I Love You and I'm Leaving You Anyway (31 page)

“I don’t know, Tracy. I’m going to be working,” Paul says.

“You know I won’t get in the way. I’m supergood at amusing myself,” I argue. This is true. I’m an excellent traveler, and I need very little hand-holding. It’s one of the few times I’d actually rather do things alone. I have more interesting experiences as a traveler when I’m not in a couple. “I
must
go,” I say. I just can’t imagine being left at home while Paul experiences India. “Please!?”

“I’ll ask those guys,” Paul says. Normally he would be fine with
me coming along. But in our six months of marriage, his lack of work has made him feel like I am more of a liability than an asset. If he were struggling and unemployed alone, he’d feel a lot less terrible about it.

Then there’s the fact that we were only together for ten months when we got married. And during that time he was traveling every other month. We never actually spent more than two or three weeks together at a stretch. It’s hard to get tired of someone when your relationship is seventeen days on, eight days off, twenty-three days on, twelve days off. He’s starting to get sick of me.

“Please?”

“I said I’ll ask.” Paul’s tone of voice is very Case Closed.

Fine then.

It takes a full week, but he finally agrees to take me. Preparing for the trip brings a new level of purpose and bustle to our lives. Paul seems to have come alive again, which is a big relief. He sounds and looks so good, I don’t even mind it when he bores me with mundane details about things like the camera equipment he is taking, which I know nothing about except that he rents it at a place called Cameras Incorporated. And the only reason I know that is because he says “Cameras Incorporated” a lot and in a way that somehow sticks in my ear.

Shrug.

Two weeks later we are in India, which is more than it’s cracked up to be. Way more.

More people drying their clothes on the median of a busy six-lane street. More four-hundred-year-old banyan trees. More need to cover your head and your shoulders. More unbelievably tasty food. More contradictions, such as the impression that India is this wildly foreign place when in fact everyone speaks English. More insane poverty—and more white-gloved luxury. More cows in the street, and more cell phones. A ton of cows and a ton of cell phones.

More of all of this.

But less stress.

As I mentioned earlier, Paul and I are never better than when we’re traveling, and I think I’ve figured out why. Because when we’re traveling, women are much less of an issue. At home in Los Angeles, women are everywhere, and not just any women, but a certain type of woman—beautiful, sexy, and hungry for validation. Now that we’ve been together awhile, it’s starting to turn into our most regularly occurring argument topic. Like at the birthday party we went to last month.

“Do you have to keep looking at that girl?” I say.

I hate parties—or maybe just when Paul’s with me—but this one is being given by one of my best friends so I have to be here.

“What girl?” he answers blankly. How come he never knows which girl?

“The one you keep looking at,” I say. I can tell when a woman Paul finds sexually interesting walks into a room. Several micro-expressions flit across his face, he blinks once or twice, he orients his body in her direction, and his energy shifts in a way that is invisible but, at least to me, completely tangible.

I turn to get a look at the girl, but I can predict what I’m going to see, because I know what gets Paul’s attention. Top three hits: dark hair, a borderline eating disorder, and bad boundaries. (I also know what doesn’t get his attention: big boobs, conventionally pretty faces, and blond hair in general. He’s much more
Dwell
magazine than
Playboy
.) Paul likes low self-esteem that masquerades as high self-esteem, which is to say a cocky girl who seems independent-slash-bitchy but who has dialed every knob on her outfit, facial expression, hairstyle, and manner toward gaining sexual approval from men. These girls are impossible for Paul (or me) to ignore—the visual equivalent of those guys who ride Harleys without mufflers, ripping through the streets in full sonic glory.

“Her,” I say, nodding in the direction of a super-skinny chick wearing a cute pink nipped-at-the-waist blazer. She’s about ten feet
away, chatting with someone. She’s the Banana Republic version of what Paul likes.

“Oh, her?” Paul says. “Whatever.”

As we pretend to mingle, I watch the woman, who is maybe thirty-five or thirty-six, ever so slightly angle her body toward Paul. She has his attention and she knows it, but unless you are hypervigilant (like me!), you probably wouldn’t detect it. As I observe the two of them doing this dance, I begin to get more and more anxious. I know if I tried to tell Paul what he was doing, he would deny it. And not necessarily because he’s a liar, but because
he doesn’t even know he is doing it.
Neither does she. But since I spent the first three-plus years of my life dependent on my dad—a man who walked into a room just to see if there was a woman (or three, or four) in there he’d want to fuck—I’m exceedingly attuned to that energy.

It’s an energy Paul’s got like crazy. It’s what I love and hate about him.

What I find especially interesting about this situation is how the three of us are locked into a pattern that only one of us—me—is actually aware of. I happen to know that the woman is recently divorced; her husband (a boy-man very similar energetically to Paul) had left her for another woman a year ago. And here she is orienting herself to another woman’s husband, just as some other woman did to get her man. She’s obviously attracted to men like her husband. And so am I. She and I are alike that way. The crazy thing is how, if she actually “got” Paul, she would just be getting more of the same.

I find it fascinating to watch this pattern repeat itself.

When I was younger, I might have wanted to say to her,
How can you do this to me when it just happened to you? You should know better
. But what I’m thinking now is
Wow…is
that
what I’m like? Do I collect glances, validation, and sexual approval from men (any men, all men) like a sort of energetic hobo picking up bottles and cans for a nickel
apiece? Because I really don’t think I am. But if Paul is here, and this woman is here, and her husband was here, and his new girlfriend is now
there…
then I must be in all that somewhere, too
.

Mercifully, India doesn’t have a lot of women without mufflers, and we spend two drama-free weeks shooting the Pop Star’s video. We’re all over Mumbai—on the beach, in the slums, in film production offices, in abandoned apartment buildings, in mind-boggling traffic and five-star hotels. We visit a Jain Hindu temple. And just like I have heard so many people say about India, I have a spiritual experience.

But not the kind with angels or white lights. I have one with a camera.

With nothing to do while Paul and the crew are busy, I take pictures of people everywhere we go. There’s a movie I love where the main character remarks that every girl eventually goes through a photography phase. Well, I’m still in mine. When I photograph people, I shoot their faces. Really close up. I want to see what’s in someone’s eyes, what’s in their soul.

The camera gives me a way to interact with people. One evening we are setting up in an apartment building—it’s really more of a series of concrete-block rooms with doors on them—and I ask a couple of little girls if I can take their picture. They say yes, so I snap a couple of quick shots, then flip the digital camera to playback and show them the photo on the screen. It blows their minds! They shake their heads back and forth in the figure-eight-type gesture that is universal in India to mean anything from
Wow to What the fuck (in a good way
)? The little girls have never seen an image of themselves.

Their slightly older brothers come over and point at themselves, as if to say, “Take my picture, too.” So I do. Now I’m the pied piper, because in short order, there are a half a dozen kids crowded around. They all want to see the photographs. The older boys take me by the arm and lead me back toward an open area, where women are pre
paring food. “Picture!” the kids say, pointing at the women, who are obviously sisters. I snap. I show the picture. They smile and giggle. And do the figure eight.

Now we’re all laughing.

A few of the boys and girls head into a back room and when they reappear, they are escorting a very old woman. The grandma. They want me to take her picture. To say I am honored doesn’t go nearly far enough. I’m gonna cry.

I shoot the grandma, with her rheumy eyes and her frail arms, her gray hair and her faded sari. She’s beautiful. Then I show her—and her whole family—the photograph. We all smile and laugh together. We’re totally connected.

It’s a spiritual experience.

Standing in this amazing moment, amid these ordinary people, I am reminded once again that there is something in life that is bigger than anything, than
everything
—bigger than poverty, bigger than a language barrier, bigger than the oceans I flew across to get here—and that
something,
that indescribable something, whatever it is, is
more real
than pain, poverty, language, or even space and time.

June Ericson called that indescribable something the Lord, and it’s a good thing I’m being reminded of it. I don’t know it yet, standing here in this Mumbai slum, but when I return to Los Angeles, I am going to barrel headlong into a situation a lot like the one I faced when I left the Ericsons. And in order to handle it, I’m definitely gonna need a Lord.

WE’RE BACK, AND THINGS
aren’t right. I don’t know what’s wrong, but something is. I feel anxious all the time, and I am really thin. I am a normally thinnish person, but now I am skinny. Like, intervention skinny.

The video isn’t over yet. The British Pop Star has flown in for another week of shooting, which necessitated a couple hundred more
trips to Cameras Incorporated and the building of a giant stage and backdrop. In our living room.

While they shoot all night long, I fall asleep in the back of the loft, to the sound of that terrible song being played over, and over, and over. For some reason, on the last night of the shoot, I start feeling “bad” and throw up several times in twenty-four hours. Even though I know I’m not sick. At least not with anything viral or bacterial.

Then today, I’m on my way to the news station—I work a one
P.M.
–to–nine
P.M.
shift every Sunday—when my phone rings. It’s a number I don’t recognize. I pick it up.

“Tracy.” It’s Paul. In that clipped tone.

“Hi!”

“I’m calling from a borrowed phone,” he says urgently. “I left mine in your purse. Last night at dinner. You gotta bring it back right now.” Now that he mentions it, I remember him putting his phone in my purse last night right before the waitress came to take our order. It would be easy for me not to notice, since we have matching phones. The only difference is that I superglued two big rhinestones on mine. At this point, though, the rhinestones are so dirty they are easy to miss.

“Where are you?” he says, sounding very serious.

“I’m on my way to the knitting store.” I want to get some new yarn to fill the boring hours in between news stories. Sundays are notoriously slow.

“Well, turn around,” he says. Like a director. “I need my phone.”

Huh. I’d think he would be saying that with a smile, but he’s not. He means it. Which is kind of hilarious. “Turn around? I can’t. I have just enough time to get to the knitting store and make it to work on time. You can meet me there.” I mean at the knitting store.

“How long before you get there?”

“I’m a mile away.” I’m thinking it’s crazy, attempting to coordinate a meeting at the yarn store. “It would make more sense if you just waited an hour and came to my work to get it. I’ll be there at one.”

Paul thinks about this for a minute. Then he says, “Where’s the yarn store?”

“Beverly and Alta Vista,” I say, pulling the exact street out of my amazing photographic memory of the map of Los Angeles. I’m a walking, talking navigation system.

“I’ll be right there.” He hangs up.

I chuckle to myself. God. That’s crazy, like I would
turn around
to bring Paul his phone. That’s funny.

I drive another couple of blocks. It occurs to me that Paul is going to get in his car and meet me at the knitting store. The knitting store!

Paul, the borderline agoraphobic.

Driving.

To get his phone.

The phrase “any lengths” pops into my mind. It’s a phrase used in the recovery world to talk about how far someone is willing to go to satisfy the addiction. It’s also how far you have to be willing to go to get recovery. Paul is definitely going to any lengths to get this phone. He must
really
want this phone. I wonder why?

I reach into my purse and pull out his phone. I look at it. There’s a new text message, right there. From a number with an out-of-state area code. Still tooling down Beverly, I open the phone and read the text:

Hey there, married man!

Instantly, my foot is shaking on the accelerator. How my foot has already gotten a message that my mind is still struggling to comprehend, I don’t know. But my foot is shaking because it now knows why I’m so skinny.

My husband is apparently cheating on me.

My mind is racing with what to do, but it’s also blank. I can’t think straight. I pick up Paul’s phone again and open it—

Hey there, married man!

Now something comes to mind. Hit redial. A girlish female voice picks up.

“Hello?” She’s giggling. Or at least her voice is. She thinks it’s the married man she just texted to say,
Hey there!

It’s not. It’s me. His wife. “Hello. This is my husband’s phone and you just sent a text message?”

There is a pause. The girl is obviously thinking. “Oh, I meant to dial 7771,” she says apologetically. Paul’s phone number ends in the digits 7774. “I must have accidentally sent it to the wrong number.”