I Love You and I'm Leaving You Anyway (23 page)

“I had a great time with you tonight,” he says softly. We’ve had a lot to drink and I am lying on my bed with my eyes closed because there’s nowhere else in this apartment to sit. Not that I could hold myself up even if there was. Although I’m halfway passed out, I can hear in his voice how much he already needs me. He’s not all defended like so many other guys. Maybe because he’s only twenty-one. He’s probably never even had his heart broken yet.

Brandon leans over and kisses me.
Whoa
. I swoon, but I try to stay cool. (I’m nearly twenty-seven. I
am
all defended.) I’ve never been kissed like that.

This is exactly the kind of sexual connection I’ve been studiously avoiding. I mean, my last boyfriend was
gay
. Gay guys don’t kiss you like that. My boyfriend before that was a philosophy major. Intellectuals don’t kiss you like that. My boyfriend before that was my husband. Husbands don’t kiss you like that. My boyfriend before that was in high school. High school boys don’t kiss you like that.

You know who kisses you like that? Guys who ride motorcycles, who are way too young, and who, when you lose track of them at the nightclub, turn out to be dancing in the go-go cage. On your first date.

That’s who.

BRANDON AND I MOVE IN
after twenty-nine days. We don’t really mean to. It happens after he and his gun-toting, Mohawk-sporting, Aryan Nation–looking roommate get evicted from their house because of Portland’s skyrocketing real estate market. The plan is for Brandon to come stay with me until he can find another place to rent. Of course, he never leaves.

Which is totally fine, since if he lives with me, I know he’ll always come back, sooner or later. Which is probably the only way I would risk giving myself so completely to someone. I am truly, madly, deeply, and sexually in love with Brandon. It’s the first time in my life I’m not withholding anything.

Not even orgasms.

I’ve noticed that the moment you stop doing something you realize exactly why you were doing it. Or in this case, the moment I
started
doing something I realized exactly why I
hadn’t
been. It wasn’t that I didn’t have orgasms because I was frigid. It was that I was refusing. Refusing to let go. Refusing to let a man have an effect on me. Refusing to be vulnerable. Refusing to be with someone completely. Refusing to lose control.

And I’m not in control of Brandon. Not in control of him. Not in control with him. Not in control of any of it.
So
not in control.

It’s not that Brandon is a bad guy. He’s not at all. In fact, for a twenty-one-year-old, he’s surprisingly mature. He works as the head chef and kitchen manager at an upscale Asian-fusion bistro downtown. It’s one of those places that has an open kitchen with a bar around it, which is good, because it would be a crying shame to waste Brandon’s face in some dungeon in the back. Like a lot of chefs, Brandon has mad sex appeal. A fair number of single women come to eat at the bar (no doubt to watch him work), and he always makes them feel good by smiling at them while he cooks. I tease him that if he can’t fuck them, at least he can feed them. It’s pretty much the same thing.

But this is the first relationship I’ve ever had that has sex at its core. Being with someone I want this bad feels dangerous to me. Maybe because the men I am superattracted to carry a lot of my dad’s sexual energy, and I know all too well what that means. They’ll abandon me. Somehow or other.

Until Brandon, all my relationships have made
sense
—they involved good guys, with nice jobs and bright futures, sensible choices, the lot of them. I have selected every partner against a set of very rational criteria. Is he going to “fit” my life? Is he going to be nice to me? Is he never, ever going to leave?

Sexual compatibility was fifth or sixth on my list of qualifications. In fact, it was an
anti
-qualification. I have a theory that you can tell who’s having the least sex (or is secretly gay) by who has the
most stable relationship. Passion is very destabilizing. And stability has, until now, been the most important quality I looked for in a man. My inner foster child demanded it.

But besides his regular job, nothing about Brandon is a concession to my inner foster child. And she’s none too pleased about it. Because Brandon does a lot of stuff that scares the living shit out of her. Like drink. Way too much. And disappear, sometimes for hours. And worst of all, Brandon flirts. Ceaselessly. With women, men, children, and mailboxes. Then my inner foster child freaks out and I have to talk her back into the relationship. The conversation goes something like this:

I can’t take this anymore!

“It’s not that bad,” I say to her. The grown-up me likes Brandon. I especially like the sexual freedom I’m experiencing and I don’t want to have to give it up. I know he’s not actually going to cheat on me, and I wish the little girl in me would just calm the fuck down so I could enjoy him. But that little girl gets kind of hysterical.

It
is
that bad! Did you see him last night? I thought we were just going to go play pool and have a beer and the next thing you know, he had jumped into a car with that guy Demetrios and they were taking off across the Burnside Bridge! I was really scared! I didn’t know where he was going or when he was going to come back!

“I know. It sucked,” I say sympathetically. “But he doesn’t mean anything bad by it. He really doesn’t. Anyway, once we caught up to them, everything was fine.”

I don’t
want
to have to catch up with them! And who’s this fucking Demetrios, anyway?
We’re
Brandon’s girlfriend! He’s supposed to be taking care of
us.
Not running off with some idiot because he’s all drunk.

“You know he loves you. Us.”

That’s what he
says.
But what about when he was talking to that chick from the ice cream shop? You could tell she liked him, and he was going along with it! We walk down Twenty-third Avenue and it seems like he’s had sex with every pretty girl we see. I don’t even like going out with him anymore.

“That’s just how Brandon is. He would never cheat on you. You know that.” I say this emphatically. It’s definitely true.

Maybe. Okay, all right, yes. But it sucks. I’m scared!

“He always comes home,” I remind her.

So? I’m scared…I think we should break up with him.

“
No
. I mean, no. You can’t do that.”

Why
not?!

“Because.”

Because why? There are other guys out there. Nice guys. Who aren’t scary.

“Because I said so.”

That’s not a reason.

“Okay,” I say. “Because I want him.”

And that’s what it comes down to. Big Me doesn’t really care if Little Me is terrified by Brandon’s behavior. Big Me wants him, and what Big Me wants, Big Me gets.

IT SUCKS TO WANT A MAN
in particular, which is the way I want Paul. It’s fine to
want
a man. And it’s fine to be
particular.
But you have to keep the “want” and the “particular” far away from each other. Preferably not even in the same sentence. Definitely not in the same man.

I must have known this intuitively because up until Paul, I’d managed to pretty much sidestep all desire for a specific man—one single man whom I needed above all others, one single man for whom I couldn’t substitute some other single man. This is how I stayed safe.

Brandon would have been the exception. But I always knew I didn’t want to marry him. He was too motorcycle-y and too blue collar. I was too art-snobbish and too ambitious. We just didn’t have enough in common. And that gave me power—having the knowledge that even though I wanted him like crazy at that particular moment,
I would never want him for eternity. It wasn’t Brandon’s fault. He was like a starter house. You’re not meant to live there forever.

Paul’s different. He’s the man I want who can’t be replaced by any other man. I’ve never dared to want someone this much before. There is a brilliant sex therapist named David Schnarch who calls this phenomenon “not wanting to want.” He says you might refuse to want your partner as a way of defending yourself against the knowledge that they can
walk out on you
any time they want. (Unless you chain them to something.) In the world of a sex therapist, not wanting to want leads to low sexual desire in a couple. Come to think of it, that’s what it leads to in my world, too. Like with Scott, and Michael, and Kenny.

But not with Paul. Paul, I want.

It’s nice to know that I must be growing psychologically if I’m willing to want someone with the intensity of my want for Paul. But it’s not much of a consolation. Because the downside of wanting only one particular man is steep and rather treacherous. And that is:

If you’re not careful, you might find yourself doing anything to keep him.

NEW YORK IS AWFUL.
Brandon and I got here the day before yesterday, after two weeks in Dallas with one of my college friends, preceded by ten days with Yvonne in Boston (the most I’d seen her since leaving Minneapolis), preceded by three weeks on an island off the coast of Honduras, four weeks in Guatemala, four weeks in Mexico, a week in Southern California, and two weeks in Salt Lake.

The journey that brought us here began when we took HIV tests and—for the week it took to get the test results—fantasized about what we’d do if they came back positive.

“Well, I would quit my job and travel,” I say.

“So would I,” Brandon says back.

“Why wait until we’re dying to live?”

“Yeah, why wait?”

The tests came back negative, but the idea was a pretty good one, so, on New Year’s Eve turning into 1992, we locked ourselves in the bathroom at the stroke of midnight and made a pinky promise to hit the road come April.

And after four months living out of a suitcase, we are now in New York, with plans to go to Minneapolis at the end of the week to see my dad.

It’s not quite as free-spirited as it sounds, though. At least not for me. Because a few days before Brandon and I made our pact to run away together I’d been called into the assistant news director’s office at work.

“Tracy, I’ve called you in here to talk about a story you wrote for the six,” Gil Hartsook says, wearing a serious expression. Not that he has any other kind.

I sit listening to him drone on, the fear needle buried so deep in my brain it’s past the red even, into the sliver of white.

“It was about the Christmas Lights Festival at the convention center,” Gil says, jogging my memory.

“Mm-hmm. What about it?” I’m wincing. Television news is like surgery—having to go back and revisit something you’ve already done is usually a bad sign.

“Well, you wrote that the Lights Festival was taking place at the Civic Center. It wasn’t. It was held at the convention center.”

Shit
. Convention center, Civic Center. How the fuck am I supposed to know the difference? I haven’t lived in Portland all
that
long.

“That’s the third mistake you’ve made in the past two months,” Gil says, tilting his head just a bit to emphasize the point. You can tell it hurts him to say this. He’s a nice man, in his midthirties—the personification of a nice house in a new subdivision in a new suburb where nice people with good jobs move to raise their good children so that their nice wives can stay home instead of having to go to some stupid job just to overpay for an old house with outrageous heating
bills in a hip neighborhood. In other words, Gil’s life is my worst nightmare.

“I know this is your first job,” he continues. “Mistakes are part of it. But not this many in this short of a time.”

He’s right. My love affair with Brandon has definitely had a negative impact on my job performance. I was much better when I had a gay boyfriend I didn’t really want to fuck. I had a lot more energy left over for work.

“I’m sorry.” I don’t know what else to say. I really hope this little talk is over.

But it’s not.

“You know, not everyone is cut out for this job,” Gil says. “Sometimes you just have to say, ‘Maybe I’m not cut out for this job.’ That’s what I had to do when I was a reporter.” Gil looks at me earnestly and I can tell that the reporter moment was a really big deal for him. No one gets into TV news because they dream of being an assistant news director. Just like no one gets into a band to be the bassist. They all want to be Mick Jagger.

At the moment, however, it looks like I’m going to be more like the fifth Beatle.

“I’m sorry to say it, but if you make one more mistake”—he’s saying this as gently as he possibly can—“we’re going to have to let you go.” He frowns in a kindly way.

This is the moment I decide to leave for real. I don’t try to improve my performance or wait to see if I am going to make another mistake. I just start making plans.

And now we are in New York.

We are staying with (and by “staying with,” I mean sleeping on the floor of) Brandon’s best friend Richie, a dissolute “artist” in his thirties who left Portland a couple of months before we did.

Actually, I
was
staying at Richie’s. I’ve just been asked to leave.

Richie and I have always had an uneasy truce in our ongoing power struggle over which of us is more important to Brandon. And
being that I have a vagina and Richie does not, I win. But still, Richie maintains a certain power over Brandon, the exact nature of which I can’t quite understand.

The night we got here, Brandon, Richie, and Richie’s friend Allison (a girl about my age whom Brandon has always crushed out on) went out for drinks. I stayed home, not at all eager to spend the evening watching Brandon moon over Allison. I’ve tried to point out to him how pathetic his crush is, in the hopes of getting him to stop, but he’s like a goldfish in a bowl swimming around going, “What water?” To him, trying to get a woman to approve of him is like breathing. He doesn’t even know he’s doing it. Ninety-five percent of the time, there’s no woman he wants to approve of him more than me. But that other 5 percent of the time…is torture for me. I figured it would be better to just let them go out, have a drink, come home, and save myself the anxiety attack.