A hard rain pounds at the windows, looking for a way in. On the monitor, Alice yells at Paul. “You could have done permanent damage. And for what? To strike out Boner Grodner?”
“If she wakes the baby, I’m going to kick her fat ass,” Wendy says as she assembles a plate for Mom.
“Mommy, you said a bad word,” Ryan says.
“No, I didn’t, honey.”
“You said ‘ass.’”
“‘Ass’ is just another word for a donkey.”
“So it’s not a bad word?”
“It is when children say it.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” Wendy says, exasperated. “Those are just the rules, Ryan. Deal with it.”
“We’ve been here for less than a week, and you’ve been in two fist-fights!” Tracy shouts at Phillip. “This is clearly not a healthy place for you.”
We cannot make out the other half of either conversation because, in true Foxman form, Paul’s and Phillip’s responses are low and monosyllabic. Under attack, we retreat into stoic fortresses built for one. It drove Jen crazy. The more she yelled, the quieter I got, sometimes not uttering a word for hours. Maybe if I had yelled back at her, things would be different now. Maybe yelling back is a kind of marital diplomacy I never learned.
Eventually someone slams the den door and the lights in the kitchen flicker and then go out. Phillip comes stomping into the dim room and opens up the freezer. He grabs an ice pack and sits down across from me, wincing as he presses it against his swollen hand.
“For a guy who punches people so often, I would think you’d know how to do it better,” Wendy says.
“I think I may have broken something.”
“Besides Tracy’s heart?”
Phillip gives Wendy a dirty look. “Don’t you ever get tired of being the thorn in everyone’s side?”
Upstairs another door slams and the lights come back on. On the monitor, Serena starts to scream.
“Fat bitch!” Wendy mutters.
“You said a curse word!” Ryan shouts, gleefully horrified.
“A bitch is a female dog,” Wendy says.
“Bitch!” Cole repeats happily.
The first time I heard my father curse, I was helping him install a timer in the garage for the lawn sprinklers. He had a screwdriver in his mouth, some screws in his hands, and he dropped a key washer, which rolled across the garage and down through the grate of the catch basin. “Ah, shit,” he said. I was eight. I laughed until my ribs ached.
Paul enters the kitchen wordlessly and opens the freezer. Phillip has the only ice pack, so he grabs a slab of frozen meat and slips it under his shirt to press against his shoulder. He leans back against the fridge and closes his eyes for a second. Seated between him and Phillip, I feel conspicuously uninjured.
“I have to get out of here,” Paul says, and heads for the door.
“You’re in no condition to drive with that shoulder,” Phillip says, getting to his feet. “I’ll take you.”
“Lucky me,” Paul says, disappearing into the front hall.
“Asshole,” Phillip says.
“An asshole is a donkey,” Ryan says.
“Asshole,” Cole says. “Bitch. Asshole. Elmo.”
Phillip considers our nephews gravely. “It’s good to see our influence on the next generation. We should seriously consider getting neutered.”
“It’s too late for me,” I say.
“Yes it is. I forgot.” He stands up and fumbles for his car keys. “Okay, then. Have a good night, everyone.”
“Wait!” I say, following him out to the front hall, where Paul is already halfway out the door. “What about the shiva?”
We look into the living room at the five empty shiva chairs lined up in front of the fireplace. “You’ll be fine,” Paul says. “Just nod and smile.”
“You can’t leave me here alone.”
Phillip flips a cigarette into his mouth and leans into the shiva candle to light it, which strikes me as somewhat sacrilegious, but I guess Dad wouldn’t mind. “It’s like a monsoon out there right now. I bet no one will even come tonight. So why don’t you come with?”
“What if people come?”
Phillip grabs a legal pad and pen from a compartment in the hall table and draws up a quick sign:
SHIVA CANCELED ON ACCOUNT OF RAIN. TRY AGAIN TOMORROW. —THE MANAGEMENT.
He jams the paper under the knocker on the front door. “Problem solved,” he says.
Chapter 40
9:15 p.m.
Sticky Fingers is in one of the last strip malls on Route 120, just about a mile down the road from the Marriott where Jen is staying. Or was staying. She is no doubt gone by now, hightailing it back to Kingston, with Wade grumbling about revenge scenarios as he drives.
Sticky Fingers. Famous for its spicy buffalo wings and nubile waitresses in their tight black T-shirts with the V-necks cut out jaggedly by scissors. The place is filled with women in short skirts or jeans, and tight sleeveless shirts. These women, with their hair and their bodies, their smiling lips, glossed to a shine. I am acutely conscious of every one of them, of every smooth thigh and creamy neck. I am dealing with major life issues here, death, divorce, fatherhood, and yet here, in this bar, I am all cock. I don’t know why this is, what makes it so, but I’d be lying if I said otherwise. I sit with my brothers at a high round table, licking hot sauce off my fingers, trying to moderate my roving eye. There’s a brunette with the kind of bee-stung lips you want to suck like candy. There’s a blond girl in a short skirt with smooth, perfect legs and the kind of smile you feel in your chest. There’s another blonde, a real one this time, with laughing eyes, and you just know she’d be fun and tender in bed. I want them all, slowly and softly, want to kiss them in the rain, save them from bad men, win their hearts, build a life. I’m probably too old for most of them. Maybe. I don’t know. I haven’t been single in over ten years; I can’t tell how old anyone is anymore, including me.
I would kill to be in love again. I loved being in love—the deep kisses, the urgent sex, the passionate declarations, the late-night phone calls, the private language and inside jokes, the way her fingers rest possessively on your forearm during dinner with her friends.
“Boys’ night out,” Phillip says appreciatively. “Why don’t we do this more?”
“Because we don’t like each other very much,” Paul says.
“That’s crap, Paul. You’re too angry at the world to know who you like and who you don’t. I like you, Paul. I love you. Both of you. I was always too young to go anywhere with you guys. I always wished we’d hung out more as brothers.”
“Well then, this must be a big moment for you.”
“The boys are back in town,” Phillip sings.
A waitress comes to bring us our drinks. “Hey, Philly,” she says. “How’ve you been?”
“Hey, Tammy. Looking good.”
We cannot help but watch her as she leaves. God himself stops what he’s doing to watch her ass as she crosses the crowded room. It’s that kind of ass. The kind of ass that fills you with equal parts lust and regret, and then, almost instantly, chagrin, because, for Christ’s sake, it’s just an ass.
“Is there anyone in this town you haven’t fucked?” Paul grumbles.
“Just because she was glad to see me doesn’t mean I fucked her.”
“So you didn’t?”
Phillip shrugs. “It’s not a fair test case. Everyone fucked Tammy Burns.”
“I didn’t,” I say sadly.
“The night’s young. Just be charming and tip well.”
Someone has selected “Sweet Home Alabama” on the jukebox. Phillip sings along, tapping his hands on the table to the little piano riff between verses. Take a hundred jukeboxes from a hundred bars in a hundred cities and they’ll all have “Sweet Home Alabama” in them. I don’t know why that should be the case, but it is. And every one of those bars has two or three assholes who will sing along at the top of thei
r lungs, especially when they get to the part that trashes Neil Young, and then look around like they should get a prize for knowing the words, like everyone doesn’t know the words, like everyone didn’t have that classic rock friend who put it on every mix he ever made, like everyone isn’t sick to death already of “Sweet Home Alabama.”
Lately, I get inexplicably angry around pretty girls.
The girls around the bar shake themselves lightly in time to the music, pouting the way girls do when they dance, like they’re experts in something we’ll never understand. I need to stop looking at these girls. No good will come from it. You keep looking at girls like this and then one day you catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror behind the bar, and if you’re not yet too old, you’re on the borderline, and the last thing you ever want to be is the old guy in the bar. There’s no dignity in it.
“Isn’t that Horry?” I say, looking over to a corner table. Horry is there, chatting up some hot young thing. I catch his eye and he waves uncertainly. When I look back a few minutes later, he and the girl are gone. I guess I can’t really blame him. I wouldn’t feel comfortable hitting on women in front of the brothers of the married woman I recently slept with. You need GPS to follow the sex lives of this family. I wonder if love is this twisted for everyone or if our family is uniquely talented at making such a mess of it.
Paul slams a dollar bill down on the table. “I’d like to perform a demonstration,” he says. “Phillip. Please go over to the jukebox and choose a song.”
“You get two for a dollar.”
“Then go crazy.”
“Anything in particular you’re in the mood for?”
“Surprise me.”
Phillip hops off his stool and makes his way across the crowded room. “Watch,” Paul says.
“What?”
“He won’t be able to get there and back without touching at least three women.”
There’s a girl at the jukebox, in a little black halter top, her jeans doing that thing where they ride so low on her hips that you wonder what’s holding them up. He leans over and whispers something to her. She looks up at him and laughs. And then she teeters a little bit, maybe because of her high heels, or possibly it’s the free Jell-O shots for women between eight and ten o’clock. I don’t know what makes women teeter. She grabs Phillip’s arm to right herself. It’s simple, effortless even, and the kind of thing that never happens to me. Her fingers continue to clutch his elbow as they chat. How does a simple wisecrack turn into bodily contact?
On his way back he is stopped by two girls who seem to know him. He leans in to accept a kiss from each one, his hands resting lightly on their exposed hips, just above the waist of their jeans, as he chats briefly. He’s about ten feet away from us when he bumps into another girl, graciously guiding her past him with his hand on the small of her back as they trade smiles.
“Four,” Paul says.
“Four what?” Phillip says.
“Nothing.”
Phillip looks mildly irked and then shrugs. When the world is your sexual buffet, you don’t sweat the small stuff. He takes a generous swig of beer. “So, Paul. I think it’s great you and Alice want to have a kid.”
Paul looks up at him and then down at the dwindling foam of his beer. “She’s driving me crazy with it. We’ve burned through our savings on her quest for fertility.”
“I find it interesting that you call it ‘her’ quest and not ‘our’ quest.”
“And I find it interesting that you’re sleeping with a woman in spitting distance of menopause, but I figure that’s your own business.”
Phillip puts down his beer, looking hurt. “You’re an asshole, Paul. You’re an asshole to me, you’re an asshole to Judd. I hope to hell you turn out to be a better father than you are a brother.”
“I’m the lousy brother?” Paul says, raising his voice. “You think it was just Dad who paid to keep you out of jail when you decided to take up marijuana farming? I didn’t take profits for three years so that we could pay off your legal fees. And, Judd? Don’t get me started on you.”
“No need,” I say. “I know all about your great sacrifice. You’ll never let me forget it.”
“What did you just say to me?” Paul says, getting to his feet. His stool clatters to the floor behind him.
I stand up to face him. “It was your own damn fault, Paul. You dragged me to Rusco’s house. I kept telling you I didn’t want to go, but you were going to show everyone what a tough bastard you were. I didn’t ask you to do it, and I’m sick and tired of paying for it. The price is just too damn high.”
“I think we should all just take a beat here,” Phillip says, but it’s too late.
Paul brings his beer mug crashing down on the table. He is seething now, his face red, his fists clenched. Around us, people move away quickly, anticipating a brawl. “I lost my scholarship. I lost everything. You went off to college and never looked back.” He sinks his teeth into every word, and they come out chewed. “And now you want to tell me that you paid a price? You ungrateful prick!”
“You could have gone to college. You chose to stay home and get drunk for two years. Should I have done that with you, pissed away my future out of gratitude?”
“Okay, this is good. We’re all talking here, getting everything out on the table.” Phillip.
The bouncer is suddenly standing behind Paul, giving us a hard look with his one real eye. He’s a retired boxer. There are framed clippings of his fights behind the bar. It’s anyone’s guess what kind of punch the guy might pack today, but he’s got presence, and his expression carries a certain tired wisdom unique to people who have known violence intimately. He places a hand like a meat hook on Paul’s shoulder. “Paul,” he says in a hoarse, surprisingly gentle voice. “You either need to sit down or take this outside.”
Paul nods, still looking at me, and then pats the bouncer’s belly. “It’s fine, Rod. I’m leaving anyway.”
Rod the prizefighter looks pointedly at Phil and then me, visualizing the cataclysmic damage he’ll do to us if it comes to that, before heading back across the bar. Paul throws a few bills down on the table.
“Paul,” I say, feeling remorseful. “I’ve always felt bad about what happened.”
“Just tell me this,” he says, his voice low, his anger spent. “How many surgeries have I had?”
“What?”
“I don’t mean when it happened. I mean since you moved out. How many operations?”
I think about it for a moment. “Three, I guess. Or four if you count the one you had right after I got married. The skin graft thing.”
Paul shakes his head slowly. “Eight.”
“What?”
“I’ve had eight surgeries. Skin and nerve grafts, tissue grafts, surgical pins. And how many times did you visit me in the hospital, or even call the house to see how I was doing?”
“I don’t know. A bunch?”
He holds up two fingers. “Twice. You came to see me twice. That’s it.”
“That can’t be right.”
“It’s not right, but it’s the truth.” He starts heading for the door.
“Paul,” I say. “Wait a minute.”
He turns to face me, and I’m shocked to see a tear running down his cheek. “Going to Rusco’s house was stupid,” he says. “Believe me, I spend time every day wishing I could go back there and stop myself, picturing the world I’d be living in now if I hadn’t gone. But stupid or not, I went there for you. You want to call me a lousy brother? I guess maybe I am. I’ll own up to it. But maybe you are too.”
I sit back on my stool, watching him leave. I should call out to him, stop him, now that we’re finally talking. But we are not a family of communicators. It took five shots and a decade’s worth of repressed anger just to say this much tonight. I’m tapped out, and so is he.
“Well, I think you two had a real breakthrough there,” Phillip says.
“Yeah? Then why do I feel so shitty?”
/> Phillip pats my back and messes up my hair. “Emotional growth hurts. It’s nothing a few more shots won’t fix.”
He disappears into the crowd at the bar. I am left alone at the table to lick the bottom of my shot glasses and assimilate the new information. You think you have all the time in the world, and then your father dies. You think you’re happily married, and then your wife fucks your boss. You think your brother is an asshole, and then you discover that it’s been you all along. If nothing else, it’s been educational.
10:30 p.m.
PHILLIP RETURNS WITH eight shot glasses jammed between every finger of both hands, another of his worthless skills. Somehow we do them all. The night takes on a kind of kaleidoscopic translucence, and I lose my sense of time and, occasionally, balance. When I come back from a trip to the bathroom, we’ve been joined by Phillip’s old girlfriend, Chelsea. “Look who I bumped into,” Phillip says. Chelsea is dressed for the hunt in a short denim skirt and a tank top that grants a generous view of her lightly freckled cleavage as she leans forward to kiss my cheek. “Fancy running into you guys here,” she says, in case I haven’t properly registered the complete randomness of this encounter from Phillip’s remark. Chelsea’s fingers dance up Phillip’s arms like he’s an instrument she’s playing. I try to catch his eye, but he looks away every time. I want to tell him that he can’t behave like this on my watch, but the shots have warmed my blood and toasted my veins, and someone has turned up the music, and to be heard I’d have to put my mouth close to his ear, like Chelsea is doing right now.
On my next bathroom trip, I see Horry making out with a skinny girl in the little nook between the men’s room and the kitchen. She’s a sloppy kisser, her tongue sliding out of her mouth to lick his lips when they separate, but he doesn’t seem to mind. Good for you, Horry, I think. I am drunk and lost and would very much like to be making out with someone of no consequence right now, mashing tequila tongues, sliding my fingertips over smooth, booze-warmed skin. Instead, I urinate for a half hour, reading the stall graffiti, still smelling Chelsea’s shampoo from when she kissed me hello.
This Is Where I Leave You: A Novel Page 24