Джонатан Троппер - This Is Where I Leave You

“I believe he had an erection,” Wendy says once he’s gone.

“Oh, stop it. He did not,” Mom says.

“Pushing seventy and he’s still getting it up,” Phillip muses. “The man’s a keeper.”

“You’re all being horrible. You’ve known Peter forever. He’s a fine man.”

“That fine man was hitting on you.” Paul .

“He was totally hitting on you.” Wendy.

“He was most definitely not hitting on me,” Mom says, flushed with pleasure.

Linda sticks her head in from the kitchen. “Is that horny old goat gone yet?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Mom says. “He was being compassionate.”

“Not as compassionate as he’d like, I’m sure.”

“So, he’s lonely. You and I, at least, should be sympathetic,” Mom says. “At our age, loneliness can seem so permanent.”

“Ah . . . Look at all the lonely people,” Phillip sings.

“Well, he might have had the decency to wait until you were through sitting shiva before groping you like that, that’s all.”

“He’s a tactile man. That’s just his way.”

That’s just his way. Jen used to say that. Like the first time she met Wade, at the WIRX holiday party, where he couldn’t seem to stop rubbing her arms and touching her back as they talked. “That’s just his way,” she said, which was how she excused all manner of bad behavior except for mine. Once, when she was pissed at me, I went so far as to try it out as an argument for the defense. “That’s just my way,” I said. She smiled sweetly and told me to fuck off. God, I miss our fights.

Linda is looking at Mom, shaking her head. “You don’t actually believe half the things you say, do you?”

“I don’t know,” Mom says, sitting back in her chair. “I can be pretty convincing.”

The bank teller has a great ass. I know this because she had to get up and go to her boss’s office when I told her I wanted to withdraw sixteen of the just under twenty thousand dollars remaining in mine and Jen’s joint checking account. When she returns, I see that she has nice lips too—full and pouty—and she has a dimple in one cheek, and something about her eyes and the way she chews her gum makes me think she’s a very sexual person. Her name is Marianna, which I know because it’s on the little badge she has affixed just beside her breasts, which aren’t particularly large but come together nicely in her push-up bra to form a perfectly adequate suntanned cleavage in the V-neck of her blouse. My guess is that she didn’t go to college, at least not a four-year college. Probably community college for her associate’s degree, and then right into the bank’s training program. She is the kind of girl who dates the kind of guys who will ultimately screw around on her, guys like her brothers, who work with their hands and drink too many beers while watching football, and have a stupid tattoo of a dragon or the Rolling Stones’ lips on their scapulas, guys upon whom she projects more romance and ambition than is actually there, and then she asks her girlfriends, who are hairdressers and medical technicians and tanning salon clerks and secretaries, why she can’t find a nice guy. And I’m dying to tell her that I’m a nice guy. I’m the last nice guy. And I haven’t been kissed or rubbed in months, and I’m as horny as a high school kid, but I’m also dying to fall in love, and if you let me, I’ll fall in love with you, and cherish you, and listen to your dreams and your hurts and I’ll be faithful and funny and I’ll never forget your birthday or make out with your girlfriend and blame it on too many shots, or come home from guys’ night out drunk and smelling of strippers. That’s what I want to tell her, but instead I say, “Can I have an envelope for that?” and if you want to know where all the good guys are, we’re standing right in front of you, lacking the balls to actually make ourselves heard.

This is something that’s been happening to me more and more lately. The world is suddenly brimming with young, nubile women, and I can’t leave the house without falling in love. I intuit whole personalities from a single smile, live out entire relationships with the woman sitting in the next car at a red light. Legs and lips hypnotize me. I am smitten by skin and breasts and hair, by smiles and frowns, by the freedom of an unhurried gait, the grace of a shrug. I imagine myself not only having sex with these women, but living with them and meeting their parents and sharing the Sunday paper in bed. I am still raw and soft from losing Jen, still missing a level of detachment and discernment, undersexed and lonely and not yet fit for mixed company.

Marianna carefully loads sixteen thousand dollars into a large manila envelope for me, and she has a yellow sunset painted onto the red nail of each ring finger, and her skin is creamy and immaculate, and I know that I will never kiss those plump lips, never see her naked, never even make her smile. We are separated by three inches of bulletproof glass and a million other barriers that I can’t articulate or overcome. So I take my envelope and file away her generic smile for further worthless review. I leave the bank more heartbroken and deflated than when I entered it, and that is saying something.

Wade made it perfectly clear that he wasn’t firing me.

“I want to make this perfectly clear,” he said. “I am not firing you.” It had been six or seven tear-fused panicky days since I’d walked in on him and Jen, days spent curled up in a ball in the Lees’ basement, still ensconced in a hollow daze, alternately enraged, grief-stricken, terrified, and shitfaced.

Wade was sitting behind his large Asian desk in his large corner office. He didn’t need a desk; he did no paperwork. He didn’t need an office either. The running joke was that the sole reason for the office was so that he had a place to screw the hot interns. Ha ha.

He pulled his lips back into a thoughtful grimace, revealing a symmetrical wall of large, bleached white teeth. If you were to draw a caricature of Wade, you would emphasize those supernaturally perfect teeth, his ridiculously broad shoulders, and, of course, his unrepentant cock. “Obviously, this is a very difficult situation. You hate me right now. Of course you do. I’m sure you’d like nothing better than to bludgeon me to death with a blunt instrument. What I did was inexcusable, and I feel terrible about it. I know you probably don’t believe that, but it’s true.”

He smiled sheepishly at me, as if he’d just admitted something mildly embarrassing about himself, like he suffers from constipation or gets regular pedicures. Then he shrugged those broad spherical shoulders that throbbed like organs beneath his expensive dress shirt. I guess I’d always been somewhat envious of Wade’s shoulders, because when you get right down to it, mine are just your basic, stripped-down version, while Wade’s are the fully loaded models that fill a shirt perfectly and look just as good out of one. I could hope they’re obscenely hairy, the way some men’s are, but it would be futile, because Wade is the kind of guy who would never stand for shoulder hair. He’d have it permanently removed by laser, and even though results vary, he’d be the guy for whom it worked. I’d probably get burned or develop a permanent discoloration. This stuff is all preordained.

Like most guys with genetically superior shoulders, Wade was an asshole, an alpha male who asserted his presence physically, through viselike handshakes and powerful backslaps, the kind of guy who needed to win at everything. His tone now was carefully apologetic, conciliatory even, but still, his expression radiated the smug satisfaction of having asserted his sexual dominance. I fucked your woman, his eyes said. Better than you ever could.