This Is Where I Leave You: A Novel

by Jonathan Tropper

  That is a quick distillation of the myriad random thoughts flashing through my mind, but all I say is, “I wish this had happened before . . . before you and Wade.” Which I think is a pretty fair summation.

  Without moving a muscle, Jen starts to silently cry, like those statues of the Virgin Mary that are always turning up in South American villages. “I know,” she says, her voice low and trembling. “I do too.”

  I look at Jen. Jen looks at me. It’s an electric moment, and later on I will wonder if that moment was a last chance blown by two people too tied up in their uncertainty and resentment to seize it. But as it happens, Tracy has picked this moment to step out into the yard, in leggings and a tank top, with a yoga mat slung over her shoulder. Her hair is back in a youthful ponytail, and maybe I’m reading into this, but it seems to me that, after seeing Phillip’s ex-girlfriends last night, she is trying to look particularly youthful. “Hey, guys,” she calls to us, all carefree and breezy, walking over to extend her hand to Jen. “We haven’t been formally introduced. I’m Tracy.”

  “Jen,” Jen says, shaking her hand.

  “Don’t mind me,” Tracy says, scoping out a flat patch of yard and tossing down her mat. Then she bends over and starts to stretch.

  “And who, exactly, is that?” Jen says.

  “That’s Tracy.”

  “So she says. Quite the firm grip, too.”

  “She’s with Phillip.”

  “Oh. I won’t get too attached, then.”

  “Don’t do that.”

  “What?”

  “Make fun of my family like you’re still a part of it.”

  Jen looks stung. It’s a good look for her. “Fair enough.”

  We stand there watching Tracy’s rising ass as she descends into her Downward-Facing Dog, out of things to say. We are going to be parents. I’m going to be a father. I wonder if Wade will be in the delivery room, holding her hand while I sit off to the side like a spectator, waiting for my child to emerge from the spread legs that got us into this mess in the first place.

  Phillip comes ambling out a moment later, in gym shorts and a tank top. “Namaste,” he says to us with a wink and a little bow.

  “Hey, Phillip,” Jen says.

  “Jen.” Phillip considers her as he unrolls his yoga mat next to Tracy’s. “I always suspected there might be something of the heartless slut in you.”

  “Takes one to know one, I guess.”

  Phillip nods and goes into a loose approximation of Tracy’s pose. “True that. But know this, my profoundly disappointing sister-in-law. Your looks may be a matter of public record, but let’s face it, your hottest years are behind you. As soon as we wrap this shiva, I am going to personally see to it that my brother here gets laid on a nightly basis by women ten years younger than you, ripe young honeys who will make him eternally grateful that you trashed your marriage.”

  Before Jen can respond, Tracy abruptly pulls out of her yoga pose and kicks Phillip’s leg out from under him, causing him to fall on his ass.

  “Prick!”

  She yanks her mat up and storms disgustedly back toward the house while Phillip calls after her. “What the fuck, honey?!” Then, still sprawled on his ass, he turns to us. “She’s usually very congenial. I don’t know what bug crawled up her ass today.”

  “That remark about ripe young honeys,” Jen says. “She may have taken that a bit personally.”

  “Huh,” Phillip says, considering it. “In retrospect, that was probably insensitive of me.”

  “I mean, what is she, fifty?”

  “She’s forty-three and that was a cheap shot. I’d expect more, even from an adulteress.” He rolls to his feet. “On the plus side, no yoga this morning.” He reaches into his sock and pulls out a cigarette and lighter.

  “You’re not going to go after her?” I say.

  “I’m gathering my wits about me,” he says, flipping the cigarette into his mouth. “So, what were you guys talking about?”

  “Nothing,” I say.

  “I’m pregnant,” Jen says.

  Phillip looks at Jen, then looks down at his freshly lit cigarette and pinches it out. “Mazel tov,” he says, smiling widely.

  I am going to be a father, just when I’ve lost my own. There are some who would see a certain divine balance in that, one soul departing to make room for another, but I’m not that guy. I don’t believe in God when I’m in trouble, the way so many people do. But at times like this, when the irony seems too cruel and well crafted to be a coincidence, I can see God in the details. Due to some mental hiccup I can’t explain, when I think of God, I picture Hugh Hefner: a thin, angular man with a prominent chin in a maroon smoking jacket. I don’t know where that image came from or why it stuck the way it did. Maybe when I was a kid I was thinking about God and I happened upon a picture of Hef in a magazine and some neurons fired and a permanent association was made. But when your vision of God is America’s horniest senior citizen in his pajamas, it’s probably fair to say that you’re not the kind of guy who sees miracles in the mundane coincidences fate lobs at your unsuspecting head like water balloons from a high terrace.

  Chapter 21

  I always imagined I’d be one of those cool dads, the ones you see with long hair and trendy clothing and a leather wrist cuff. One of those guys who change diapers and never yell and buy all the overpriced snacks at the ballpark and carry the kid on their shoulders all the way home. I spent a good deal more time picturing myself as a father than as a husband. I figured I’d be a husband first, and certainly, I imagined what sort of woman I might marry—a smart, sensitive, good-natured lingerie model—but I didn’t picture myself as any particular type of husband. Just me, married, basically. A smarter man might have seen that as cause for concern, a big red flag flapping noisily in the wind.

  Looking back, which is what you do when your life goes to shit, often and obsessively—I can’t really say if Jen and I would have made it if we hadn’t lost the baby. I know it’s the zenith of stupidity to count on a baby to save a failing marriage. The kid can’t even burp on his own, and you want him to repair a relationship that you’ve spent years twisting and tying into hard, salt-crusted sailor’s knots. But still, I can’t help wondering if that baby might have saved us, the same way that losing it accelerated our downward spiral into the thorny underbrush of marital decay. Losing him. Not it. “Losing it” is how you’d refer to your virginity or your wallet, but not your baby; even if you never did get to hold him, and smell his scalp, and wipe his white spittle off your shoulder. Yes, it was a boy. Baby Boy Foxman, it said, on his death certificate. He would have had untamable curly hair like me, and maybe Jen’s luminous green eyes, and he and I would have gone to ball games and to the park, and I would have taught him to ride his bike and throw a curveball. I don’t know how to throw a curveball, but you’d better believe I would have learned. And when he got older I’d have taught him to drive, and he wouldn’t have felt the need to rebel, to do hard drugs or mutilate his smooth, handsome face (Jen’s graceful cheekbones, my prominent chin) with studs and bolts, because there’d be nothing to rebel against, but if he had I would have given him his space, and then he’d have come back and we’d have bonded again, maybe over his first-ever beer—and who am I kidding, did I really believe he and his friends weren’t scoring beer already from someone’s older brother? But he was a smart kid with a good head on his shoulders and sometimes kids were going to act out, test their boundaries, but I trusted him to make the right decisions, and he knew he could always come to me, and . . . Damn. I’m off, just like that.

  My point is that it would be too easy to say that losing the baby is where we went off the rails. People love to do that, to point to some single phenomenon, assign it all the blame, and wipe the slate clean, like when overeaters sue McDonald’s for making them fat pigs. But the truth is always a lot fuzzier, hiding in soft focus on the periphery. When it comes down to it, you’ve either got the sort of marriage that will withstand
trauma, or you don’t. Jen and I had still loved each other, maybe not with the same hormonal ferocity that we did back when we’d first started dating, but no one really stays that way, do they? We still enjoyed each other’s company, had enough in common, found each other suitably attractive. We were content enough on a daily basis. But there was no denying that certain colors had faded and levels had fallen, like when a plane loses one engine but still has another three to carry it across the ocean.

  It took a long time for us to finally conceive. Jen had an asymmetrical uterus that only the most nimble of sperm could navigate, but we persevered. When Jen finally got an uncontestable blue line on her home pregnancy test, we did a little dance in the bathroom doorway, Jen waving the pee stick above her head like a lighter at a concert. And for a little while there, it was like new life had been breathed into us. We would stay up late into the night, talking about neighborhoods, and schools, and names, and how we wouldn’t let it change us, while deep down hoping to hell that it would, that this would be the thing that filled the hole left by all the other unnamable things we had somehow lost along the way. We started having sex more frequently, hotter, nastier sex than we’d had in some time, especially in the later months, as the growing mound of her belly compelled us to seek out new positions—sideways from behind, one hand wrapped greedily around Jen’s pornographically engorged breasts, the other sliding down below the wide orb of her distended belly, where she would squeeze it tightly between her thighs and grind against it. I had become increasingly uncomfortable having missionary sex with her, convinced that with every smack of our bellies I could actually feel the baby.

  “I can’t feel the baby,” Jen said. She had called me at the station, where I was simultaneously screening callers for Wade and looking at pictures of Jessica Biel online.

  “What do you mean?”

  “He always kicks when I’m in the shower. Today he didn’t.”

  “Maybe he’s sleeping.”

  “I don’t feel right. Something’s wrong.” She was in her eighth month, and for the last few weeks her hormones were the inmates running the asylum. I had learned the hard way that it was best to pretty much agree with everything she said.

  “Have you had any coffee? Maybe he just needs a little caffeine?”

  “Just meet me at the doctor. I’m leaving now.”

  I sighed and closed out Jessica Biel, but not before I saw the silent judgment in her eyes.

  I was late getting to the hospital. Late because there were no damn parking spots and how the hell do you build a major hospital and not think to include a single substantial parking lot? So I was a half hour late, on the one day in recorded history that Jen’s doctor’s office decided to run on time. Usually you stewed for an hour in the waiting room, reading parenting magazines and trading quick sympathetic looks with the other expectant fathers, wordlessly affirming that when you weren’t sitting quietly whipped at the ob-gyn, you were out getting drunk at football games and hunting buffalo in a loincloth. But on that day, by the time I’d come in and identified myself and been led back to the examination room by the theatrically gay receptionist, Jen was already in tears, wiping the blue conducting goop from the sonogram off her belly. And as the room started to spin and my lungs started to contract, the doctor explained that our baby had been strangled in the womb by his umbilical cord. He’d already explained it all to Jen, so she had to hear it all again because I’d been late.

  Jen stopped making eye contact with me after that. Our marriage had unwittingly become fused to that little ball of life growing in her belly, and when it died, so did we. And while she’d never admit to it and rationally knew that it was ridiculous, Jen simply couldn’t handle the fact that I’d been late, that I’d let her go into that examination room by herself. People need someone to blame. I had failed her in some fundamental way, and she simply couldn’t bring herself to forgive me. I think she may have tried to, but in the end, it just seemed easier for her to start sleeping with Wade instead. So now we’ve each done something unforgivable, and the universe is once again in perfect balance.

  Chapter 22

  11:25 a.m.

  No visitors yet. The mornings are generally slow. Jen has left to go check into the Marriott over on Route 120. She’s going to stay overnight, determined that we talk this through further. Phillip is still being yelled at by Tracy behind closed doors not thick enough to drown out her high-pitched, weepy admonishments. I feel bad for Tracy. I don’t know much about her, but she seems to be a nice enough person. Dating Phillip brings out the slut or the shrew in a woman, and there would be no dignity in a woman her age playing the slut card. Paul has used the excuse of driving Horry to work to go check on things at the store. Alice is on the couch, balancing her coffee mug and some mini muffins on her plate. Barry’s out in the backyard, trying to run a conference call while watching the kids in the pool. Mom, Wendy, and I are sitting on regular chairs, not willing to spend a moment longer than we have to in the shiva chairs.

  “What did Jen have to say for herself?” Mom says.

  “Nothing. The usual.”

  “She looked good,” Wendy says. “Infidelity agrees with her.” Jen’s long limbs and slim build have always been viewed by Wendy with a mixture of resentment and awe.

  “I think it’s interesting that she came,” Mom says. “I think it means something.”

  “What, Mom? What does it mean?”

  “I’m just saying. Things may not be as finished as you think.”

  “Does it mean she wasn’t screwing my boss for a year?”

  “No, Judd, it doesn’t mean that. She cheated on you, and I know that hurts. But it’s only sex, Judd, scratching an itch. We’ve been programmed to attach far too much significance to it, to the point where we lose sight of everything else. It’s just one tree in a thick forest.”

  “It’s a pretty big damn tree.”

  “Over the course of a fifty-year marriage, one bad year isn’t very significant. Your marriage might still be there to be saved. But you’ll never know if you keep indulging your hate and anger like the world owes you reparations.”

  “Thanks, Mom. As always, your unsolicited advice, however useless, is greatly appreciated.”

  “You’re welcome, sweetie.”

  Phillip emerges and lowers himself by his arms like a gymnast into an empty shiva chair, letting out a long, dejected sigh. “Apparently, I’m an irredeemable asshole.”

  “And yet, I have a feeling she’s not done trying to redeem you,” Mom says.

  “Go figure.”

  “Why are you doing this, Philly?”

  “Doing what?”

  “Dating a cougar.” Wendy.

  “Dating your mother.” Me.

  “Jesus Christ.” Phillip.

  “I think she’s nice,” Alice says. “And very attractive.”

  “Yes, she’s lovely,” my mother says. “And closer to my age than yours.”

  “I’m not as young as you like to think, Mom. And neither are you.”

  “Don’t be spiteful, Philly. It doesn’t suit you.”

  “And that skirt doesn’t suit you. You’ll be giving everyone crotch shots from your shiva chair.”

  “I just want to make sure you’ve thought this through,” Mom says. “Because there’s no scenario in which this doesn’t end badly.”

  “Much like this conversation,” I say.

  “Which ends right now,” Phillip says.

  “We are your family, Phillip. We love you.”

  We all say “But!” at the same instant.

  Mom looks around, momentarily thrown. “That’s right. But. But she’s too old. But you’re not going to start a family with her. But have you even thought about her in all of this?”

  Phillip shakes his head, not taking the bait.

  “What happens to Tracy when this runs its course, Philly? You’ll have no trouble finding new lovers—knowing you, you already have. But the older she gets, the harder it will be f
or her to find someone. She has so much less time than you to find the right person, and you’re wasting it for her.”

  “And why can’t I be the right person?”

  Mom smiles at him, sadly and with great tenderness. “Don’t be an ass.”

  “That’s it, I’m out of here,” Phillip says, getting to his feet.

  “I’ll come with you,” I say.

  “You’re not supposed to leave the house,” Mom says. “We’re sitting shiva.”

  “Ask Wendy about her marriage,” I say. “We’ll be back before the dust settles.”

  “Dick,” Wendy says.

  “Sorry, sis. It’s every man for himself.”

  Paul, returned from the store, steps through the living room doorway just as Phillip reaches it. “Hey, Phillip,” he says, smiles, and then punches him square in the jaw, sending him sprawling back into the room, knocking over a handful of chairs.

  “Paul!” Alice shrieks.

  “He sucker punched me before.”

  Phillip, flat on his back, props himself up on one elbow, wincing as he rubs his jaw. Tracy comes running out of her room, having heard the commotion. When she sees Phillip lying on the floor, she shakes her head in disgust and turns on her heel, disappearing back into the den. We won’t be seeing her again anytime soon.

  “If I stand up, are you going to hit me again?” Phillip says to Paul.

  “No, I’m good,” Paul says, rubbing his knuckles. He reaches over and offers Phillip his hand. Phillip takes it and Paul yanks him to his feet, and then, to everyone’s surprise, pulls Phillip into a little hug and whispers something into his ear. Phillip nods and pats the back of Paul’s head. Then he turns to me. “You coming?”