“Okay. Go back to your bed. I’ll bring you some water and a drink in a little while.”
“Can I come in bed with you?”
Dad said, “Jesus Christ,” and pulled up their comforter, while Mom laughed the way she did sometimes at things I didn’t intend to be funny. Normally I didn’t mind—it felt good to make her laugh—but tonight I had a headache and I wasn’t in the mood. So I padded back down the hall to my bed and promptly blocked out the entire event, the way you do.
11:50 a.m.
YOU CAN SEE your parents have sex, you can see your wife in bed with your boss, and still, none of it packs quite the same surreal punch as seeing your mother kiss another woman. Wendy ushers out the shiva callers—“Thank you all for coming. We hope to see you again under happier circumstances”—while Phillip handles the stragglers and those who can’t quite take a hint somewhat less tactfully: “Okay there, Mr. and Mrs. Cooper. Don’t let the door hit you where the good lord split you.” And then it is just us, Wendy, Phillip, Paul, Horry, Alice, Tracy, and me, sitting in the living room, coming to terms with the new reality.
Paul opens the discussion. “What the fuck?”
“You didn’t know?” Me.
“What do you mean? You did?”
“We had our suspicions.” Wendy.
“So Mom’s a lesbian now? Cool.” Phillip.
“Don’t trivialize it,” Tracy says. “That was actually a very moving thing to witness.”
“She can’t be a lesbian,” Paul says. “She was married for forty years.”
“Well, it’s a little late in life for her experimental phase, don’t you think?” Wendy.
“I think they prefer the term ‘bisexual,’” Horry says.
We all turn to look at him.
“And you know this because . . . ?” Paul says.
Horry shrugs, blushing slightly.
“How long?” Wendy demands.
“How Long is a Chinaman?” Phillip says, mechanically repeating an old childhood joke.
“Run and play, Phillip, the adults are talking,” Wendy says. “How long, Horry?”
“I don’t really know.”
“Ballpark it.”
“I think they should tell you themselves.”
“Holy shit!” Paul says. “Mom is a lesbian.”
“A bisexual.”
“Whatever.”
“Well, whatever, then,” Horry says. “Mine is too.”
“I think it’s wonderful,” Alice says. “I mean, they’ve been best friends since forever. What a deep bond they must have.”
“Jesus Christ, Alice! My father’s body is still warm!” Paul shakes his head. “Am I the only one who is having a problem with this?”
“A problem is something to solve,” Phillip says. “If there’s no solution, it’s not a problem, so stop treating it like one.”
We all turn to look at Phillip.
“That actually almost makes sense,” Wendy says.
“It’s something I learned from Tracy,” Phillip says. “Isn’t she something?” He leans forward to kiss her, and she turns away from his kiss.
“What’s wrong, baby?”
“Not here.”
“I just complimented you. What are you getting all pissy about?”
“I said not here.”
“And I said, what are you getting all pissy about?”
“This isn’t the appropriate time or place.”
“My mother just stuck her tongue down her best friend’s throat in front of her children and half the neighborhood. In case you’ve missed it, we don’t really do appropriate here.”
“I’m leaving,” Tracy says, getting to her feet.
“Since when do you walk away from a discussion? You live for discussions. That’s all you ever want to do is discuss the shit out of everything.”
She looks down at him and shakes her head slowly. “You are such an asshole.” Then she turns and heads back toward the den.
“But I’m engaging here, honey!” he calls angrily after her. “I’m taking ownership of my feelings.” He watches her go, then shrugs and turns back to us. “Don’t ever date a shrink,” he grumbles. “It’s like trying to read Chinese.”
Chapter 46
1:45 p.m.
Jen has checked out of the Marriott. I make the drive to Kingston in just over ninety minutes and pull into my driveway, like I have a thousand times before. Her white Jeep is parked, as usual, too close to the center, and I have to open my door gently against the stone retaining wall to squeeze out of mine.
She comes to the door in her college boxers and an old concert T-shirt of mine. Elvis Costello and the Attractions. We went to see him play a few times. When I have a cold, I can sing “Almost Blue” and sound just like him. It never fails to crack her up. We have history, Jen and I, a mess of artifacts strewn haphazardly in our wake. Her hair is down, longer than I’m used to, and she is pale and tired, her eyes swollen from crying, and she looks for all the world like she can use a hug. So I give her one and she breaks down, sobbing violently into my neck, her body convulsing to the point that I worry about the pregnancy.
The bedroom smells of Jen. She lies down horizontally across the bed and closes her eyes. We’ll have to throw out the bed, I think to myself. There’s a lot we’ll have to throw out.
“Run me a bath?” she says.
She lies in the tub, in the slanted shadows of the afternoon sun through the blinds, while I sit on the edge, tracing letters in the surface of the water. We talk for a long time, long enough for her to have to add hot water twice. I don’t know what we talk about—the baby, the past, college, our honeymoon. She cries when she speaks briefly about Wade, not because she misses him, but because she’s humiliated. I remember what Tracy said about gathering up what’s left of her dignity. These are the facts: I am drawn to women like Jen, who are drawn to men like Wade, and it’s not healthy for any of us, but that’s just the way it is. The Tracys of this world will always fall for the Phillips, who can always be counted on to fuck the Chelseas. And round and round we’ll go, doing our pathetic little dance, denying our own true natures in the name of love, or something we can pass off in its place. I can feel myself getting angry again. I’m not sure at whom. I’ve been angry for so long it’s like a reflex now.
When Jen stands up in the tub, I watch the water cascade down her back. It’s a sight to behold, and one I can’t recall seeing before. We must have taken baths together, but I guess there’s always something new to see. Back in our bedroom, she collapses onto the bed, wrapped in a towel. “Judd.”
“Yes.”
“Will you lie with me?”
This is my bedroom. This is my bed. This is my wife. When I was a kid, I would flex my eyeballs to make everything go blurry. If I can just do that with my brain for a little while, flex until certain thoughts become blurred, this can be my life again. I strip off the sheets on my side of the bed and lie down on the bare mattress. Jen watches me and understands, then turns away, pulling my arms around her, wearing me like a cape.
“Do you think it can ever be the same?” she says. She is fading, her voice thinning out like the voice of a little girl.
“I don’t know.”
“Or maybe not the same. Something different, but good.”
“Maybe.”
She sighs and then shudders, pressing her back against my front as her breathing slows. I press my lips to her bare shoulder and take in the familiar smell of her. I slide my hands over her chest and then down past her navel, to where her belly is hardening, just above her groin. She takes my hands and slides them down a bit lower, just above the pelvic bone, pressing them into one spot on her belly then another.
“There she is,” she whispers. She leans her head back, her cheek lightly brushing mine.
“She?”
“Yes. It’s a girl.”
There is no reason I can think of that this should make me cry. Jen rolls over and wraps her arms around me, her damp
hair falling over my face like a tent, and she rocks me back and forth, exactly like Mom will tell her not to rock the baby, or she’ll be rocking her to sleep until she’s five years old. She kisses my eyes. My cheek. My chin. My mouth, softly and with great tenderness. I can taste my tears on her lips. Sleep falls down on us like a heavy curtain.
4:40 p.m.
I WAKE UP with a start. The room is bathed in dusky shadows, and I am momentarily disoriented. I take a minute to sift through the facts and determine which are real and which the residue of dreams. I am in my house, in my bed, with Jen sleeping beside me. Just like that, the nightmare is over, the curse broken. Jen is snoring lightly. She never believed me that she snored, and I always threatened to record her, but, of course, never did. It was one of those playful arguments that we would carry with us unresolved into old age. I look up at the familiar brown swirl of water damage on the ceiling. If it is possible to feel affection for water damage, then that’s what I feel for that little brown swirl.
Jen’s towel has come unraveled in her sleep, and a lone breast peeks out like a sentry, standing guard. I run my finger gently across her collarbone, around her shoulder, and down her arm. The years fall away from her in her sleep, her brow smooth, her mouth slightly open, like a little girl watching a magic trick. I have loved her for so long. Our past trails behind us like a comet’s tail, the future stretched out before us like the universe. Things happen. People get lost and love breaks.
I want to forgive her, and I think I can, but it’s not like issuing a certificate. I’ll have to keep forgiving her until it takes, and knowing me and knowing her, that’s not always going to come easy. But at this moment, as she lies beside me, growing our baby girl inside of her, I can forgive her. I lean down to kiss her on the spot where her cheekbone meets her temple and let my lips rest there for a moment, inhaling the clean smell of her scalp. Then I whisper to her, my lips grazing the soft flesh of her earlobe. I hover in the doorway like a ghost, half-lit by the hallway lights, watching her sleep. Then I’m running, down the hall and then the stairs, which creak in all the familiar spots, and out the front door, where the cool evening air fills my nostrils like a drug.
Chapter 47
6:30 p.m.
Phillip is up on the roof. Not on the wide area we sometimes sit on, but on the topmost gable above the attic, perched like a gargoyle. There’s a black Town Car parked in the driveway, its trunk open like a gaping mouth. A portly driver in a black suit leans against the car having a smoke. I jump out of my car and join Paul, Alice, Horry, and Wendy at the edge of the lawn. Serena, slung over Wendy’s shoulder, sucks happily on a pacifier. Tracy stands in the middle of the lawn, looking up at Phillip.
“Please get down!” she calls up to him. “You’ll kill yourself!”
“That’s the general idea,” Phillip shouts back. He stands up, one foot on either side of the gable, and spreads his arms out for balance. “Send the limo away.”
“What’s going on?” I say.
“Phillip proposed to Tracy,” Wendy says. “In front of us all.”
“And what did Tracy say?”
Wendy smirks at me. “Where have you been?”
“I went to see Jen.”
“Really? How’d that go?”
I look up at Phillip, trembling on the roof, arms spread like Christ. “Everything’s relative, I guess.”
“He’s taking it like a man,” Paul says.
“I swear to God, if you get in that car I’ll jump!”
Tracy turns to us. “You don’t think he’d really jump, do you?”
Wendy looks up at Phillip and shakes her head. “Only one way to find out, I guess.”
“I love you!” Phillip shouts.
“You’re being childish and manipulative!”
“Whatever works.”
Mom and Linda come running up from across the street. “What in the world is going on?” Linda says.
“Tracy’s not going to marry Phillip,” I say.
“Tracy’s not a fool,” Mom says. She steps out onto the lawn and faces Tracy. “There’s only one way to treat a tantrum and that is to ignore it.”
“Ignore it?”
“Yes.”
“But he’s not a four-year-old.”
“Honey, we’re all four-year-olds.”
Tracy appears conflicted. “What if he jumps?”
“Then I’ll have to rethink my thesis.”
Tracy looks at Mom for a long moment, her eyes growing wet. “You must think I’m such an idiot.”
Mom looks at her with great tenderness. “You’re no idiot. You’re not the first woman who wanted to believe in Phillip. But you’re far and away the best one, and I’m very sorry to see you go.” She steps forward and pulls Tracy into a warm hug.
“What’s going on?” Phillip shouts from above.
Tracy looks up to him. “I’m going to leave now.”
“Please don’t.”
Tracy turns to us and smiles. “Well, it was very nice to have met you all. I’m very sorry if my being here caused any problems.” She steps over to me and gives me a hug. “Let me know how it all turns out,” she whispers.
“Don’t go!” Phillip shouts.
But Tracy goes. She casts a last regretful look back up at Phillip and then climbs gracefully into the car. The driver tosses his cigarette to take her bag and slams the trunk. We watch the car drive slowly down Knob’s End and then turn back to the roof, where Phillip is now sitting dejectedly. “I can’t believe she really left,” he says.
“Will you come down now?” Mom says.
“I guess so.”
But when he stands up to pull his leg back over the gable, his pants catch on one of the snow guards. He loses his footing and slides down the side of the roof, scrambling in vain to grab on to the slate shingles. There is time for him to gasp, “Fuck me!” as he slides down the roof and then over the gutter. He is briefly airborne, arms flailing, before landing hard in the hedges that line the side of the house. We all run around the corner of the house to find him lying flat on his back atop a crushed bush, looking up at the sky like he’s stoned.
“Philly!” Mom shouts, falling to her knees in front of him. “Don’t try to move.”
“You ever notice how much closer the sky looks when you’re lying down?” he says.
“Can you move your legs?” Wendy says.
“If I feel like it.” He closes his eyes for a second. “That really hurt,” he says.
“I’m going to call 911,” Mom says.
He opens his eyes and looks at her. “Mom.”
“Yes, honey.”
“So what, you’re like, a lesbian now?”
7:30 p.m.
MOM WAS TAKING care of Dad around the clock. When the stairs became a problem, they had a hospital bed installed in the den. Mom would put him to sleep and then go upstairs to sleep alone in their bed. She was tired and bereft and so Linda started spending the nights with her. One night, more as a distraction than anything else, Linda confessed to Mom that she’d had numerous female lovers in the years since her husband had died. Mom had never kissed another woman, a fact of which she was instantly ashamed. What kind of celebrity shrink hasn’t experimented? She owed it to her readers. “We were both sad and lonely and sexually deprived, and within minutes we were making out like a couple of high school kids.”
No one really wants to hear the detailed story of how their mother became a lesbian, do they? That’s not bigotry. I never wanted to hear the details of her heterosexual sex life either. But Mom is ready to unload. She perches herself on one fat arm of the leather easy chair in the living room and tells us her story. Linda sits on the other arm, for purposes of symmetry. They have clearly imagined this moment before.
“It started out as something purely surreal and physical.” Mom speaks in her TV voice, like she’s narrating the documentary of her bisexual awakening. “But Linda and I have been so close for so long. It was only natural that a physical relatio
nship would evolve into something more.”
“You make it all sound so perfectly normal,” Paul says.
“Well, yes. That’s how it felt, I suppose.”
“Except for the part where you were cheating on your dying husband.”
“Paul,” Alice says.
“No, it’s okay,” Mom says. “He knew.”
“Dad knew?” I say.
“Your father was a very enlightened man, sexually speaking.”
“Our father?” Phillip.
“Let me tell you a story about your father.”
“Please don’t.” Wendy.
Linda clears her throat. “Your father was always so good to Horry and me. He accepted us as family, he took care of our finances. When Horry was injured, and I was paying for all of his care, your father made our mortgage payments for a full year, so we wouldn’t lose the house. I would never have betrayed him. Hillary was the love of his life, and he died knowing she wouldn’t be alone. He told me that many times toward the end.”
“So Dad was cool with it,” Phillip says.
“He said he’d always sensed something there,” Mom says.
“So why didn’t you tell us?” I say. “You’ve always been so open about your sex life.”
“I didn’t want to complicate your grief. Mort was a generous and loving husband. He was a good father to all of you. He deserved to be mourned without any distractions.”
Something occurs to me. “It wasn’t Dad who wanted us to sit shiva, was it?”
Mom blushes and looks down at her lap. “Smart boy.”
There are exclamations and groans of dismay from my siblings.
“Oh, come on!” Mom says. “You knew how your father felt about religion. Or, rather, didn’t feel. I’m just surprised you all went along with it for so long.”
“We thought it was his dying request!” Paul says. “Jesus Christ, Mom! What were you thinking?”
“Do you have any idea how hard it is to get the four of you to stay in the same place for more than a few hours? My husband, your father, had died. I needed you. And you needed each other, even if you still don’t know it.”
This Is Where I Leave You: A Novel Page 27