Chapter Two
Brent
Radical honesty.
“I can’t live without you, but I can’t live with you anymore.”
I turned away from the patio door, where I’d been staring out into our backyard lost in thought, and walked to the breakfast nook table Macy and I had shared for over twenty years.
“What do you mean, Brent? That you can’t live with me anymore?”
I scooted my chair out, a necessity for my long-ass legs, and sat.
Macy was on the built-in bench against the wall.
She’d prepared two spinach, banana, and pineapple smoothies—our usual, before or after a morning workout at one of our fitness and wellness centers.
That morning, I’d played and lost a shirts-and-skins pickup game with some of the dad bods and old heads.
Macy’d taught a Pilates class and done a spot check of the cleanliness in the showers and weight rooms to make sure the new cleaning service we’d contracted were doing the job thoroughly.
She placed our smoothies in the spots we usually sat together to drink them and where we used to talk about the day ahead or about our two kids.
Empty nest syndrome was looming, with the youngest about to start senior year in high school.
I could have raised my voice, gone off, or crashed out, given all I could have been angry about.
But I kept in mind the tone and words Thea, my therapist of the past few years, had me rehearse during our recent sessions focusing on coming out and initiating the divorce.
I didn’t want this to be messy, sad, or dramatic. Just honest. Radically honest.
“Exactly what I said,” I said gently but assertively.
I’d come to be known as a gentle giant by those closest to me.
Still, I had to be aware of how my size, tone, and being Black and male presenting could be mistaken for something more sinister.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about this and I…
I can’t do this between us anymore. I can’t keep pretending and putting up this facade. ”
“Just like that?” We sat in silence for what seemed like minutes. “I knew this was coming. I guess I just didn’t expect it to be like this. After our morning routine. What about Little Brent and Bracee?”
I’d thought about how living a lie and sparing the truth would impact our little family, the King-DuPree family: me, my college sweetheart Macy, and our two kids, now young adults, Bracee and Little Brent, who, now that he was entering his senior year of high school, preferred to go by L.B.
Macy and I had started the month of June as empty nesters, in a way.
Bracee had come home for a week after commencement before returning to L.A.
for her final summer class at college before starting law school.
L.B. was in L.A., too, doing an internship with the L.A.
Galaxy and their coaching staff for the summer’s soccer camps.
“They’re not kids anymore. Bracee’s about to graduate college, and Little will be off to college in a year. They can handle it.”
“I’m not just talking about you wanting out,” Macy said. “I mean, they’ve seen us walk past each other in the hall to our separate rooms for years. I’m talking about you being…”
I reached out and put Macy’s hand in mine.
I’d always loved the way her mahogany and my caramel skin tones looked enmeshed.
In person. In photos. Wherever. Even with a pending separation, together Macy and I made a beautiful match.
Always did. With our kids, we were an updated version of the Huxtables.
“You can say it, Macy. Radical honesty, as Thea tells us. There’s nothing for you or the kids to be embarrassed about. Half their friends and generation are queer or fluid anyway.”
“I know,” Macy said. “Maybe I just don’t want to acknowledge what I’ve always known. Don’t take it personal.”
“But it is personal. To me. I’m figuring it out. Not straight, bi, gay. Figuring it out if I need a label at all. I’m almost comfortable defining it for myself.”
Finally, I said the words that reflected my truth.
The dam that held our twenty-plus-year marriage together had finally been broached by the truth I’d been simultaneously wondering, acknowledging, and denying for years.
Thanks to solo and couples and family therapy with Thea the therapist over the past few years, plus occasionally attending a support group for queer fathers, I was ready to live that truth.
Or at least figure out what it could be as a divorced, newly out, Black, forty-two-year-old father of two young adults, living in the Bay Area.
In the beginning, I wanted to be married.
It was a choice I made and took responsibility for.
Marriage to Macy gave me a chance to dispel the rumors about me in college.
It gave me a chance to raise a family I’d never really had, a chance to suppress a part of me I never really wanted to accept until recently.
Though I was extremely happy with how my life and family had turned out with Macy, Bracee, and Little Brent, I’d grown tired of the emptiness that came with lying to myself about who I really was.
The sleepless nights. The staring at the ceiling.
The sitting and crying in the bathroom alone.
The wondering what it would be like to live my authentic life now, after giving up half of my life not being true to myself.
The envy toward others around me, like my students, who were living in their truths.
The jealousy I felt when public figures lived their lives out, open, and proud, including the new generation of “zesty” athletes, with their painted nails, runway fashions, and comfort with expressing their masculinity and femininity, that society started to embrace.
The resentment toward Macy that I started to feel even though I didn’t want to.
I loved her and our life. Thank goodness for therapy pulling me out of the dark place my life had been spiraling into.
A tear pooled at the corner of Macy’s left eye. I grabbed a napkin from the nearby holder with my free hand and handed it to her, but it streaked down her face anyway.
“I know. I know.” She dabbed her face and continued. “I’m not crying because you’re queer or gay or whatever. Or because I’m sad for me or for the kids.”
“Then what’s up?”
Macy and I were still holding hands, a testament, I thought, to still having love, care, and concern for one another.
She was my best friend from college. Even when the passion in the bedroom seemed to wither for reasons I hadn’t been able to figure out until recently, we’d always had respect and friendship as a baseline.
And fun.
“Cheers. Happy muthafucking Pride month. I shouldn’t have made your ass go to therapy,” Macy said.
She held up her smoothie bottle and let out her signature loud laugh-snort, a chuckle that filled the room and bounced across the walls.
Her laugh did not go with her petite, dainty, put-together debutante persona.
I couldn’t help but to join her in laughter.
It was always contagious. “Bracee and Little are gonna blame me for you getting all healthy and confident and ready to live your best life.”
We were better friends than partners, something Thea had pointed out many times during our couple sessions. We knew it but resisted and denied it for the majority of our marriage.
The laughter was a relief to what I thought would have been a tense conversation. Not that this breakup wasn’t inevitable. We both knew the untruths that had plagued our years together since college.
“Now, I’m not trying to be in these streets, as the kids say,” I said, and then I started tearing up thinking about our little family and long memories we’d created together.
Being a present and at-home father, a million images flashed in my mind of me, Macy, Bracee, and Little Brent.
“I ain’t tryna jump into anything quick with anybody, Macy.
Besides, nobody’s gonna want this old country boy from St. Louis. ”
“You’ve been in the Bay Area for twenty-two years. You are not that country anymore.”
“Still.”
“Don’t sell yourself short, Brent. The hairline might be going going gone a bit and the beard got a few more grays, but the way the women and men be checking you out at our gyms…‘Oh, Mr. King-DuPree this…Mr. King-DuPree that.’ ”
“Oh, you mean the way the men, and probably some women, be checking you out,” I said. We smiled at each other. With her confidence, outspokenness, beauty, brains, and money, Macy would bounce back from this inevitability we’d been putting off.
“I love and respect you and what we’ve had for twenty-two years.
I mean it when I say I’m not wanting out just to want in with someone else.
And I want you to know I’ve never done anything with anyone outside of you and me since we got married.
Woman or man. Even when Thea got us through the conversation about giving each other permission to be open and try out other people. ”
“You’ve never given me a reason to doubt. And you still have that option to take, if you want.”
“Just being clear,” I said. “I don’t want any rumors of my infidelity or secret dalliances. And I certainly won’t spread any about anything you’ve done, permission or not. You know how this subdivision and our friends and neighbors can be.”
“No rumors. We’re clear.”
“I want to live free and be happy. I want that for both of us while we are still relatively young and have whatever time we have in this life.”
We sat silently for a few more minutes, each of us processing what we were discussing and deciding.
“My father, ugh,” Macy said, piercing the silence, and rolled her eyes. “Talk about needing therapy.” Macy pointed at herself and continued. “We were just kids ourselves. He fucked up our timeline. And your last name.”