Джонатан Троппер - This Is Where I Leave You

“So she says. Quite the firm grip, too.”

“She’s with Phillip.”

“Oh. I won’t get too attached, then.”

“Don’t do that.”

“What?”

“Make fun of my family like you’re still a part of it.”

Jen looks stung. It’s a good look for her. “Fair enough.”

We stand there watching Tracy’s rising ass as she descends into her Downward-Facing Dog, out of things to say. We are going to be parents. I’m going to be a father. I wonder if Wade will be in the delivery room, holding her hand while I sit off to the side like a spectator, waiting for my child to emerge from the spread legs that got us into this mess in the first place.

Phillip comes ambling out a moment later, in gym shorts and a tank top. “Namaste,” he says to us with a wink and a little bow.

“Hey, Phillip,” Jen says.

“Jen.” Phillip considers her as he unrolls his yoga mat next to Tracy’s. “I always suspected there might be something of the heartless slut in you.”

“Takes one to know one, I guess.”

Phillip nods and goes into a loose approximation of Tracy’s pose. “True that. But know this, my profoundly disappointing sister-in-law. Your looks may be a matter of public record, but let’s face it, your hottest years are behind you. As soon as we wrap this shiva, I am going to personally see to it that my brother here gets laid on a nightly basis by women ten years younger than you, ripe young honeys who will make him eternally grateful that you trashed your marriage.”

Before Jen can respond, Tracy abruptly pulls out of her yoga pose and kicks Phillip’s leg out from under him, causing him to fall on his ass.

“Prick!”

She yanks her mat up and storms disgustedly back toward the house while Phillip calls after her. “What the fuck, honey?!” Then, still sprawled on his ass, he turns to us. “She’s usually very congenial. I don’t know what bug crawled up her ass today.”

“That remark about ripe young honeys,” Jen says. “She may have taken that a bit personally.”

“Huh,” Phillip says, considering it. “In retrospect, that was probably insensitive of me.”

“I mean, what is she, fifty?”

“She’s forty-three and that was a cheap shot. I’d expect more, even from an adulteress.” He rolls to his feet. “On the plus side, no yoga this morning.” He reaches into his sock and pulls out a cigarette and lighter.

“You’re not going to go after her?” I say.

“I’m gathering my wits about me,” he says, flipping the cigarette into his mouth. “So, what were you guys talking about?”

“Nothing,” I say.

“I’m pregnant,” Jen says.

Phillip looks at Jen, then looks down at his freshly lit cigarette and pinches it out. “Mazel tov,” he says, smiling widely.

I am going to be a father, just when I’ve lost my own. There are some who would see a certain divine balance in that, one soul departing to make room for another, but I’m not that guy. I don’t believe in God when I’m in trouble, the way so many people do. But at times like this, when the irony seems too cruel and well crafted to be a coincidence, I can see God in the details. Due to some mental hiccup I can’t explain, when I think of God, I picture Hugh Hefner: a thin, angular man with a prominent chin in a maroon smoking jacket. I don’t know where that image came from or why it stuck the way it did. Maybe when I was a kid I was thinking about God and I happened upon a picture of Hef in a magazine and some neurons fired and a permanent association was made. But when your vision of God is America’s horniest senior citizen in his pajamas, it’s probably fair to say that you’re not the kind of guy who sees miracles in the mundane coincidences fate lobs at your unsuspecting head like water balloons from a high terrace.

Ialways imagined I’d be one of those cool dads, the ones you see with long hair and trendy clothing and a leather wrist cuff. One of those guys who change diapers and never yell and buy all the overpriced snacks at the ballpark and carry the kid on their shoulders all the way home. I spent a good deal more time picturing myself as a father than as a husband. I figured I’d be a husband first, and certainly, I imagined what sort of woman I might marry—a smart, sensitive, good-natured lingerie model—but I didn’t picture myself as any particular type of husband. Just me, married, basically. A smarter man might have seen that as cause for concern, a big red flag flapping noisily in the wind.

Looking back, which is what you do when your life goes to shit, often and obsessively—I can’t really say if Jen and I would have made it if we hadn’t lost the baby. I know it’s the zenith of stupidity to count on a baby to save a failing marriage. The kid can’t even burp on his own, and you want him to repair a relationship that you’ve spent years twisting and tying into hard, salt-crusted sailor’s knots. But still, I can’t help wondering if that baby might have saved us, the same way that losing it accelerated our downward spiral into the thorny underbrush of marital decay. Losing him. Not it. “Losing it” is how you’d refer to your virginity or your wallet, but not your baby; even if you never did get to hold him, and smell his scalp, and wipe his white spittle off your shoulder. Yes, it was a boy. Baby Boy Foxman, it said, on his death certificate. He would have had untamable curly hair like me, and maybe Jen’s luminous green eyes, and he and I would have gone to ball games and to the park, and I would have taught him to ride his bike and throw a curveball. I don’t know how to throw a curveball, but you’d better believe I would have learned. And when he got older I’d have taught him to drive, and he wouldn’t have felt the need to rebel, to do hard drugs or mutilate his smooth, handsome face (Jen’s graceful cheekbones, my prominent chin) with studs and bolts, because there’d be nothing to rebel against, but if he had I would have given him his space, and then he’d have come back and we’d have bonded again, maybe over his first-ever beer—and who am I kidding, did I really believe he and his friends weren’t scoring beer already from someone’s older brother? But he was a smart kid with a good head on his shoulders and sometimes kids were going to act out, test their boundaries, but I trusted him to make the right decisions, and he knew he could always come to me, and . . . Damn. I’m off, just like that.

My point is that it would be too easy to say that losing the baby is where we went off the rails. People love to do that, to point to some single phenomenon, assign it all the blame, and wipe the slate clean, like when overeaters sue McDonald’s for making them fat pigs. But the truth is always a lot fuzzier, hiding in soft focus on the periphery. When it comes down to it, you’ve either got the sort of marriage that will withstand trauma, or you don’t. Jen and I had still loved each other, maybe not with the same hormonal ferocity that we did back when we’d first started dating, but no one really stays that way, do they? We still enjoyed each other’s company, had enough in common, found each other suitably attractive. We were content enough on a daily basis. But there was no denying that certain colors had faded and levels had fallen, like when a plane loses one engine but still has another three to carry it across the ocean.

It took a long time for us to finally conceive. Jen had an asymmetrical uterus that only the most nimble of sperm could navigate, but we persevered. When Jen finally got an uncontestable blue line on her home pregnancy test, we did a little dance in the bathroom doorway, Jen waving the pee stick above her head like a lighter at a concert. And for a little while there, it was like new life had been breathed into us. We would stay up late into the night, talking about neighborhoods, and schools, and names, and how we wouldn’t let it change us, while deep down hoping to hell that it would, that this would be the thing that filled the hole left by all the other unnamable things we had somehow lost along the way. We started having sex more frequently, hotter, nastier sex than we’d had in some time, especially in the later months, as the growing mound of her belly compelled us to seek out new positions—sideways from behind, one hand wrapped greedily around Jen’s pornographically engorged breasts, the other sliding down below the wide orb of her distended belly, where she would squeeze it tightly between her thighs and grind against it. I had become increasingly uncomfortable having missionary sex with her, convinced that with every smack of our bellies I could actually feel the baby.