Plan B: A Novel

by Jonathan Tropper

  We all stared at her, stunned by what she had said. I’d always known that Alison was hopelessly hung up on Jack, but it had never occurred to me that she could be experiencing the same combination of disconnection and emptiness closing in on her that I’d been feeling. The sense that time was switching from a jog to a sprint and we weren’t even in the race. My heart went out to her, even while my petty misery retroactively welcomed her company. Until you found your way out of the woods, it was reassuring to find other people lost in them with you.

  “It’s not insane,” Lindsey said to her gently. “We’re all going through the same things. When you’re younger you just take it as a given that certain things will fall into place on their own. Relationships, family, careers, the whole deal. They might not come exactly as you picture them, but they’ll come in some form.” She smiled ruefully. “You just never figure that they might not come at all. And then you hit thirty and . . . shit! You suddenly realize that they’re not necessarily coming and you panic. Or at least, I did.”

  “It’s funny,” I said. “I know I was depressed, feeling like my life was nowhere and everything, but I was completely convinced that you guys were all happy with your lives, and I was the only loser. It’s somewhat comforting to see that you’re all screwed up, too.”

  “I’m so glad the tragicomic opera that is my life could be a source of comfort to you,” Alison said with a quick smirk, and you could feel the pressure around us dissolving.

  “And don’t think I don’t appreciate it,” I said.

  “Excuse me,” Chuck said, stepping fully back onto the rock now. “But is there going to be a bathroom break here? I mean, I enjoy all this sharing and introspection as much as the next whimpering, pathetic loser, but really. There are limits.”

  “Chuck,” Alison said shaking her head sadly. “I’m so sorry about what I said before. Please forgive me, I was totally out of line.”

  Chuck considered her for a moment and then flashed a mischievous grin. “You weren’t out of line,” he said. “This is out of line.” He stepped forward and without any hesitation pushed her into the lake.

  “Chuck!” Lindsey and I shouted in unison.

  Alison came up sputtering as she treaded water, but I saw with relief that she was also laughing. “You had that coming,” Chuck called to her with a smile. “Just a little something to ease the tension.”

  “The tension was already eased,” Lindsey said, still staring incredulously at Alison who was now doing the side stroke in a little circle, still laughing.

  “Don’t fuck me up with details,” Chuck said and then stepped off the rock, landing with a splash in the water near Alison. “Hey,” he shouted up to us. “The water’s really warm. You guys should come in.”

  I looked at Lindsey, who looked back at me with a smile and shrugged. “Let’s go.”

  Lindsey took a running jump, looking like one of those girls in the Mountain Dew commercials, and I gingerly eased myself over the edge of the rock, taking great pains not to stretch or bump my bruised ribs. The water was surprisingly warm, almost room temperature, and we swam in it for a while, joking around and splashing each other. The fall air was much colder than the water, so none of us felt very inclined to get out.

  I’ve got something to say,” Chuck said, while we treaded water lazily in the shadow of the rock. We all looked at him expectantly. “This isn’t easy.”

  “It’s easier when you’re not wearing shoes,” I said.

  “Not swimming, you putz,” he said, splashing me halfheartedly. “You guys were all talking about how you had these secondary reasons for wanting to do this intervention, and I just wanted to tell you all that I had another reason, too.” He paused, but no one said a word. Chuck rarely expressed himself, and we didn’t want to do anything to shake his confidence. He grabbed onto the edge of the rock to stabilize himself before continuing. “You see, I’ve always kind of been the comic relief in our little group here, you know? My love life, my attitude, my language.”

  “Come on, Chuck,” Lindsey said. “You know it’s just friendly teasing.”

  “I know,” Chuck said. “And on a daily basis I never minded it. Hey, I bring it upon myself. But over the years it’s had the cumulative effect of making me feel like none of you takes me too seriously as a person, which pisses me off. It makes me feel that maybe I’m not such a serious person, but I am. I’ve devoted my life to healing people, and I’m good at it, I really am. It’s ironic, because you guys talk about how you haven’t made anything of your lives yet, while I’ve become a surgeon, and yet somehow I’m still the class clown.”

  “Chuck,” Alison said. “It’s not like that.”

  “It is,” he said. “But I don’t blame you guys for it. I’m not blind to my own behavior. If anything, I’m upset with myself. I was the fat kid in high school, and I worked my ass off so that in college I’d be taken seriously. Now here I am, years later, and I still have this uncanny knack for making myself seem comical.”

  “Jesus, Chuck,” I said. “I had no idea you felt this way.”

  “Hey,” he said with a smile. “I’m not crying over it. I know none of you mean any harm by it and like I said, it’s my own doing. I mean hey, look at this right here.” He splashed the water and swam a little backstroke. “I’m asking you to take me seriously while I’m swimming in my clothing.”

  “There is a certain measure of comedy in that,” Lindsey admitted.

  “Is that what you’re doing, Chuck?” Alison asked. “Asking us to take you seriously?”

  He looked at her thoughtfully. “I’m not asking for anything to change. But when we discussed taking Jack up here I thought, now here will be the perfect opportunity to show these guys what I can do, to let you see the doctor side of me for once, instead of just the joker. Like all of you, I wanted to help Jack, but I guess I was also looking for a little respect for myself. For who I am and what I’ve made of myself.”

  He finished speaking and looked around sheepishly. The three of us treaded water in silence. “Will someone please say something,” Chuck said.

  “I never thought you were a joke in high school and I don’t think you’re one now,” I finally said. “It’s just this tone that was set, I don’t even know when. But I know that we never would have tried this without you, because we think of you as our in-house medical expert. We may not discuss it all the time, but we’re all very aware of who you are.”

  “I’m sure I’m not the only one who calls you for free medical advice,” Alison said, and we all smiled.

  “Besides,” Lindsey said, splashing Chuck playfully. “Don’t undervalue comic relief. We do count on you to lighten the mood from time to time. No one’s better at it than you.”

  “Yeah, well I just wanted to say what was on my mind.”

  “I’m glad you did,” Alison said.

  We looked at each other, floating in the lake on the four points of an invisible diamond, and there was a symmetry about us that had been missing since we’d come up to Carmelina. We were all pieces in this complex puzzle, taken apart years ago, and with Chuck’s remarks the old bond was finally excavated and we clicked into our places in the tableau. The knowledge that we’d all felt a need to come together, to regroup and assess the assorted wounds and scars we’d accumulated in the years since college, united us in a shared sense of well-being.

  “We’re like plague beetles,” I said.

  “Come again?” Alison said.

  “I saw it on the Discovery Channel. They’re these beetles who eat leaves, but they have to eat in groups, many beetles to the same leaf. This way, they dilute the poisonous parts of the leaf throughout the group. If one or two of them tried to eat the leaf alone, the poison would kill them. I feel like we each had our own bit of poison we were dealing with, and by coming up here together we were like those beetles, climbing onto the leaf to do it together.”

  Everyone contemplated my analogy for a second or two, and then Chuck said, “Ben, I thi
nk I speak for all of us when I say you’ve got way too much free time. I mean, when the hell do you think this shit up?”

  I splashed him in the face, laughing. “Let’s make a pact,” I said. “We should come up here once a year for a long weekend, to just kind of touch base with each other.”

  “Sounds good to me,” said Alison, gently breaststroking in place.

  “I’m there,” Lindsey said.

  “Okay,” Chuck said. “We have a year to elect the next candidate for an intervention.”

  We laughed. I knew that it was highly unlikely we’d actually keep to the pact, but it felt good to make it anyway. It meant that for now, at least, we were all feeling the same attachment to each other. I became conscious of a gradual throbbing in my side, and realized that my battered torso had had it. With a groan I swam over to the rock and guided myself along its shelf to where I could pull myself out of the water. My soaked clothing weighed me down and I grunted from the effort. “You okay?” Lindsey asked, swimming up behind me.

  “Fine,” I lied, shivering in the cold air. “I could use another codeine fix.”

  “Okay, let’s get out.” She pulled herself easily out onto the rock and turned back to Chuck and Alison. “You guys coming?”

  “In a minute,” Chuck said. “I’m still peeing.”

  “Chuck!” Alison shrieked and quickly swam over to the rock, laughing as she went.

  “Oh, come on,” he called after her. “Don’t even try to tell me that you weren’t doing the same thing!”

  “You know what really bothers me,” Alison said to Lindsey and me, taking a sip from her mug. We’d all showered off the grime from the lake and the three of us were sitting in the living room drinking hot cider while Chuck was upstairs packing. The lake water may have been warm, but the air had been downright frosty as we ran back to the house in our drenched clothing, and we were still coaxing the chill from our bones.

  “What’s that?” Lindsey said, curled up on the couch, inhaling the steam from her cider.

  “Looking back, I can’t even say what it is that attracted me to Jack so strongly. I know it must have been something to keep me going all these years, but when I try to quantify it . . . nothing.”

  “Just cause you can’t articulate it doesn’t mean it isn’t there,” I said.

  “That’s what I tell myself,” Alison said. “Because the alternative is even more pathetic, that I hung onto him blindly, more from inertia than anything else. I mean, I’m a smart person, with friends and a career. I don’t think I suffer from low self-esteem or anything. So why can’t I shake this?”

  “I’ve been asking you that for years,” Lindsey said.

  “And you know what else?” Alison said. “I have this notion that it was all timing. That if I’d met Jack even one semester later, he wouldn’t have had the same effect on me. I don’t know . . . I was going through this whole alienation thing with my sisters right then, feeling like I needed to prove to them how provincial they were. I mean, it was more about me than them, really. I got to NYU and everyone seemed so directed, so committed to pursuing some greater plan, and there I was, raised to think about husbands and families.”

  “Cut to ten years later,” I said. “And look how all of our great plans have turned out.”

  “I know,” she said. “And now, of course, everything I was resisting is what I want more than anything.”

  “I still don’t get how all of that led to Jack,” Lindsey said.

  Alison looked at her with a bemused grin. “If you met my sisters’ husbands, you’d understand. They’re practically interchangeable. Ivy Leaguers, corporate champions, weekend athletes. They even share Knicks season tickets. The truth is, they’re actually great guys. Good fathers, loving husbands. But at the time, I felt that my eyes had been opened to a whole new world, and I was determined to break the mold, to come back with something different. Jack was the antithesis of the man I was expected to bring home, you know? A little wild, a little dangerous, more openly passionate, less refined. When I met him, he was everything I thought I was looking for, wrapped up in this beautiful, sexy package.” She sighed deeply. “I opened myself up to him so completely, just gave myself over to the possibility of him. And now, all these years later, I’m still clinging to that possibility. Like if I can just prove that the girl I was in college was right, it will be this great happy ending and a justification for the last ten years.”

  “And if not?” Lindsey asked.

  “Then I guess I have to face the fact that I’m no longer that misguided kid,” Alison answered. “That now I’m just. . . old.”

  “Do you love him?”

  Alison looked down into her cider. “I do,” she whispered. “Terribly. That’s the problem.”

  “Wow, Alison,” I said, after a moments’ silence. “Who knew you were such a mess?”

  “I know,” she said with a smile. “I hide it well. You know, I saw a shrink for a while.”

  That raised our eyebrows. “No way,” I said.

  “A few years ago. My parents insisted,” she said. “I mean, I was like twenty-seven years old. By that age, all of my sisters already had their first babies. I was way off schedule and they were worried.”

  “How’d that go?” I asked.

  “He asked me out.”

  “He did not!” Lindsey squealed.

  “He did,” Alison said, smiling.

  “This guy knows how you’re hopelessly in love with Jack and he asks you out? There’s a man who likes a challenge.”

  “I know. That’s what I told him when we broke up.”

  “Broke up? You mean you actually dated him?” I asked incredulously as Lindsey snickered.

  “Sure,” Alison said. She was laughing now, too. “He was a good-looking guy, a great listener . . .”

  Lindsey burst out laughing. “I can’t believe you dated your shrink. You, of all people!”

  “How long?” I asked.

  “About two months,” Alison said. “But two intense months.”

  “I’ll bet,” Lindsey said. “Why’d it end?”

  “We had sex once in his office, right there on the leather couch. It was actually pretty hot. But as I was leaving his receptionist handed me my bill and—”

  “Oh god,” I said, now laughing, too.

  “It was pretty strange,” Alison said, grinning. “I was like, I’m paying for this? How desperate am I? That pretty much did it for me. Seeing a shrink shouldn’t make you feel more pathetic than you already are.”

  “Did you pay it?” I asked.

  “Well, that’s what made it worse. My parents were paying for it.”

  Lindsey lost it, almost falling off the couch as she laughed uncontrollably. “Your parents paid for you to have sex!” she stammered. “That’s perfect! I can’t believe you never told me!”

  “It’s nothing I was terribly proud of,” Alison said, demurely sipping at her cider. “It’s a shame though. He was a pretty good guy.”

  “What’s so funny?” Chuck said, coming down the stairs. “What’d I miss?”

  “I was just telling them how I slept with my therapist,” Alison said.

  “Who hasn’t?” Chuck replied, plopping down into an armchair. “Wait a minute. You have a therapist?”

  “Had one,” Alison said.

  “Literally,” I said, prompting another round of chuckles.

  “You also slept with your therapist?” Alison asked Chuck.

  “Sure,” Chuck said. “But does it count if I made the appointment because I’d seen her in the hospital and I wanted to sleep with her?”

  “Judges?” Lindsey said with a flourish.

  “I think that’s a disqualification,” I said.

  “It’s a common syndrome,” Chuck said.

  “Patients falling for their therapists?” I asked.

  “No. Therapists sleeping with their patients. I’ve slept with a few therapists.”

  “It’s kind of an expensive way to meet women
, isn’t it?” Lindsey asked.

  “No more expensive than dating, if you think about it,” Chuck said. “Plus, you don’t have to worry that you’re talking about yourself too much because that’s what you’re supposed to do. And as soon as you want to break things off, you’ve got the perfect excuse. You just say ‘this is wrong. You’re my therapist for god’s sake!’ They feel much too guilty to give you a hard time.”

  “You should really write a book, Chuck,” Lindsey said.

  “Is he serious?” Alison asked, turning to me. “I can never tell.”

  “I’ve known him too long to rule out the possibility.”

  “Speaking of serious,” Chuck said, sitting up in the chair. “I’m going to head home this afternoon. I can’t tell any of you what to do, but there’s plenty of room in my car if any of you want to come.”

  His remark was greeted with a thoughtful silence, as we contemplated what we should do. I’d avoided confronting the issue of going home ever since Chuck had raised it the day Jack disappeared. We’d been in Carmelina for just under a week, but already Manhattan seemed worlds away, and the prospect of going back filled me with a quiet dread. Even though I could picture my apartment and my cubicle at Esquire, I could find no trace of myself at either place. It was like looking at photos in an old scrap book, familiar but no longer relevant. I wondered how long it would take, once I returned, for the emptiness to reclaim me. I thought about Lindsey and the logistics of returning to our respective apartments, mine on the Upper West Side and hers in Soho. After everything we’d been through in the last week, the idea of living separately didn’t make any sense, but moving in together after a week seemed equally irrational. Everything that worked perfectly up in the mountains seemed as if it might not hold up under scrutiny when we got back to the city. Still, we were going to have to go back sooner or later.