I Love You and I'm Leaving You Anyway

by Tracy McMillan

  So you throw a slipcover on it—something decent looking, from Target maybe—and hope for the best.

  The hard part is dealing with the knowledge that whatever has happened, it can happen again. That has me pretty terrified most of the time, but it’s a terror below the level of consciousness, the same way I imagine people in Bosnia got through the bad years with the Serbs. You know something awful can happen at any moment, and in a way you are braced for it, but until that moment comes, you just go on along as best you can.

  WHEN YOU’RE DOWNTOWN, which side of the street you’re on makes all the difference. The side we live on belongs to the hipsters, with their $3,000 rents and their carefully managed grime. The other side belongs to the hobos. It’s full of homeless people and dirty, clogged with “apartments” made of refrigerator boxes and low-down people and dogs. But the hobo side has an excellent burger place that we like to eat from, if not at, because it’s more than a little bit rough. While Paul waits for our order, Sam and I head upstairs to set the table.

  Once inside the building, I realize I don’t have my mailbox key, so I bolt back to get Paul’s key. As I wait for a car to pass before I can cross, I see Paul pacing the sidewalk on the other side of the street. He’s on the phone.

  It’s her.

  There’s something about his body language, the way he’s smiling into the phone, the way he’s so entranced by the discussion that he doesn’t even see me standing here, watching him cheat. I turn and go back into the building.

  “What’s wrong, Mom?” Sam asks.

  “Nothing, pumpkin,” I lie. “Let’s go upstairs.”

  “What about the mail?”

  “We’ll get it later.”

  A few minutes later Paul brings the food, and I unpack it. My burger stays mostly untouched. I’m skinny these days, like I said.

  I’m getting so used to living in crisis, I go through the motions of the evening, cleaning up after dinner, loading the dishwasher, and listening to the rhythmic churn of the water inside. All the while, I’m dying to get my hands on Paul’s phone, but he’s got it on him, in his pocket.

  Every nerve ending in my body is leaning toward Paul, the way flowers lean toward the sun. Nothing else will exist until I see that phone. Even, sad to say, my own child. I’m just glad Sam’s got a TV to watch and a video game to play. I’m good for nothing until I can open that phone and find out for sure what I already know. Paul’s lies are so wide and so deep, only when I can see something with my own eyes do I believe it.

  Right before it’s time to read to Sam before bed, Paul goes into the bathroom. He has set his phone down on the kitchen counter, so it’s there, calling my name. I know I shouldn’t do this right now, but I have to…

  My heart starts its familiar race, the blood screams through my veins, and my eyes blur with whatever physiological thing happens to them when the stress hormone gets dumped into my bloodstream. My mouth is dry.

  My kid is lying in bed already, waiting for his story.

  I open the phone. And there it is…the same phone number as July 17, the day of the knitting store; I can tell from the area code. But the caller ID says “Ccollins”—that’s the name of Paul’s point man at work. Then I look more closely and notice there are two “C”s in Ccollins—Paul has anticipated my snooping, and he’s taken steps to cover his tracks.

  I’m devastated he’s talking to this Jessica again—it’s like a baseball bat to my stomach, but it’s a shock to my mind as well. How can it be that this formerly rational man is going to such silly lengths to hide his need to talk to a twenty-one-year-old girl with an Ohio area code who thinks text messages to married men should be punctuated with exclamation points?

  It doesn’t make sense. None of this does.

  Especially when there’s a little boy in the other room who wants to know what happens next in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

  I go into Sam’s room. I’m tense. He’s lying in bed, dressed in his jammies, waiting for Paul and me to come in for our nightly reading routine. Having a routine is good for kids. It makes them feel safe, like the adults in their world can be counted on. I never had one, but I’m trying to do things differently with my son. Trying…and, apparently, failing. Because I have to cancel the routine tonight. There is no way I am successfully concealing the stress, the fear, the pain, and the anguish of what is going on right now.

  “I’m sorry, honey. I can’t read to you tonight,” I say, struggling not to cry. Sam looks at me, and I can see that he’s afraid. He knows something is going on, but he has no idea what. He doesn’t ask.

  Paul comes into the room, set to read. “Are we ready?” He doesn’t know I’ve looked at his phone. He still thinks we’re in a family together. He doesn’t seem to understand what he’s doing to destroy that.

  “We’re not reading tonight,” I announce to him. I sound sick. Because I am. I give Sam a kiss on the forehead, just like I always do. “I love you, honey. I’m having a hard time tonight. I’ll feel better in the morning.”

  He doesn’t believe me.

  ON SUNDAY I GO TO WORK. I’m scared to leave the house. When I’m home, I have the illusion that nothing bad can happen to us, like refusing to go to sleep so you don’t have to have a nightmare. But I have to work, so off I go.

  At lunch, which is at five P.M., a wave of nausea hits me right between the eyes. I see a visual of her phone number with its brand-new-in-town area code. I relive flashes of July 17—Hey there, married man!—of the hobo side of the street, of “Ccollins” appearing on Paul’s caller ID. My whole posttraumatic thing happens—the revving heart, the shaking, the fear. I call Paul and get no answer, which makes it worse.

  The eleven o’clock producer assigns me a bunch of stories, and I do them, grateful to have something to think about other than my fear. Writing the news has always been good for me this way—there’s almost nothing it can’t take your mind off of. No wonder there are so many twenty-four-hour news channels.

  I slog through the rest of my shift, and by nine fifteen, I’m home. Paul is lying on the sofa, the one that matches his eyes. He is asleep.

  “Hey,” I say, leaning over to kiss him. He wakes up. He seems startled.

  “How was work?”

  “Fine.”

  Normally, Paul hugs and kisses me the moment I walk in the door. All the insanity around here hasn’t affected our sex life at all. He wants me just as much as he ever did, maybe even more. But right now he’s strangely distant.

  “What’d you do tonight?” I ask.

  “Worked on the video. Want to see it?” I follow him over to his desk, where he shows me the latest cut of the video. Normally, he would wrap his hand absentmindedly around my leg while we watch, but not tonight.

  That’s when I register the shirt. He’s wearing the plaid Dolce and Gabbana. His “date” shirt.

  “What did you have for dinner?” I ask innocently.

  “A hamburger,” Paul says as he fiddles with something on the computer. “From across the street.”

  I don’t see signs of any food having been consumed. Paul usually leaves his takeout containers on the stainless steel counter. He’s not big on tidying up.

  “Where are the containers?” I ask, scrutinizing him carefully for the tiny twitches and blinks that tell me when he’s lying. I think I detect something, but it’s hard to be sure.

  “I ate it there,” he says. And that’s when I know for sure he’s lying. Because that place is full of lowlifes and derelicts.

  No one eats in there.

  THAT NIGHT I WAKE UP in the middle of the night. There is only one thought in my mind—apparently the answer to a logic problem it has been working on for hours, if not days—and that thought is: Get the receipt. Get. The. Receipt. I know immediately what my mind is telling me to do. Paul saves all of his receipts. So if he ate somewhere tonight, somewhere other than the derelict place across the street, it will be in his pocket.

  I creep out of
bed and grab his pants, the lame designer jeans that made me wonder about him in the first place, the ones he wears almost every day. I reach into the front right-hand pocket. I pull out a small piece of white paper. It’s a receipt. From the New Otani Hotel, just a few blocks away.

  Sushi. Four glasses of sake. Total: $80 and change, plus tip.

  Something shifts in me. I’m suddenly done. Free. I know enough now.

  I crumple up the receipt and walk over to where Paul is sleeping, on the couch. I drop it on his chest.

  “Fuck you,” I say.

  He opens his eyes, wide awake. He knows I know. We argue for an hour or two, but it doesn’t matter. It’s over. Or almost over. First we have to have the most intense sex I’ve ever had in my life. Where I transmit through my body all the fury, all the ache, all the worry, the love, the fear, and the horror I’ve ever had for, about, at, to, from, and with Paul.

  Or—and this is sick, but true—for, about, at, to, from, and with Daddy.

  Now it’s over.

  IN THE MORNING, I call Saundra, at home. She answers the phone, miraculously. I tell her what’s happened. “What should I do?” I ask. I’m hungover emotionally, but I’m pretty clear, given the circumstances.

  “Well, Tracy,” she says, “you could do what Yoko did.”

  I love Yoko Ono, so I can’t wait to hear what she did. Whatever it is, I’m doing it. “What did Yoko do?”

  “She sent John Lennon away.” Of course she did. Saundra continues, “What you can do is, if you have the strength, you can pack Paul a bag and put it by the front door. And then you call him and tell him, ‘You can’t do that around me.’ That’s what you do. If you have the strength.”

  I have the strength. It has taken me twenty pounds, eighteen months, and a million tears. But finally, I have the strength to let go. No, not of Paul. I’ve felt like this before Paul came along—maybe not as extremely, but I’ve felt it—and I’m sure I could find someone else who could make me feel it again. So it’s not him I need to let go of.

  It’s Daddy.

  Fifteen

  I Love You, but I Love Myself More

  MY DAD IS BEING TRANSFERRED. With two-thirds of his term served, he’s now eligible for the minimum level of custody—a federal prison camp. It’s the last stop for a guy like my dad—who has traveled the whole circuit from maximum to medium, to minimum to prison camp—before going home. Prison camps are nice, the places you hear them joking about on late-night talk shows, where they send people like Michael Milken or Martha Stewart when they run afoul of the law. I ask my dad where exactly he thinks he’s going to end up.

  “There are two places they could send me—Yankton, South Dakota, or Duluth, Minnesota,” he says.

  “Which one’s better?”

  “They’re both about equal, but get this—if I go to Yankton, I get a one-day furlough. They put me on the Greyhound, since there’s no official prison that goes there. I checked out the route, and the bus goes from Waseca”—where he’s in a minimum-security prison now—“to Omaha. Then there’s a three-hour layover in Omaha. Then I get on another bus to Yankton. Altogether it’s seventeen hours of freedom!”

  There is something unbridled in his voice, an excitement I haven’t heard in a long time, if ever. “That sounds amazing!” I say, and I mean it. I can’t imagine what seventeen hours of freedom would be like after fifteen years behind bars.

  “And get this—the best part is that they give me enough money for two meals!” He claps his hands together and makes this gleeful sound—the one he used to make all the time when I was a little girl. “Hah! Guess where I’m going to go?!”

  I have no idea. “Where?”

  “Kentucky Fried Chicken!” He’s so happy, it breaks my heart. The years collapse and I see the two of us in the visiting room at Leavenworth—me little, him big—eating box lunches of Kentucky Fried Chicken delivered for visiting day. I haven’t the heart to tell him it’s called KFC now and it’s not what it used to be. “I’m gonna get me some Original Recipe.”

  Then I get this image…of my dad as a little boy in an adult’s body, so unable to negotiate the world that he has to be put on a bus with enough money for two meals pinned to his jacket. And when I see him like that, it all makes sense. My dad has spent all this time in jail not because he’s a bad man who doesn’t deserve to be let off the hook, but because he’s a lonely, sad, and wounded boy hungry for nurture (woman) who is acutely afraid of life. A ten-foot-by-ten-foot cell is as much of the world as he is equipped to handle. Agoraphobia.

  Just like Paul.

  I FINISH PACKING PAUL’S big bag and leave it outside the door to the loft. I put everything he would need in there, even his pillow. He is coming to get it between three and five, but I will be gone already. My girlfriend Gigi is “babysitting” me for the evening—first we will meet some friends at a restaurant, and then I will spend the night “sleeping” in the guest room at the home of another friend, Liza. Funny how it takes a crisis to realize how loved you really are.

  At the restaurant Gigi drags me to (“You’ll be fine, it will be good for you”), I have a revelation. I am sitting next to a guy I’ve never met before, and he is making polite conversation about the Internet and some of the various blogs he is into. I’ve hardly heard of blogs—it’s 2005—but I’m interested in them. I watch myself nodding my head and following the conversation with surprising coherence.

  While the man chatters amiably, it occurs to me that even though I packed my husband’s bag today and put it by the front door, firmly asserting that you can’t do that around me, I’m not really in that much pain at the moment. By “the moment” I mean: Right. This. Second. I can follow what my table neighbor is saying as long as I’m focused on him, on Now, on whatever he is doing or saying in this very moment. It’s actually quite spacious right here. In the moment.

  I begin to observe more closely. Actually, I am conducting a test. I focus on the conversation. Then I focus on the bag outside the door. Then I focus on next week or next month when I will come home after work and Paul will not be sitting behind his desk. What I see is that the moment is like a radio station. The pain only happens—no, always happens—whenever I leave the absolute present, like the static that occurs when I click 105.6 or 105.8 instead of 105.7. One tick into the past or into the future, and it feels like I am being suffocated.

  But right now, as this guy methodically mixes his wasabi into his (light) soy sauce (the one with the green top), I am fine. There is actually no pain right here, as he twirls his chopsticks round and round in the tiny dish. There is an ache, yes, but it’s not the burning serrated-edge-knife-wound-type ache that I feel when I think about life without Paul; or about how I knew this would happen all along, but for some godforsaken reason I had to do it anyway; or how hurt and confused Sam is going to be when he finds out Paul is gone.

  Nothing hurts worse than when I think about Sam. This is how it happens, isn’t it? The way the exact same pain is passed down from generation to generation. My dad abandons me, then I choose a man with my dad’s qualities, who then abandons me and my son. Now my son carries the same kind of hurt I carry, like he carries the gene that caused the gap between my two front teeth. And it’s my fault. It makes me want to die.

  But if I put my inability to live with the consequences of my actions above my responsibility to atone for them, I will be replicating my mother, Linda. Passing that pain down. Linda had to drink over what she did—and abandoned me altogether. Sam needs me. And Saundra said Sam will get through this whole thing to the exact degree that I do. He is my son; we are connected.

  So I come back to sitting here, at this table full of strangers, who are eating sushi and rattling on happily about movies, and music, and normal things. After a couple of steady breaths, I can feel that I am going to be okay. All I have to do is be willing to keep bringing myself back to the present moment—at least one more time than I leave it.

  SOMEWHERE IN ALL THIS I have started
writing again. I’ve been penning songs all along, and of course, I’ve been writing plenty of news, but I hadn’t tried a screenplay since 1999. Six years. Then on the way home from India I got the idea to write a movie about a woman who has a spiritual awakening—not by going to India, but by meeting her man’s “other woman.” (Tell me my intuition isn’t spot-on!)

  In my story a man has just died. While his wife is cleaning out his office, she accidentally hits the space bar on his computer and discovers that he has a MySpace page. With a “top friend” who is a sexy young woman. In this story, the main character, Diana, sets out to meet the other woman. She poses as a photographer conducting an art project that entails taking pictures of young girls. I won’t give away too much, but interesting things happen, and both Diana and the girl are changed people by the end of the film. I titled it The Spacebar.

  I start writing as soon as we get back from our trip and continue until two weeks after I find the text message. The movie pours out of me. It has become a place for me to work out all the fear, confusion, pain, and anger I am experiencing as a result of what’s happening with Paul. In fact, I think The Spacebar may have indirectly hastened his departure. Because when he finished reading it, he tossed it on the sofa and said calmly, “It’s good, Tracy.” It almost felt as if he was jealous that I was able to take all the madness of our lives and not only make sense of it but turn it into something positive. Something artistic.

  I sent the script to the one screenwriter friend I have, a mom I’ve known for years, who also happens to be a big deal in the business. She gave it to her agent, but he’s not calling, which isn’t really a surprise. Those guys are busy—everyone in town wants an agent.

  But it’s a big step for me to go against the Yvonne voice in my head and deign to believe that maybe something I did could be good enough—so I congratulate myself for at least being willing to be rejected. For me, that’s huge progress.