I Love You and I'm Leaving You Anyway (33 page)

“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 to
gether. 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.

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.

And even though everything else around me appears to be in shambles, I choose to believe that this is a fresh new start for me.
The Spacebar
is evidence of it. A new me is being born—conceived the first day I saw Paul’s picture and gestating ever since. As everyone knows, birth isn’t very pretty. It involves blood, and guts, and agony. It hurts and it never goes according to plan. But what you get when it’s over is so magnificent, so awe inspiring—a brand-new life!—that it’s all worth it. Beyond worth it.

It’s just hard to know that when you’re in the thick of it.

SAM IS IN THERAPY.
I found someone for him to talk to after the mother of one of his friends phoned me with some very disturbing news. It was just days after Paul and I split up.

“I’m calling because I thought you should know what happened with Sam today,” she begins.

I’ve never gotten this type of call. Sam has never been a problem. He is the cautious type who becomes alarmed if the car is moving before his seat belt is buckled. Sam follows the rules—he does his homework without being told. He brushes his teeth at slumber parties. He is scrupulously honest. He’s a popular member of the boy group who makes a spirited, and sometimes silly, sidekick.

What he does not make is trouble.

“What happened?” I’m nervous, because I know this can’t be good.

The mother, a sweetheart named Michelle, explains how the boys had been involved in some type of minor kerfuffle and it led Sam to an emotional meltdown (to be expected under the circumstances). Michelle apparently called the boys aside to discuss what happened and, in true “progressive parenting” style, ask each one what he felt should be done about it.

“His answer really concerned me,” Michelle says. “Sam said he thought he ‘should just die.’ I’m sure he didn’t mean it literally, but still. Is everything okay?”

There are no words for the feelings that bubble up inside when you hear that your child is in that kind of emotional jeopardy, and worse, that the danger is within. “Oh my god” is all I can say. “Oh my god.”

This makes me cry.

“My husband moved out this week,” I say, but I can barely get the words out. “And Sam is really close to him, and I know it’s having a terrible effect on him.”

“Didn’t you just recently get married?” Michelle, married for fifteen years, can’t understand how these facts—that I’m both divorcing
and
a newlywed—could possibly reconcile themselves.

“Yes.” That’s all I can say:
yes
. Yes, I got us into this. And yes, I’m getting us out.

Sometimes the moment is where the pain is. This is one of those times.

I hang up the phone and immediately call Saundra, even though it’s a Friday night. She gives me the name of a child therapist, someone in Arcadia, a good twenty-five miles east of here, but I’ll do whatever it takes.

Later, I ask Sam about the incident. Gently. “Why did you say you should die, honey?”

“I don’t know,” Sam says. My boy doesn’t talk a lot, unless it’s about Pokemon. “I just did.”

“Can you tell me any more about it?” I venture to ask.

“Not really.”

Later, when I think about it further, I feel intuitively that Sam is picking up on all of the torment and self-hatred in this house—Paul loathes who he has become; I am startlingly thin—and it chills me down to my bones. I have always believed that children transmit the unspoken and/or repressed thoughts and feelings in a household. They are like little broadcasting towers, picking up signals and playing them back in such a way that the parents must see exactly what they can’t or won’t look at.

Sam is showing me where my “love” affair has taken me, and it’s as bad as any drug addiction. The way I’ve stayed with Paul no matter what he’s done—through the lies and the insanity. If I look at Paul as if he’s a drug, it all makes perfect sense. I had to have it. I just had to have it.

In fact, I can look back on
all
of my relationships—the marriages, the men; the ones I got, the ones I didn’t get—and I see how I have pursued my love obsession with the same single-mindedness I once used to pursue drinking and drugs. Maybe more. And now, “suddenly,” on the verge of my third divorce, it’s pretty goddamn obvious that I am demoralized in the same way I would be if I were still drinking. Maybe I’m not in jail, but I’ve got to hire a lawyer, and my kid is in trouble, and the life I built up for myself is in shambles.

Again.

Strangely, this gives me hope. Because what I know about hitting
bottom is that if you can surrender, I mean really surrender, it can be the beginning of an amazing healing.

MOST DAYS I FEEL LIKE
I’m in this Quentin Tarantino movie, the one where a badass martial-arts chick played by Uma Thurman is thrown into a wooden coffin and buried alive by the bad guys. Even though it’s a movie (and you know that if she doesn’t get out of the coffin it’s going to be a really short movie), when you’re watching it you totally think,
Wow, she’s a goner
. Because her only hope of escape is to apply all of the kung fu lessons she’s ever learned in her life. And even then, her prospects look really dim.

This is basically what I have to do now. Going through the death of my third marriage is just like being buried alive, and the coffin is my mind.

My brain, I am discovering, is my true enemy. There’s an obsessive thought factory up there, churning out an endless loop of negativity twenty-four hours a day and then some.
He left you for a twenty-one-year-old. You’re forty-one! You’re old. You’re ugly. He lied to you. He cheated on you. He left you. For a twenty-one-year-old. No one will ever love you
. You get the idea. About the only thing it doesn’t say is You’re fat, and that’s only because I’m pretty much starving.

The factory also produces so-called nice thoughts, fantasies, which are beautiful pictures of the way it used to be with Paul, or the way it could be if only he would come back, or the way it would have been if he’d never met that girl or maybe just gotten a job. These thoughts are just as torturous as the negative ones, if not more so, because some part of me wishes they could be true even though I already know they definitely aren’t. And never will be.