Джонатан Троппер - This Is Where I Leave You

When we’re done, I roll off of Penny, feeling ridiculously accomplished and wondering how soon I can leave.

“That was nice,” Penny says drowsily, throwing a leg over mine, splaying out her fingers against my chest.

“Okay. Give it to me straight,” I say. “I can take it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Why did my wife need to have sex with someone else?”

“Because she’s an evil bitch.”

“Come on. Really.”

Penny lies back on her pillow and removes her leg from mine. I grab it and put it back. I like it there. “In my limited experience, women rarely leave because the sex is bad. The sex becomes bad because something else has gone wrong.”

“Really?”

“Nah. He probably just has a world-class schlong.”

“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.”

Penny laughs. “Judd Foxman. Naked in my bed. This is beyond surreal.”

“Surreal is my new reality.”

She kisses both my eyes and wraps her arms around me in a way that brings me dangerously close to tears. I should tell her about the baby. It’s on the tip of my tongue.

“Judd Foxman.”

“What?”

“Nothing. I just like to say your name.”

Penny pulls me closer and burrows her head into the hollow of my neck, lazily repeating my name a few more times as she drifts off to sleep. I open my mouth to say any number of things, but in the end I just lie there, telling myself that no one can feel this disconnected forever.

WENDY AND BARRY are standing on the front walk, having an argument. Wendy gesticulates wildly while Barry stands there absorbing it, swatting away gnats as he waits her out. I wonder, as I often do, why they stay together, what it is they offer each other that keeps them locked in this bloodless stalemate. But I suppose if I understood anything about marriage, I’d have understood my own a little bit better.

“I’m sorry, babe, it’s the eleventh hour,” Barry is saying. “I need to be there to close this deal now, or it’s all going to go up in smoke.”

“You’ve had a death in the family. Can’t they understand that?”

“Yes, but I can’t be gone for seven days. They need me there.”

“And what about your family? We need you too.”

“I’m doing this for my family.”

“Right. That old load of crap.”

They fall silent when I step out of the car.

“Where the hell have you been?” Wendy says.

“Clearing my head.”

“You didn’t tell anyone where you were going.”

“There’s actually a good reason for that.”

“What?”

“I didn’t want to.”

Barry snickers. Dumb move. Wendy turns on him with a baleful stare, and I use the distraction to slide past them and into the house.

Mom and Linda are in the living room, playing Scrabble at the coffee table and drinking tea. Paul, Alice, and Tracy are on the couch watching Jon Stewart, while Phillip sits on the floor, thumbing through a shoebox of old photos. They all look up at me. Alice smiles, but I can’t look at her, can’t be anywhere near her. The monitor in the hall is broadcasting Serena’s cries in stereo. No one seems terribly concerned.

“Where have you been?” Mom says.

“Out and about.”

“Don’t be evasive. Just say you’d rather not tell me.”

“I’d rather not tell you.”

“But now you have me curious. Did you see Jen today?”

“Yeah.”

“And . . . ?”

“And now I’m going to bed.”

Alice flashes me a meaningful look, and I try to remember if there’s a lock on the basement door.

“Look at this picture,” Phillip says.

I squat down to see the photo he’s holding. I’m around eleven, Paul twelve, and Phillip is two years old. Paul and I are throwing him to each other, playing catch with our little brother in this very living room, twentysomething years ago. Phillip loved that, would laugh hysterically, his eyes wide with excitement as we launched him airborne at each other. Pay catch, Yudd. Pay catch, Pole. We are all smiling in the picture, three brothers having a grand old time just playing around in the living room, no agendas, no buried resentments or permanent scars. Even under the best of circumstances, there’s just something so damn tragic about growing up.

“Look here,” Phillip says, pointing to the corner of the photo. “In the breakfront.”

The breakfront has two sets of glass doors, behind which Mom keeps her crystal glasses and the good china.

“I don’t see anything.”

“Look at the glass on the last door.”

I stare at the picture and then, just as I’m about to give up, I see it, a reflection in the glass, a face and arms. Dad, watching us from off camera, smiling widely as Phillip flies between us. The breakfront still stands against the living room wall, and I look into the glass doors a moment. When I look back down Phillip is smiling at me.

“I did the same thing.”

“He’s like a ghost,” I say.

“Last night I woke up and thought I saw him walking out of the study,” Phillip says. When Phillip was little, he would put on his toy tool belt and stand beside Dad as he fixed things in the house. “The compressor is shot,” he would repeat solemnly, brimming with self-importance. He was a very cute kid, and I can remember how much we all adored him, how even then, I hated the fact that he had to grow older.

The baby is still crying her little lungs out upstairs. I lean forward to tousle Phillip’s hair. “I’m going to go check on that baby.”

“They’re letting her cry,” Mom says.

“That doesn’t make it right.”

Phillip watches me as I stand back up and head for the stairs.

“Judd.”

“Yeah.”

He grins. “You smell like pussy.”

SERENA STOPS CRYING the instant I pick her up. Her head is bald like an old man’s, with just a ring of dark hair around the perimeter. She feels almost weightless against my chest in her little pink pajamas. “It’s okay,” I say softly, and make other idiotic sounds like you do when you’re holding a baby. Her tiny fingers find my chin and she latches on with a surprisingly strong grip, like my chin will save her life, like my chin is exactly what she was crying out for. I sit down on the bed, cradling her little head against my shoulder, inhaling her sweet baby scent. Someday she’ll get older, and the world will start having its way with her. She’ll throw temper tantrums, she’ll need speech therapy, she’ll grow breasts and have pimples, she’ll fight with her parents, she’ll worry about her weight, she’ll put out, she’ll have her heart broken, she’ll be happy, she’ll be lonely, she’ll be complicated, she’ll be confused, she’ll be depressed, she’ll fall in love and get married, and she’ll have a baby of her own. But right now she is pure and undiminished and beautiful. I lie back on the bed as she sleeps on my chest, listening to her tiny little snores, admiring the soft nub of her unformed nose, the sucking blister on her upturned lip. After a few minutes, when her breathing becomes almost imperceptible, I gently lay her down in the crib and head back downstairs. I crawl under my covers and drift off to sleep, still feeling the warm spot where she lay on my chest.

Dad is bent over me, fixing my wooden leg with a socket wrench. I’m on a chair and he’s on his knees in front of me, turning the wrench and humming Simon and Garfunkel. I’d rather be a hammer than a nail. Yes I would. I can see through his curly, gray hair to where it’s thinning at his pink scalp, can smell the grease on him, can smell the detergent coming off his favorite blue work shirt. The socket wrench clicks noisily as it spins, and I can see the long muscles in his forearms flex and move as he turns it. He has spent his life working with tools, and they fit naturally into his hands. I’m staring down at him, knowing that I can’t tell him that he’s dead, that if I do he’ll disappear. I want him to look up at me, want to see his face, but he is focused on the leg and he doesn’t look up. “Almost there,” he says. Then he puts down the socket wrench and grabs on to my knee with both hands. “Here we go,” he says. He pulls on the prosthesis, which slides off my knee and splits down the middle, and his hands come away with one half of it in each, and there is my real leg again, hairless and pink, but whole and unharmed. Then he looks up at me and smiles widely, like he might have smiled at me when I was a little boy, like he never did once I was older, a warm and loving smile, uncomplicated by my own encroaching manhood, and the love surging between us is electric and palpable. When I wake up I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to escape the dim silence of the basement to find him again, but there’s only darkness and the sad, steady whisper of the central air handler behind the wall, telling its mechanical secrets in the dark.