Джонатан Троппер - This Is Where I Leave You

We should all just face reality and stop taking our meals together.

I’m so sorry about your father,” Jen says to me once the room has cleared out. She moves to hug me, but I step back like she’s contagious. She lowers her hands and nods sadly. She is wearing a navy dress that hangs effortlessly on her, stopping at midthigh. Her perfume reminds me of our bedroom, and it makes me homesick. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Are you seriously asking me that?”

“No, I guess not,” she says. “This must be hard for you.”

“It’s not like he died suddenly. I’ll be fine.”

“When will you be coming home?”

“I don’t have a home.”

“I mean, when will you be back in Kingston?”

“In about a week.”

She gives me a funny look. “You’re going to spend a week here? Every time you were here with me, you couldn’t wait to be out that front door.”

“We’re sitting shiva.”

“Oh. I didn’t think—”

“Yeah. Dad wanted it.”

She is momentarily distracted by a half-trashed platter of smoked salmon on the table. “Wow, that really reeks.”

“It’s lox. That’s how it’s supposed to smell.”

“Well, could we go outside for a little bit? I can’t handle the smell of fish ever since . . . you know.”

“I don’t mind it. And you won’t be here for very long anyway.”

“Judd, please. I know it’s a bad time, but I really need to talk to you.”

“What, Jen? What could you possibly have left to tell me? Are you and Wade getting married? Is that it?”

“No. It’s nothing like that.” She is looking around at the discarded food all over the dining room table, the half-eaten bagels and Danishes, the sliced vegetables, the maple syrup and waffle fragments smeared across the tablecloth by Ryan and Cole.

“Good, because, you know, adultery is probably not the best foundation upon which to build a marriage.”

“Oh, crap.”

“What?”

She looks at me and then covers her mouth and bolts from the room.

I find her in the powder room, vomiting into the toilet. When she’s done, she flushes the toilet and sits on the floor with her back against the wall, wiping her mouth with a torn strand of toilet paper. “Jesus, I hate this part,” she says.

She looks up at me, and there’s something in her eyes that I don’t like. When you’ve been married to someone for a while, you occasionally share these brief psychic moments, and right at that instant I know what she’s going to say just before she says it, even while I’m thinking that it can’t possibly be true.

The last time I had sex with Jen, as near as I can figure, was around three months ago. It was exactly the kind of rote, forgettable sex we’d been having at that time, the kind we’d sworn, back in the day, that we would never have. There was nothing technically wrong with it; tumescence and lubrication were both achieved on cue, his-and-hers orgasms distributed on schedule like party favors. It’s just that after you’ve been married for a while, it becomes much harder to lose yourself in sex the way you used to. For one thing, you’ve become a bit too efficient, you’ve learned what works and what doesn’t, and so foreplay, entry, and orgasm can often be condensed into a five-to-seven-minute span. Good sex requires many different things, but in most cases, efficiency isn’t one of them.

Also, when you share all of the administrative headaches of life with someone else, small piles of unaddressed, quotidian resentments build up over time like plaque, lingering on the fringes of your consciousness even as you kiss, lick, and fondle each other. So even as Jen panted in my ear and rocked her hips beneath me, some part of her brain would be consumed with the basement lightbulb she’d been asking me to change for going on a week now, or how I never managed to fully close my dresser drawers in the morning, which didn’t bother me but somehow threatened the delicate balance of her entire universe, or how I considered a cereal bowl washed even if all I did was rinse it with hot water and leave it in the sink, or how I never remembered to give her phone messages from friends who had called while she was out. And as I slid into Jen and felt her long smooth thighs clamp down on my hips, I might be thinking that she’d been a little bitchy tonight, that she had a tendency, at times, to react with a disproportionate amount of bitchiness, which only served to exacerbate things, digging whatever marital hole we were standing in a little deeper. Or maybe I’d be thinking about the latest American Express bill, how Jen had once again exceeded our budget by over a thousand dollars, and how I knew, if confronted, she’d have a rationale for every single line on the statement and then assure me that there had been returns made, that significant credits would appear on the next statement. I already knew from experience that these phantom credits would never materialize, or, if they did, Jen would use them to justify the next bill as well, effectively applying a single month’s credit to two bills. When it came to profligate spending, Jen was a demon accountant, bending the laws of mathematics to her will. And even as she shuddered through her orgasm, Jen might have been thinking about how I couldn’t, for the life of me, get my underwear from my body to the hamper without a stopover on the bedroom floor, or how I wasn’t as warm as I should have been when her mother called, and maybe, as I came (after her—let the record show), I would probably be thinking about how much goddamn time she spent on the phone with her mother and girlfriends every night, or the way she spit large chunks of toothpaste out into the sink and left them there to harden into little winter-fresh slugs that had to be scraped off the porcelain. She couldn’t handle a slightly opened dresser drawer, but a sink full of crusty, expectorated toothpaste was apparently not an issue.

None of this was very serious, obviously, just the minor aches and pains of a living marriage. And every so often we’d get into a fight over something larger, and we’d scream and vent all of our gripes, tears would fall, hurts would be validated, and sex would get good again for a while, passionate and intense, and then the cycle would repeat.

So we lay there fucking through our resentment, our thoughts wandering as we rubbed mechanically against each other—for warmth, or intimacy, or maybe just base gratification, our minds a frenzy of disconnected thoughts and festering gripes, each of us too distracted to realize that the other was equally self-absorbed. And there was no hazy afterglow when we were finished, no lingering in each other’s arms as the sweat slowly dried on our skin; just peeing, washing, and the donning of sleepwear, and then the warm, numbing glow of the television.

So, you’re going to be a father,” Jen says gingerly.

“How is that even possible?”

We are standing on the patio in the backyard, overlooking the pool, which is brimming from yesterday’s rain. Today the skies are clear, and the August sun is burning through what’s left of the morning fog.

“I’m almost three months. Think about it.”

“You can’t possibly know that it’s mine.”

“Yes, I can. Trust me.”

“Trust is not my first impulse when it comes to you.”

“It’s your baby, Judd.”

“Bullshit.”

“It is.”

“You can keep saying that, and I can keep saying ‘bullshit,’ or you can say something else.”

She looks at me for a long moment and then shakes her head, giving in. “It turns out, Wade is sterile.”