I Love You and I'm Leaving You Anyway (29 page)

“We’re going to Daddy’s new house,” I say, trying to sound chipper, but it’s hard. I hate lying to myself. There’s nothing chipper about this. I’m in one of those moments where my choices have become super-duper real. Too real. This happens every once in a while. The surveillance camera that I use to watch myself live shuts down, and I am just left with the living itself. And in this moment, I am having to deal with the fact that I have divorced Dan, and that means that I have to fork over my baby every other weekend. He’s only two and a half.

“Mommy and Daddy live in two houses now, Mommy’s house”—I point at the cute two-bedroom Dan and I signed the paperwork on two days after I gave birth—“and Daddy’s house, where we are going right now. You’re going to like it.”

My kid stares at me. Sam’s got an inner stillness that is more than a little unnerving. He’s so much like Dan. It figures I would end up giving birth to the type of guy I used to date. God has an awesome sense of humor.

I hand Sam his pacifier. “Here, dude,” I say. “Take this.” Without a word, he grabs it with his tiny beefy hands and pops it in his mouth. He loves that thing.

“It’s not perfect, I know,” I say over my shoulder in the direction of Sam’s car seat. “And I wish it could’ve been different.” I’m talking to him like he understands, because I think that on a nonverbal level, he does. “But this is how it is, and we’re going to make the best of it. Starting…now.” I paste a big smile on my face. Not fakey, but encouraging. I’d like to think I’m modeling how you deal with life’s imperfections. But maybe I’m just modeling how to be flawed.

Dan’s living in a cute little place, a 1920s house situated on a semibusy street about two miles away. The street level of the house has been converted into a dog groomer and a medical supply store, neither of which seem to have any customers. I actually found the place. I was driving by and saw the phone number in the window. Later, Dan called and now it’s his. (In a year, I will decide I’d rather work part-time and hang out with my son than work full-time and be a homeowner—leading Dan and me to
swap
houses. I will move in over the dog groomer. And Dan will move back into the little house on the hill. Sam’s life will stay as much the same as it possibly can.)

We pull into the driveway. I’m not feeling
as
sick as I thought I would. I open up the back door and pull Sam out of his car seat. “Come on, pumpkin. We’re here.”

Dan has been pushing for fifty-fifty custody, but I’ve managed
to talk him into a more reasonable sixty-five/thirty-five. At least for another year or so. When he gets difficult on me, I am reminded that part of the reason I married him (in spite of knowing I didn’t have the skills to make a marriage work) is that I really believed he might take my baby away from me. Not that Dan’s a bad guy. He’s just very possessive. And in my mind, because he’s from a “good” family and is a “normal” person, Dan has a bigger claim to a child than I do. White makes right. Male makes right. Money makes right.

But the longer I practice my recovery, the more I am growing up. I’ve worked very hard—I’m now an A-student of not drinking—doing what it takes to stay sober, including therapy twice a week. It’s been a year now, and the change in me has been, by all accounts, remarkable. I am a calmer, less compulsive person. Maybe four times more wacky than the average girl, but for me, it’s a vast improvement.

Dan and I have more or less reverted to our original coworker relationship, except now our “work” is a child instead of a news story. When we keep things on the colleague level—and it’s not hard to do—everything is cordial, friendly even. I like Dan. I always have. He’s very smart and can be funny and insightful when he feels like it.

On the personal level, things sometimes get difficult, but they never really get ugly. We are both just too sensible for that. (And maybe because we were never that passionate to begin with.) Dan feels rejected, but he shouldn’t, because weirdly, this couldn’t be any less personal. There is no man on earth I would have stayed with. (Except for maybe—and that’s a very big maybe—Matt Damon.) He’s furious that I’ve unilaterally “ruined” his child’s life, and yet, I think there’s a part of him that is glad he doesn’t have to be with me anymore. He secretly wants another chance to throw a dart, too.

To my face, though, when he gets mad he can’t stop saying sentences containing the words “broken” and “home.” When it gets confrontational, I am learning how to take responsibility for my own choices and ask myself,
What did you think was gonna happen by
having a baby with a guy you dated for six months? You thought it was going to be easy?

Of course not.

Nevertheless, I am totally committed to Dan. Maybe I’m not in a conjugal relationship with him, but we are in a family. And I’m committed to our family. We both are. I’d say the fact that we’re civil 85 percent of the time, along with the facts that I’m not drinking and we love this child so much we’re willing to deal with each other for
life
in order to make things as good as possible for him…

Well, it may not be perfect, but it’s pretty damn good.

THE GURU SMELLS LIKE ROSES
. That’s the first thing I notice. Paul and I are on our knees, and two seconds ago we were nudging ourselves forward, and then suddenly it’s our turn, and the guru’s helpers thrust us—both of us, together—right into her arms. Now we’re smushed into the guru’s breast, and she is rocking us, together, back and forth, murmuring Hindi words in our ear. It seems like she’s more focused on Paul, and it occurs to me that she knows he’s got more pain than I do, but I dismiss the thought, because
He’s a lot worse off than I am
doesn’t sound like the kind of thing you should be thinking about your husband-to-be in the presence of a guru.

Twenty seconds later, the guru is sprinkling rose petals on us and the hug is over. We stand up and walk off the dais and my legs are a little like jelly, and I’m a little stunned.

“I don’t feel any different,” Paul says, kind of dicklike, as we try to locate our shoes in the pile right outside the door. It’s not as difficult to find the shoes as it might sound, since neither of us wears Birkenstocks. “In fact, I feel exactly the same.”

Ugh
, I think to myself. That’s exactly the kind of thing privileged white guys say when faced with a spiritual experience they don’t necessarily understand. But I don’t say anything, because just think
ing that makes me feel judgmental and I suspect my own spiritual growth demands that I let go of judgment, at least until we’re out of this ashram.

We get in the car and drive to the nearest Starbucks. We are walking out, double Americanos in hand, when Paul looks at me.

“What?” I say.

It’s a really strange look on his face. One I’ve never seen before.

“Tracy…”

Paul hardly ever says my actual name. And when he does, it’s not good. He says it clipped, like he’s not smiling during the
Tray-
part and he’s angry about the
-cy
part.

“What?!” I’m worried now, and I’m not going to bother to hide it.

“I can’t.”

“Can’t what?!” Of course, I already know what he can’t. He can’t do it. He can’t marry me.

“I just can’t. I don’t think I can. I’m just scared as fuck.”

I go into super-duper calm mode. Breaking-news mode. Where all my senses are on high alert. The adrenaline is pumping. My muscles are taut. My mind is processing at double speed. After years of working in very tense TV news situations, this poised awareness is second nature in times of exceedingly high stress.

“What exactly,” I ask carefully, “are you afraid of?” I have the car keys in my hand. I place my Americano in the drink holder and start the car. I pull out of the parking lot. I am on autopilot. “It’s all right. You can tell me.”

“I feel like…
glurkglurkglurkglurk
…”

He’s talking but I can’t hear him. I’ve taken a right and I’m instinctively heading toward San Francisco because it’s nearby. And I don’t know where else to go. Where do you go when the guy you love is bailing on you? You’d think I would know, since my dad gave me so much practice.

As I drive my mind jumps around from thought to thought—
My kid, the dress, my friends, my apartment, my kid, what the fuck, I knew
it, my kid, my washer and dryer, my kid
—but there is one thought above all that my mind keeps coming back to:
There’s nothing I can do about this. My life is imploding, and there’s nothing I can do.

Paul, meanwhile, is over there in the passenger seat giving me some kind of explanation, saying words I know the meaning of but that nonetheless are not making any sense to me. It’s all something to the effect of how he’s a terrible man, a bad husband, how he failed with Sarah, his first wife, and he’s scared as shit that it’s going to happen again, because he’s a bad person, he’s just bad, I don’t even know how bad. He was bad to his kid’s mom, and he’s never been sure about me anyway, and he liked how Jennifer Maynard wore perfume, and I don’t wear perfume, and…
glurkglurkglurk
.

There’s nothing I can do about this. My life is imploding, and there’s nothing I can do.

We are starving so we stop and eat dinner in San Francisco, in silence. We’re going to drive home—it’s the late afternoon now—but both of us are so drained we decide to just get a hotel room outside the city and leave early in the morning. We stay in an Embassy Suites, and Paul orders his usual fruit and yogurt room service, which is what he always does when he stays in a hotel. We don’t have sex, but there are a few moments of seminormalcy sprinkled into the silence.

It’s hard to maintain crisis mode for twelve straight hours.

In the morning I wake up at peace. That part of me that survived my crazy childhood—the foster homes, the abuses, the fear, the abandonment, the pain, and the loneliness—she’s showing up, taking the keys, and driving this car back home. I’m looking out for me now. Whatever happens with Paul is whatever happens.

We ride in silence down Interstate 5. It’s glorious outside. Late fall and early winter is by far the most beautiful time of year in California—the bluest possible sky, the rolling hills the color of sweet corn. I never ever get tired of the West; it means something to me, something personal, about freedom and possibilities, and now, at forty, it’s starting to mean something about losses and hopes dashed.

How many car trips with how many men?

And then I start crying. I can see so perfectly, out here on the open road, what I’ve really believed about myself all my life—that I’m less than other people, that there’s something wrong with me, that I’ll always be left, and that I’ll never be loved—I can see it for what it is, that it’s not the truth, that it was never true, and now that I can see it, it never will be true again. Never.

I cry and I cry. For the little girl who felt like something was just so wrong with her that she manifested her deepest belief about herself as this day, and this situation, and this man, who obviously believes the same thing about himself.

I cry for both of us.

We stop for gas in Grapevine, the last big oasis before you drive over the mountains that separate the San Joaquin Valley from the L.A. megalopolis. Paul takes the keys. He’ll drive the rest of the way.

We’ve been driving four hours and still haven’t said a single unnecessary word.

And then—a handful of miles from the gas station—just as we’re about to enter the mountains…

FLURGNNRRRFFFFFFF…
sssssssssssssssssssssssss.

The car rolls to a crooked, limping stop. I turn around and look out the back right window as Paul maneuvers the car to the shoulder of the interstate. We sit there for a long second. He speaks first.

“I think we have a flat tire.” There’s a smile in his voice, because this is, after all, really fucking funny. A flat tire.

“You’re kidding me.” It’s not a question. It’s a statement of grave, towering irony. A
flat tire
! That’s hilarious! I’ve made this drive a dozen times, and I’ve never had a flat tire. Ever. And then to have a flat tire now, right now, twenty-four hours into the fight that is going to end this relationship.

Well. That kind of flat tire only happens in the movies. And not just any kind of movie. That kind of flat tire only happens in one kind of movie. A romantic comedy. And ask any film student; they’ll
tell you how all romantic comedies end. Because they all end the same way.

With a wedding.

IT’S ALMOST FOUR
in the afternoon. The light inside the old hotel is fading—the deepest corners of the once-grand lobby are already dark. Two hundred tea lights glimmer like little stars on the floor and line the balustrade where the dozen or so guests are gathered. They’re watching me.

I am walking toward the magnificent marble staircase, where Paul waits for me on the landing, twenty steps up. My dress sweeps away the rose petals strewn in my path. A Native American man plays an indigenous flute, and it’s a haunting sound, especially in this place. Paul’s watching me, too.

It is ten months and one day from the day we met.

Saundra steps forward and the ceremony begins. She tells the guests how much she loves me and what a special person I am, and how honored she is to be part of this special day. She talks about what marriage means, how it’s a spiritual journey, and how it’s really about practicing—and perfecting—your ability to love. Then my friend Herb gets up and reads something by Rumi. The whole time Paul has his long, slim fingers on the small of my back, and I can feel the pressure of his hand and it’s comforting to me. He smiles at me, and I know that he loves me. And that’s what matters more than anything else.

Interstate 5 seems a long, long time ago.

Paul and I have each prepared something for the ceremony. I’ve written a song. It’s called “Happy.” I’ve brought an acoustic guitar. I can’t play for shit, but actually, the song is kind of amazing because I really mean what I’m singing.