This Is Where I Leave You: A Novel

by Jonathan Tropper

  The sex is as good and bad as first times tend to be, like a play rehearsal full of missed marks, botched lines, bad lighting, and no calls for an encore. We don’t do it up against the wall, on the kitchen sink, in the shower, from behind while she’s bent over the bed. It’s just paint-by-numbers missionary sex: kiss, rub, lick, stroke, enter, rock, moan, and come, all at the proper time. I’m playing scared, letting her set the rhythm, trying my best to banish the image of Wade humping Jen that hovers in the background of my mind. Thanks in part to my earlier release with Alice, I’m able to hold out until Penny finishes, gasping and digging her teeth into my chin hard enough to leave a mark. And it occurs to me, as I surrender to my own somewhat subdued orgasm, that I’ve come twice today, and as sad and twisted as each occasion was, both involved actual, live women, one on top of me, and one beneath me, and maybe that’s a cause for some small measure of optimism, even if we’re not counting Alice. Which we’re not.

  When we’re done, I roll off of Penny, feeling ridiculously accomplished and wondering how soon I can leave.

  “That was nice,” Penny says drowsily, throwing a leg over mine, splaying out her fingers against my chest.

  “Okay. Give it to me straight,” I say. “I can take it.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Why did my wife need to have sex with someone else?”

  “Because she’s an evil bitch.”

  “Come on. Really.”

  Penny lies back on her pillow and removes her leg from mine. I grab it and put it back. I like it there. “In my limited experience, women rarely leave because the sex is bad. The sex becomes bad because something else has gone wrong.”

  “Really?”

  “Nah. He probably just has a world-class schlong.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.”

  Penny laughs. “Judd Foxman. Naked in my bed. This is beyond surreal.”

  “Surreal is my new reality.”

  She kisses both my eyes and wraps her arms around me in a way that brings me dangerously close to tears. I should tell her about the baby. It’s on the tip of my tongue.

  “Judd Foxman.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I just like to say your name.”

  Penny pulls me closer and burrows her head into the hollow of my neck, lazily repeating my name a few more times as she drifts off to sleep. I open my mouth to say any number of things, but in the end I just lie there, telling myself that no one can feel this disconnected forever.

  11:30 p.m.

  WENDY AND BARRY are standing on the front walk, having an argument. Wendy gesticulates wildly while Barry stands there absorbing it, swatting away gnats as he waits her out. I wonder, as I often do, why they stay together, what it is they offer each other that keeps them locked in this bloodless stalemate. But I suppose if I understood anything about marriage, I’d have understood my own a little bit better.

  “I’m sorry, babe, it’s the eleventh hour,” Barry is saying. “I need to be there to close this deal now, or it’s all going to go up in smoke.”

  “You’ve had a death in the family. Can’t they understand that?”

  “Yes, but I can’t be gone for seven days. They need me there.”

  “And what about your family? We need you too.”

  “I’m doing this for my family.”

  “Right. That old load of crap.”

  They fall silent when I step out of the car.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Wendy says.

  “Clearing my head.”

  “You didn’t tell anyone where you were going.”

  “There’s actually a good reason for that.”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t want to.”

  Barry snickers. Dumb move. Wendy turns on him with a baleful stare, and I use the distraction to slide past them and into the house.

  Mom and Linda are in the living room, playing Scrabble at the coffee table and drinking tea. Paul, Alice, and Tracy are on the couch watching Jon Stewart, while Phillip sits on the floor, thumbing through a shoebox of old photos. They all look up at me. Alice smiles, but I can’t look at her, can’t be anywhere near her. The monitor in the hall is broadcasting Serena’s cries in stereo. No one seems terribly concerned.

  “Where have you been?” Mom says.

  “Out and about.”

  “Don’t be evasive. Just say you’d rather not tell me.”

  “I’d rather not tell you.”

  “But now you have me curious. Did you see Jen today?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “And now I’m going to bed.”

  Alice flashes me a meaningful look, and I try to remember if there’s a lock on the basement door.

  “Look at this picture,” Phillip says.

  I squat down to see the photo he’s holding. I’m around eleven, Paul twelve, and Phillip is two years old. Paul and I are throwing him to each other, playing catch with our little brother in this very living room, twentysomething years ago. Phillip loved that, would laugh hysterically, his eyes wide with excitement as we launched him airborne at each other. Pay catch, Yudd. Pay catch, Pole. We are all smiling in the picture, three brothers having a grand old time just playing around in the living room, no agendas, no buried resentments or permanent scars. Even under the best of circumstances, there’s just something so damn tragic about growing up.

  “Look here,” Phillip says, pointing to the corner of the photo. “In the breakfront.”

  The breakfront has two sets of glass doors, behind which Mom keeps her crystal glasses and the good china.

  “I don’t see anything.”

  “Look at the glass on the last door.”

  I stare at the picture and then, just as I’m about to give up, I see it, a reflection in the glass, a face and arms. Dad, watching us from off camera, smiling widely as Phillip flies between us. The breakfront still stands against the living room wall, and I look into the glass doors a moment. When I look back down Phillip is smiling at me.

  “I did the same thing.”

  “He’s like a ghost,” I say.

  “Last night I woke up and thought I saw him walking out of the study,” Phillip says. When Phillip was little, he would put on his toy tool belt and stand beside Dad as he fixed things in the house. “The compressor is shot,” he would repeat solemnly, brimming with self-importance. He was a very cute kid, and I can remember how much we all adored him, how even then, I hated the fact that he had to grow older.

  The baby is still crying her little lungs out upstairs. I lean forward to tousle Phillip’s hair. “I’m going to go check on that baby.”

  “They’re letting her cry,” Mom says.

  “That doesn’t make it right.”

  Phillip watches me as I stand back up and head for the stairs.

  “Judd.”

  “Yeah.”

  He grins. “You smell like pussy.”

  11:40 p.m.

  SERENA STOPS CRYING the instant I pick her up. Her head is bald like an old man’s, with just a ring of dark hair around the perimeter. She feels almost weightless against my chest in her little pink pajamas. “It’s okay,” I say softly, and make other idiotic sounds like you do when you’re holding a baby. Her tiny fingers find my chin and she latches on with a surprisingly strong grip, like my chin will save her life, like my chin is exactly what she was crying out for. I sit down on the bed, cradling her little head against my shoulder, inhaling her sweet baby scent. Someday she’ll get older, and the world will start having its way with her. She’ll throw temper tantrums, she’ll need speech therapy, she’ll grow breasts and have pimples, she’ll fight with her parents, she’ll worry about her weight, she’ll put out, she’ll have her heart broken, she’ll be happy, she’ll be lonely, she’ll be complicated, she’ll be confused, she’ll be depressed, she’ll fall in love and get married, and she’ll have a baby of her own. But right now she is pure and undiminished and beauti
ful. I lie back on the bed as she sleeps on my chest, listening to her tiny little snores, admiring the soft nub of her unformed nose, the sucking blister on her upturned lip. After a few minutes, when her breathing becomes almost imperceptible, I gently lay her down in the crib and head back downstairs. I crawl under my covers and drift off to sleep, still feeling the warm spot where she lay on my chest.

  Sunday

  Chapter 32

  5:20 a.m.

  Dad is bent over me, fixing my wooden leg with a socket wrench. I’m on a chair and he’s on his knees in front of me, turning the wrench and humming Simon and Garfunkel. I’d rather be a hammer than a nail. Yes I would. I can see through his curly, gray hair to where it’s thinning at his pink scalp, can smell the grease on him, can smell the detergent coming off his favorite blue work shirt. The socket wrench clicks noisily as it spins, and I can see the long muscles in his forearms flex and move as he turns it. He has spent his life working with tools, and they fit naturally into his hands. I’m staring down at him, knowing that I can’t tell him that he’s dead, that if I do he’ll disappear. I want him to look up at me, want to see his face, but he is focused on the leg and he doesn’t look up. “Almost there,” he says. Then he puts down the socket wrench and grabs on to my knee with both hands. “Here we go,” he says. He pulls on the prosthesis, which slides off my knee and splits down the middle, and his hands come away with one half of it in each, and there is my real leg again, hairless and pink, but whole and unharmed. Then he looks up at me and smiles widely, like he might have smiled at me when I was a little boy, like he never did once I was older, a warm and loving smile, uncomplicated by my own encroaching manhood, and the love surging between us is electric and palpable. When I wake up I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to escape the dim silence of the basement to find him again, but there’s only darkness and the sad, steady whisper of the central air handler behind the wall, telling its mechanical secrets in the dark.

  Chapter 33

  5:38 a.m.

  Upon top of the house. Looking over miles of roof; slate, concrete, copper, clay, all bathed in the pink glow of the sun rising over Elmsbrook. There’s a bird, maybe a cardinal, maybe a robin, I don’t know, it has a red chest. It’s chirping in the branch of a tree of equally uncertain nomenclature. Elm, or oak, or ash. I think I used to know things like that, the names of birds and trees. Now it feels like I don’t know much about anything. I don’t know why planes fly, and what causes lightning, and what it means to short a stock, and the difference between the Shiites and Sunnis, and who’s slaughtering whom in Darfur, and why the U.S. dollar is so weak, and why the American League is so much better than the National League. I don’t know how Jen and I became strangers in our own marriage, how we let something that should have brought us closer derail us like a couple of amateurs. We were two reasonably smart people in love with each other, and then, one day we were less so, and maybe we were headed here anyway, maybe she just got there first, because she felt the loss of our baby more acutely. For a moment, a feeling circles me, something approaching clarity, maybe even acceptance, but it fails to settle and ultimately dissipates.

  I think about Jen. I think about Penny. I could probably have something with Penny, but I’d still be thinking of Jen. I could maybe try to win Jen back, but I’d still be thinking of Wade. And so would she. He’d be a ghost, haunting our bed every time we touched. So what do I do?

  There are just too many things I don’t know.

  The girl in last night’s movie saw the way the sheepdog trainer carried his injured daughter and she just knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that nothing mattered more than being with him. She knew. But she wasn’t a real person, that girl, she was an actress with an eating disorder who was charged with DUI last year and who slept with her married director just long enough to wreck his life before falling out of love and off the wagon. That’s love in real life: messy and corrupt and completely unreliable. I like Penny, and I still love Jen, and I hate Jen and I couldn’t leave Penny’s sad little apartment fast enough. I want someone who will love me and touch me and understand me and let me take care of them, but beyond that, I don’t know.

  I just don’t know.

  There’s a scraping sound behind me, and Wendy climbs onto the roof, still groggy with sleep.

  “Hey there.”

  “Good morning.”

  She stands beside me and reaches into the chimney for a second, her hand emerging with a box of Marlboros and a lighter. “Want one?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Mind if I do?”

  I don’t answer because it wouldn’t matter. You can’t let your dog crap on the sidewalk, but it’s perfectly acceptable to blow carcinogens down other people’s throats. Somewhere along the way, smokers exempted themselves from the social contract.

  Wendy lights up, inhaling so deeply that I can picture her lungs inflating and darkening with smoke. “So, Barry’s getting the hell out of Dodge.”

  “Where to?”

  “Everywhere. California, Chicago, London. His fund took a big hit last year with the whole subprime thing, and I say that with no actual concept of what the whole subprime thing actually is. But apparently everything depends on getting this deal done.”

  “Are you worried?”

  She shrugs. “It’s Barry. This is what he does. If I worried, that would defeat the whole purpose of being married to him.” She takes another drag on her cigarette. “So, you slept with Jen last night?”

  “Penny.”

  “Oh! Good for you. Right?”

  “I feel like I’ll never be able to have sex with someone new without thinking the whole time about the fact that I’m having sex with someone new.”

  Wendy shrugs. “You’ll get over it.”

  From below comes the sound of the front door closing, and a moment later Linda crosses the front yard. She stops on the sidewalk and turns her face up to the sky, letting the morning breeze kiss her face, before heading down the block toward her house.

  “She’s here early,” Wendy muses.

  “She’s here late,” I say.

  “Oh,” Wendy says. Then, “Oh! No!”

  “Exactly.”

  “No way! You think?”

  “Nothing surprises me anymore.”

  A quiet moment while Wendy processes the new information.

  “It kind of makes sense, a little,” she says.

  “Kind of.”

  “If so, how do we feel about it?”

  “We are numb.”

  Wendy considers that for a moment, tapping her lip with the end of her cigarette. “Yes. That’s a perfect description of what we are.”

  The bird that may or may not be a cardinal or a robin takes flight, swooping down toward the backyard to catch the air pocket that will take her to the next tree. It would be nice to be able to do that, I think. To just pick up from wherever you were that wasn’t working out for you and ride the winds to a better place. I’d be in Australia by now.

  “You slept with Horry.”

  “He told you?”

  “I was up here yesterday morning too. Saw you do the walk of shame.”

  She shrugs. “It’s no big deal.”

  “It’s adultery.”

  Wendy raises her eyebrows at me, biting back whatever it was she was prepared to say, a rare display of restraint. We are perched on a roof and you can’t be too careful.

  “Horry is grandfathered in.”

  “Is that how it works?”

  “That’s how it works.”

  “That makes half of your graduating class eligible.”

  She laughs and stubs out her cigarette on a roof shingle. “In an alternate universe where Horry didn’t get his brains bashed in, he and I are married. Once in a blue moon I get to visit that universe.”

  “And it’s really that simple.”

  “My alternate universe, my rules.”

  Behind and below us, the back door slams. We turn around to look down into the bac
kyard. Tracy is standing at the head of the pool in a black one-piece bathing suit. Her dive is flawless, her stroke strong and graceful. She swims back and forth with machinelike precision, doing those little somersaults against the wall at each end like she’s in the Olympics. I get tired just looking at her.

  “Poor thing,” Wendy says.

  Tracy slices through the water like a shark, and Wendy and I watch her from our perch above the world, unaccustomed to such grace and discipline. I think, not for the first time, that she deserves better than Phillip, better than this family of ours. Someone should save her from us while there’s still time.

  Chapter 34

  10:13 a.m.

  There are tricks to paying a shiva call. You don’t want to come during off-peak hours, or you risk being the only one there, face-to-face with five surly mourners who, but for your presence, would be off their low chairs, stretching their legs and their compressed spines, taking a bathroom break, or having a snack. Evenings are your safest bet, after seven, when everyone’s eaten and the room is full. Weekday afternoons are a dead zone. Sunday is a crapshoot. Do a drive-by and count the parked cars before you stop. If you’re lucky, there will already be a conversation going on when you come in, so you won’t have to sit there trying to start one of your own. It’s hard to talk to the bereft. You never know what’s off-limits.

  And speaking of limits, there apparently aren’t any when it comes to Mom’s slinky wardrobe. The old expression goes, a good speech is like a woman’s skirt: short enough to hold your attention, long enough to cover the subject. Mom’s short denim skirt isn’t a speech, it’s more like a quick, dirty joke, the kind people are always e-mailing to you. And she’s wearing a tight black camisole with spaghetti straps. She looks like a retired stripper.