Джонатан Троппер - This Is Where I Leave You

I’m heading down a wide, carpeted hallway toward the parking lot when my legs give out on me. I stumble against the wall and slide down until I’m sitting on the floor. A group of tuxedoed guys in their early twenties emerge from a conference room, bustling with nervous energy. They pass around a silver flask and smack each other a lot; the groom and his groomsmen. The groom is differentiated with tails and a white tie. He’s in his early twenties, handsome in an almost pretty way, his face scrubbed, his hair gelled. The groomsmen file into another room at the behest of the photographer, who is ready to shoot the wedding party, and for a moment it’s just the groom and me in the hall. Our eyes meet and he smiles a greeting.

“You okay, bro?” he says, brimming with benevolence and goodwill.

“Yeah,” I say. “Good luck.”

“Thanks. I’m going to need it.”

“You have no idea.”

I am not real to him. This is his wedding day, and nothing is real to him. And I am in mourning, and in shock, and he is not real to me. We are ghosts, passing each other in a haunted house, and it’s hard to say who pities whom more. He straightens his tie and heads back into the conference room to record his cocky naïveté for posterity, and I get up on shaky feet and walk out to the parking lot.

I MAKE THE two-hour drive back to Kingston, to the house Jen and I used to share. I let myself in through the front door, like I do from time to time when I know she and Wade aren’t around. If I had a shrink, he would ask me why I feel the need to burglarize my former home, and I would tell him the same thing I’m telling you: I have no idea. I just know that sometimes, without any premeditation, I go there and poke around. Technically, the house is still half-mine, and if Jen truly didn’t want me there, she’d have changed the locks, or at least the alarm code.

I let myself into the front hall, taking note of the mail table that no longer has the picture of Jen and me on it. The kitchen is unchanged, except for the fridge door, which no longer has the pictures of Jen and me at Martha’s Vineyard or the old black and white of me from college that she always loved, sitting on a railing in my Bob Marley hat, smiling at her as she snapped the photo. There are no photos anywhere of her and Wade, which I’d like to read as a sign that she’s not that invested yet, but when you’ve been carrying on a yearlong illicit affair, there just aren’t a lot of photo ops.

I climb the stairs and swing open the door to our bedroom, the scene of the crime. There’s the bed, there’s the reading chair, there’s the dresser, the mirror, nothing to indicate that this was any kind of marital ground zero. I walk over to my old dresser and pull open a random drawer. Inside are a handful of Wade’s boxer shorts and undershirts and a pile of dark socks. The drawer beneath it has a selection of polo shirts and T-shirts. In the closet, there are a few pairs of jeans and two suits. From what I can tell, Wade has moved in the essentials, but not everything. He’s still keeping his own place. I pull out the trousers from his suits and then go into the medicine chest for a pair of tweezers. I grab a six-pack of his beer from the fridge and take it with me to the den, where I watch Mad Max without sound on the plasma television while gently pulling the stitches out of his pant seams, leaving just enough to hold the pants together, so that they won’t fall apart until he moves around in them a little, preferably at work, in front of a large crowd. After I put the pants back, I open the night table drawer. There’s a billfold with a few hundred-dollar bills, a prescription bottle that says naproxen but that I know from past visits contains his Viagra stash, a checkbook, some loose change, receipts, a Sports Illustrated, a cell phone charger, and the spare key to his Maserati. I pocket the Viagra and three hundred dollars.

Down in the basement there’s a carton full of our old photo albums. I pull one out and flip through it. Our trip to the Caribbean a few years ago, in the aftermath of our dead baby; a two-week consolation prize. We splurged on a private villa. There was the beach, a pool, a water slide, and a casino. We made a rule: no talking about the baby, about home, about anything of consequence. We lay on the sand for hours, baking in the sun, staring out at the blue water until we could see it with our eyes closed. We read our novels and retained nothing. The sun turned our brains to Jell-O. Jen bought some new bikinis that showed off her tan and let a fat native woman braid her hair in cornrows like Bo Derek’s. In the evenings, we would have sex before dinner, urgently and desperately, bruising our groins, kissing our lips raw.

There was another couple, Ray and Tina from Chicago, on honeymoon for their second marriage. Ray had a Chrysler dealership. Tina had big hair, a pierced navel, and store-bought fingernails. She’d been his secretary for years. You didn’t need much of an imagination to guess what had ended his first marriage. We all went on a midnight cruise, getting drunk on red rum drinks. There was a reggae band and we tried to dance but it’s hard to dance to reggae unless you’re very stoned. Ray stared at Jen’s tight ass. Tina was shorter and a little bottom heavy, but she had these sexy bee-stung lips and she grazed my arms with her fake nails when she talked. Ray and I got drunk and he confided in me that he’d give anything to have sex with someone who looked like Jen. We joked about swapping for the night. Back in our villa, Jen and I made fun—but not in a mean way—of Ray’s Tom Selleck mustache and thick gold necklace, of Tina’s nails and that she wore heels to the beach.

After they went back to Chicago, we felt the silence between us even more. We read, we swam, we lay out on the beach, watching happier people. I went parasailing one day, and Jen rode in the speedboat, taking pictures of me in the sky. A day later, Jen was bitten by something in the ocean and her knee swelled up like a balloon. By the time we flew home, we could barely look at each other. Was she already seeing him then? Or maybe not yet seeing him, but flirting with him? Already redrafting the boundaries of her life? When, exactly, did she cross that line and stop being mine? The only thing more painful than not knowing would be knowing. Having to go back to every picture in every album and stamp it real or a lie. I don’t have the stomach for it.

In the back of the album there’s a single orphaned photo out of its sleeve, and I recognize it from our honeymoon in Anguilla: Jen in a pool—looking seductively at the camera while, in the background, whitecaps dapple the blue ocean. It’s one of those accidentally perfect pictures you take, when the sun is just where it needs to be, and the focus is perfect, and you’ve caught your subject at her absolute best. I look at the photo for a long time, at Jen when she was still Jen, when we were still us. I put the album back in the box and make it as far as the second stair before turning around and pulling it back out.

Back in the car, I place the photo faceup on the passenger seat, where it stays for the drive back to Elmsbrook. I couldn’t begin to tell you why.

HOME, FOR LACK of a better word, or option. Fireflies flicker and glow in front of my windshield as dusk thickens into another humid summer night on Knob’s End. I can smell barbecue. I follow the sounds of voices around to the backyard. Everyone is gathered on the patio eating, while Barry mans the grill. Wendy is sprawled on a lounge chair with Cole asleep on her chest. Everyone else is at the table, eating burgers and minute steaks, dipping chips and washing them down with Diet Coke. Paul is pitching a wiffle ball to Ryan, who whacks every third pitch or so. Horry plays the field while Phillip stands off to the side, providing the play-by-play through cupped hands. “The pitch . . . Oh, he got a piece of that one, it’s going deep, sending Callen to the warning track. That ball is out of here! Ryan Hollis’s two thousandth career home run. The crowd goes wild. You know he’ll be getting some tonight, Bill . . .”