Plan B: A Novel

by Jonathan Tropper

  We all headed back toward our bedrooms, but I turned around one last time. “Jack?”

  “What?”

  “Did you get my letter?”

  “Fuck you, Ben!” he yelled, punching the door with what sounded like bare knuckles.

  “Ouch,” I said. “That had to hurt.” I turned around and went back to bed.

  I awoke again at 10:30 and gazed out my window. The trees surrounding the lake were a patchwork quilt of harvest colors, their yellows, oranges, and reds magnificently reflected in the pristine surface of the lake. For a few minutes I just sat up in my bed and watched a group of birds bathing on the near side of the lake, reflecting on how romantic and satisfying the view would be if there was a warm body tucked into the blanket with me. Now it just left me feeling like the sheets beside me, cold and empty.

  There was a knock on my door and then Alison stepped in. “You up?”

  “Yep.”

  “We’re having breakfast.”

  “Sounds like a plan.” I pulled the blanket off and rolled out of bed for the second time that morning. “He quieted down, huh?”

  “I think he screamed himself hoarse,” she said. “Is that a Darth Vader mask?”

  “What? Oh, yes. It is.” I had left it sitting on the night table. Alison looked at me questioningly. “I’m not sure why I packed it,” I confessed. “I thought it might come in handy.”

  “You never know,” she said.

  Here’s how we got the food to Jack. Alison made him scrambled eggs and ketchup on toast, which we put on a plate and into a ziplocked bag. We poured his orange juice into a Tupperware cup with a removable lid, and some coffee into a car mug with a lid that said Mystic Aquarium and had a picture of two dolphins in midleap on the side. All of this we placed onto a tray, which Chuck and I carried quietly up the stairs, tiptoeing until we were directly in front of the study door. I bent down and peeked through the keyhole, hoping that the mild groan in the floorboards would be muffled by the carpeting.

  Jack was pacing the room like a caged animal, back and forth relentlessly. He was fairly close to the door, so all I could see was the area between his knees and his navel, but his body language was full of angry energy. I held up my left hand to signal Chuck, while silently inserting the key with my right. My heart sped up as I held my breath, concentrating on being completely silent. Chuck crouched before me, leaning in to where the door would open. When Jack turned around and headed toward the back of the room again, I dropped my left hand and in one quick motion turned the lock and pushed open the door, without letting go of the doorknob. Chuck instantly tossed the tray inside, its contents bouncing off of it as it hit the floor. I had time to see Jack spin around in surprise, his eyes raging under a tangled mane of dirty blond locks, and then, as he leapt forward, I slammed the door shut and turned the key. The knob shook in my hands as his body hit the door the instant it closed, and the key was knocked out of the hole and onto the carpet.

  “Ben!” Jack yelled, banging on the door in frustration. “Let me out of here!”

  “Shut up and eat your breakfast, Jack,” Chuck called back pleasantly.

  “You guys are going to go to jail for this!” Jack shouted. “I swear, I’ll make you pay.” He gave the door a final, resounding kick and then after a little while we heard him bend down to pick up the food.

  “How’d it go?” Lindsey asked when we returned.

  “No problem,” Chuck said.

  “He really sounds insane,” I said, somewhat shaken by the intensity of Jack’s rage.

  “He’s going through withdrawal,” Chuck said. “He’s used to jump starting his day with coke. He’s panicking now, wondering how he’s going to get some.”

  “Panicking?” Alison asked.

  “Imagine if you woke up one morning and found that your lungs could only get half the oxygen they were used to,” Chuck said.

  “It’s really like that?”

  “I don’t know from experience, but I’ve met my share of addicts in the ER, and they’ll do pretty much anything to get ahold of some drugs. They’re surprisingly resourceful. You get junkies who have run out of drugs cutting off their ears or driving nails into their hands just to get some prescription painkillers.”

  “Jesus!” Lindsey said. “I think you can spare us the details.”

  “Okay,” Chuck agreed, biting into an English muffin. “But I just wanted to prepare you.”

  “For what?”

  “When he’s done going crazy, that’s when it will really begin.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “He hasn’t had time to think yet. He’s too panicked,” Chuck said. “Once he calms down and assesses his situation, he’ll start making his escape plans.” He swallowed and looked around at us. “That’s when things will really get hairy.”

  “I’m still at that age where people say ‘she hasn’t gotten married yet,’ ” Lindsey said to me later that day. We were driving Alison’s Beamer into town to buy additional Tupperware for feeding Jack. We were on a two-lane blacktop that wound its way through the forest for about eight miles before it hooked up with Route 57, the main artery through Carmelina.

  “You’re only thirty,” I said.

  “I know. But I think it’s time I started acting my age. Get back into teaching or something. Stop being so damn flighty. People might still be able to say ‘she hasn’t married yet,’ but at some point in your thirties you cross some invisible line and then they start saying ‘she never got married.’ ”

  “I’m guessing you’re not just concerned with the semantics.”

  “No.” She was quiet for a minute. She breathed against the car window and began doodling with her fingernail in the fog her breath had created. “I want a family someday,” she said quietly.

  “What’s bugging you?” I asked, the car’s tires stirring up a patter of loose gravel as I swung onto Route 57.

  “Nothing. I don’t know,” she said, running her middle and ring fingers through her hair in a gesture that was so familiar it brought a lump to my throat. “I don’t have a career, I don’t have a family, and I don’t know what to do next. I’ve been so determined to escape anything permanent, and now I just feel like I’m nowhere. And what if that’s the permanent thing by default?”

  “That would suck.”

  “Thanks for your support,” she said wryly.

  On the side of the road an old man sat smoking a pipe next to a set of tables stacked with pumpkins. He wore a hooded sweatshirt under his plaid flannel shirt and the wooden sign behind him said, “5 days till Halloween.” I saw that the “5” was on a removable slat, like those old scoreboards we had in Little League.

  “We’re all nowhere,” I said, watching the pumpkin man recede in my rearview mirror.

  “No,” she disagreed. “You’re working as a writer, Jack’s a famous actor, Chuck’s a surgeon, for god’s sake. Alison’s a successful lawyer . . .”

  “Chuck’s incapable of a serious relationship,” I said. “Alison has not gotten anywhere with anyone she dates because she’s still hung up on Jack. We all know how great Jack’s doing. And I’m divorced, dissatisfied with my job, and haven’t gotten one step closer to finishing a novel than I was when I got married. Thanks, now you’ve got me depressed.”

  “You already were,” Lindsey said, smiling.

  I said, “I guess one of the drawbacks to doing nothing with your life is that you’re never quite sure when you’ve accomplished it.”

  Lindsey’s smiled turned sad. “It’s like we all set out so determined, so sure of our direction, and now we’ve gotten lost, and we’re just wandering around in circles,” she said, unclasping her seat belt as I pulled into the parking lot at Edward’s. “We’re all in this rut, you know?”

  “The only difference between a rut and a grave is depth,” I said.

  “Jesus, that’s grim.”

  “I just mean that we don’t have forever to work everything out anymore,” I said. “
Sometimes I think to myself that I’m not lost, just behind schedule, you know? And then I feel this horrible pressure to catch up, but I don’t even know the first step to take. Maybe that’s why I rushed into a marriage.” I turned to look at her. “I’m thirty years old. Shit. By now I was supposed to have at least one novel published. I was supposed to have a wife and a kid and house somewhere quiet, where you can hear the crickets at night. Somewhere out there is this whole other life that I’m supposed to be leading, and I just can’t seem to find it.”

  “When you’re in college you’re just so sure that the future is going to unfold exactly how you want it to,” Lindsey said.

  “I know.” I thought about if for a second. “The future just isn’t what it used to be.” She giggled.

  “You laugh,” I said. “But it’s true. Nothing has gone according to plan.”

  “You know how to make god laugh?” Lindsey asked me as we got out of the car.

  “How?”

  “Make a plan,” she said.

  Carmelina’s town center was basically two streets, Main and Maple that intersected at a cobblestone roundabout, the center of which had been turned into a small park with benches and a greenish copper sculpture of a Union soldier on horseback. Unlike Catskills towns further north like Roscoe or Monticello, Carmelina was not strictly a working-class town that relied on industry built around its “summer people” to see it through the grim winters. The town was close enough to the city to attract a significant population of middle-class families who lived there year-round. As a result, Carmelina’s business district had a rustic, country feel without being at all decrepit. The streets were lined with a charming assortment of mom-and-pop stores with names like Curly’s Comics, Parker’s Five and Dime, the Carmelina Fudge Factory, Kids’ Threads, the Itty Bitty Gift Shop, Rich’s Hardware, Paperbacks Plus, and Mane Tamers Hair Salon. If you were looking for a Banana Republic or a T.C.B.Y. or a Sam Goody you’d have to drive back down Route 17 another thirty miles to the Middletown Mall.

  It was the late afternoon shopping hour on Main Street, which meant that there were maybe thirty or so people on the streets, mostly mothers with small children and elderly couples. Everyone we passed either said hello or smiled a greeting, which reassured you that you actually had mass and took up space. It was a far cry from Manhattan, where a packed subway car could easily make you wonder whether you even existed.

  “It’s like a movie town,” Lindsey observed, looping her arm through mine. “It feels like the opening scene of a Christmas movie.” We strolled around for a little while, looking at the stores (Cora’s Collectibles, Fat Man’s Ice Cream Shop) and I enjoyed the sensation that, to all of the people we passed, we were just another couple. The small simplicity of the town generated a reality where the twisted nature of my current state of affairs couldn’t exist. For this moment in time, we were a couple. I brought my elbow into my side, pulling Lindsey closer to me as we strolled down the sidewalk. She didn’t pull away, and a quick, sideways glance showed the hint of an amused smile at the corner of her mouth.

  Lindsey felt like walking, so we followed Main Street out of the business district, where it curved around a dried-up corn field and out of sight. The sidewalk disappeared and you could feel the real estate prices falling with each bend in the road. The houses we passed were single-story, prefab units, the kind that got delivered via the interstate by large flatbeds with flashing lights and “wide load” warning signs. Every driveway either had a pickup truck parked in it or oil stains to mark where one would be returning later in the day. The men driving those trucks would have hard expressions and callused, grease-stained hands. The kind of men who, by their rugged natures, made city slickers like me feel weak and unmanly.

  “Did you notice any train tracks?” I asked Lindsey.

  “No, why?”

  “Because we somehow crossed over to the wrong side of them.”

  “It may be Carmelina, but it’s still the Catskills,” she said. I noticed that she was no longer holding on to my arm and wondered if that was unintentional or if she’d deliberately retracted it.

  “I can’t remember the last time we were alone like this,” I said, which was my own uniquely nerveless way of broaching the whole general topic.

  She frowned at me, confirming too late that the wiser course would have been to not say anything. “I’m sure that you can,” she said, some sarcasm creeping into her tone.

  The smart thing to do right then would have been to shut my mouth and keep walking, leaving the awkward moment behind, so I stopped and said, “What just happened?”

  She turned to face me, her expression dark. “How about we just don’t go there right now, okay?”

  “Go where?” I asked.

  She shot me a look. “You know damn well where. You always have to bring up the past. You can never leave well enough alone.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Your lack of judgment, I suppose.”

  “No, I mean why do you think that?” I said, trying not to sound defensive. “I wasn’t trying to bring anything up.”

  “Yes,” she said angrily. “You were. You can’t tolerate a single unexamined moment.”

  I must have looked pretty miserable, because her expression softened and she stepped closer to me, putting her hands on my shoulders. “Listen,” she said. “I’m really glad we’re spending time together now. I’ve missed talking to you terribly. But don’t complicate things by dredging up old issues. You’re not going to find any answers there.”

  We looked at each other for a minute. “Okay,” I finally said, more by way of concession than agreement. I felt something inside my chest, warm and quivering, slowly deflate. It was absolutely ridiculous for me to be feeling heartbroken here, over this, but there it was. “I’m sorry.”

  “Forgiven,” she said with a smile. She gave me a short hug, during which I thankfully resisted the urge to nuzzle her hair and kiss her. “Can’t we just spend time together without complicating everything?”

  “Sure,” I said, knowing that it already was complicated. The damage was done. I’d forced the issue and been deftly shot down. I’d been kidding myself to think it might have been otherwise. Lindsey had hugged me and let it go, but the words were out there, a barrier that I’d unwittingly forced her to put up between us. The “just friends” speech at age thirty. A new and profound low.

  “Come on,” she said, turning around. “Let’s head back.” We turned and began walking into town. A growing rumbling behind us gradually turned into a roar, as a scary looking bearded guy shot by us on a Harley. The back of his T-shirt said, “If you can read this, then the bitch fell off,” which normally would have been kind of funny, but I was all out of laughs for the moment.

  We went into Parker’s Five and Dime, kind of an everything store, and bought out the Tupperware section. The burly, middle-aged man behind the counter, whose name was almost certainly Parker, rang up our purchases on an antique cash register, the kind where a red sign that says “Sold” pops up when the final sum appears in the little window. “How are you today?” he said, bagging the plastic containers.

  “Never better,” I lied.

  We drove home in silence, Lindsey looking out the window and humming softly while I dejectedly contemplated the order of things. The ink was still drying on my divorce, but all of my regret seemed to be directed at a breakup that had happened over five years ago. It occurred to me that there might be a peculiar balance to what I was feeling now. When Lindsey left me, I channeled all the feelings I had for her into Sarah, and now that Sarah was gone, those feelings were free to return to their point of origin. Then again, I might have been transferring my anguish over the divorce onto Lindsey simply because she was there. Less likely, but not impossible. I stole a quick glance at Lindsey, who thought I tended to complicate things. I remembered a literary anecdote about Kurt Vonnegut. When a visitor expressed surprise at his rather untidy office, he pointed to his head and said
, “You think that’s messy, you should see what it’s like in here.”

  When we got back to the house Alison was sitting at the kitchen table, eating Ben and Jerry’s Cookies and Cream out of the container and looking distraught. The Indigo Girls were playing on the stereo in the living room, but as far as I could tell that had nothing to do with it.

  “He hasn’t made a sound all afternoon,” she said. “I’ve tried to talk to him, but he doesn’t respond.”

  “He’s either pissed or sleeping,” I said.

  “This isn’t how I thought it would be,” she said dejectedly. “I thought we’d be able to keep him company, to talk him through it. He’s so alone in there.”

  “It’s just the first day,” Lindsey said. “We’re in this for the long haul, don’t forget. Things will change.”

  “I guess,” Alison said, sounding unconvinced.

  “Where’s Chuck?” I asked.

  “He rented a car and drove back to New York to get his nose taken care of and arrange for someone to cover his patients. He’ll be back late tonight or early tomorrow morning.” She stood up and returned the ice cream to the freezer. “I also checked my messages at home,” she said slowly.

  “Yeah?”

  “There was one from Paul Seward. He wanted to know if I’d heard from Jack in the last day or two.”

  “It begins,” Lindsey said dramatically.

  “I figure we’ll just ignore him,” Alison said.

  “Maybe, for now,” I said. “Right now he’ll probably just wait for Jack to resurface. Seward probably figures he went on a bender.”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time,” Lindsey said.

  “I think they start preproduction on Blue Angel II next week,” Alison said. “Seward will be frantic if he hasn’t heard from Jack.”

  “Not as frantic as the producers and director will be when Jack doesn’t show up,” Lindsey said. “And given Jack’s recent publicity, they’ll instantly assume the worst.”