I Love You and I'm Leaving You Anyway (25 page)

“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
.

He had to get fixed.

Even more incredibly, I knew Brandon had been doing heroin on occasion. Because I was doing it with him! I just didn’t think it was that big of a deal, and I never imagined that it was seriously out of control. Although, looking back on even my brief exposure to the drug, I should have known.

I had always sworn I would never do heroin.
My dad was a heroin dealer,
I thought.
I know
exactly
what that drug is about. No need to go there.
I’d also watched one of my best friends in college get strung out in the months leading up to graduation, with her boyfriend, a governor’s son. She left suddenly and went to rehab and I never saw her again. Her experience gave me a chance to re-swear that I would never do heroin. And I didn’t.

Until one night when Brandon and I are hanging out with Corey, a chef friend of ours whom I know from Salt Lake. He and Brandon are working in the same restaurant and have struck up a friendship over food and—I am about to find out—much, much more.

We are crowded into my tiny room, which is not much more than a futon with a moat around it, drinking beers, trying to figure out our next move for the night. I go to the fridge to get another beer and when I come back, Brandon is wearing his roller skates. (When he isn’t riding his bike around, he’s wearing his roller skates. The man just loves wheels. All kinds of them.)

“I’ll be right back,” he says, giving me one of his sexy-devil-troll grins. He rolls out the door and, presumably, into the elevator.

I look at Corey. “Where’s he going?”

“He’ll be back in a minute.” Corey smiles like the Mona Lisa, which is his version of doing the Snoopy Dance. He’s not real big on emotion.

While Brandon’s gone, Corey and I talk a little about our mutual friends and the Salt Lake diaspora—everyone with any ambition at all leaves, unless they’re Mormon—marveling at how many of us have ended up in New York. In six minutes flat, Brandon whizzes back into the room.

“That was fast,” I say. I really cannot imagine where he went. I’m thinking maybe he got a bottle of champagne or something.

Instead he pulls a handful of tiny little squares of wax paper out of his satchel. There are maybe four or five of them and they look kind of beautiful, the type of thing you would find at a high-end stationery store packed with beautiful, but extravagantly unnecessary, things.

“What’s that?”

“You’ll see,” Brandon says, unfolding one of the envelopes. It’s like a teeny-tiny gift. I figure there must be something really good inside.

He opens it. It’s a white powder, no more than a teaspoon. He dumps it onto one of my glass picture frames and starts arranging it into tiny—by cocaine standards—lines, each about an inch and a half long and as wide as a piece of yarn.

Twenty-seven years of saying
I’ll never do heroin
instantly evaporates.

Gone.

Brandon pulls out a straw cut to one-quarter its original length. I should have wondered where this straw suddenly came from. I don’t. I am too busy watching Brandon sniff a line up his nose. Corey is next.

“I want to do it!” It’s the almost-bratty pleading of a younger sister, eager to do whatever it is that the big boys are doing. Corey hands me the straw.

“Take it easy,” he says. He smiles, bigger this time. Not only is the drug hitting his brain, but he’s also introducing me to something he knows is going to make me feel a way I’ve never, ever felt before.

Pain-free. Sublime. Out of this world.

And there’s a power in that. Like giving a girl her first (penis-induced) orgasm.

I take the straw in my hand and inhale. I’ve snorted something up my nose a thousand times before—I had that semiserious coke phase
in Salt Lake—so the sensation of a narcotic powder burning through my nasal cavity is like a familiar road I haven’t been on in a long time. But this time that road leads somewhere completely new, like a dream where you’re at your house but it’s really, say, Margaret Thatcher’s. And in this case, Margaret Thatcher’s house is…awesome.

My first thought:
I never knew how much pain I had in my body until it was gone.

My second thought:
Why is everyone so afraid of this drug?! It’s not that big a deal.

My third thought:
When can I do this again?!

Here’s what those two little lines feel like: the complete cessation of any anxiety, worry, or fear about myself, my life, my past, or my future. All while being
completely lucid
. I thought heroin was going to be like LSD, where grape jelly would be dripping down the walls and people’s faces would melt. But my mind is clear, perfectly clear. Clear as a bell.

I lay back on my crappy futon and contemplate the feeling I’m having, really meditate on it. I am floating on a cloud, but it’s not airy, it’s firm, like one of those Tempur-Pedic mattresses. It conforms perfectly to my body—I’m enveloped by it as it exerts the perfect amount of counterpressure to make me feel fully supported and secure yet not squeezed at all.

When I describe this to a therapist, years later, he nods knowingly. “Sounds like what it feels like to be held as an infant,” he observes. And it’s true. Heroin is like going back to infancy, only
this
time, my needs are being met. I’m safe, and I’m not hungry, and I’m feeling no discomfort.

On second thought, maybe I better not do this again.

But of course, I do. A few more times. It’s called “chipping,” where you do just the right amount, just as often as you can without getting addicted. What I find out is that this amount is shockingly small. Apparently recreational heroin is the same as casual sex. Which is to say, it doesn’t stay casual for long.

For me it is three times in one week. Sunday night, then Thursday night, then I used the leftovers on Friday. On Monday I wake up with the worst “flu” I’ve ever had. For the next several days I am the
sickest, sickest, sickest
I’ve ever been. I can’t even
look
at food. I ache, I am nauseous, I have the chills, I can’t move, and I want to die.

Die.

By that time one of my dad’s posse members, Cadillac, is living in New York to pursue his acting career, after getting a series of parts in August Wilson plays that ended up on Broadway. Cadillac regularly takes me to dinner, just to keep an eye on me. He’s the one who tells me what is wrong with me, a week into my “flu.”

“What’s the matter with you, Tracy? You’re not hungry?” he says. I’m only picking at my chicken Caesar salad.

“I don’t feel good.” I decide to leave it at that.

“You sick?” He’s eyeing me. Have you ever tried to get anything over on a fifty-seven-year-old former hustler? You can’t.

“Kind of.” I make eye contact with him. I’m trying to figure out if I can level with him. I think I can. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Of course, baby,” Cadillac says sweetly. Like my dad, he’s a little bit of a flirt. “You ask right ahead.”

“Well…” I hesitate. “What do you do when you’ve been doing something you know you shouldn’t be doing?”

“Like what?” He stares lasers at me. “What you been doing?”

I don’t even fool around. I just come out with it. “I did heroin a few times. And now I feel like shit.”

Cadillac gets this look on his face. Like it all makes sense now. “You achey? Sick feelin’?”

I nod.

“And you can’t eat?”

I nod again.

“That’s a jones, baby. You jonesin’.” There’s no judgment in his voice, which is a relief. He’s just communicating a fact.

Shit. Right. Of
course!
That’s what this is!
It’s one of those times where I know something is right the moment I hear it, even though I would never think of it on my own.

“Fuck! Are you serious? I only did it three times! I, I mean, three times in one week,” I stammer. “I mean I’ve been doing it a little bit here and there—”

“That’s all it takes,” Cadillac says knowingly. “That’s all it takes. Why you think it’s so addictive?”

Why indeed. Because if all it takes to get as sick as I’ve ever been
in my life
is to do a drug three times in one week,
then that must be an evil drug
. Especially since I spent my whole life saying I would never do that drug because of my dad being a heroin dealer.

And now my boyfriend. Or should I say, my soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend.

I guess knowing something about heroin doesn’t really matter, does it? It is just one sneaky drug. When you’re doing it. When your man is doing it. It just creeps up on a person, and it is staggering when you find out what it is doing to you (or to your man)
right under your nose
. Suddenly, I have a lot more compassion for heroin addicts. And the people who love them.