All That You Leave Behind: A Memoir(27)

The jig was up. I had been found out. It wasn’t exactly cheating, but it was behavior that Paul would not tolerate. I wondered if he was going to kick me out. Did I even care? We had another pressing issue: He was supposed to visit me in L.A. in twenty-four hours. Soon he canceled his flight and forwarded me the confirmation. Message received.

More bad news came. The next day my dad called to tell me that his father, our papa, was in critical condition and likely to pass soon. I needed to get on a plane to Minnesota immediately. I was shaken by the news, as death was not something I had any experience with. I was about to learn.

The funeral was Irish Catholic, full of both tears and raucous laughter. A smattering of our strongest male cousins were asked to carry the coffin, and much to my dad’s chagrin, I was asked as well. I was apparently the most masculine of the female cousins. As I helped carry the coffin, the weight of it and the situation allowed me to step outside myself and put the drama with Paul into perspective. After the burial I asked my dad, who was always a crier, how he was holding up. “He had a good ol’ life and it was time for him to go.” My dad was sad but he knew that death was always the ending that life had in store for us. He also knew a good death was never guaranteed. When my dad was forty-eight, his sister had died from an aneurysm. He’d wept for months, long enough to remember that things could always be worse.

I flew back to New York after the funeral and was surprised to find Paul waiting at the airport to drive me home. I had sent him my flight information on the off chance that he would come pick me up, as was tradition, but I wasn’t sure if he would show up.

We drove back to our shared apartment in silence. The death in the family had given me a life preserver for the relationship, and I had to decide if I would take it. I felt conflicted, so I kept treading water. I wanted the comfort of a relationship, but none of the work or sacrifice. I soon realized that we had both picked poorly. Paul was a jealous person, and I was quite adept at making him jealous.

The explosion—or implosion, depending on how you look at it—happened one night when Paul asked me to get drinks after work with some co-workers. We spent the evening laughing and having fun, doing that smug dance that people in relationships do around single people, but something about that fourth glass of wine made me want to act out. We got in a cab. I started texting a guy friend and flirting. I had changed his name on my phone to Liz H, a female friend of mine. I felt a little guilty but was able to quickly reframe it in my mind by insisting that Paul’s jealousy made me behave this way. But it was all fairly obvious and Paul guessed the true identity of the contact, which quickly led to a shouting match. We were standing outside our apartment when he pushed me down to the ground. I looked up at him, shocked. “You pushed me!”

“You fell,” he muttered in disgust.

We moved inside the apartment, where we continued to scream and rail and slam doors. He said the things that men say when they want women to feel small and useless. He threw my phone out the window. I told him I was leaving.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the last night of the relationship. But it should have been. We were still living together when I started seeing someone else, to be as deliberately hurtful as possible. I wouldn’t come home some nights, leaving Paul to wonder where I was, who I was with. When I told my dad what had happened the night Paul shoved me, he said, “You need to move, and now.” I told him that it was an accident and I had driven Paul to this point. My father was resolute, but he would not help me move. This was my burden to bear. I found a friend who was also looking for a place to live and began the slow, painful process of moving out.

In the meantime, my dad told me that he was going to call Paul to “set him straight.” I begged him not to, explaining my embarrassingly bad behavior within the relationship. I felt like the whole situation had been blown so far out of proportion. Or had it just escalated so quickly that it was difficult to believe what was happening? Either way, I knew something irreversible had happened when the fight turned physical. Neither my dad nor I acknowledged that he himself knew what it was like to push a woman, that he recognized Paul’s situation more than my own.

Much to Paul’s credit, he picked up the phone when my dad called. He apologized, knowing full well that the damage was already done. He helped me move out and dropped me off in my new apartment. Even though the relationship was a flawed one, I felt scared and alone when he said his final goodbye.

I left it to my former roommates to take care of Paul while I worked on building a new life for myself. A friend of mine had moved into the house during that turbulent time, and I found out that she and Paul had begun spending more time together. I liked her a lot; she was wry, smart, stylish, and my physical opposite. I grew anxious and jealous of the idea that they might sleep together. I wrote to her in a panic asking if my fears were true or if they were an invention of my mind. She took some time and wrote back to me. I opened her email at work and started shaking. She admitted that they did have feelings for each other and they’d already acted on them.

I had not expected this. A raw anger took over. I knew I was finally getting a taste of my own medicine, but I was unable to accept it. Seething, I wrote back.


And just so you know, at the end of the relationship Paul became deeply scary and hurtful, calling me every name he could think of and then pulling a 180 and begging me to stay with him, that he was terrified to be alone, even became physically threatening one evening. I sincerely hope he never repeats that behavior but it is something he is capable of (I know he really regrets this). It’s sad that it has gone this way and it’s too bad that I lost a friend over it. There will come a time when the Paul thing falls apart (because trust me, no one who hates himself the way he does is meant to be in a relationship at this juncture in time) and you will want to talk to me. Don’t. I am very into setting emotional boundaries for myself and I have deleted you from my phone. Please do not contact me.