“Yeah, thanks, Boner,” Phillip says.
Boner gives Phillip a withering look. “That was the last time you call me Boner, you hear me?”
Phillip looks at me, and I shake my head. Don’t do it.
“I’m sorry, Boner.”
Boner lunges at Phillip, but Paul catches him and turns him around, whispering in his ear, while I drag Phillip toward Mom’s Jeep. “Jesus, Phillip. Grow up, would you?”
“I gotta be me,” he says, snickering.
Wendy looks over the roof of Mom’s car and smiles cheerfully at us.
“You guys are so going to hell.”
Chapter 31
1:05 p.m.
Iwake up in the basement with a start to find Alice lying on her back beside me, looking up at the ceiling. “He stirs,” she says. I am momentarily disoriented. The last thing I can remember was coming downstairs to peel off my soaked suit. I haven’t smoked weed in years, and my nap felt as deep as a night’s sleep. “What time is it?”
“It’s just after one.” She turns onto her side to face me, resting her face on her hand. “You’ve been sleeping for almost two hours.”
“Where is everyone?”
“Paul went to work. Everyone else is out at the pool.”
“You’re not.”
“Neither are you.” She stretches a bit, the tops of her breasts rising and spilling out of her low-cut dress.
“What’s going on, Alice?”
“You seem to be staring at my breasts.”
“Your breasts are in my face.”
Alice props herself up on one elbow and pulls slowly at the neckline of her dress, stretching it down until her naked breasts emerge, round and whole. “You always liked my breasts.”
“What’s not to like?” I’m thinking that this is a dream, a strange, twisted, but not altogether unpleasant dream.
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“I feel bad about how I reacted when I found out Jen was expecting. I should have been happy for you, and instead I just felt bad for me.”
“A simple apology would have been fine,” I say.
“There’s nothing in the world I want more than to have a baby,” she says. “You know that, right?”
“Yes.”
She moves closer, so that her breasts are now dangerously close. The room starts to spin a little bit. What was in that joint, Dad? “Um, can you put those away?”
“In a minute,” she says. “First I want you to listen to me.”
“Okay.”
Alice takes a deep breath and looks me dead in the eye. “I’ve been trying to get pregnant for almost two years. I don’t ovulate regularly. My cycle never returned to normal when I came off the pill. I take a drug to make me ovulate, and my eggs have tested fine, but Paul won’t get his sperm tested. I was thinking, maybe I would increase the odds and you’d give me some of yours.”
“You want my sperm?”
“Yours seems to have what it takes.”
“What does Paul think about that?”
“Paul will never know. It will be our secret. And you and I will never know if it was yours or Paul’s sperm that did the trick. It’s perfect, really. Any baby that resembles you will resemble Paul.”
“There are so many things wrong with that idea, I don’t even know where to start.”
Alice rolls over, almost onto me, her face hovering inches above mine. “Won’t you help me, Judd? Please? Forget Paul, forget everyone and everything else. We liked each other a lot once; we used to come to this basement and have sex right here where we’re lying now. And maybe we were what we were then so you could help Paul and me with this now.”
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“If you and Paul need my sperm, you can have it. But not like this. We can go to a doctor. I mean, Jesus, Alice, look at what you’re doing here.”
She sits up on the bed, flushed and angry. “I’ve been going to doc
tors for two years, Judd. That’s two years of needles and hormones and specialist after specialist. Do you have any idea how exhausting that is? I’ve been peeing on sticks and crying myself to sleep for two years. All Paul has to do is come home and screw me when I’m ovulating, and half the time he can’t be bothered to do that. He actually smoked weed today.”
She starts to cry. “He knew I was ovulating and he came home stoned.”
“Hey, it’ll be okay.” I could never resist a crying girl. I don’t know what that says about me, but it’s probably not something good. I reach out to touch her shoulder, and she takes my hand, cradling it against her breasts, which seem to be drawing all of the light in the dim base
ment. “Please, Judd,” she whispers. Then, never taking her eyes from mine, she shimmies her way down the bed, dragging the waistband of my boxers down to my knees. Her tears are warm against my thighs.
“Please.”
She pulls up her dress, and I catch a glimpse of a dark thatch of pu
bic hair just before she grabs hold of my shamefully hard cock like a stick shift and straddles me.
“Alice. No.”
And then she slides me into her, and she is drenched in there, prob
ably from all that estrogen she’s taking, and I haven’t had sex in a very long time and as soon as her weight settles on me and she starts to move, I explode inside of her. She squeezes me between her thighs, rocking gently on me, her hand pressed down on my chest for support. After a moment, she tucks her breasts back into her dress and then leans forward to plant a quick, soft kiss on my lips. “Thank you,” she says. “Our little secret.”
Down below, I slide out of her with a soft, guilty plop.
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2:00 p.m.
I fall in love twice on the way to meeting Jen over at the Marriott for a drink. Th
e first time it’s a girl walking her dog. She’s wearing white shorts and a tank top that hangs just high enough to reveal a tan swatch of flat belly, and she’s got mussed blond hair and great skin, but beyond that, she just seems cool and laid-back; a dog person, but not one of those intense dog people who French-kiss their dogs and have their pic
tures in their wallets and buy them birthday cards. Her dog is some kind of terrier, and if I asked her, she would tell me that he’s a mutt, and how the minute she saw him at the shelter, she knew she would be taking him home. She’s laughing into her cell phone, nice white teeth, and even though I can’t hear the laugh, I know if I did, I’d like it. She looks like someone who doesn’t sweat the small stuff, who would be happy going for pizza and a movie or just taking a long walk before going home and climbing into bed. The dog will not sleep with us, because the noise of our lovemaking riles him up—she may be just this side of reserved in a crowd, but in bed her sexuality flows uninhibited. And when we’re done, lying sweaty and spent on the damp, twisted wreckage of our sheets, she entertains me with stories of her experimental lesbian phase in college, before padding naked into her studio to work on the latest book cover she’s been commissioned to design, because she’s a much sought-after graphic artist and she has deadlines to meet. The second woman is in the car next to mine at a traffi
c light. She’s
dark-skinned, with long black hair and eyes the color of coal, and she’s drumming on her steering wheel and singing along to whatever’s on her radio. When she sees me watching, her sheepish grin is warm and di
rect, and I can tell that she’s one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet, fun and approachable and never a bad word to say about anyone. In fact, the only times we’ll argue is when I’m trying to convince her that someone is a real asshole and she just won’t see it. It will frustrate me, 206
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but then she’ll smile and I’ll remember why I’m with her, what a good and generous soul she has, and how she makes me a better person and how all of my friends are in love
with her, and how good she is to my child, how she sings off -key in the shower, making up silly lyrics when she doesn’t know the real ones, and how, when I’m feeling down, she wraps her arms around me from behind in bed and runs her lips over my shoulders, humming lightly into my skin until I’ve decompressed. Then the light changes and she’s gone, just like the dog-loving graphic artist before her, both of them headed back to sexy, softly lit, uncomplicated lives. And me? I’m mourning my father and having sex with my sister-in-law and falling in love with strangers on the way to see the wife who slept with my boss and is now simultaneously divorcing me and having my baby. I feel like the driver who spends that extra sec
ond fussing with his cell phone and looks up just in time to see the front of his car crash through the guardrail and drive off the cliff . 2:17 p.m.
There are dark shadows under Jen’s bloodshot eyes, and she ner
vously stirs her glass of ginger ale in the Clubhouse Grille, situated in a recessed portion of the hotel lobby. The only other patrons are a group of flight attendants a few tables over, laughing and drinking in their blue uniforms, their little suitcases lined up like sentries. There is a wedding this evening at the Marriott, and the lobby hums with industry as ven
dors scurry around in a state of controlled chaos. Party planners streak past, speaking urgently into headsets; flowers are carried through on trays; skinny kids dressed all in black tear silently across the floor in their sneakers like slacker ninjas, carrying bulky photographic equipment. Jen is nauseous and exhausted and wants to talk about our marriage.
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“Yesterday was the first time you’ve asked me anything related to us,” she says.
“We don’t talk very often.”
“I know. But we’re going to be parents, Judd, and I think we’re going to have to get better at talking to each other.”
“So this baby is your free pass, is that it?”
She offers a wan grin. “I know it sucks, but yes. You’re going to have to come to some kind of terms with me so that we can work together here.”
“Maybe I don’t want to work with you.”
She puts down her glass and looks at me. “What does that mean, exactly?”
“I didn’t want this baby. I once wanted a baby with you, but that was before I knew who you really were. Our dead baby was the one I wanted. This baby . . . doesn’t feel real to me. It doesn’t feel like mine any more than you do.”
Jen studies her drink for a long time, and when she looks back up at me, her eyes are filled with tears. For an instant I flash to Alice’s tears, dripping down her face and onto my belly, but I banish the memory be
fore it can make me too queasy. One train wreck at a time, I always say.
“I think that may be the ugliest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“You wanted me to talk about it. I’m talking.”
I don’t remember what I just said, and I have no idea if I even meant it. I just know I wanted it to hurt. In the day or so I’ve known the baby is mine, I have managed to avoid doing any concrete thinking about it. It’s still completely unreal to me, but if I said that to Jen, she would nod sympathetically and keep talking about being parents together, and I’ve got a splitting headache as it is. The fragments of my fractured life are spinning in my head like a buzz saw, and I feel moments away from coming apart in a very real and permanent way. 208
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“Do you want to know why I started seeing Wade?” Jen says softly. I consider it for a moment. “Not really, no.”
“When our baby died, I was grieving. I needed to mourn him. You acted like everything was fine. Well, maybe not fine, but not so far from it. No big deal, Jen, we’ll just make another one.”
“You’re exaggerating.”
“Not by a lot.”
“So you worked through your grief by having sex with Wade.”
One of the ninjas drops a steel pole, which rolls thunderously across the marble floor. Jen jumps. The kid curses and picks up the pole. A party planner materializes to admonish him, somewhat severely, I think.
Jen looks intently at me. “You had stopped looking at me, stopped touching me. It was like I had failed you, failed to keep our baby safe, and until we had a new baby, I had nothing to offer you. You lost sight of me.”
“That’s not true.”
“You wouldn’t hold me, or cry with me. You just looked away and talked about how it would all be fine, how we’d try again when I was ready.”
“I was trying to reassure you. I knew how much having a baby meant to you.”
“You may not have meant to make me feel that way, but it was how I felt. And I guess, as wrong as it was—and I know it was wrong—Wade was someone I hadn’t disappointed. He wanted me, and it had nothing to do with a baby. And that made him appealing.”
I consider what she’s saying, try to place myself back there, in those days after she’d delivered our strangled baby, but that time has become a dark blur, and I can’t recall very much about it. “You never said any
thing to me.”
“We were in such different places. I was grieving our dead child.”
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“So was I.”
“You were looking at the calendar, asking the doctors when we could try again. You say you were trying to reassure me, and that’s probably true. But to me, right then, it felt like you were moving on, leaving me behind. And somewhere along the way, you stopped seeing me as your wife; you just saw me as the mother of your dead and maybe future child.” She clasps her hands together, shakes her head, and offers up a sad little smile. “It’s tragic, really, when you think about it. I needed you to see me as your wife and all you could see was the failed mother. And now I need you to see me as the mother of your child, and all you can see is the failed wife.”
“You’ve thought about this a lot.”
“I don’t get out much.”
“You should have told me.”
“I did. You didn’t hear me.”
“You should have kept telling me until I did. I would have eventually.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
“We could have fixed this!” I am suddenly, violently furious. “We could have fixed it. But you gave up. You found someone else before I even knew anything was wrong. This could have been our baby.”
“It’s still our baby. You and me.”
“There is no you and me,” I say, getting up to leave. “We are strang
ers. And I don’t see how I can raise a child with a stranger.”
“Judd,” she says, beseeching. “We’re finally talking. Please sit down.”
I can sense the flight attendants shutting up to tune in to the little drama playing out in their midst. I take a long, last look at Jen, at her tired eyes, her desperate expression.
“I can’t do this.”
“Please don’t leave,” she says, but I’m already moving, weaving through the tables to get out of there. The last thing I hear her say is
“This isn’t going to go away.” And it’s that very fact, obvious though it 210
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may be, that squeezes the air from my lungs and makes me run. Be
cause, more than anything, what I want is for it to go away. I am not ready to be a father. I have nothing to offer: no wisdom, no expertise, no home, no job, no wife. If I wanted to adopt a child, I wouldn’t even qualify. What I’ve got is a great big bag of nothing, and no kid will re
spect a father like that. This was my chance to start over, to fi nd someone who would defy the odds and love me, to fi gure out the rest of my life. Now any chance of a clean break is gone, and as a single father I have become, by default, even more pathetic.
I’m heading down a wide, carpeted hallway toward the parking lot when my legs give out on me. I stumble against the w
all and slide down until I’m sitting on the floor. A group of tuxedoed guys in their early twenties emerge from a conference room, bustling with nervous energy. They pass around a silver flask and smack each other a lot; the groom and his groomsmen. The groom is differentiated with tails and a white tie. He’s in his early twenties, handsome in an almost pretty way, his face scrubbed, his hair gelled. The groomsmen file into another room at the behest of the photographer, who is ready to shoot the wedding party, and for a moment it’s just the groom and me in the hall. Our eyes meet and he smiles a greeting.
“You okay, bro?” he says, brimming with benevolence and goodwill.
“Yeah,” I say. “Good luck.”
“Thanks. I’m going to need it.”
“You have no idea.”
I am not real to him. This is his wedding day, and nothing is real to him. And I am in mourning, and in shock, and he is not real to me. We are ghosts, passing each other in a haunted house, and it’s hard to say who pities whom more. He straightens his tie and heads back into the conference room to record his cocky naïveté for posterity, and I get up on shaky feet and walk out to the parking lot.
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4:40 p.m.
I make the two-hour drive back to Kingston, to the house Jen and I used to share. I let myself in through the front door, like I do from time to time when I know she and Wade aren’t around. If I had a shrink, he would ask me why I feel the need to burglarize my former home, and I would tell him the same thing I’m telling you: I have no idea. I just know that sometimes, without any premeditation, I go there and poke around. Technically, the house is still half-mine, and if Jen truly didn’t want me there, she’d have changed the locks, or at least the alarm code. I let myself into the front hall, taking note of the mail table that no longer has the picture of Jen and me on it. The kitchen is unchanged, except for the fridge door, which no longer has the pictures of Jen and me at Martha’s Vineyard or the old black and white of me from college that she always loved, sitting on a railing in my Bob Marley hat, smiling at her as she snapped the photo. There are no photos anywhere of her and Wade, which I’d like to read as a sign that she’s not that invested yet, but when you’ve been carrying on a yearlong illicit affair, there just aren’t a lot of photo ops.
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