On Wednesday September 5, 2007, almost ten years to the date I met him, the father of my child, my ex, a celebrity by no other name in my stories, I called him and we had the following exchange, give and take some paraphrasing and creative non-fictional license (J stands for me and X for…duh):
J: Are you planning on having a baby with that woman soon, or are you currently expecting?
X: (pregnant silence—pun intended!)
J: Hello? You there? Is this one o f those “dropped calls can fuck up shit” commercials?
X: I’m here. Why are you asking me that now?
J: Just answer the question and be honest. It’s just me X, you can be honest.
X: That’s the thing, I can’t because I don’t want to hurt your feelings and----
Hold up, wait a minute, freeze frame and let me walk onto the screen and address the audience directly here. I feel I owe you an explanation. For a year now X has equivocated on the exactitudes of his involvement with said woman. After summer last year, the bomb exploded that he had “a girlfriend”—see chapter entitled “Giant Ice Cream Scooper”. Then it was smokes and mirrors to suggest that had been a fling that ended. Around January he got back real close to me. Then there were suggestions to counter that closeness that came from circumstances but still no real clear honest words from him. There was a rapprochement though, for sure. Members of his family were encouraged—could things be on the upswing with us? I tried to not be optimistic because I knew because he was making no pronouncements towards any such outcome and to be crass about, he was not trying to get in my pants. But all the while and despite hovering realities suggesting otherwise, X continued to be in my life and give me the proverbial rope to hang my little pathetic hopes on: he acted like he wanted me in his and wanted to be in my life. Myriad gifts, showers of attention and a high degree of explicit and implicit control over my daily routine. One obvious way was to claim to have almost absolutely no ability to babysit our son, especially in that night/weekend time windown when people who need one usually get a life. No, he was too busy, working hard on raising some funds to help improve our lives and amend for past wrongs. He’d love to watch him but he couldn’t—so I was house arrested.
Perversely, his “constant calls” worked like crack on me (how much he needs to speak with moi!) but very much like GPS for him. I was never cause for a “where you at text?” so much as I was a known bleep on his radar—always accounted for and guaranteed to not be having any fun or sex because I was with my child at home. Further perverse were the endless conversations about his future endeavors: our business ideas, our savings plans to get a mortgage for me—but really, was it for me or for us?, him passing me that inhibriating feeling of “I’m the only one he talks about all this stuff with” laced with “he really needs me”... Again, crack for me but very much like, oh I don’t know, what is the name for shamelessly self-serving ego tripping drug? Yeah, I would guess it was that for him. Most perverse of all though, and most hurtful in the end, were the instances, two of them, when confronted by a very terrified, weak, teary and vulnerable me, he actually denied all: denied her importance, her worth to him and as a person, and the reasonableness of my anxieties. And so this is what the year had been like: me taking every little crumb of attention from X to (secretely though not exactly subconsciously) tell myself that yes, he does did love me; him just keeping me on my crumbs diet, in the dark.
I did a whole year of him pretending that we had this wonderfully close, warm, profound relationship. A relationship interestingly lacking sex and the parts where I get something out of it for myself, beside delusions. All this happening while he developed a great new love of his own with someone who, like himself and unlike myself, was fully informed. Can I say that I was not exactly aware of the depth of that deception? I know I sound retarded but those who say love is blind mistook a mental deficiency for an optical one: love is just retarded. Did I have the intuition to feel afraid all year? Yes, of course. Did the attention minus sex equation give me anxiety and make me feel dirty and pathetic just right after it made me feel great, every time? Yes. Did I feel at times like all I was getting was a charity handout straight from the vault of his guilt? Yes. I can’t say I didn’t think these things but I can say, I have to say because it is true, that I didn’t think them in the place in my mind where thoughts register or where thoughts connect to action, or where thoughts are allowed to escape the vicious onslaught of sanitizing rationalization my ego subjects them to. (Does my mind even have such a pristine secure thinking space? Probably not). I knew but I couldn’t really know and didn’t want to know and I was being told “not to know”—you get the idea. And back to the action of this fateful phonecall:
J: No, yes you can be honest. You have not spared my feelings through being dishonest. My feelings have been walking up and down my sleeves, bleeding, with a black eye and on clutches for you to see for 12 months, if you know what I mean... So please. Look, I'll tell you what I think the truth is, since you can’t say it, and you just confirm or deny.
X: Okay
(J’s internal monologue: Did this motherfucker just say “Okay?”)
J: (Ahem, clear throat, heart pounding like crazy) Here is what I think, I think “You have been in a loving, serious relationship with her and you love her and she loves you and you’re even thinking about babies, and this has gone on for a whole year now.”
X: … Yeah, yeah, that’s correct.
J: So for this entire past year, while you knew I foolishly entertained the possibility she was just a fling, and while you had repeatedly told me she was just that, going as far as to disparage her intellect and character to emphasize that point--this entire year, you were having a relationship with her?
X: I was trying to spare your feelings.
J: You hold keys to my apartment, speak to me 10 times a day, know my every move and don’t think to mention that while this is going on and you’re taking up all this space in my life, you have a serious girlfriend in yours?
X: Like I said, I was just trying to spare your feelings…
And then we had the rest of the talk where I get on my high horse of self-righteous indignation because well, what else does one have left in this context? I explain in detail the depths and range of his indecency as a human being. Because we do that when we are hurt, strangely. We waste time telling a motherfucker, “do you understand, no let me spell it out for you, how much this makes you a m-o-t-h-e-r-f-u-c-k-e-r?!”, as if this is in any way a strike back at them. Then, in the moment, of course, he agrees and mea culps himself all the way back to 1998, the most obvious way to respond. And then, shameless, because hurt people have no shame, I get on the mother of the high horse of self-righteousness, the even higher horse of Maturity and Generosity and outline how we will handle this. I engender this measured tone, I sound so noble, I feel like I should slap ‘im with my white glove, or something. I say something to the effect of wishing them the best and just wanting my space and time and looking forward to the time when relations will normalize. You get the idea, we’ve all seen that scene in many movies:
He predictably feigns pain at the thought we will be cut off from each other now, references the sort of friend he thought I’d be forever, something about his homie and about his special relationship to his baby’s mother, “homie” and “baby mother” being the top and sole two words infamous list of shit your ex should never fucking call you.
Then it happens, the watershed moment happens. I have a fantasy in my mind of who I am in this moment, in this conversation and it materializes. And I realize, I am really doing this: I have passed from pretending to be in control to being in control. As I am talking, as this is happening, I am walking inside myself and trying to find my panic, my terror, my devastating pain at the loss of him, that familiar demon, I want to find it before it finds me, I do not want to walk unaware into another scene of prostration on the floor of my apartment wailing and… I find nothing. It is no longer there. I realize that I have faked it til I made it and I am zen right now, I am capable of seeing this through. Though without having had a real meditative breakthrough I feel something like those people who through meditation got their ego to shut up long enough so that they could take a big bite of reality, swallow it, not choke to death and live to tell.
So like a Maya Angelou cliché, I rise and shit, on the pedestal of “I am the one who called you out”. I am the one who albeit many months (years!) and sad episodes late, said I would like the drama of you making me look stupid and degraded to myself, to your new girlfriend and to everyone who knows me , to stop. I am the one who said, don't lie anymore, I don't want the pity, I don't need the pity. I am the one gladly taking whatever little’s left of my dignity, thank you very much, and leaving this sordid little party, like a ho with runny stockings and lipstick who knows it’s going to be fine once she takes a shower and changes clothes. I am the one making the first move in my own best interest that I can be proud of making, in almost 10 years. It may all be a delusion of grandeur but I literally feel myself take flight, and I am the light breeze over the darkening forrest that was this part of my life, and I am going to go now and hung. up. this. phone. Fully adrenalized and distraught and very pained and elated and confused and drowsy and aprehensive is how I describe the aftermath of that phonecall; such is the place from which I write today.
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