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 g
o. 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.”
“Well, I can help you out with that.” I look at the receipt. “It says here you were in Marina Del Rey.”
“Then I guess I was in Marina Del Rey.” He’s gone flat again. And cold. This makes me heat up.
“Why were you all the way out there?”
“I don’t know.”
It’s clear he’s going to stonewall me now and that makes me want to be hysterical. I want to shout, Just tell me the fucking truth! But I don’t because I know then I’ll have absolutely no chance of getting it out of him. My only hope is to move in on him so slowly that he doesn’t even realize I’m there, like when you’re trying to catch a butterfly. Or a bug.
“Please try to remember,” I say nonthreateningly. “It can’t be that hard. You came home from Texas. It was a Saturday. You were in Marina Del Rey. You ate a sandwich. Two of them. You were with someone, obviously. Who was it?”
I know Paul would never hit me, but he’s looking at me like he would if he could.
“Drop it, Tracy.” It’s a threat. Definitely.
“I’m not going to drop it, Paul. I want an answer.” He doesn’t give me one. If we were Justin and Britney, now is when we would just have a dance-off. Part of what I love about Paul is that he’s strong enough to resist me, but that includes times like this when I wish he wasn’t.
I can’t put a gun to his head and make him say the truth, so instead I go back to studying the receipt. There’s gotta be something on here that will give me the answer. I check the credit card numbers against the numbers on another receipt. No match. Interesting. Paul only has one credit card, which he uses for everything. That’s when I look at the signature. It’s a bit smudged because it’s the yellow copy of the restaurant receipt. But, upon closer inspection, it’s not Paul’s usual scrawl. It’s…someone else’s. It’s…No way…Once I realize whose name it is, I wonder why I couldn’t see it all along. It’s Caitlin Kelly.
That’s the girl who sent the FedEx package with the confetti and the lollipops and the photographs. The one I found when I was snooping through Paul’s apartment when he was in Chicago and I was house-sitting. There was no postmark on the box, but it was clear he’d seen her in the fairly recent past and that they’d had a “thing” of some kind. At the time, I found a way to ask about her without revealing that I’d been snooping. He said she was a sweet girl who lived out of state whom he’d met through mutual friends and that they had planned to visit eventually, but in the meantime he’d gotten involved with me, so it never happened.
Well, now it’s really obvious that it did.
I close my eyes in pain and cast my head to the side, over my right shoulder. Like I’ve just taken an invisible right uppercut to the jaw.
“I didn’t sleep with her,” Paul says.
Bullshit.
“I didn’t. I swear.”
I want so badly for this to be true. My mind is jumping through all the various possibilities. On the one hand, I have no way of proving that he slept with her. On the other, I can’t imagine Paul, with whom I have had sex every time I’ve seen him since we met, being around a girl and not sleeping with her. On another hand, it’s now September and we are getting married. My son has a bunk bed in the other room. I have
moved out of my apartment. This Caitlin Kelly person is clearly ancient history. I would be very wise to let it go.
So I do. Right after we argue for a couple of hours.
That night we go to bed and we have our sex and when we wake up in the morning, everything is back to normal. Except for Caitlin Kelly, which I’ve managed to squeeze like a trash compactor into a teeny-tiny size that I can hide in the deepest recesses of my being. (Just like Daddy taught me.) Because my life is in session here, and I don’t know how to stop it and I don’t think I could even if I tried. So down it goes.
It’s scary how easy that is.
TURNS OUT BRANDON’S been a heroin addict all this time. A fully employed, apartment-renting, bike-riding, movie-star-looking heroin addict.
I just found out.
He told me himself, now that he’s in South Carolina trying to dry out or whatever you call it when you’re trying to figure out what makes you put a needle in your arm. I know what makes people put needles in their arm:
Pain.
My theory is that every drug has its own explanation, based on what the drug does. Heroin is an opiate. Opiates are for pain. Nicotine makes you numb. Nicotine is for rage. Meth makes you stay up for days. Meth is for being superhuman. Marijuana dulls and has a mild hallucinogenic quality. Marijuana is for sensitive fantasists. What else? Cocaine makes you fearless. Cocaine is for the fearful. (And the grandiose.) Alcohol is a liquid depressant. Alcohol is for submerging yourself, dissolving yourself. I have had one or more of these problems at various points, sure, but you would hardly notice it, because I’ve surrounded myself with people who are much more extreme than me. Like Brandon.
I have only one question for myself. How could I not know?
Here’s how: I didn’t want to know. But that was subconscious. Like how they say we use only 10 percent of our mind and the rest is subconscious? Brandon’s addiction was lost somewhere in my 90 percent.
A lot of things start to add up when I realize Brandon has been doing heroin all along. Maybe even from that very first night we stayed with Richie and Allison. I wonder if this explains Richie’s hold over Brandon? And other mysteries, like how Brandon never wanted to sleep over. How even when he was there he wasn’t there. And most of all, how the night of my dad’s conviction Brandon had to go no matter what.
I Love You and I'm Leaving You Anyway Page 22
