Джонатан Троппер - This Is Where I Leave You

“Nothing,” Phillip says. “It was a false alarm.”

“Look at the three of you!”

“You guys smell like a dorm room,” Wendy says, wrinkling up her nose.

“You got high at temple?” Mom says, outraged.

“Of course not.” Paul.

“No.” Me.

“Who’s hungry?” Phillip.

In the distance, we can hear the wail of the fire trucks.

“Ah, shit,” Paul says.

Mom leans against a car, exasperated. “I blame myself.”

“That’s a relief,” I say. “Now can we get out of here?”

But just then Boner emerges from the crowd and comes striding purposefully over to us, brow furrowed, face flushed with anger. “What the hell, Paul?” he demands.

Paul shrugs. “False alarm, I guess.”

“And you three are the only ones who got wet.”

“It’s been that kind of week,” I say.

Boner steps right up into Paul’s face. “I smell weed.”

“You would know.”

The two childhood friends stare each other down for a moment and then look away. The rules have changed. Boner sighs. “You guys should get out of here before the cops show up.”

“That’s a great idea,” Wendy says. “Come on, Mom. I’ll drive.”

“Thanks, buddy,” Paul says, smacking Boner’s shoulder.

“Just go.”

“Thanks for everything,” I say, shaking his hand. “Good shabbos.”

“Yeah, thanks, Boner,” Phillip says.

Boner gives Phillip a withering look. “That was the last time you call me Boner, you hear me?”

Phillip looks at me, and I shake my head. Don’t do it.

“I’m sorry, Boner.”

Boner lunges at Phillip, but Paul catches him and turns him around, whispering in his ear, while I drag Phillip toward Mom’s Jeep. “Jesus, Phillip. Grow up, would you?”

“I gotta be me,” he says, snickering.

Wendy looks over the roof of Mom’s car and smiles cheerfully at us. “You guys are so going to hell.”

Iwake up in the basement with a start to find Alice lying on her back beside me, looking up at the ceiling. “He stirs,” she says.

I am momentarily disoriented. The last thing I can remember was coming downstairs to peel off my soaked suit. I haven’t smoked weed in years, and my nap felt as deep as a night’s sleep. “What time is it?”

“It’s just after one.” She turns onto her side to face me, resting her face on her hand. “You’ve been sleeping for almost two hours.”

“Where is everyone?”

“Paul went to work. Everyone else is out at the pool.”

“You’re not.”

“Neither are you.” She stretches a bit, the tops of her breasts rising and spilling out of her low-cut dress.

“What’s going on, Alice?”

“You seem to be staring at my breasts.”

“Your breasts are in my face.”

Alice props herself up on one elbow and pulls slowly at the neckline of her dress, stretching it down until her naked breasts emerge, round and whole. “You always liked my breasts.”

“What’s not to like?” I’m thinking that this is a dream, a strange, twisted, but not altogether unpleasant dream.

“I feel bad about how I reacted when I found out Jen was expecting. I should have been happy for you, and instead I just felt bad for me.”

“A simple apology would have been fine,” I say.

“There’s nothing in the world I want more than to have a baby,” she says. “You know that, right?”

“Yes.”

She moves closer, so that her breasts are now dangerously close. The room starts to spin a little bit. What was in that joint, Dad? “Um, can you put those away?”

“In a minute,” she says. “First I want you to listen to me.”

“Okay.”

Alice takes a deep breath and looks me dead in the eye. “I’ve been trying to get pregnant for almost two years. I don’t ovulate regularly. My cycle never returned to normal when I came off the pill. I take a drug to make me ovulate, and my eggs have tested fine, but Paul won’t get his sperm tested. I was thinking, maybe I would increase the odds and you’d give me some of yours.”

“You want my sperm?”

“Yours seems to have what it takes.”

“What does Paul think about that?”

“Paul will never know. It will be our secret. And you and I will never know if it was yours or Paul’s sperm that did the trick. It’s perfect, really. Any baby that resembles you will resemble Paul.”

“There are so many things wrong with that idea, I don’t even know where to start.”

Alice rolls over, almost onto me, her face hovering inches above mine. “Won’t you help me, Judd? Please? Forget Paul, forget everyone and everything else. We liked each other a lot once; we used to come to this basement and have sex right here where we’re lying now. And maybe we were what we were then so you could help Paul and me with this now.”

“If you and Paul need my sperm, you can have it. But not like this. We can go to a doctor. I mean, Jesus, Alice, look at what you’re doing here.”

She sits up on the bed, flushed and angry. “I’ve been going to doctors for two years, Judd. That’s two years of needles and hormones and specialist after specialist. Do you have any idea how exhausting that is? I’ve been peeing on sticks and crying myself to sleep for two years. All Paul has to do is come home and screw me when I’m ovulating, and half the time he can’t be bothered to do that. He actually smoked weed today.” She starts to cry. “He knew I was ovulating and he came home stoned.”

“Hey, it’ll be okay.” I could never resist a crying girl. I don’t know what that says about me, but it’s probably not something good. I reach out to touch her shoulder, and she takes my hand, cradling it against her breasts, which seem to be drawing all of the light in the dim basement. “Please, Judd,” she whispers. Then, never taking her eyes from mine, she shimmies her way down the bed, dragging the waistband of my boxers down to my knees. Her tears are warm against my thighs. “Please.”

She pulls up her dress, and I catch a glimpse of a dark thatch of pubic hair just before she grabs hold of my shamefully hard cock like a stick shift and straddles me.

“Alice. No.”

And then she slides me into her, and she is drenched in there, probably from all that estrogen she’s taking, and I haven’t had sex in a very long time and as soon as her weight settles on me and she starts to move, I explode inside of her. She squeezes me between her thighs, rocking gently on me, her hand pressed down on my chest for support. After a moment, she tucks her breasts back into her dress and then leans forward to plant a quick, soft kiss on my lips. “Thank you,” she says. “Our little secret.”

Down below, I slide out of her with a soft, guilty plop.

I FALL IN love twice on the way to meeting Jen over at the Marriott for a drink. The first time it’s a girl walking her dog. She’s wearing white shorts and a tank top that hangs just high enough to reveal a tan swatch of flat belly, and she’s got mussed blond hair and great skin, but beyond that, she just seems cool and laid-back; a dog person, but not one of those intense dog people who French-kiss their dogs and have their pictures in their wallets and buy them birthday cards. Her dog is some kind of terrier, and if I asked her, she would tell me that he’s a mutt, and how the minute she saw him at the shelter, she knew she would be taking him home. She’s laughing into her cell phone, nice white teeth, and even though I can’t hear the laugh, I know if I did, I’d like it. She looks like someone who doesn’t sweat the small stuff, who would be happy going for pizza and a movie or just taking a long walk before going home and climbing into bed. The dog will not sleep with us, because the noise of our lovemaking riles him up—she may be just this side of reserved in a crowd, but in bed her sexuality flows uninhibited. And when we’re done, lying sweaty and spent on the damp, twisted wreckage of our sheets, she entertains me with stories of her experimental lesbian phase in college, before padding naked into her studio to work on the latest book cover she’s been commissioned to design, because she’s a much sought-after graphic artist and she has deadlines to meet.