I Love You and I'm Leaving You Anyway (34 page)

Every painful feeling I’m having in this breakup—almost every tear I’ve shed—starts with one of these obsessive thoughts.

Which is where the kung fu comes in.

In the movie, Uma’s kung fu master is a guy with gorgeous long white hair and a Fu Manchu beard named Pai Mei. Pai Mei sets up a piece of wood and tells Uma to break it in two with her bare hands. Of course she can’t. She turns her knuckles bloody trying.

That’s when Pai Mei tells Uma the secret to developing devastating kung fu: if she wants to break through the wood with her bare hands, she needs to stop being afraid of the wood.

“You need to make the wood afraid of you,” Pai Mei says.

This is what I’m doing now. Instead of trying to get rid of the obsessive thoughts, I am using them. I am countering every single one of those agonizing fantasies and self-hating thoughts that enter my mind with four words I say to myself, sometimes silently, sometimes out loud:

I love you, Tracy.

Every. Single. Time. Which when your newlywed husband has been caught dating a girl of twenty-one can be a helluva lot of times per day.
I love you, Tracy. I love you, Tracy. I love you, Tracy.
Sometimes the emphasis is on the “I,” and sometimes it’s on the “love,” and other times it’s on the “you.” Those are three different meanings, and I need to hear all of them.

After doing this for a while (like a month), what I’m finding is that if you tell yourself you love you four hundred thousand times a day, you start to look and feel and act like a person
who is loving herself.
What does that look like? Kinda happy. Kinda peaceful. Like someone drawing good people and things into her life. What doesn’t it look like? It definitely does not look bitter, angry, victim-y, or depressed.

Not that there aren’t still bad days or bad moments. There are. But at least there aren’t bad weeks and bad months. Hell, I know women who’ve had bad years, even bad decades. Some of them have given up on men altogether and now have cats instead.

I guess the point of my mantra is a lot like the point of a saying in the recovery world: “You keep what you give away.” In terms of
busting through solid wood with your bare knuckles, it means if you think about love, you feel love. If you think about bitterness, you feel bitter. It’s not that I don’t experience bitterness; I do sometimes. But I’m not practicing bitterness—saying over and over,
He sucks, I’m a victim, he sucks, fuck him, he sucks.

Even if he does suck.

It’s astounding to realize that despite everything, I actually feel better than ever. I know now that the awful pain of my past breakups—especially those where “he” left me—had less to do with the loss of those men and more to do with the washed-out bridge between me and
me
. The fact that I would just leave myself standing there, alone and vulnerable, listening to all the garbage that was being said about me,
by me,
is stunning.

But things are changing. Before all this Paul business, if you didn’t love me, I didn’t love me. I’d do anything to keep your love—I had to!—because if you deemed me unworthy of love, I wouldn’t (couldn’t) love myself. Like in junior high, if you didn’t like my new sweater, I didn’t like it either.

In the simplest of terms possible, this breakup—the “worst” thing that has ever happened to me in all my years of relationships—has taught me how to like my sweater no matter what. All I have to do is commit to the sweater. To myself. No matter what my soon-to-be-ex-husband did. Or what my thoughts are saying to me.

The implications of this are far-reaching. It means I can make a mistake, a giant mistake, and still say,
I love you, Tracy
. And I can save myself when the bad guys threaten to bury me alive.

That is some devastating kung fu.

MOVING DAY FINALLY ARRIVES
two months later. Paul has been living in a hotel all this time while Sam and I stabilized emotionally and I lined up a place of our own. This might be the hardest day of my life.

Sam is safely ensconced at Dan’s house, clear of any shrapnel. Thank god for Dan. He has been so good to me in all this. I swear, ten years later, Dan is teaching me what marriage really means—he knows I am way more than my flaws, and he is standing by me, pulling with me, to minimize the damage to our son
from what I’ve done
. And I love him for this.

My friend Tracy—Tracy Renee—comes to sit with me while I wait for the movers, and when she has to go, another friend comes to take her place. They are witnesses, but none of them can save me from the moment when I sit alone in this huge loft, sobbing.

I cry for the mess I’ve made. I cry for the plans I laid. I cry for the girl who thought
this
is what felt so right. It’s been twenty-one months since I first wondered if I was going to like living downtown.

Well, now I know.

THE NEXT DAY, I TAKE SAM
to the loft one last time. As much as I would love to just slam the door on the whole wretched affair, I know that allowing him to say good-bye to his room and to get some closure will be what’s healthiest in the long run.

There’s an idea in child development that you don’t need—nor do you want—a perfect mother. What you want is a “good enough” mother. Someone who will make mistakes and frustrate you so that you learn how to adapt, how to cope, how to deal with life, while still in the safety of home. Sam is totally hooked up in this respect, huh?

There’s another idea that goes along with the idea of a “good enough” mother: that you’re
going
to make mistakes as a parent, so it’s not so much about whether you do damage, it’s about how you go about repairing it. Acknowledging what has happened is the first thing. Then you have to allow for grieving.

That’s why I brought him here. I want to help him make the passage from the boy who had a stepdad he loved named Paul…to a boy who no longer does.

We stop at the bodega on the way into the building and buy one of those candles with a picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe on it. I don’t even know what Our Lady of Guadalupe represents, but whatever it is, she’ll do. We walk into the loft, down the long hallway, and I can’t help but remember the first time I ever made this trek. I had so much hope. I really thought my dreams were about to come true. They were—just not how I thought.

Sam is quiet, but he doesn’t seem morose. There are a couple of things he wants to make sure he gets while he’s here.

“Don’t forget my candy kit, Mom,” he reminds me. He’s talking about the kit we got at one of those educational stores that uses candy making to teach kids the basics of chemistry. “It’s on top of the refrigerator.”

He can’t reach up there, so I grab it and put it on the dining room table. The table is covered with a piece of glass, under which we have slid a lot of Polaroid pictures we took over the months we were here. I pull some of them out and tuck them into my purse. We might want to look at them someday, a long, long time from now.

Sam, meanwhile, has gone into his room. There’s nothing in there but the giant pin screen, the one he never did touch in months of sleeping right next to it. “Everything’s gone,” he says.

“It’s not gone. It’s in the new place.” I want to cry, but I’m reluctant to make my feelings bigger than his. I remember June Ericson and how she handled the day she told me I was leaving. This is
his
moment to say good-bye, and I don’t want to get in the way of that. “Come on, pumpkin. Let’s do the candle.”

We go back into the dining room, and I pull out the candle. I get some matches. I lay them next to the candle. I’m trying to be just a little bit ceremonious—this is a ritual, like a funeral. We’re letting go of us: me, Sam, and Paul.

Because Paul is dead.

I fold my hands in prayer. “Fold your hands, muffin.” He does. I’m supposed to start the prayer now and suddenly I’m at a loss for
words. What are we praying for, exactly? I’ve never been that good at the extemporaneous. It’s exactly why I never became a reporter. All those live shots! Then I remember. We’re praying to acknowledge the fact that if this is happening, somehow, it is for the highest good. Because god is good. All the time.

“Dear god, we bless the time we had in this house. We bless Paul and we forgive Paul. We let him go with love and light. And so it is. Amen.”

I strike a match and hand it to Sam, who lights the candle. I wipe a tear from my eye. “No one knows exactly why things in life unfold the way they do. But I
know
”—I say it a little more fiercely than I mean to—“I know that
everything
that happens is in our highest good. It’s up to us to make it so.” I put a hand on his back. “Do you understand, honey?”

“Yeah.” I look into Sam’s soulful, downturned eyes and I can see that he really does understand. Somehow. “All right,” I say softly. “I think it’s time to go.”

“Mom?” His face is a little brighter. He’s got something he wants to say before we leave. “Can I do one last thing?”

“Yeah?”

“Can I touch the pin screen?”

This I did not expect. What an amazing request! Now that we’re leaving, Sam wants to do the one thing he never got to do—touch the pin screen—because we told him not to do it. Sam, a high-integrity person, held up his side of the bargain. Which is more than I can say for Paul.

“Yes, you can,” I say. “You totally can.”

We go into his room, and I watch as Sam takes his plump little fingers and painstakingly pushes in a few pins in the lower left-hand corner of the screen. It doesn’t disturb the design on the pin screen, but it does say,
I was here
. And perhaps it adds,
Motherfuckers.

He looks up at me and smiles. I smile back.

Now
we can go.

OF COURSE, I MEET SOMEONE.
I don’t mean to. But I go out to a Halloween party and we strike up a conversation, and the next thing I know, the party is over. He isn’t really my type. Too tall, very blond, with big muscles. The kind of guy who likes Vegas, or used to. But he’s smart and he makes me laugh. And he’s got a childhood like mine. His name, improbably, is Sam.

A couple of weeks later I run into him with mutual friends and we end up going for a cup of coffee. I level with him immediately. “Listen,” I say. “I’ve been married three times. In fact, I’m married right now. As we speak.”

You’d think this would send him packing immediately. But he doesn’t seem all that deterred. Instead, when we get to the end of the coffee he says to me, “Can I get your phone number?”

And what occurs to me, without my wanting it to, is:
Oh shit. He’s gonna want to marry me.

When Big Sam calls and asks me out, I say yes.

Then, an hour later, I call back and say no. I feel awful about it, but who am I kidding? I’m in no position to date this guy. For one thing, Paul only left three months ago. For another, as Paul and I approach our one-year wedding anniversary, he’s been wanting to reconcile sleep with me. For old times’ sake. And I’ve been
wanting
to let him.

So I do. And after a week or two, I don’t.

I just couldn’t resist the opportunity to feel what it’s like to have Paul want me and to not really want him back. I know exactly how lame this is. After everything that’s happened? After how much pain Paul has caused me and my son?

What was I thinking?

The truth is, I’m not thinking. I’m just being human. But my ten-day relapse has shown me something very important that I could not have seen any other way: Paul is not this all-powerful love of my life. He’s just a guy whose demons lined up treacherously close to mine and my dad’s. And now that I’m no longer locked in a desperate
battle to win Daddy’s love—by getting Paul to stop lying to me and cheating on me—even the sex is only so-so.

Free at last.

Free at last.

THE TV-WRITING AGENT
finally gets in touch with me—eight months later, on Paul’s birthday, no less—to say he just read
The Spacebar,
he loves it, and he would like to represent me. I’m ecstatic, not only because getting an agent is the (first) Holy Grail of a Hollywood writing career, but also because it looks like all the anguish I lived through with Paul—and poured into that script—might end up yielding something good after all.

We meet for lunch. The agent tells me the next step is to send my screenplay around town and see which production companies and TV executives like it enough to take a meeting with me. The idea is that people who take meetings with me will eventually want to hire me. For something. Anything.

While I’m waiting for Hollywood to call back, I decide it might be interesting to actually carry out the photo project my main character, Diana, undertakes in
The Spacebar
. I have a camera. I have a computer. Why the heck not? It might be interesting.

So I do what Diana does in the script. I place an ad on Craigslist looking for girls to take pictures of—nothing pervy, just simple portraits of young women. I figure whatever I learn doing this project I will use as research for the next draft of
The Spacebar.
And a gallery-owner friend of mine has offered to put together an art show featuring the photos. Fun for days!

I craft my Craigslist ad to read almost exactly like Diana’s—
Fine art photographer seeking subjects for a project about girls on MySpace. Please reply with link to your profile.

The response is immediate and abundant. One hundred and twenty or so girls write me back with links to their MySpace profiles.
They all want to have their picture taken. It seems you are no one these days until someone wants to take your picture. It’s the American Apparel thing—any girl can be a model. You don’t have to be especially pretty, you just have to be willing to wear one of those leotards, project your sexuality into the camera, and spread your legs far enough to embarrass your mother.

My plan is to meet with a bunch of girls at a local bookstore and to photograph them in their own spaces, preferably their bedrooms. It sounds creepy, I know. But shockingly, not one girl bats an eyelash at the plan. Maybe because I seem
so
not like a pervert. Or maybe because they’re all so desperate to be even a teensy bit famous.