I Love You and I'm Leaving You Anyway (11 page)

I STOPPED AT THE STORE
and bought a toothbrush, which is now tucked into the outside pocket of my purse. I don’t know what I am thinking. I’m certainly not ready to have sex with Paul. He hasn’t even said anything about an actual relationship yet! I guess I just figure I can sleep over without having to confront the sex question. And if that doesn’t work, I can leave before things get too hot and heavy. Practice setting boundaries, you know? I’m in therapy. I know how to do that.

Right.

But then I sit down on Paul’s bed. Two minutes in that huge four-poster and all that is left of my “boundaries” is a pair of itty-bitty thong underwear. That’s not much to have between you and a throbbing member worthy of a Magnum-size condom. Better come up with a quick Plan C.

“I have to say something,” I venture, coming up for air.

“What?” he says. He’s devouring me with the intensity of a grizzly bear in April.

“Just, um—” I put a hand to his chest to call a time out. “See, the thing is…” I hem. I haw. “The thing is…”

“What’s the thing?” he asks, nibbling my pinky finger. He licks the tip, then slides the whole thing in his mouth.

Ohhhhhh myyyy gawddddd
. “The thing is…”

I’m trying to tell him that I need to be in a relationship with him if I’m going to be having sex with him (after all, I am the marrying kind—for me to just sleep with a guy feels like going on one of those loop-de-loop roller coasters without bothering to wear the seat belt), but it’s exceedingly difficult to form any kind of rational statement when you’re starring in a foreplay scene worthy of
Nine ½ Weeks
.

“Go ahead…you can say anything,” he coos in between nibbles. He’s not toying with me exactly. It’s more that he doesn’t seem to know I’m trying to say something really important. Or maybe he thinks I’m trying to tell him something awful, like I have herpes—which I don’t—and subconsciously, he doesn’t want to hear it.

“Uh…Um…Ahhhh…” It’s a struggle to locate some actual words. All my brain cells have taken up residence between my legs, leaving only the amygdala, or whatever part of the brain moans and groans, in charge. Finally, after a lot of effort, I manage something that comes pretty close to a coherent sentence. “Um. I don’t know if I should ‘go there’ with you.”

Once the words leave my mouth, you can feel it. He knows exactly what I’m talking about. After all, he’s in his late thirties; he’s not stupid. He stops nibbling.

I keep talking. Slowly.

“I mean, if I ‘go there’ with you, I’ll get attached to you,” I say quietly.

“Attached” is code for
I’ll want a relationship
, motherfucker, without scaring the shit out of a guy. I have learned over the years to be unflinchingly honest with myself: there is no way in hell I am going to “just be friends” (with or without benefits) with a guy that I am this wet for. I need to get very very very real with myself, even if the only words I can muster are awkward and euphemistic. If not, I run the risk of having my heart broken, or at least trampled on, and it will have been something I, and only I, could have prevented.

I’m almost forty, and I finally get it: few guys will lie outright
about not wanting to be my boyfriend, but tons of them will totally allow me to delude myself. It may not be entirely ethical for a guy to do this, but then, me being willing to delude myself isn’t entirely honest, either.

On the other hand, I have found that a boundary, any boundary, even one as flimsy as a triangle of periwinkle-colored mesh on a Cosabella thong, will deter most men from sport-fucking me—but only if I am willing to say (in some way that is not super overly scarily direct) that I am the kind of girl who functions best in long-term relationships. Which is another, better way of saying that any sex we’re having is only casual for one of us. If it appears to be casual for me, it’s because I’m faking it.

“Okay, you,” Paul says in that same sweetly affectionate tone of voice he used the other night. “I understand perfectly. With perfect”—he sweeps his top lip, just his top lip, against mine—“perfection.” We drift off to sleep, and that’s it for that discussion, maybe because it is four in the morning, but also because I think he gets it.

In the morning, we make out for a while, then go to the coffee place across the street. We order double Americanos and perform the choreography of fixing them up—I cream, you sugar; I sugar, you cream—in perfect sync.
We’re so comfortable,
I think to myself,
no one watching would know we only just spent our first night together
. I want to be mistaken for his girlfriend.

It’s almost time for me to go to work, so Paul walks me to my car. “Have a sweet, sweet day,” he says as I unlock the door. Before I can get in, he tattoos me with another one of those soulful kisses, the ones that make me feel where he came from…and where he’s going…and where I came from…and where he’s taking me.

I climb into my car, besotted.

And as the keys in the ignition do their
ding, ding, ding,
I watch him walk away, still in his furry slippers, and I think to myself:

Jesus Christ, I’m in love.

THAT YEAR I HIT THE CHRISTMAS
bonanza. After all, it wasn’t just any Christmas. It was our first Christmas as a “family” and my dad was eager to be the best Mike Brady he could be to his daughter, Cindy, and his new wife, played by Sharon Stone in
Casino
. After four years in the joint (not to mention ripping me from the Ericsons’ home), he had a lot of making up to do. A
lot
a lot.

Pretty much all I knew of Christmas—if you don’t count the one I spent with Linda when we were robbed and all of our presents were stolen—came from the Ericsons, where the holiday was actually a spiritual affair. Okay, sure, I got an Easy-Bake Oven one year and a Barbie camper another, but the real party was down at Hope Lutheran, where the two blond children playing Joseph and Mary in the Nativity play were politely ignoring the fact that someone had made a terrible mistake and cast a biracial Baby Jesus. Me. On Christmas Eve we went to church, and on Christmas Day we went to church, and then Mrs. Ericson made a turkey with all the trimmings and somewhere in there we opened a couple of gifts, one of which was definitely going to be new pajamas. The big takeaway of the whole day:
Christ is born! The King has come! Rejoice!

Not so in the McMillan household. In the McMillan household it’s pretty much
Fuck the King! We’re about to get PAID!

Christmas is about
presents
.

“Are these all mine?” I say, eyeing the booty under the tree. It’s like that old segment on the children’s show
Wonderama,
where greedy kids go around grabbing gifts until either time runs out or they can’t hold any more.

“All for my little gyurl,” Daddy says proudly. I can see why he’s happy. We haven’t had a Christmas together since I wore diapers.

It’s ridiculous with gifts under that tree. There are big ones. Little ones. Ones in between. More than you could ever use or want. If the Ericsons were the personification of what a New Age person would call Christ consciousness, my dad was pretty much the definition of anti–Christ consciousness. No, not like the devil. Like, materialist. Like, temporal. Like, Donald Trump. To my dad, god can be touched, tasted, worn, driven, and best of all, had sex with. Combine this with the need to atone for all those years of being gone, and you’ve got a pile of gifts bigger than Mount Sinai.

And it was a pile of surprising novelty and range, unless you consider that they were given by a man who painted a thousand square feet of hardwood floor in a blue, yellow, and orange psychedelic pattern for a party. Here is just a partial list: a rock polisher, a crystal radio set (never opened), a Baby Alive, a Barbie town house (my dad probably figured the Barbie and the girls could do some pretty lucrative “dating” out of that thing), a white Panasonic tape recorder I would use to conduct interviews with “Diana Ross” (played by me, of course), a pajama-and-robe set, and too many articles of clothing to mention. Thirty-eight in all.

After what seems like hours of ripping tape and paper, the mountain of presents dwindles to that one, final gift. I lean over to pick it up, but it’s too heavy.

“Let me get that for you,” my dad says, sliding it toward me. As it scrapes against the yellow swirl on the floor, the box makes one of
those awful sliding sounds that usually make my skin crawl, but for once I don’t care.

I get down on my knees, in prayer to the box. I can’t believe it’s all mine.

“Can you guess what it is?” Yvonne chimes in. This is one of her good days. When all the gerbils in her mind are working overtime to convince her that life with her recidivist new husband and his emotionally disturbed child is really just a disco version of
Leave It to Beaver
. I hope the gerbils are getting holiday pay.

Well, let’s see. “It’s not a bike,” I say, stumped. I shake my head.

“Go ahead,” Freddie says, eyes sparkling. “Open it.”

I tear into the paper and open the box. Inside is a gift a nine-year-old girl could never, ever, have imagined. A perfect, glossy, seven-pound bowling ball. With my name engraved on it.

Tracy.

Looking at it, I know one thing with more certainty than I have ever known it before:

My daddy
does
love me.

PAUL NEVER CALLED.
First two hours went by. Then four. Then a whole evening. Then a whole day. My anxiety starts like a coffee headache—at first a murmur I hope will subside, or go away completely, but instead it gets more and more insistent until it’s a shout. At this point, it’s a bullhorn.

I’ve been to enough therapy, read enough books, and been rejected by enough men to know that this is not what it seems to be. Oh, the racing heart is real. The sleeplessness is real. The feeling of abandonment is real. But like a ventriloquist who throws his voice into a creepy little puppet, none of this anxiety is coming from where it seems to be coming from, which is to say, Paul. It’s
actually
coming from a time long ago and far away where a little girl without a mother is waiting for her dad to come get her—her dad who is probably out
screwing some chick, or pimping some ho, or caught up in some other activity. Her dad, who could be anywhere, returning anytime. But even though
I know all that,
I could
swear
the puppet’s talking.

Swear it.

And here’s what the puppet is saying:
There is something wrong with you. You are not pretty enough, not smart enough, not well-bred enough, not skinny enough, not rich enough, and not sexy enough, not sexy enough, and definitely not sexy enough to be chosen. There are people who would love you, yeah, but not anyone you really, really want.

I call up Siobhan, one of my most therapied, most yoga’d, most kooky, most spiritual girlfriends, and ask her for something, anything, to help me understand what’s happening here. “What in hell is this guy thinking? He called me, like, twenty times in three days, and now—nothing!” I’m seriously confused.

“Dude, that sucks. But it’s also really rad,” she says in her born-and-raised-in-Berkeley voice.

“Rad,” I repeat. Rad is not what I was thinking this was. “And why’s that?”

“Because now you get to get free.”

“Free,” I say. “Keep going.”

“Yeah. Think about it. This isn’t a
new
feeling.” She sucks in a huge breath because she’s about to start giggling. Because this is so funny. And so rad. “This is how you’ve
always felt
.”

You know how some people can just string a few words together, words you’ve heard a thousand times before, but for some reason, this one time you hear them and you know what they mean and you know it’s true? That’s what’s happening to me in this conversation.

This is how I’ve always felt.

She’s right. I remember feeling pretty much exactly this way about Andy Weld, in second grade. He always wore this T-shirt with a happy face on it, which was ironic because he was definitely a future Zoloft user.

“You’re just on a wheel, going over and over the same thoughts and
feelings until you realize that they’re an illusion. One day you just
see
it and then you’re free.” Siobhan puts a vocal flourish on the end of the sentence, the same one a game show host would use while explaining the rules to a new contestant.
Once you buy a prize, it’s yours to keep!

Oh, goody.

But wait, there’s more. “You have to act like you personally invited every single person, place, or thing into your life so that you could see whatever part of the illusion it’s showing you.”

Huh?

I kind of get it.

Then I totally get it. If what Siobhan is saying is true—and I know it is—it turns cause-and-effect upside down. It means these feelings—of abandonment, anxiety, not-enough-ness—actually came
first,
and the men followed. Like maybe I’m conscripting them, at gunpoint, into my war against me. I stick a pistol in their ribs and say, “I need someone to prove to me that men will ultimately disappoint me. You’re coming with me.”

The guys I draft are the ones who already feel bad about themselves, already have mommy issues or daddy issues or whatever, who already can’t believe they’re worth being close to. So they abandon and feel guilty. And I get abandoned and feel worthless.

Perfect!

A nice guy isn’t really a match for that. Unless he’s a nice guy who feels bad about himself. In which case, I’ve been hired to play the abandoner. It’s not that I don’t love them. It’s just that there’s a script, and we have to stick to it.

I hang up with Siobhan glad to have some clarity. To understand what’s going on.

Too bad it doesn’t take this awful feeling away.

I HAVEN’T SEEN MUCH OF DADDY
lately. He’s a dashing figure, literally, on his way in or out all of the time. Mostly out.
Even though he’s gone a lot, there are still signs of his presence. Like the spinach stain on the kitchen wall from the night he and Yvonne had that major blowout. Or my ill-behaved dog Stanley—50 percent German shepherd, 50 percent Siberian husky, 100 percent total nightmare—who’d be toast if my dad weren’t here, because no one can stand him, not even me. Stanley is sweet, but he could do with some of my hyperactivity pills.

There are other indications that my dad’s still here—like his friend Tina and her boyfriend Marvin (referred to by some as “a rat in a toilet”), who are upstairs living in my bed, where they’ve been hunkered down for the past three months. Tina is an unidentified associate of my dad’s, or is it Marvin who is the associate? I don’t know and it doesn’t really matter. All I know is they never leave the room and they’re
awfully
subdued.

When I ask Yvonne where my dad is, she says he’s “at work.” His job is obviously nothing like Betsy’s dad’s job. Betsy’s dad walks down the street from the bus stop every night at precisely five-something carrying a briefcase and wearing a fedora. He works at Honeywell, where he’s some kind of engineer.

My dad carries a briefcase and wears a hat and even works downtown, but it’s just not the same thing.

Case in point. One night last week Yvonne and Freddie wake me up in the middle of the night. They pour me into the backseat of the car and we drive to one of those bad suburbs two tiers out—the kind populated with meth types and people who like aboveground pools.

We knock on the door, and it opens into a party. Not, like, a seventies party with Afros and hoop earrings and halter dresses. This was more like a Saturday-afternoon family barbecue where kids are running around, the women are klatching in the kitchen, and the men are off doing their (illegal, but the women don’t—or don’t want to—know) Men Things.

Except it’s in the middle of the night.

There are probably a half dozen kids there, several right around
my age. We quickly rustle up a competitive game of tag that—necessarily—takes place indoors. We run through the house, tagging each other, screaming, and having a generally fabulous time. No one has to tell me why that band Chicago is wondering if anybody really knows or cares what time it is. Gatherings like this are proof positive that time is just a number.

I’m barreling up the steps, hot on the heels of a sandy-haired girl with a voice that sounds like she’s smoked one too many secondhand Marlboros, when I look to my left, into the master bedroom. The men must have heard us coming, because one of them is in the process of giving the door a nudge just strong enough to swing it shut. He doesn’t seem
worried
. It’s more like he’s just being thorough. As if you were going to the bathroom with the door open and you heard someone on the stairs.

But he is too late. I see in there.

They are all holding balloons. Long, skinny ones. The kind used by street-fair clowns to make Jeff Koons–type dogs.

There are five guys, maybe six, and they are either sitting on or kneeling by the bed, arranged in the kind of classical tableaux you first encounter in Survey of Art History 101 during your freshman year in college. The wavy-haired dude nearest the door—a dead ringer for Oates of that band Hall and the Other Guy Who Is Not Hall—is holding a dangling, flaccid, green balloon. The other guys have them, too, and they’re filling them with something—something that is apparently located in a pile in the middle of the bed, since that’s where their attention is very intensely focused. My dad is the only guy standing, and he’s apart from the rest of them. I guess that means he’s the supervisor. I don’t know if I’m seeing things, but I could swear there’s a hat and a briefcase.

Then, in a split second, the door closes.

Suddenly I know where my dad is when he’s not with me. He’s out having birthday parties with men in bad suburbs in the middle of the night. Women, as a business, is over, replaced with “girl” (a street
name for heroin), a substance of such towering profitability it moots even the easy money to be had in the sex trade. Not that womanizing—the sport—wasn’t in full effect. But that’s not business; that’s pleasure.

Not long after that, Tina and her rat-in-the-toilet boyfriend Marvin get out of my bed and go “live” somewhere else. I move back into my room, glad to be out of the guest bedroom, where the bed doesn’t have a canopy and the wallpaper isn’t a pretty Edwardian pale blue. As I’m exploring my new-old-new-again room, I find a saucer on top of the tall dresser, the one I don’t often use. The saucer is littered with a few grains of something that looks almost like salt and pepper, but darker and smaller.
That’s heroin,
I say to myself. I don’t really know how I know that.

But I know that it goes into balloons.

AFTER SIX DAYS, I CALL PAUL.
This is a big deal because normally, I do not call men. Ever. I operate on the theory that men vote with their fingers—if they want you, they dial, and if they don’t, they don’t. I don’t refuse to call men as part of a game. I do it because when a guy doesn’t call, he
is
communicating—the fact that he doesn’t want to/can’t/won’t call. So why ring him up and make him say it out loud? That’s just masochism for me and sadism for him. (Or is it sadism for me and masochism for him?) And then there’s the fact that if the guy isn’t highly motivated toward me now, how’s he going to stick around when we get into our first fight? Better to just not start something I already know, deep down, he can’t finish. You’d be hard-pressed to talk me out of this strategy, because it has worked extremely well. My dating-to-living-together ratio is like 97.6 percent.