bing her arms and touching her back as they talked. “That’s just his way,”
she said, which was how she excused all manner of bad behavior except for mine. Once, when she was pissed at me, I went so far as to try it out as an argument for the defense. “That’s just my way,” I said. She smiled sweetly and told me to fuck off. God, I miss our fi ghts. Linda is looking at Mom, shaking her head. “You don’t actually be
lieve half the things you say, do you?”
“I don’t know,” Mom says, sitting back in her chair. “I can be pretty convincing.”
Chapter 13
2:30 p.m.
The bank teller has a great ass. I know this because she had to get up and go to her boss’s office when I told her I wanted to withdraw sixteen of the just under twenty thousand dollars remaining in mine and Jen’s joint checking account. When she returns, I see that she has nice lips too—full and pouty—and she has a dimple in one cheek, and something about her eyes and the way she chews her gum makes me think she’s a very sexual person. Her name is Marianna, which I know because it’s on the little badge she has affixed just beside her breasts, which aren’t particularly large but come together nicely in her push-up bra to form a perfectly adequate suntanned cleavage in the V-neck of her blouse. My guess is that she didn’t go to college, at least not a fouryear college. Probably community college for her associate’s degree, and then right into the bank’s training program. She is the kind of girl who dates the kind of guys who will ultimately screw around on her, guys like her brothers, who work with their hands and drink too many beers while watching football, and have a stupid tattoo of a dragon or the Roll
ing Stones’ lips on their scapulas, guys upon whom she projects more romance and ambition than is actually there, and then she asks her girl
friends, who are hairdressers and medical technicians and tanning salon clerks and secretaries, why she can’t find a nice guy. And I’m dying to tell her that I’m a nice guy. I’m the last nice guy. And I haven’t been kissed 100
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or rubbed in months, and I’m as horny as a high school kid, but I’m also dying to fall in love, and if you let me, I’ll fall in love with you, and cherish you, and listen to your dreams and your hurts and I’ll be faithful and funny and I’ll never forget your birthday or make out with your girl
friend and blame it on too many shots, or come home from guys’ night out drunk and smelling of strippers. That’s what I want to tell her, but instead I say, “Can I have an envelope for that?” and if you want to know where all the good guys are, we’re standing right in front of you, lacking the balls to actually make ourselves heard.
This is something that’s been happening to me more and more lately. The world is suddenly brimming with young, nubile women, and I can’t leave the house without falling in love. I intuit whole personalities from a single smile, live out entire relationships with the woman sitting in the next car at a red light. Legs and lips hypnotize me. I am smitten by skin and breasts and hair, by smiles and frowns, by the freedom of an unhurried gait, the grace of a shrug. I imagine myself not only having sex with these women, but living with them and meeting their parents and sharing the Sunday paper in bed. I am still raw and soft from losing Jen, still missing a level of detachment and discernment, undersexed and lonely and not yet fit for mixed company. Marianna carefully loads sixteen thousand dollars into a large ma
nila envelope for me, and she has a yellow sunset painted onto the red nail of each ring finger, and her skin is creamy and immaculate, and I know that I will never kiss those plump lips, never see her naked, never even make her smile. We are separated by three inches of bulletproof glass and a million other barriers that I can’t articulate or overcome. So I take my envelope and file away her generic smile for further worthless review. I leave the bank more heartbroken and deflated than when I entered it, and that is saying something.
Chapter 14
Wade made it perfectly clear that he wasn’t fi ring me.
“I want to make this perfectly clear,” he said. “I am not fi r
ing you.” It had been six or seven tear-fused panicky days since I’d walked in on him and Jen, days spent curled up in a ball in the Lees’ basement, still ensconced in a hollow daze, alternately enraged, grief-stricken, ter
rified, and shitfaced.
Wade was sitting behind his large Asian desk in his large corner of
fice. He didn’t need a desk; he did no paperwork. He didn’t need an of
fi ce either. The running joke was that the sole reason for the offi
ce was
so that he had a place to screw the hot interns. Ha ha. He pulled his lips back into a thoughtful grimace, revealing a sym
metrical wall of large, bleached white teeth. If you were to draw a cari
cature of Wade, you would emphasize those supernaturally perfect teeth, his ridiculously broad shoulders, and, of course, his unrepentant cock. “Obviously, this is a very difficult situation. You hate me right now. Of course you do. I’m sure you’d like nothing better than to bludgeon me to death with a blunt instrument. What I did was inexcusable, and I feel terrible about it. I know you probably don’t believe that, but it’s true.”
He smiled sheepishly at me, as if he’d just admitted something mildly embarrassing about himself, like he suffers from constipation or gets regular pedicures. Then he shrugged those broad spherical 102
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shoulders that throbbed like organs beneath his expensive dress shirt. I guess I’d always been somewhat envious of Wade’s shoulders, because when you get right down to it, mine are just your basic, stripped-down version, while Wade’s are the fully loaded models that fill a shirt per
fectly and look just as good out of one. I could hope they’re obscenely hairy, the way some men’s are, but it would be futile, because Wade is the kind of guy who would never stand for shoulder hair. He’d have it permanently removed by laser, and even though results vary, he’d be the guy for whom it worked. I’d probably get burned or develop a perma
nent discoloration. Th
is stuff is all preordained.
Like most guys with genetically superior shoulders, Wade was an asshole, an alpha male who asserted his presence physically, through viselike handshakes and powerful backslaps, the kind of guy who needed to win at everything. His tone now was carefully apologetic, conciliatory even, but still, his expression radiated the smug satisfaction of having asserted his sexual dominance. I fucked your woman, his eyes said. Bet
ter than you ever could.
“Are you going to keep fucking her?” I said.
“What?”
“Are you going to keep fucking my wife?”
Wade looked over to Stuart Kaplan, who sat unobtrusively behind us on the couch. Stuart was the station manager and default head of hu
man resources. It was something of a workplace irony that they couldn’t seem to hire the right person to run H.R., and after the last woman quit, Stuart had simply absorbed the department. Wade made fun of him ceaselessly on the air, called him Stuart the Suit. They had clearly met in anticipation of this meeting, to discuss the hairy legal ramifi cations of the marquee radio host sleeping with the wife of one of his staff . And now Stuart was sitting in to serve as a witness that I wasn’t being dis
missed or subtly urged to resign in any way.
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“Listen,” Stuart interjected. “I don’t think that’s a constructive ap
proach to take here—”
“You said you feel terrible about it,” I said, staring at the small patch of stubble between Wade’s eyes where he shaved his unibrow. “So, that being the case, do you think you’re going to stop? I think it’s a fair ques
tion, and not at all irrelevant to this discussion.”
“I think we should confine this talk to o
ur professional relationship.”
“So you’re going to keep fucking her.”
Wade looked to Stuart for some help.
“I know this is hard,” Stuart said.
“How do you know that, Stuart the Suit? Did he fuck your wife too?”
Stuart was sixty years old, had a closet full of identical pin-striped suits and a rattling chest full of phlegm from years of chain-smoking. His moods swung to whatever extent they did on the basis of his in
creasingly erratic bowel function. If he even had a wife, the odds of Wade or even Stuart himself wanting to sleep with her were probably quite low.
“Judd,” Stuart said resignedly, which was how he said pretty much everything.
“Stuart,” I said.
He slid a document in front of me. It was a contract, acknowledging a significant raise, provided that I would indemnify Man Up with Wade Boulanger and WIRX from any future legal proceedings.
“How are your testicles, Wade?”
“Th
ey’re fi ne.”
I hoped they were blistered and peeling, or at least caked in A&D Ointment and sticking uncomfortably to his underwear.
“Listen, Judd,” Wade said, returning to his prepared script. “You’re a fantastic producer. You’re integral to the show. Regardless of how things shake out personally, we don’t want to lose you.”
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I was being offered a consolation prize. Numbers had been crunched, risks assessed, and they had estimated the value of my broken marriage at another thirty thousand dollars a year before taxes. My life had just become inordinately expensive. I was going to have to pay alimony and keep up the mortgage on the house while renting my own apartment. Even with this raise, things would be tight, but it would certainly help. The only smart choice was to accept the offer and soldier on while I looked for another opportunity. The idea of working for Wade sickened me, but this was not a time to be unemployed on top of everything else. I looked up at Wade, at his furrowed brow, his pursed lips, those goddamn shoulders. He met my gaze as he exhaled, long and slow. And then he said, “I love her, Judd.”
“Wade!” Stuart shouted, making us both jump. I jumped to my feet. “Fuck you.”
“Judd,” Stuart said.
“Stuart!” I shouted back, startling all three of us. And then I tore up the document. And then I grabbed my chair and hurled it across the desk at Wade, who jumped up and fell back in his own chair, knocking over magazines, souvenir beer mugs from sponsors, and the glass rect
angle filled with neon blue liquid that, when turned on, created the soothing impression of waves. “You’ll be hearing from my lawyers,” I said, even though I didn’t have a single lawyer, let alone lawyers, even though I had no idea where to get a lawyer or what kind of lawyer you needed when your boss climbed into bed with your wife. The good ones were probably not listed in the Yellow Pages. But I had just torn up a contract and hurled a chair across the room, and that sort of violence required punctuation with a coherent statement of some kind, and
“You’ll be hearing from my lawyers” is what came to mind. I stepped out of Wade’s office, into the large common area. Assis
tants and interns sat frozen at their desks, staring; ad sales executives hovered in cubicles, awakened from their corporate stupor by the com
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motion. I saw the truth in their averted gazes. They all knew. Everybody knew. Under their scrutiny, my rage dissolved almost instantly, replaced with the hot shame of public emasculation. My wife had slept with an
other man, so what did that make me? A limp, flaccid, inadequate lover, possibly a premature ejaculator, or maybe even gay. The array of possi
bilities was breathtaking.
“His balls caught fi re,” I announced in the quivering voice of a very small man. Then I walked down the corridor to the elevators as slowly and proudly as possible, which wasn’t terribly slow or proud, when you got right down to it.
Chapter 15
7:00 p.m.
The house is filled again, thirty or forty visitors, sitting in the plastic chairs, crammed around the buffet in the dining room, spilling over into the front hall and kitchen. The smell of perfume and instant coff ee fills the air. Random fragments of conversation fly back and forth across the room like shuttlecocks. Our shiva is quite the scene for the over-sixty set. Outside on the cul-de-sac, two men back out of opposing parking spots and lightly crash into each other. A small crowd gathers outside and everyone looks out the window as hands are wrung and fi n
gers pointed, and a short while later the red swirl of police lights dances across the living room walls as reports are filed. And the visitors keep coming, old friends and distant relatives, the new seamlessly replacing the old, walking in somber and unsure, walking out satisfied and well fed. By now, we see them not as individuals, but as a single coff ee-swilling, bagel-chomping, tearfully smiling mass of well-wishers and rubberneck
ers. We can all nod and smile and carry on our end of the conversation in an endless loop while our minds float somewhere outside our bodies. We are thinking about our kids, our lack of kids, about fi nances and fiancées and soon-to-be ex-wives, about the sex we’re not having, the sex our soon-to-be ex-wives are having, about loneliness and love and death and Dad, and this constant crowd is like a fog on a dark road; you just keep driving and watch it dissipate in your low beams.
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The energy changes a little when some girls show up to visit Phillip. There are three of them, in their early twenties, and they breeze into the room in a whirling miasma of bronzed legs and bouncing asses, trailing sexuality like fairy dust as they make their way to Phillip’s chair. Th ey
instantly become the center of attention, and while other conversations are still going on, these girls, as they flex their smooth calves to go up on the tips of their high espadrilles to kiss Phillip’s cheek, seem to be fol
lowed by their own spotlight. After the kisses, the hugs, the dramatic expressions of condolence punctuated by the flipping of hair and batting of lashes, three empty chairs magically materialize in front of Phillip’s shiva chair, and the girls sit down. They are accustomed to seats appear
ing for them wherever they go; they assume it’s probably like that for everyone. I recognize these girls, old high school friends of Phillip’s, all of whom he slept with repeatedly, two of whom, it was rumored, he slept with together on more than one occasion.
“Oh my God, Phillip,” Chelsea says. She is a long-legged redhead in a skirt that would be appropriate for tennis. She and Phillip were on and off for years. “I haven’t seen you since that boat party, you remember? That Russian kid with the yacht? Oh my God, we got so messed up that night.”
“I remember,” Phillip says.
“I’m so sorry about your father,” Janelle says. She has a pretty face underneath her spray-on tan and is slightly chunky, but in that way men like.
“Th
ank you.”
“He was such a nice man,” Kelly says. Kelly has a platinum pixie cut and a come-hither smile, and you can just picture her drinking too much and dancing on the pool table in the frat house.
“So, Philly,” Chelsea says. “What have you been up to?”
“I’ve been doing A&R work for a record label.”
“That’s so cool!”
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“It’s a small, independent label, a boutique,” Phillip says modestly.
“Nothing too exciting. You guys remember my brother Judd?”
They turn to me as one and say hi. I say hi back and try to decide which one I would most want to sleep with. The answer is, all of them. Line them up and I’ll knock them down. They are pretty and sexy and friendly and easy and exactly the kind of girls I never had a chance with back in the da
y. But now . . . now I’m divorced and damaged, and aren’t these the kind of girls who like damaged men?
“So what have you all been up to?” Phillip says, and what follows is ten minutes of giggles and banter, repeatedly tossed hair, and some re
ally bad grammar. They laugh at pretty much everything Phillip says, and Chelsea, in particular, seems to hang on his every word, her chair gradually inching closer until her ankles rest easily against his. And then Tracy comes back, having spent the afternoon out of the house after her argument with Phillip. I watch her enter the room, see her register these hot young things surrounding her man as she makes her way through the chairs to Phillip’s side. “Hey, babe,” she says, smiling first at him and then at the girls. I have never heard her say “babe,” and it rolls clumsily off her tongue like a hasty lie. “How’s it going?”
“Great,” he says. “These are some old friends of mine from high school.”
“And college,” Chelsea reminds him with a smile.
“That’s right. Chelsea and I were also in college together.”
“I love the name Chelsea,” Tracy says.
“Th
anks.”
“This is Tracy,” Phillip says. He doesn’t say “my fiancée,” or any other designation, and the omission lands with a resounding thud in our midst. But Tracy clings admirably to her gracious smile, and for the fi rst time since I’ve met her, I feel bad for her. She’s a smart woman, and on some level, she has to know that this thing with Phillip will never work. Still, she leans forward to graciously shake hands and repeat each girl’s
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name as she’s introduced, like she’s at a business meeting. The girls fl ash their whitened teeth and extend their hands, their French-manicured nails catching the light and slicing the air like razor blades. 8:15 p.m.
“Long day, huh?” Linda says to me. She’s sitting on a stool at the center island in the kitchen, peering down through her bifocals at the Times crossword puzzle.
“I thought I might go pick up Horry again.”
“I thought you might, too,” she says, sliding her car keys across the marble countertop. “You’re blocked in again.”
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