This Is Where I Leave You: A Novel

by Jonathan Tropper

  “Wendy!” Barry calls, and the way it rolls off his tongue, fast and plaintive, it’s less his wife’s name than a tic to be politely ignored in company, which is what Wendy does.

  Linda serves up a meal of poached salmon and mashed potatoes. She circles the table, doling out heaping servings wherever she sees the white of a dish, ducking around Barry, who is still pacing and cursing loudly into his earpiece. Alice helps Linda, because Alice is an in-law and technically not one of the bereaved. Barry doesn’t help, because Barry is technically an asshole.

  Alice and Paul have been trying to have a baby for a while now, without much success. She’s taking fertility drugs that cause her to gain weight and hormones that cause her to cry about how fat she is. This according to Wendy, who also informed me that when Alice thinks she’s ovulating, she stays in bed and makes Paul come home on his lunch breaks. “Can you imagine?” Wendy said. “Poor Paul has to get it up twice a day for that . . . ?”

  Right now Alice is making a face as she stares at Ryan at the piano. It’s a forced smile that says I am so okay enjoying the cuteness of someone else’s child, even though I can’t seem to grow one of my own. She flashes Paul a meaningful look that he doesn’t catch, so focused is he on shoveling mashed potatoes into his mouth and avoiding eye contact with the rest of his siblings.

  Ryan has apparently found something else to abuse, and the piano falls silent at exactly the same time that the baby monitor does, and the sudden quiet feels awkward, like we were all hiding behind the noise.

  “Bitches ain’t shit but hos and trix!” The rap song blares loudly across the table, and Phillip quickly reaches into his shirt pocket and sheepishly pulls out his flashing cell phone. “I keep meaning to change that ringtone,” he says, flipping it open. “Hey . . . What? No, that’s great! Perfect timing.” He flips the phone closed and looks at all of us meaningfully. “She’s here,” he says, like we’ve all been waiting. Like we have any idea what he’s talking about. Then he strides out of the dining room and hits the front door running. We all run into the kitchen to peer out the bay window to the street, where a woman has just stepped out of the backseat of a dark Lincoln Town Car. The mystery woman has no visible tattoos, no obvious breast implants, no fuck-me pumps, no “bubble butt”—as Phillip generally refers to his ass of choice—straining against a short skirt under which no underwear is being worn. Even at a distance it’s clear that this woman, in her well-tailored pantsuit, with her blond hair tied back in a neat, Grace Kelly bun, is someone who wears underwear. Expensive underwear, I should think, maybe even sexy underwear, from Victoria’s Secret or La Perla. She’s definitely attractive, but sleek and finished, like brushed chrome. In other words, she is exactly the kind of woman you would expect not to have any association with Phillip. Sophisticated, refined, and, from what I can see, significantly older than him.

  “Who is that?” my mother says.

  “Maybe his lawyer,” Wendy guesses.

  “Phillip has a lawyer?” Alice says.

  “Only when he’s in trouble.”

  “Is he in trouble?”

  “Odds are.”

  By now Phillip has reached her. They don’t shake hands or kiss chastely, but attack each other with ravenous mouths and sloppy tongues.

  “Well, I guess she’s not his lawyer,” Alice says, maybe just a tad snidely. You can never tell with Alice. She doesn’t like Wendy. She’s not crazy about any of us. Alice comes from a nice family, where the siblings and siblings-in-law kiss each other hello and good-bye and remember each other’s birthdays and anniversaries and call their parents just to say hi, calls that end with breezy I-love-yous that are effortless and true. To her, we Foxmans are a savage race, brutish aliens who don’t express affection and shamelessly watch our baby brother grope the ass of a stranger through the kitchen window.

  “I’ll e-mail you the ratios,” Barry says behind us. “We’ve inverted them twice already.”

  Having traded enough spit for the time being, Phillip and his mystery guest head up the front walk, and we move away from the window, Wendy, as always, getting in the last word: “It would be so like Phillip to be doing his lawyer.”

  2:30 p.m.

  “THIS IS TRACY,” Phillip announces proudly, standing at the head of the table, where we are all once again seated, having scrambled back when he finished tonguing and groping her and led her up the bluestone path. “My fiancée.” We are probably not all sitting there with our jaws on our plates, but that’s how it feels. Up close, it’s clear she’s a good fifteen or so years older than him, a very well-preserved mid-fortysomething.

  “Engaged to be engaged,” Tracy corrects him fondly, in a manner that suggests a long-standing familiarity with correcting Phillip. The women Phillip usually dates aren’t the sort to correct him. They are strippers, actresses, waitresses, hairstylists, bridesmaids who hike up their crinoline for him in the parking lot during the reception, and once, memorably, the bride herself. “I couldn’t help it,” he told me through cracked, swollen lips, from the hospital bed he’d subsequently landed in when the groomsmen tracked him down. “It just happened.” “It just happened” was Phillip’s go-to explanation for pretty much everything, the perfect epitaph for a man who always seemed to be an innocent bystander to his own life.

  “Hello, everyone,” Tracy says, confident and composed. “I’m sorry we’re meeting under such sad circumstances.” She doesn’t giggle or crack her gum. Phillip throws his arm around her, grinning like he’s just pulled off a great practical joke. No one says anything for a long moment, so Phillip performs a roll call.

  “That’s my sister, Wendy,” he says, pointing.

  “Great suit,” Wendy says.

  “Thank you.”

  “The guy talking to himself is her husband, Barry.”

  Barry looks right at Tracy and says, “I can maybe sell another eighth of a point to them. Maybe. But they’ll want some pretty solid assurances. We’ve plowed this field before.”

  “Barry is something of an ass.”

  “Phillip!”

  “It’s okay, baby. He can’t hear us. That’s my brother Paul, and his wife, Alice. They don’t like me very much.”

  “Only because you’re such a douche,” Paul says. It’s the first thing he’s said, I think, since he spoke at the funeral. There’s no way to know what’s pissing him off right now. In my family, we don’t so much air our grievances as wallow in them. Anger and resentment are cumulative.

  “Nice to meet you,” Alice says, her overly sweet tone meant to apologize for Paul, for the rest of us, for being fifteen pounds overweight, for not being as elegant and composed as Tracy. I was like you once, her voice pleads. A size two with perfect hair. Let’s be best friends.

  “And that’s my brother Judd. Actually, he does like me these days, if memory serves.”

  “Hi, Judd.”

  “Hey.”

  “Judd is recently cuckolded.”

  “Thanks for clarifying that, Phil,” I say.

  “Just looking to avoid any awkward faux pas later on,” Phillip says. “Tracy’s one of us now.”

  “Get out while you still can!” Alice jokes too loudly. Her agitated smile is a long, crooked fissure across her cheeks, widening painfully before faltering and then disappearing altogether.

  “We’ve been down this road before,” Barry says. “It’s a nonstarter.”

  “And this is my mom,” Phillip says, turning Tracy to face our mother, who is sitting beside Linda, forcing a smile.

  “Hello, Tracy. I hope you won’t judge our behavior too harshly. It’s been a trying day.”

  “Please, Mrs. Foxman. I’m the one who should apologize, for arriving unannounced at such a difficult time.”

  “So why don’t you?” Wendy says.

  “Wendy!” Mom snaps.

  “He called Barry an ass.”

  “I’m sorry,” Phillip says. “It’s been a while. It’s entirely possible, though highly unlikely, that Barry
is no longer an ass.”

  “Phillip.” Tracy says his name sternly, with control and conviction, and Phillip clams up like a trained dog.

  “Phillip is nervous,” Tracy says. “This is hard for him. Obviously, he would have preferred to make the introductions under better circumstances, but in addition to being Phillip’s fiancée, I am also his life coach, and we both felt, at this difficult time, that it would help him greatly if I were here.”

  “Define ‘life coach,’” my mother says, her tone clipped and loaded.

  “Tracy was my therapist,” Phillip says proudly.

  “You’re his therapist and you’re dating him?” Wendy says.

  “As soon as we realized our feelings for each other, I referred Phillip to another colleague.”

  “Is that even ethical?”

  “It’s something we grappled with,” Tracy says.

  “It just happened,” Phillip says in the same instant.

  And then little Cole comes down the stairs, naked from the waist down, carrying the old white potty that’s been sitting under the sink in the hall bathroom since Phillip was toilet trained. Cole is in what Wendy refers to as his E.T. stage, wherein he waddles around the house like E.T., exploring and trashing everything within reach, making strange little noises as he goes. He steps over to Barry, who has finally ended his call and sat down at the table, and proffers the potty for his inspection. “Look, Daddy,” he says. “T!”

  Barry looks down, uncomprehending. “What does he want?” Like he’s never met his three-year-old son before.

  “T!” Cole yells triumphantly. And indeed, the crap in the potty does seem to be shaped like a crude letter T. Then Cole bends down and heaves the potty up over his head in a high arc that brings it crashing down onto the dining room table, shattering glasses and sending silverware flying. Alice screams, Horry and I dive for cover, and the contents of Cole’s overturned potty land on Paul’s plate like a side dish. Paul jumps back like a grenade has landed, so violently that he somehow takes Alice down with him in a jumble of limbs and chair legs.

  “Jesus Christ, Cole!” Barry screams. “What the hell is wrong with you!”

  “Stop yelling!” Wendy yells.

  Cole looks up at his frazzled, worthless parents and, with no preamble, bursts into a loud, fully realized crying fit. And since neither one of them seem inclined to comfort him, I exercise my uncle privileges and pick him up to blubber into my neck, his tiny kid butt sticky against my forearm. “Good job, little man,” I say, “making in the potty like that.” Positive reinforcement and all that. After this trauma, the kid will likely be in diapers until he’s ten.

  “I make a T,” he says through subsiding tears, rubbing his snot on my collar, and there’s nothing sweeter than a two-year-old speaking, with his high-pitched sincerity and his immigrant English. I’ve never really appreciated kids the way some people do, but I can listen to Cole talk all day. Of course, as an uncle, I’m not the one who has to scrape his crap off the table.

  “That’s right, Cole,” I say, looking over at Paul’s plate. “It is a T, and a nice one at that.”

  Paul and Alice climb to their feet shaken and nauseated. We are all standing now, posed around the table like a painting, the Foxman family minus one, contemplating the steaming, erudite turd on Paul’s plate. It’s utterly inconceivable that we will survive seven days together here, caroming off each other like spinning molecules in a chemical reaction. There’s no way to know how it will all shake out, but as far as metaphors go, you can’t do much better than shit on the good china.

  Chapter 6

  If you’ve ever been in a failed marriage, and statistically speaking, it’s a safe bet that you have, or, if not, that you soon will be, then you’ll know that the first thing you do at the end is reflect on the beginning. Maybe it’s some form of reverse closure, or just the basic human impulse toward sentimentality, or masochism, but as you stand there shell-shocked in the charred ruins of your life, your mind will invariably go back to the time when it all started. And even if you didn’t fall in love in the eighties, in your mind it will feel like the eighties, all innocent and airbrushed, with bright colors and shoulder pads and Pat Benatar or the Cure on the soundtrack. There you were, minding your own business, walking across campus to class, or stepping into a café for a cup of coffee, or dancing at a wedding, or drinking at a bar with some friends. And then you saw her, laughing at someone’s joke, tucking her hair behind her ear, or taking the stage with a friend to sing a slightly drunken karaoke version of “Ninety-nine Red Balloons” (and she was just drunk enough to cop to knowing the German lyrics too), or she was leaning against the wall, eyebrows arched genially over her lite beer as she surveyed the scene, or she was strolling alone through the falling snow without a jacket, her sleeves pulled tightly over her hands in the absence of gloves, or she was . . .

  . . . riding her bike across the quad, on her way to class. I had seen her around, with her small leather backpack, her blond ponytail flying in the slipstream behind her as she sailed past on her red Schwinn. We were both juniors, but we didn’t have any classes together and were probably just a few weeks away from being on nodding terms. But on that day, as she pedaled past me, I called out to her, “Hey! Bike Girl!”

  She braked too hard and skinned her shin on the pedal as she slid off the seat. “Ouch! Crap!”

  “Oh, shit, I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean for you to actually stop.”

  She looked at me, perplexed. “But you called out to me.” Her eyes were an incandescent green; I suspected tinted lenses, but I wanted to write a song about them right there anyway. I’d stand outside her dorm room with a guitar and serenade her, while her friends looked on, smiling approvingly in their skimpy pajamas.

  “Yeah, I guess I did. Poor impulse control, I’m sorry. I didn’t really have a plan beyond that.”

  Her laugh was rich and throaty. She did it like a girl who knew how to laugh, who had a long association with laughing. And she looked at me, this pretty blond girl, the kind of girl from whom I’d been conditioned to expect a smiling but no less firm rejection, and she said, “I’ll give you five seconds to come up with one.”

  This was unprecedented, and the miracle emboldened me. “I just thought we’d have a lot to talk about,” I said.

  “Really.”

  “This bike, for instance. You’re the only girl on campus who rides a bike.”

  “So?”

  “I think you do it ironically.”

  “You’re accusing me of ironic cycling?”

  “It’s a growing sport. There’s an Olympic petition.”

  “Is your hair always like that?”

  I had thick, curly hair like pulled springs, and back in college I kind of gave it the run of the place. “The higher the hair, the closer to God.”

  “I limp,” she said.

  “What?”

  “That’s why I ride the bike when I cross the quad. I was born with one leg shorter than the other.”

  “You’re so full of shit.”

  “Afraid not.”

  So she got off the bike and showed me her custom sneaker. “You see how this sole is almost an inch thicker than the other?”

  “Damn. I’m an asshole.”

  “It’s okay. You didn’t mean it.”

  “I’m Judd, by the way. Judd Foxman.”

  “I’m Jen.”

  “If it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll call you Bike Girl for a little while longer.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “I’m only going to call you Jen after I’ve kissed you.”

  She seemed accustomed to such bold repartee. “But what if you never do?”

  “Then it won’t matter anyway.”

  “You’re ruling out the possibility of friendship.”

  “I’m guessing a girl like you has enough friends.”

  “And what kind of girl is that, exactly?”

  “An ironic cycler.”

>   That laugh again, from out of nowhere, like it had been percolating inside her waiting to be released. In the sixty seconds she’d known me, I’d already made her laugh twice, and I’d read enough Playboy by then to know that beautiful women want a man who can make them laugh. Of course, what they really meant was a man who could make them laugh after he’d delivered multiple orgasms on his private jet with his trusty nine-inch cock, but I was on a roll, and hope tentatively unfurled its wings in my chest, preparing to take flight.

  I knew that she was much too pretty and well-adjusted for me. Over the last few years, I had carved out a niche for myself on campus among the screwed-up girls with dark lipstick and too many earrings, who worked through their mixed bag of childhood traumas by drinking excessively and having sex with unthreatening Jewish guys with ridiculous hair. This had actually happened exactly twice in as many years, but since it was all the action I’d seen, I liked to think of it as a niche. And I was not at all Jen’s type, but her type, genetically gifted man-boys with expensive sports cars, hairless Abercrombie bodies, and entitlement issues, hadn’t really been working for her as of late. Her last boyfriend, Everett—that was really his name, and he looked exactly how you’re picturing him, only not as tall—had actually told her that her poor posture made her look unimpressive. This from a boy, she later railed to me, with a concave chest and a pencil-thin dick. The one before that, David, had returned from winter break to tell her he had gotten engaged and was getting married that spring. Jen was in turmoil; she was grappling with self-esteem issues and a failed attempt at anorexia. I was in the right place at the right time, and the gods were finally ready to cut me some slack.

  But I didn’t know any of that yet. All I knew was that a conversation that should have ended already seemed to have taken on a life of its own, and a girl who, according to the laws of the universe, shouldn’t have given me a second glance was now leaning forward, her smiling mouth aimed unmistakably at mine. It was a quick, soft peck, but I felt the give in her lips, a hint of plush softness just beneath the surface, and I was in love. Seriously. Just like that.