met her yet.
I stub out my cigarette and go into the house. Methodically I dial the phone. When she answers, I confirm our dinner plans for the night, and then I take a deep breath and just…ask. If I can stay with her. I feel like I’m calling my Aunt Do, only this time, Yvonne never steps in to say the whole thing was a big mistake.
My “friend” thinks it’s strange, I can tell, but she says yes.
In a couple of days, Richie and Allison are going to Portland for a week, so I will be able to go back and stay with Brandon. I’m furious with him and I don’t know if I’ll ever trust him again, but I don’t say anything, because Tracy Ripley-Connor is already making plans.
I’ve been looking in the Village Voice for an apartment, and I find one on West Seventeenth Street that sounds great. It’s $850 a month, and I have no idea how I will afford it, but I do know that where there is a will, there is a way. There is something deep inside of me that came into this world not just to survive but to conquer, and I am finally here and I’m not going to let some stupid people from Portland get in my way.
No way.
Oh, and P.S., on Friday I’m going to get the job. New York may be awful, but it also sure is great.
DEEP DOWN, PAUL AND I both want a family. Not in the sense that we want kids—we both have one child each already and that’s enough for us—but in the sense that we need to belong somewhere, to someone, and to know that our life matters to another human being.
Paul’s childhood was as sad as mine, in a totally different way. When, early on, I joke that I was raised by wolves, he replies, “So was I. Rich, white wolves.”
Paul’s dad, Richard, was an executive who moved the family all over the country, going so far as to dye his hair gray at the age of thirty-eight to interview for a CEO job. He thought he’d have a better chance if they thought he was older. He got the job.
Paul’s parents had a troubled marriage. Richard was a charming and handsome liar (my words, not Paul’s) of huge intelligence and even huger ambition. Paul’s mother, Anne, was a young Jackie Kennedy type, a great beauty who chain-smoked, didn’t eat all that much (from the looks of her), and somehow conditioned herself to stay with Paul’s dad no matter what. She died, of heartbreak I think, barely out of her fifties. Paul also has an older brother who suffers from some type of mental illness involving delusions of grandeur. He was mostly functional until a couple of years ago, when he got arrested on federal charges involving fraud or conspiracy or something like that. They were dropped after it became obvious that he isn’t really criminal, just crazy.
Paul has already been married, too. Not to his child’s mother. To another woman whom he married as a “joke” in his early twenties after knowing her less than a month. Still, they stayed together many years before the marriage finally fizzled out. In the years since then, Paul’s career took off while his personal life began a downward spiral, which is why I think he had that reckoning that led him to me. The good news about the marriage is that it is some kind of assurance that he’s capable of long-term attachment. Which is more than you can say about a lot of single guys in their late thirties.
What’s more, my son is smitten with Paul, and the feeling is mutual. They first met about a month after we started dating, and from the very beginning, it was clear that they had a connection. At seven, Sam is still young enough to openheartedly accept a new man into his life. It helps that Paul has a repertoire of silly voices and at heart he is a boy himself. But the fact that he also likes to play the same video games as Sam is the real deal maker.
Now that Paul and I are getting married, the three of us are spending much more time together. Sometimes we do nothing in particular, like walk the dog around downtown L.A. or go across the street for coffee and bagels. Other times we make a day of it, like when we took a trip to Six Flags. Paul took Sam on the water ride, just the two of them, while I watched. The meant-to-be quality that I experience in my relationship with Paul extends to my son, too.
We all feel it.
Recently, Paul and I were sitting on the ice-blue sofa, the one that matches the color of Paul’s eyes, and Sam came up and threw his arms around me. As I snuggled him close, I said, “I love you, muffin.” (That’s what I call him, muffin.) In a rare display of emotion, he answered, “I love you, Mom.” Then innocently, beautifully, he added, “I love you, Paul.” Paul and I looked at each other, surprised. “I love you too, Sam,” Paul said.
It was only a few weeks later that Paul asked me to marry him.
I suspect this feeling of family is the thing that sets me apart from the five million other women Paul dated but didn’t ask to marry him. Paul loves me, yes. But having Sam’s love and respect seems to make Paul feel really good about himself in a way that goes beyond what a woman could give him. It helps him heal the hurt little boy inside him and I think it helps soothe the pain he feels over the fact that his own son is being raised several states away. It’s not all Paul’s fault that the boy’s mother insisted on returning to her hometown (and that Paul’s work is in California), but I can tell that doesn’t make him feel any less guilty or ashamed he’s not there.
This family we’re building—including Paul’s son—is our great hope. If every relationship has a purpose—a deep underlying need that the partnership promises to fulfill—ours is to create a home.
To have and to hold.
To belong.
PAUL HAS CLEARED OUT the spare bedroom for Sam. There’s not a lot of stuff in there to begin with, just a desk with a bunch of crap Paul never uses, which he’s moved into the living room. That leaves just one huge thing in the room, a four-foot-by-five-foot pin screen that Paul built to use for film animation projects. It’s basically a gimongous version of one of those little doohickeys that you press your hand or face on, causing all the little pins to give way, forming a perfect impression. The pin screen is so massive (“One of the largest in existence,” Paul informs me) that it can’t be moved. There is a picture “painted” into it that Paul wants to keep and Sam has been warned not to touch it. He’s such a good boy, he definitely won’t.
The three of us went to Ikea and picked out a bunk bed for Sam, and now Paul is in there putting it together. Every once in a while he hollers for me to come in and hold something so he can screw it together. We’re all very excited about our new life. I’ve been doing more cooking than usual, and I’d say my roasted beets are getting pretty close to perfection.
> I’ve given notice to my landlord that I’m moving, which is going to be a big job, since Sam and I have been living in the same place for four years. Paul’s loft is full of furniture, and most of my stuff was crap to begin with, so I’m giving away almost everything. The only thing I’m really gonna miss is my washer and dryer. At Paul’s place, the laundry is down the hall.
Everyone we know is so happy for us that we’re getting married. The girls at the coffee place, our various buddies in the building, and of course, Tracy, my best friend, who lives in the complex—they’re all stoked. Even Sam’s dad is excited.
Things are going so smoothly, in fact, I could almost ignore the fact that Paul has hardly mentioned the engagement, much less anything about a wedding. I’m chalking it up to buyer’s remorse, which I know he’ll get over.
I just need to give him a little time.
Twelve
I Love You, Which Is Why I’m Lying to You
I’VE HARDLY SPOKEN to my dad. It’s been eight months since I got to New York and I’ve probably heard from him less than a half-dozen times. It’s the least we’ve been in touch since we reconciled in 1983. That was ten years ago.
But I’m too busy to be worried. My career is on fire. In a short time, I’ve gone from occasional newswriting shifts at WCBS to full-time freelance work at WNBC. After a little while there, I got an additional job as the regular fill-in writer on NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw, and then, in addition to that, my own regular position on the weekends at NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams. If it sounds like I work thirteen days a week, it’s because I do.
I find it hilarious that as a news writer, I have failed up so spectacularly. I wonder what old Gil Hartsook would think if he could see me now.
On the personal side, New York is like a bad boyfriend. I love it so much, but it’s kind of like meh about me in return. I’m turning into a classic career girl—great job, cute outfits—and not a whole lot else.
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