I Love You and I'm Leaving You Anyway (32 page)

I know this is a lie. My foot is telling me so. My shrinking arms are telling me so. But this girl is not going to admit that to me, the married man’s wife. Besides, it’s really Paul I need to interrogate. And his actions have already told me everything I need to know.

“Oh, okay,” I say pointedly to the girl. She knows I know. I know she knows I know. “Thank you, then. Bye.” I hang up. I think it over for a minute—damn, she lied well! This makes me angry. Girl-on-girl violence—like cheating with another woman’s man—just isn’t right. I call her back. This time, she lets it go to voice mail.

Hi, this is Jessica—

I hang up. My foot is still twitching on the gas pedal.

Seconds later, I pull up to the knitting store and walk in. I’m in a daze. The woman behind the counter greets me cheerfully.

“Hello, how are you?” she says.

She doesn’t know that my life just ended,
I think to myself. I go through the motions of looking for some new yarn because I have no other idea what I should do. That’s when I see Jean, one of my closest friends in recovery, standing right next to me. Jean is older than me, and wiser than me, and not only that, she’s a therapist who has been through all kinds of stuff in her own life. She’s truly a godsend at this moment. I don’t know whether to be unbelievably happy that the Universe has plopped her into my world right when I need her the most or to kill myself over what is going down right now.

I throw myself into Jean’s arms and spill out the story. “Paul left his phone in my purse and he called me and wanted it back right away—so bad that he’s driving down here right now, and that made
me suspicious, like
Why does he want that phone so badly?
so I looked at it, and there was a text message from a girl that said”—I lean in close and whisper in an acid singsongy voice—
“Hey there married man!”

I try to steady myself. The only thing I forgot to say is that I’m freaking out. As if that needs saying.

“Oh my god,” Jean says in her L.A.-via–New York accent. She hugs me. “I’m so
sawry
. I’ve been there, sister. Just take a breath.”

She hugs me a minute while I do just that. “Now tell me again what you said. He’s coming down here?”

“He’s on his way right now.” I’m too stunned to even cry. Jean leads me out of the store and we stand there, on Beverly Boulevard, between the upscale knittery and the upscale furniture store, so all of West Hollywood can watch me deal with my crumbling marriage.

“How long has this been going on?” Jean asks.

“I don’t know.” I pull out Paul’s phone and show her the text. “Here it is. See for yourself.” Jean flips open the phone and reads it. She’s appalled on my behalf. “This really sucks, Tracy. What is he thinking?”

“I don’t know! He hasn’t gotten a job and I know he’s been really freaked out about it, but why would he do
this
?” We’re looking at each other when I see Paul’s car come barreling toward us. “Oh my god, there he is.”

Paul slows the car, pulls over, and rolls down the window. He sees Jean, which makes him nervous. She’s not under his spell like I am. Make that like I
was
.

“Just throw it in the car,” he says, meaning the phone. He sounds casual, as if I
haven’t
read this Jessica person’s text message and he’s just going to get the phone back and go on with his life. Our life.

“No, Paul,” I say. “Get out of the car. We need to talk.”

His face shatters, like he knows that whatever life we had planned on November 28, 2004, is already over. And it’s only July 17, 2005. He parks the car, then skulks over. In a flash I see that Paul compul
sively does behaviors that cause people to think about him the way he thinks about himself—like he’s a piece of shit. He can’t stop.

The closer he gets, the more hysterical I am. “What the fuck are you doing, Paul? What the
fuck
!” He looks me in the eye and it’s obvious—he has no idea what the fuck he’s doing.

“I don’t know, Tracy.” He says it not apologetically, not like he’s surrendering, but like he’s driving a stake through my heart. He says it angrily and like I am somehow to blame.

“Well who is she?”

“She’s some dumb chick who works at Cameras Incorporated.” There’s that name again. I know that name.

“The camera place?!” I’m having a hard time grasping that my husband of eight months is picking up counter girls at the camera-rental place. “Are you crazy?”

“Yes. Probably.” He sounds more dead than crazy. Now he can’t look at me.

“
Look
at me, Paul! You can’t just
do
this! What about me? What about Sam? What the
fuck
are you doing?” I’m hollering. I can hear myself hollering.

And he hollers back.
“I couldn’t get a job, okay? I couldn’t get a job!”
He sounds pathetic.

Paul launches into a long, dramatic monologue that manages to be both totally disgusting and totally heartbreaking at the same time. “I needed to get my mojo back. And that’s how I do it. I need girls. It’s always been like this. When I was married to Sarah, I never worked. Maybe two or three times a year. And when we broke up and I started fuckin’ girls, I started getting work like crazy. My career took off, dude. The same thing happened when I was with Cecilia.” He means the mother of his child. “I got three commercials the day she moved out. And then you and I got married and I lost that big job on our honeymoon…” He stops speaking, adrift for a moment. I just stare at him, dumbfounded, watching as he retraces the trail of bread crumbs that brought him to this pitiful and wretched place. “I
knew if I got a girl I could get a job. If I could get a girl to like me, I could get my power back.”

He had to get his power back.

His logic makes perfect sense to him. And suddenly, it makes perfect sense to me, too. How I chose this man, precisely what I recognized in him when I saw his face online and I just knew that he would one day be my husband. He wasn’t my husband. He was—he
is
—my father!

Getting power by getting women—that’s my dad. Borrowing from a woman’s regard for him in order to regard himself—that’s what my dad does. He can’t generate his own love for himself; he needs to borrow it from the gaze in a woman’s eye. For years, my dad made his living
literally
off women’s bodies. Paul wants to do that, too, just in a highly symbolic way—because he did, after all, go to Harvard.

The whole thing is epic and literary.

Paul looks up at me, and I can truly see him, for the first time since we met, without all the regard I’ve been giving him. It’s like the mask has been pulled off and what is left is a little boy, standing in front of a yarn store, stuck in a world he doesn’t really understand. Paul’s going through life with the same sense of disconnect I have when I’m trying to figure out the clasp on a necklace while looking in the mirror. Things just aren’t where his mind is telling him they are.

Paul’s insane. That’s what he is. Just like his brother in the psychiatric facility. Or to a lesser degree, his dad, who dyed his hair to be a CEO. Or my dad, who just told me last week that when he gets out of prison (which will be
soon,
he says) he wants to start a business farming earthworms. Earthworms!

This must be what a friend of Paul’s was alluding to when he came up to me early in the relationship and said, “I’ve never seen Paul so good! This is the best ‘Paul’ he’s ever been.”

I thought this was a good thing! I guess I didn’t stop to think that if you can “fix” someone—the way I fixed Paul then, and the way
Paul now wants Jessica to fix him—it can only mean one thing. He was broken to begin with.

Maybe things aren’t where my mind is telling me they are, either.

THE NEXT DAY WE GO TO SEE
my therapist, Saundra. She cuts right to the chase and asks Paul if he is willing to change his mind about needing women to get jobs. He’s unsure.

“Well, are you willing to try to make the marriage work?” she asks.

“What does that mean?” Paul wants to know. “‘Make the marriage work.’”

“It means stop seeing the girl.” Saundra carefully shifts her expression into neutral, a struggle no doubt, due to the what-the-fuckness of Paul’s question.

“I’m not
really
seeing her,” Paul says, trying to minimize. “We just talk on the phone.” Like that changes anything. He has truly lost his mind.

“Then stop talking to her on the phone,” Saundra’s mouth says. Her face says,
Dude, please
.

“All right.”

“You
will
?” I pipe up, startled. I hadn’t expected him to agree so readily.

“Sure. Yes.” He’s weirdly disengaged, but it’s a yes, so I’ll take it.

“And you’re going to need to see someone for couple’s therapy,” Saundra adds. “As well as individual therapy.”

Paul agrees to it all. By the end he seems contrite. Like he’s just passed through the well-worn stages of a spree, and this is where he’s ended up—where he always ends up—at the wrong end of a woman’s glare. And even though he doesn’t seem to fully comprehend the consequences of his actions, he’s clearly ashamed of himself.

I have some compassion for him. If I hadn’t had such a run-in myself with bottles of wine and bags of pot when I had a baby I was trying to love, I wouldn’t understand at all. But I have, and so I do.

Yet there’s another thing I know from my own experience, and it’s got me pretty worried—that without a major shift, all the shame and guilt in the world isn’t gonna be enough to stop him.

PAUL AND I HAVE
this amazing ability to live in impossible circumstances. We just go back about our lives. It’s not that we pretend nothing happened. It’s there, like a stain on the sofa that forever reminds you of the time you were careless with that Sharpie. The temptation is to feel awful every time you see the stain, but you can’t or you might as well just throw out the couch. Because there’s nothing you’re going to do to turn the clock back to before you left the cap off.

So you throw a slipcover on it—something decent looking, from Target maybe—and hope for the best.

The hard part is dealing with the knowledge that whatever has happened, it can happen again. That has me pretty terrified most of the time, but it’s a terror below the level of consciousness, the same way I imagine people in Bosnia got through the bad years with the Serbs. You know something awful can happen at any moment, and in a way you are braced for it, but until that moment comes, you just go on along as best you can.

WHEN YOU’RE DOWNTOWN,
which side of the street you’re on makes all the difference. The side we live on belongs to the hipsters, with their $3,000 rents and their carefully managed grime. The other side belongs to the hobos. It’s full of homeless people and dirty, clogged with “apartments” made of refrigerator boxes and low-down people and dogs. But the hobo side has an excellent burger place that we like to eat from, if not at, because it’s more than a little bit rough. While Paul waits for our order, Sam and I head upstairs to set the table.

Once inside the building, I realize I don’t have my mailbox key, so I bolt back to get Paul’s key. As I wait for a car to pass before I can cross, I see Paul pacing the sidewalk on the other side of the street. He’s on the phone.

It’s her.

There’s something about his body language, the way he’s smiling into the phone, the way he’s so entranced by the discussion that he doesn’t even see me standing here, watching him cheat. I turn and go back into the building.

“What’s wrong, Mom?” Sam asks.

“Nothing, pumpkin,” I lie. “Let’s go upstairs.”

“What about the mail?”

“We’ll get it later.”

A few minutes later Paul brings the food, and I unpack it. My burger stays mostly untouched. I’m skinny these days, like I said.

I’m getting so used to living in crisis, I go through the motions of the evening, cleaning up after dinner, loading the dishwasher, and listening to the rhythmic churn of the water inside. All the while, I’m dying to get my hands on Paul’s phone, but he’s got it on him, in his pocket.

Every nerve ending in my body is leaning toward Paul, the way flowers lean toward the sun. Nothing else will exist until I see that phone. Even, sad to say, my own child. I’m just glad Sam’s got a TV to watch and a video game to play. I’m good for nothing until I can open that phone and find out for sure what I already know. Paul’s lies are so wide and so deep, only when I can see something with my own eyes do I believe it.

Right before it’s time to read to Sam before bed, Paul goes into the bathroom. He has set his phone down on the kitchen counter, so it’s there, calling my name. I know I shouldn’t do this right now, but I have to…

My heart starts its familiar race, the blood screams through my veins, and my eyes blur with whatever physiological thing happens
to them when the stress hormone gets dumped into my bloodstream. My mouth is dry.

My kid is lying in bed already, waiting for his story.

I open the phone. And there it is…the same phone number as July 17, the day of the knitting store; I can tell from the area code. But the caller ID says “Ccollins”—that’s the name of Paul’s point man at work. Then I look more closely and notice there are two “C”s in Ccollins—Paul has anticipated my snooping, and he’s taken steps to cover his tracks.

I’m devastated he’s talking to this
Jessica
again—it’s like a baseball bat to my stomach, but it’s a shock to my mind as well. How can it be that this formerly rational man is going to such silly lengths to hide his need to talk to a twenty-one-year-old girl with an Ohio area code who thinks text messages to married men should be punctuated with exclamation points?

It doesn’t make sense. None of this does.

Especially when there’s a little boy in the other room who wants to know what happens next in
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
.

I go into Sam’s room. I’m tense. He’s lying in bed, dressed in his jammies, waiting for Paul and me to come in for our nightly reading routine. Having a routine is good for kids. It makes them feel safe, like the adults in their world can be counted on. I never had one, but I’m trying to do things differently with my son. Trying…and, apparently, failing. Because I have to cancel the routine tonight. There is no way I am successfully concealing the stress, the fear, the pain, and the anguish of what is going on right now.