I Love You and I'm Leaving You Anyway (24 page)

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.

“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.

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.

Brandon and I are still together, but barely. We just can’t seem to stop fighting. But we can’t seem to break up, either. We moved out of Chelsea after only four months, thinking that too much togetherness
was our problem. I got a roommate and moved to the East Village. Brandon moved in with Richie and Allison. That was almost four months ago.

A lonely four months.

Tonight we’re fighting because Brandon doesn’t want to sleep over. He never wants to sleep over anymore. And as far as I’m concerned, the whole point of having a boyfriend is to lie on my side with my head on a pillow that is perched on his shoulder and drift blissfully, safely, off to sleep. But Brandon has changed since we got to New York. I know he loves me, and he says it often. But something very basic is missing. Usually him.

Tonight we are having one of those rare nights when he’s not working and I’m not working. We are smoking our after-sex cigarettes when my phone rings. It’s kind of a surprise since it’s nine o’clock at night, and the only person who calls me that late is right next to me, still breathing heavily from his orgasm. I pick up the phone.

“Hello?”

“Oh, Tracy. Thank god you’re home.”

“Aunt Winnie?” It’s my dad’s second-oldest sister. She used to live in another state but now has moved to Minneapolis and is living in my dad’s house. She’s one of my two sane aunts—she spent twenty-five years working in an insurance office and has never been shot or done crime or been to jail.

“Yeah, girl. Bad news.” She takes a breath. “Your dad’s been convicted.”

Whoooooooooooooooo…
That’s the whistling sound of Wile E. Coyote falling into the Grand Canyon after running right off the edge of the cliff and failing to scramble back onto solid land—which is what my guts are doing right now.

Convicted?!

I’d say
convicted
was impossible, except I know it so totally isn’t. What seems impossible is that my dad has been arrested, posted bail,
hired a lawyer, postponed the trial at least once or twice on technicalities, sat through opening arguments, watched a parade of witnesses, listened to closing arguments, gone to jury deliberation, and waited for a verdict
all without telling me
.

I’m a journalist. I know how slowly the criminal justice system works. This had to have been going on for at least a year. I do all the math in a split second.

“Convicted,” I say. My ears are telling me I sound dead.

“Yeah, baby. They convicted him.” Aunt Winnie has a raspy voice that would be superannoying if she wasn’t such a nice person with such a warm personality. She’s got that McMillan sunshine. “Can you believe it?” I can hear her shaking her head over the phone—
mm-mm-mm
—like Florida Evans on
Good Times.

“Convicted. Aunt Winnie, I didn’t even know! I didn’t even—”

Aunt Winnie takes a breath and I can tell that she
just this moment figured out
what I’m about to say. She knows her brother. I know my dad.

“He never even told you he was arrested, did he?” She says it at the same moment I’m thinking it.

I look at Brandon. I’m kind of panicky now. I’m actually almost feeling the emotion as it’s happening, which is unusual for me. Usually I feel things way after the fact, like how international phone calls used to be. They talk, and then way later, you hear it. Except with feelings. “He never told me, Aunt Winnie!” I have that shrill sound that people have on news video when they’ve been shocked by whatever it is that’s getting them on the news in the first place.

Brandon looks at me, and I can tell from his face he knows something awful is happening. Maybe someone has been in a terrible accident. Maybe someone has died. I don’t think it would ever occur to him that someone has gone to jail.

“If he had told me, I would have come to Minneapolis!” I say. “We could have seen each other!” I sound unreasonable, hysterical. Like a little girl. Brandon looks frightened. He picks up his jeans and
puts one leg in, then the other. It’s easier to watch him do this than to try to process what is happening on the phone.

“I’m sorry, baby. To have to be the one to call you.”

“He didn’t tell me!” I’m not blubbering. There are no tears coming out of my eyes, but they’re coming out of my voice. “What did they convict him for?!”

“Cocaine conspiracy,” she says. Of course they did. I told him they would. “And he’s facing a lot of time, too. He was the ringleader.”

I didn’t think of this. If he’s been convicted, that means he’s going to be sentenced. There are sentencing guidelines. I know because of all the sentences you write as a TV news writer, probably none is written more often than this one:

ANCHOR

If convicted, so-and-so could face up to
five ten twenty
twenty-five years in prison.

It’s called a “tag,” and it is always the final idea of the story. The wrap-up. The culmination. The one declaration that is so final, it allows you to move your attention to the next story, the next crime, the next sentence, the next life in chaos.

“How much time is he facing?”

“Twenty-five years.”

I haven’t fainted in years, but this could do it. I take Brandon’s hand. He’s fully dressed now, shoes and everything. I’m too shocked to find this odd.

“What?! Are you sure?” My dad is fifty-seven years old. Twenty-five years would make him eighty-two on release. Most American black men celebrate their eighty-second birthday in a coffin. My dad just got life in prison. Or death.

“That’s what his lawyer said. We’ll find out for sure at the sentencing.”

“When’s that?”

“April.” April is two months away.

I’m stunned. I don’t know what to say. But Aunt Winnie, who has been through this numerous times—for her sister, her brother, her other brother, her nephew, and her son, not to mention the murder of her other sister and her niece—knows what to do.

Get off the phone.

“Okay, baby. I’ll call you when I find out more. You take care a yourself.”

“Okay. Bye.”

“Bye-bye.”

We hang up.

To be honest, I’m relieved to get off the phone. I want to smoke a cigarette, smoke a joint, and curl up in Brandon’s arms. In that order.

I look at Brandon. “That was my aunt. My dad’s been convicted. Cocaine, I guess. He’s facing twenty-five years.” I try to cry, but it’s stunted. Like when a sneeze gets aborted right in the middle. If there’s a vein that carries my tears, it’s either too small for me to find it or too mangled with scar tissue to get the needle in.

Brandon doesn’t say anything, but he lets me lay my head on his shoulder for a solemn ten minutes while I don’t really cry. I don’t know what’s more disturbing: that my dad’s going to spend the rest of his life in prison or that I can hardly shed a tear over it. After a little while, I get a new problem. Brandon is standing up.

“I have to go,” he says.

I get up. I look at him.
Are you for real?
I’d say I’m shocked, but shock is so lame. I should just say I’m lame. “What are you talking about?” I mumble, even though I know what he’s talking about. He’s talking about
leaving
.

Nothing surprises me anymore.

“I have to go, Tracy. I’m sorry.” He grabs his messenger bag and slings it over his shoulder.

“Where the fuck are you going?” Now
I’ve hit a vein with something in it. Anger.

“I just have to go.”

I know where he’s going. To Richie’s. “You’re going to Richie’s, aren’t you?
Aren’t you?!
” My roommate Jake is in the bedroom right next to mine, but I don’t care if he hears me.

“Don’t yell at me,” Brandon says, sounding almost hurt. “I have to go.” He actually has his hand on the doorknob. He’s actually going to leave.

“If you walk out that door, don’t ever bother to come back,” I threaten. It sounds really stupid coming out of my mouth, but I mean it. “I’m serious!”

“Don’t do this, Tracy. I just have to go. I’m sorry. I just can’t stay.”

None of this computes and I can no longer hold it together. I revert to some lower, mammalian part of the brain and go all pathetic on him.
“Why?”
I wail. “Why do you have to go right now? Please just stay with me tonight. Just tonight.” I’m three now. My stuffed animals are sitting by the door. The social worker is on her way.

“I’m sorry.” He is sorry. Even I can see that, and I’m practically delirious. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

He leaves.

The door shuts. Behind him.

I can’t believe it. And I can’t cry. I curl up on my lame futon and go to sleep. Even though it’s still in the couch position.

I’M HELPING PAUL
get organized for his taxes. It’s been some years since he’s filed a return and I convinced him to go see an accountant, partly for selfish reasons—I don’t want to be married to someone who owes back taxes—and partly for him, since it can’t feel good to have the IRS hanging over your head. Besides, Paul
wants
to do his taxes, he just doesn’t know how to go about it.

I know this because Paul saves every single receipt he gets. As soon as he is handed a receipt, it goes immediately into his right
front jeans pocket, and then later, at the end of the day, he puts them into a very large drawer that is set aside expressly for this purpose. Right now there is a sideboard in the dining room with three drawers, all of them filled with receipts—from 2004, 2003, and 2002. I’m sorting through them, one year at a time, starting with this year, 2004.

I am something of a private detective and I can’t help but notice that these receipts are a virtual record of his dating activities. I’ve been with Paul all of 2004 so there’s not too much here I wasn’t a part of, but 2003 and 2002…now, those might be interesting.

“Does it freak you out that I’m looking through these receipts?”

“No,” he says. “Should it?” I guess Paul is a lot more trusting than I am. “I have nothing to hide.”

“Really? Everyone has something to hide.” I’m not sure if I believe that or if I’m just being provocative. Probably I believe that everyone has stuff they’d rather not have anyone see, even if they wouldn’t go so far as to hide it.

“No, really,” he says. “I’m an open book.”

I leave it at that, concentrating instead on picking up the tiny pieces of paper, uncrinkling them, and putting them in piles of entertainment, office supplies, and restaurant dinners. So far, the only story here is how much Paul spends on coffee. A pretty penny.

But then I pick up a restaurant receipt from January. Twenty-ninth.
That’s the night after he never called me again.
I take a breath and look at Paul. He doesn’t seem to notice that I’ve broken my smoothing-then-filing rhythm and am still holding this receipt. I sneak a longer glance at it. It’s from El Carmen, the kind of Mexican restaurant that might be featured in
In Style
magazine, which is to say, packed to the gills with lonely, pretty girls who have expensive handbags and near-terminal cases of baby lust.
Ketel One vodka, $10.00. Margarita, $10.00. Two appetizers
. I remember the last time I saw him was a Thursday, which means the day after was a Friday.
I check the time on the receipt: 8:47
P.M
. Definitely a date time. In fact, it must be a date, if for no other reason than Paul rarely drinks alcohol, and he certainly wouldn’t drink Ketel One.

I carefully consider opening my mouth but decide against it.
Just keep your mouth shut, Tracy. He didn’t do anything wrong,
I reason. He just wasn’t ready to commit. He knew if he dated me he’d have to marry me, remember?
Shhhhhh.

However, I’m now on high alert for every receipt that comes by. It doesn’t take long before I find the Big One. I didn’t even know I was looking for it.

May 7, 2004.

Oh shit. That day of infamy is burned into my brain forever. The Lost Weekend. I peer more closely at the receipt. It’s from a café—I don’t recognize the name—in Marina Del Rey.
Marina Del Rey?
That’s all the way on the other side of town, near the beach. What in god’s name was he doing out there? I check the time—a little after twelve noon. The food—two sandwiches. In the eight-dollar range. This is not looking good.

I decide I’d better come clean right away. “Paul. I’m looking at a receipt from May seventh.” Ooh. I feel a little sick. The adrenaline surge rushes through my veins.

“May seventh?”

“The day you saw
Van Helsing
? When you said you had to lie low because you felt so drained after seeing your kid?” I’m trying to keep the accusatory edge out of my voice but failing. There’s a long pause before Paul says anything.

“What do you want, Tracy?” I like how Paul cuts right to the chase.

“I want to know where you were.” I don’t add
and who you were with.

“I don’t remember.”