I Love You and I'm Leaving You Anyway Read Free Page A

seem: they’re polite, they open your car door, and they don’t pressure you for sex. They commit after a certain period of dating (usually thirty or sixty days, about as long as one is allowed to let an invoice languish before it is considered past due), they take you home to meet their (totally nice) families, they have steady jobs and good credit. They like their mother but they don’t feel responsible for her and (probably as a result) they don’t use women as a drug, because they’re not out there trying to reclaim the power over women they didn’t have as a boy.
    They drive defensively.
    There is only one problem with these men: they are boring. Scratch that. It’s not that they are boring, it’s just that they aren’t exciting. I used to think that if excitement was a coin, the flip side would be boredom. Now, almost thirty years of dating later, I’ve decided the flip side of excitement is intimacy. Without all those “exciting” ups and downs, two people can actually build a stable relationship and eventually experience closeness. Something my subconscious was determined never to let happen to me.
    There is this Jungian thing I learned, where if you look at a woman’s choice of mate (or even date) you will see the male version of herself. And if you look at a man’s partner, you will see his inner female.
    Take a quick look around—it’s a pretty G-D interesting theory, right?
    I have two Inner Males—the pastor and the pimp. And for a long time, it was confusing as hell, dawg. Seventy-five percent of me is an upper-middle-class white boy—a commitment-oriented intellectualwho got an IRA with his first job and thinks strip clubs are lame and slutty girls are just that: slutty.
    The other 25 percent of me is really, really horny.
    My UNG side would put together a relationship, a home, and a future. Then my inner pimp would trade it all away for one night in Bangkok. Or even Portland, Oregon.
    Which explains how Paul, bless his heart, was my perfect match. We each had a side of ourselves that wanted desperately to make a home. And we each had a side that would not, or could not, allow that to happen. But more on that in a moment.
     
    I NEVER REALLY KNEW MY DAD until I visited the place where he was born—a no-stoplight town in rural Alabama called Midway, two highways from anywhere, with maybe a few hundred people, almost all of them black.
    I had always imagined the Deep South as this perspiring, mythic place of plantations, Spanish moss, and houses up on cinder blocks. A place where two slices of white bread are always served with dinner. Not long before my fortieth birthday, while on a solo visit to Atlanta, I decided to find out for myself.
    I hop in a rental car and make the two-hour drive.
    I find the town without too much trouble. I take the left turn off the county road and then, typical of me, suddenly realize I had absolutely no plan for Finding My People.
    Up ahead there are four guys sitting on lawn chairs, stuff spread out on the ground for a yard sale. A fine place to start, I figure. I come to a stop right in front of the driveway and get out of my car. The four men, who I now see are drinking Budweisers, are wearing expressions like something out of the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. They’re Richard Dreyfuss. I’m the alien.
    Not quite sure what to say, I just launch into my introduction.
    “Hi, my name is Tracy McMillan, and my dad is from this townoriginally, and I was over visiting in Atlanta and I just decided to just drive down here and check it out.” I take a breath, aware that I am probably coming off like a sorority girl, and a white one at that.
    One of the men, in his late forties maybe, looks at me a long spell. Then he turns to the guy next to him and they exchange a glance that says something like Are you seeing what I’m seeing? They are still thinking about how to respond when a large eighties Oldsmobile four-door sedan—the kind of thing a Los