I Love You and I'm Leaving You Anyway (18 page)

I don’t say anything. I just look at him.

I look so closely, I can see—I mean, actually
witness
—his whole mien shifting. His eyes blink more slowly. His muscles poise. His mouth narrows and thins. He’s like a color-changing animal sensing the presence of mortal danger.

“What’s up?” He says it like a question, but really it’s a challenge. It gives him time to rapidly flip through his misdeeds, trying to figure out which one I know about.

Sharp yellow afternoon light bounces off the blue skyscrapers that tower outside the window. Paul stands there, staring at me. He wants an answer. And I can see he’s afraid.

“Nothing,” I say lightly. I’ve managed to scrub any hint of defensiveness out of my voice, out of my posture. Twenty-eight years fold in on themselves, and it’s like I’m standing in front of Yvonne, where survival means hiding any sign of my real thoughts, feelings, deeds. Not just hiding them and then after four or five seconds revealing the truth so we can laugh about how funny that was. Hiding them like I’m in a war movie and the soldiers really
will
kill me if they know I stole the loaf of bread.

Paul’s expression shifts again. He’s walking toward me. Almost like he’s in a trance. Or maybe it’s me who’s in a trance, because somehow, I know exactly what happens next.

Sex.

LESS THAN AN HOUR LATER,
I am standing in front of the passenger door, waiting for Paul to unlock it. I’m calm now, my brain awash in sex opiates. It no longer seems so god-awfully important to get my hands on that movie ticket, though I am curious, in an almost abstract way, as to what it says.

Perhaps that is how I am suddenly able to turn in a performance
that would be Oscar-worthy—if they gave Oscars for lying to your boyfriend in order to find out if he is lying to you.

“I need something to spit this gum into,” I announce. I’m careful to say this exactly as if it were true, as if I have simply been chewing a piece of gum that I am now finished with—not as if I’ve planned ahead of time by putting a piece of gum into my mouth in order to have one to spit out. All so I could have a plausible reason to do as I am doing now and rummage through the center console of the car. I casually retrieve the ticket.

May 7, 2004.
Four o’clock in the afternoon.
Van Helsing
.

He’s a liar.

(But I already knew that, didn’t I? I probably knew it the moment I met him.)

It occurs to me that I need to make absolutely sure that it was Paul himself who saw the movie, and that (for example) the ticket didn’t belong to, say, a friend who borrowed the car and then left the ticket stub in the center console. So I ask a simple question:

“How was
Van Helsing
?”

I query just like I am making polite conversation. I can hear my voice coming out of my throat, and even I can’t believe how casual I sound. I forgot I knew how to lie so well.

“Bad,” Paul replies. He doesn’t know he’s stepped right into my carefully laid trap. He probably forgot that he lied about being out of town that weekend. He undoubtedly never suspected that I am even craftier than he is. “Actually, it wasn’t bad,” he clarifies. “It was just boring. I don’t know what’s worse.”

Neither do I, and I don’t care. I’m too busy thinking about my next move. What do I do now that I know Paul lied to me? I wonder what exactly it is he lied about? Deep down I don’t think he’s fucking another woman, but at the same time, deep down I know there is another woman mixed up somewhere in this story.

It is confusing. But only if I try to make sense of it with my left brain.

Because one thing is immediately, abundantly clear. My right brain has already informed me that I have no intention of leaving this man.

And I know that is seriously fucked up.

I’VE DECIDED TO STOP HAVING SEX
with Scott. I’m not really sure why. I suddenly just “got sick” of it. I feel like sex is everywhere—on billboards, in magazines, in movies—and there’s this intense pressure to be having it all the time. I don’t like the pressure.

It’s been a year since I lost my virginity to Scott. I made the decision to go all the way like I make all my decisions: I thought about it, considered all my options, and calculated the best course of action. It was time. After all, we’d been together a year, he definitely loved me, and I had to lose it to
someone
. Might as well have been him. And to top it off, he and his main girlfriend were clearly on the verge of breaking up.

It finally happened one night at a Minnesota Kicks soccer game. Actually, we never even made it to our seats inside the stadium—probably as a result of the two Big Gulp–size cocktails I’d had of rum and Tahitian Treat. Instead of watching the game, we turn the tailgate party into heavy-duty canoodling in the car. One thing leads to another pretty quick.

“I have an idea,” Scott whispers to me as he turns the key in the ignition of the forest green Pontiac.

“Wha?” I am perilously close to retching. I am a lightweight who can totally hold her liquor. Once I’ve thrown up.

“Yeah,” he says. “This is a great idea.”

I manage to open one eye wide enough to see Scott’s face. He looks even more like a Cheshire cat than usual. He also looks a little frightened. Part of me already knows what’s about to happen—like how people on the news say they definitely knew their assailant was planning to kill them—but the Good Girl part of me feels it would
be unseemly to be “okay” with losing my virginity, so I force myself to pretend that I’m too drunk to know what’s going on.

In four minutes we have pulled into the parking lot of a Motel 8. “Wait here,” Scott says. He’s going to take care of everything. I like that about Scott. He disappears into the lobby.

If I were writing this as an episode of a 1980s teen drama, Scott’s absence would be the moment where I reflect on my life as a little girl and my impending transition to full-fledged womanhood. There would be some sort of montage with shots of me on a swing, me blowing out birthday candles, and me getting my very first kiss, set to the sweeping emotion of a big dumb song like, say, “Endless Love” or some shit.

But it’s not. It’s really just me, with my head lolling around on the headrest, hoping that I don’t throw up or chicken out before I get to become “a woman.”

Scott is back in a jiffy, and next thing I know he is guiding me down a brightly lit hallway. “How
mush
was this room?” I slur. I am very concerned with how much money this little rite of passage is going to cost.

“Forty-two dollars.”

Let’s see, that will come to, oh, seven dollars a minute.

Everything between the moment the door opens and the keen pain between my legs is a blur.

Fluorescent lights. Thin sheets. Kissing. Fumbling. Scott’s nervous. He doesn’t want to seem like he doesn’t know what he’s doing. I don’t want to embarrass him. I’ll just pretend I don’t notice. Uh-oh. Awkward. Really awkward. God, this is kind of weir—Shit. What was THAT? Wow, is that it? Is that what it feels like? That’s not at all what I thought it would be like. Weird. I wonder if I’m bleeding. Aren’t you supposed to bleed the first time? Was that my hymen? I didn’t
feel
anything break. Wow, Scott is kind of embarrassing himself. He’s, like, grunting! This hurts, kind of. I wonder how long it takes. Just curious. This isn’t like
bad
really, but I wouldn’t really call it good, either. And it’s certainly nothing like those
Foreigner songs. Scott’s speeding up. Oh. Wait a minute. I think he’s going to—

Wow. That was quick.

SO AFTER A YEAR OF THAT,
more or less, except in the backseat of the green Pontiac or downstairs in the basement in Scott’s brother’s old twin bed, I’ve just decided to stop. I simply don’t like sex all that much. Maybe if I had orgasms from it, it would be different. Maybe if it was more like masturbation. But it’s not. The thing I like most about sex is how it makes me feel that my boyfriend loves me. But now that we’ve been together for two years, I already know he loves me, so I don’t really need to have the sex anymore. Right?

“I’ll give you blow jobs, though,” I offer him. Generously.

Scott doesn’t have the temerity to get angry at my abrupt decision to cut him off. He’ll take the blow jobs. I think we both know that I’m very willing to just walk away from the relationship entirely if he doesn’t.

Unfortunately, abstinence isn’t having the intended effect. I wanted it to help me shake the feeling that everyone else is getting something out of sex that I am somehow failing to get. Madonna is the face of this feeling—when she urges me to be like a slut, but be one like a virgin? To wield sexual power like it’s a big giant bag of money or drugs? To measure myself by how many people want to have sex with me? It makes me want to rebel.

Years from now I will make the connection between my feelings about sex and the fact that I spent the first three years of my life steeped in the energy of people who trade sex for a living. But right now, I hate this idea that my sexuality is my worth. Not only because it feels hopelessly archaic, like I’m some slave girl or a geisha, even if I’m a well-paid, well-dressed, well-regarded geisha. But also (mostly) because I feel I don’t measure up.

And I don’t really feel like trying to.

MAYBE THERE’S ANOTHER
reason I don’t want to have sex with Scott. Because I’ve met a new guy. In a bar, one of those places with peanut shells all over the floor. My friend Christie and I started frequenting the place a couple of months ago, after hearing that they don’t ask for IDs. We go on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when drinks are cheap.

The drinking age in Minnesota is nineteen. We are only seventeen, but it takes little more than a warm smile and a short skirt to make up the two years in between. Sometimes I wear my sweatshirt falling off my shoulder just like that girl in
Flashdance
. (I haven’t seen the movie yet, but people tell me I look like her. I wish.) As an insurance policy, I have a fake ID, but I’d rather not use it, since it’s kind of really obvious that someone took a razor blade and sliced off the “4” in 1964 and used superglue to replace it with a “2.”

I drink gin and sours. Many of them. One night I counted. I drank eight gin and sours between seven forty-five and closing time. That’s a lot of gin and sours.

Good thing I’m not paying for them.

That’s because—as a second insurance policy—I’ve made friends with the bartender. His name is Ken (everyone calls him Kenny), and he’s really sweet. He has thin medium-brown hair and medium-blue eyes. His skin tone is medium too and so is his height. In fact, he is medium in pretty much every way, at least externally.

Internally, he’s one of the more interesting guys you’ll meet in a place like Minneapolis. He’s twenty-six (about to turn twenty-seven), has traveled all over the world, and has a black belt in some random martial art the exact name of which I can’t recall. He’s got a degree in international studies and in two weeks he’s going back to the University of Minnesota for an MBA. He’s all kinds of smart. He also keeps the gin and sours coming.

I am kind of dazzled by him.

I think he likes me, too. The past couple of times we’ve been at the
bar, he’s asked Christie and me to stay late after the bar closes and hang out. We turn the music way up and sit in the booths and drink cocktails. I dance around and I can tell Kenny likes watching me. Cham, the Cambodian dish boy, hangs out with us, and so does Bonnie, the waitress, and a couple of the kitchen guys, too. We all play Ms. PacMan with quarters Kenny gets from the cash register behind the bar.

Last Thursday something unexpected happened. Kenny and I were cozied up in one of the back booths, marveling that we’d gone to rival high schools (I carefully avoided saying how many years apart) and had at one time belonged to the same church congregation. (That was during Yvonne’s Lutheran period.) I hadn’t been feeling any particular sexual chemistry (not that I would have, since heavy sexual chemistry tended to overwhelm me, hence the need for all those gin and sours) but suddenly there he was, kissing me.

And he has amazing, cushy lips.

It’s
a lot
different kissing a guy who’s twenty-six (about to turn twenty-seven) than kissing the fumbling twenty-year-old I’ve been dealing with. Kenny has got skills—
Subtlety! Nuance! Technique!
—obviously cultivated over years of experience. I’m pleasantly surprised, and where I think I opened this night merely interested in him, now I am downright smitten.

Meanwhile, Christie has hit it off with one of the cooks. She has just emerged from the kitchen looking disheveled. “He’s gonna give me a ride home,” she announces. “Is that okay? I mean, can you get home okay?”

Christie is a bold girl. Usually, this particular girl-girl transaction—where you have to figure out how to bail on your friend to leave with a guy, without looking (or feeling) like a slut—has an element of slight shame to it. Not for Christie. She looks at me. I look at her. She looks at the cook. I look at Kenny.

“I’ll give you a ride home,” Kenny offers. He is a real man, taking charge of the situation like that. “No problem at all.”

“Really? It’s not that far away,” I say. He’s already agreed to drive
me, but I still feel the need to talk him into it, I guess because I automatically consider myself a pain in the ass. “Just on the other side of Lake Harriet.”

“I know where you live. You went to Wilson, right? I went to Grant, remember?” he says, tapping the tip of my nose. “It’s absolutely no problem. I’d love to do it.” He smiles, and it’s so warm, and so—what?—
loving,
I just know I’m in perfectly good hands with this guy. He’s like Scott, in that he clearly wants to take care of me, except he’s better. Way better.

Christie takes off with the cook, and soon it is Kenny and me alone. We make out for a while, and I’m really enjoying it. I feel grown-up, sophisticated. Like I’m finally hanging out with My Type of People.