I Love You and I'm Leaving You Anyway

by Tracy McMillan

  I find it fascinating to watch this pattern repeat itself.

  When I was younger, I might have wanted to say to her, How can you do this to me when it just happened to you? You should know better. But what I’m thinking now is Wow…is that what I’m like? Do I collect glances, validation, and sexual approval from men (any men, all men) like a sort of energetic hobo picking up bottles and cans for a nickel apiece? Because I really don’t think I am. But if Paul is here, and this woman is here, and her husband was here, and his new girlfriend is now there…then I must be in all that somewhere, too.

  Mercifully, India doesn’t have a lot of women without mufflers, and we spend two drama-free weeks shooting the Pop Star’s video. We’re all over Mumbai—on the beach, in the slums, in film production offices, in abandoned apartment buildings, in mind-boggling traffic and five-star hotels. We visit a Jain Hindu temple. And just like I have heard so many people say about India, I have a spiritual experience.

  But not the kind with angels or white lights. I have one with a camera.

  With nothing to do while Paul and the crew are busy, I take pictures of people everywhere we go. There’s a movie I love where the main character remarks that every girl eventually goes through a photography phase. Well, I’m still in mine. When I photograph people, I shoot their faces. Really close up. I want to see what’s in someone’s eyes, what’s in their soul.

  The camera gives me a way to interact with people. One evening we are setting up in an apartment building—it’s really more of a series of concrete-block rooms with doors on them—and I ask a couple of little girls if I can take their picture. They say yes, so I snap a couple of quick shots, then flip the digital camera to playback and show them the photo on the screen. It blows their minds! They shake their heads back and forth in the figure-eight-type gesture that is universal in India to mean anything from Wow to What the fuck (in a good way)? The little girls have never seen an image of themselves.

  Their slightly older brothers come over and point at themselves, as if to say, “Take my picture, too.” So I do. Now I’m the pied piper, because in short order, there are a half a dozen kids crowded around. They all want to see the photographs. The older boys take me by the arm and lead me back toward an open area, where women are preparing food. “Picture!” the kids say, pointing at the women, who are obviously sisters. I snap. I show the picture. They smile and giggle. And do the figure eight.

  Now we’re all laughing.

  A few of the boys and girls head into a back room and when they reappear, they are escorting a very old woman. The grandma. They want me to take her picture. To say I am honored doesn’t go nearly far enough. I’m gonna cry.

  I shoot the grandma, with her rheumy eyes and her frail arms, her gray hair and her faded sari. She’s beautiful. Then I show her—and her whole family—the photograph. We all smile and laugh together. We’re totally connected.

  It’s a spiritual experience.

  Standing in this amazing moment, amid these ordinary people, I am reminded once again that there is something in life that is bigger than anything, than everything—bigger than poverty, bigger than a language barrier, bigger than the oceans I flew across to get here—and that something, that indescribable something, whatever it is, is more real than pain, poverty, language, or even space and time.

  June Ericson called that indescribable something the Lord, and it’s a good thing I’m being reminded of it. I don’t know it yet, standing here in this Mumbai slum, but when I return to Los Angeles, I am going to barrel headlong into a situation a lot like the one I faced when I left the Ericsons. And in order to handle it, I’m definitely gonna need a Lord.

  WE’RE BACK, AND THINGS aren’t right. I don’t know what’s wrong, but something is. I feel anxious all the time, and I am really thin. I am a normally thinnish person, but now I am skinny. Like, intervention skinny.

  The video isn’t over yet. The British Pop Star has flown in for another week of shooting, which necessitated a couple hundred more trips to Cameras Incorporated and the building of a giant stage and backdrop. In our living room.

  While they shoot all night long, I fall asleep in the back of the loft, to the sound of that terrible song being played over, and over, and over. For some reason, on the last night of the shoot, I start feeling “bad” and throw up several times in twenty-four hours. Even though I know I’m not sick. At least not with anything viral or bacterial.

  Then today, I’m on my way to the news station—I work a one P.M.–to–nine P.M. shift every Sunday—when my phone rings. It’s a number I don’t recognize. I pick it up.

  “Tracy.” It’s Paul. In that clipped tone.

  “Hi!”

  “I’m calling from a borrowed phone,” he says urgently. “I left mine in your purse. Last night at dinner. You gotta bring it back right now.” Now that he mentions it, I remember him putting his phone in my purse last night right before the waitress came to take our order. It would be easy for me not to notice, since we have matching phones. The only difference is that I superglued two big rhinestones on mine. At this point, though, the rhinestones are so dirty they are easy to miss.

  “Where are you?” he says, sounding very serious.

  “I’m on my way to the knitting store.” I want to get some new yarn to fill the boring hours in between news stories. Sundays are notoriously slow.

  “Well, turn around,” he says. Like a director. “I need my phone.”

  Huh. I’d think he would be saying that with a smile, but he’s not. He means it. Which is kind of hilarious. “Turn around? I can’t. I have just enough time to get to the knitting store and make it to work on time. You can meet me there.” I mean at the knitting store.

  “How long before you get there?”

  “I’m a mile away.” I’m thinking it’s crazy, attempting to coordinate a meeting at the yarn store. “It would make more sense if you just waited an hour and came to my work to get it. I’ll be there at one.”

  Paul thinks about this for a minute. Then he says, “Where’s the yarn store?”

  “Beverly and Alta Vista,” I say, pulling the exact street out of my amazing photographic memory of the map of Los Angeles. I’m a walking, talking navigation system.

  “I’ll be right there.” He hangs up.

  I chuckle to myself. God. That’s crazy, like I would turn around to bring Paul his phone. That’s funny.

  I drive another couple of blocks. It occurs to me that Paul is going to get in his car and meet me at the knitting store. The knitting store!

  Paul, the borderline agoraphobic.

  Driving.

  To get his phone.

  The phrase “any lengths” pops into my mind. It’s a phrase used in the recovery world to talk about how far someone is willing to go to satisfy the addiction. It’s also how far you have to be willing to go to get recovery. Paul is definitely going to any lengths to get this phone. He must really want this phone. I wonder why?

  I reach into my purse and pull out his phone. I look at it. There’s a new text message, right there. From a number with an out-of-state area code. Still tooling down Beverly, I open the phone and read the text:

  Hey there, married man!

  Instantly, my foot is shaking on the accelerator. How my foot has already gotten a message that my mind is still struggling to comprehend, I don’t know. But my foot is shaking because it now knows why I’m so skinny.

  My husband is apparently cheating on me.

  My mind is racing with what to do, but it’s also blank. I can’t think straight. I pick up Paul’s phone again and open it—

  Hey there, married man!

  Now something comes to mind. Hit redial. A girlish female voice picks up.

  “Hello?” She’s giggling. Or at least her voice is. She thinks it’s the married man she just texted to say, Hey there!

  It’s not. It’s me. His wife. “Hello. This is my husband’s phone and you just sent a text message?”

  There is a
pause. The girl is obviously thinking. “Oh, I meant to dial 7771,” she says apologetically. Paul’s phone number ends in the digits 7774. “I must have accidentally sent it to the wrong number.”

  I know this is a lie. My foot is telling me so. My shrinking arms are telling me so. But this girl is not going to admit that to me, the married man’s wife. Besides, it’s really Paul I need to interrogate. And his actions have already told me everything I need to know.

  “Oh, okay,” I say pointedly to the girl. She knows I know. I know she knows I know. “Thank you, then. Bye.” I hang up. I think it over for a minute—damn, she lied well! This makes me angry. Girl-on-girl violence—like cheating with another woman’s man—just isn’t right. I call her back. This time, she lets it go to voice mail.

  Hi, this is Jessica—

  I hang up. My foot is still twitching on the gas pedal.

  Seconds later, I pull up to the knitting store and walk in. I’m in a daze. The woman behind the counter greets me cheerfully.

  “Hello, how are you?” she says.

  She doesn’t know that my life just ended, I think to myself. I go through the motions of looking for some new yarn because I have no other idea what I should do. That’s when I see Jean, one of my closest friends in recovery, standing right next to me. Jean is older than me, and wiser than me, and not only that, she’s a therapist who has been through all kinds of stuff in her own life. She’s truly a godsend at this moment. I don’t know whether to be unbelievably happy that the Universe has plopped her into my world right when I need her the most or to kill myself over what is going down right now.

  I throw myself into Jean’s arms and spill out the story. “Paul left his phone in my purse and he called me and wanted it back right away—so bad that he’s driving down here right now, and that made me suspicious, like Why does he want that phone so badly? so I looked at it, and there was a text message from a girl that said”—I lean in close and whisper in an acid singsongy voice—“Hey there married man!”

  I try to steady myself. The only thing I forgot to say is that I’m freaking out. As if that needs saying.

  “Oh my god,” Jean says in her L.A.-via–New York accent. She hugs me. “I’m so sawry. I’ve been there, sister. Just take a breath.”

  She hugs me a minute while I do just that. “Now tell me again what you said. He’s coming down here?”

  “He’s on his way right now.” I’m too stunned to even cry. Jean leads me out of the store and we stand there, on Beverly Boulevard, between the upscale knittery and the upscale furniture store, so all of West Hollywood can watch me deal with my crumbling marriage.

  “How long has this been going on?” Jean asks.

  “I don’t know.” I pull out Paul’s phone and show her the text. “Here it is. See for yourself.” Jean flips open the phone and reads it. She’s appalled on my behalf. “This really sucks, Tracy. What is he thinking?”

  “I don’t know! He hasn’t gotten a job and I know he’s been really freaked out about it, but why would he do this?” We’re looking at each other when I see Paul’s car come barreling toward us. “Oh my god, there he is.”

  Paul slows the car, pulls over, and rolls down the window. He sees Jean, which makes him nervous. She’s not under his spell like I am. Make that like I was.

  “Just throw it in the car,” he says, meaning the phone. He sounds casual, as if I haven’t read this Jessica person’s text message and he’s just going to get the phone back and go on with his life. Our life.

  “No, Paul,” I say. “Get out of the car. We need to talk.”

  His face shatters, like he knows that whatever life we had planned on November 28, 2004, is already over. And it’s only July 17, 2005. He parks the car, then skulks over. In a flash I see that Paul compulsively does behaviors that cause people to think about him the way he thinks about himself—like he’s a piece of shit. He can’t stop.

  The closer he gets, the more hysterical I am. “What the fuck are you doing, Paul? What the fuck!” He looks me in the eye and it’s obvious—he has no idea what the fuck he’s doing.

  “I don’t know, Tracy.” He says it not apologetically, not like he’s surrendering, but like he’s driving a stake through my heart. He says it angrily and like I am somehow to blame.

  “Well who is she?”

  “She’s some dumb chick who works at Cameras Incorporated.” There’s that name again. I know that name.

  “The camera place?!” I’m having a hard time grasping that my husband of eight months is picking up counter girls at the camera-rental place. “Are you crazy?”

  “Yes. Probably.” He sounds more dead than crazy. Now he can’t look at me.

  “Look at me, Paul! You can’t just do this! What about me? What about Sam? What the fuck are you doing?” I’m hollering. I can hear myself hollering.

  And he hollers back. “I couldn’t get a job, okay? I couldn’t get a job!” He sounds pathetic.

  Paul launches into a long, dramatic monologue that manages to be both totally disgusting and totally heartbreaking at the same time. “I needed to get my mojo back. And that’s how I do it. I need girls. It’s always been like this. When I was married to Sarah, I never worked. Maybe two or three times a year. And when we broke up and I started fuckin’ girls, I started getting work like crazy. My career took off, dude. The same thing happened when I was with Cecilia.” He means the mother of his child. “I got three commercials the day she moved out. And then you and I got married and I lost that big job on our honeymoon…” He stops speaking, adrift for a moment. I just stare at him, dumbfounded, watching as he retraces the trail of bread crumbs that brought him to this pitiful and wretched place. “I knew if I got a girl I could get a job. If I could get a girl to like me, I could get my power back.”

  He had to get his power back.

  His logic makes perfect sense to him. And suddenly, it makes perfect sense to me, too. How I chose this man, precisely what I recognized in him when I saw his face online and I just knew that he would one day be my husband. He wasn’t my husband. He was—he is—my father!

  Getting power by getting women—that’s my dad. Borrowing from a woman’s regard for him in order to regard himself—that’s what my dad does. He can’t generate his own love for himself; he needs to borrow it from the gaze in a woman’s eye. For years, my dad made his living literally off women’s bodies. Paul wants to do that, too, just in a highly symbolic way—because he did, after all, go to Harvard.

  The whole thing is epic and literary.

  Paul looks up at me, and I can truly see him, for the first time since we met, without all the regard I’ve been giving him. It’s like the mask has been pulled off and what is left is a little boy, standing in front of a yarn store, stuck in a world he doesn’t really understand. Paul’s going through life with the same sense of disconnect I have when I’m trying to figure out the clasp on a necklace while looking in the mirror. Things just aren’t where his mind is telling him they are.

  Paul’s insane. That’s what he is. Just like his brother in the psychiatric facility. Or to a lesser degree, his dad, who dyed his hair to be a CEO. Or my dad, who just told me last week that when he gets out of prison (which will be soon, he says) he wants to start a business farming earthworms. Earthworms!

  This must be what a friend of Paul’s was alluding to when he came up to me early in the relationship and said, “I’ve never seen Paul so good! This is the best ‘Paul’ he’s ever been.”

  I thought this was a good thing! I guess I didn’t stop to think that if you can “fix” someone—the way I fixed Paul then, and the way Paul now wants Jessica to fix him—it can only mean one thing. He was broken to begin with.

  Maybe things aren’t where my mind is telling me they are, either.

  THE NEXT DAY WE GO TO SEE my therapist, Saundra. She cuts right to the chase and asks Paul if he is willing to change his mind about needing women to get jobs. He’s unsure.

  “Well, are you willing to
try to make the marriage work?” she asks.

  “What does that mean?” Paul wants to know. “‘Make the marriage work.’”

  “It means stop seeing the girl.” Saundra carefully shifts her expression into neutral, a struggle no doubt, due to the what-the-fuckness of Paul’s question.

  “I’m not really seeing her,” Paul says, trying to minimize. “We just talk on the phone.” Like that changes anything. He has truly lost his mind.

  “Then stop talking to her on the phone,” Saundra’s mouth says. Her face says, Dude, please.

  “All right.”

  “You will?” I pipe up, startled. I hadn’t expected him to agree so readily.

  “Sure. Yes.” He’s weirdly disengaged, but it’s a yes, so I’ll take it.

  “And you’re going to need to see someone for couple’s therapy,” Saundra adds. “As well as individual therapy.”

  Paul agrees to it all. By the end he seems contrite. Like he’s just passed through the well-worn stages of a spree, and this is where he’s ended up—where he always ends up—at the wrong end of a woman’s glare. And even though he doesn’t seem to fully comprehend the consequences of his actions, he’s clearly ashamed of himself.

  I have some compassion for him. If I hadn’t had such a run-in myself with bottles of wine and bags of pot when I had a baby I was trying to love, I wouldn’t understand at all. But I have, and so I do.

  Yet there’s another thing I know from my own experience, and it’s got me pretty worried—that without a major shift, all the shame and guilt in the world isn’t gonna be enough to stop him.

  PAUL AND I HAVE this amazing ability to live in impossible circumstances. We just go back about our lives. It’s not that we pretend nothing happened. It’s there, like a stain on the sofa that forever reminds you of the time you were careless with that Sharpie. The temptation is to feel awful every time you see the stain, but you can’t or you might as well just throw out the couch. Because there’s nothing you’re going to do to turn the clock back to before you left the cap off.