Джонатан Троппер - This Is Where I Leave You

Upon top of the house. Looking over miles of roof; slate, concrete, copper, clay, all bathed in the pink glow of the sun rising over Elmsbrook. There’s a bird, maybe a cardinal, maybe a robin, I don’t know, it has a red chest. It’s chirping in the branch of a tree of equally uncertain nomenclature. Elm, or oak, or ash. I think I used to know things like that, the names of birds and trees. Now it feels like I don’t know much about anything. I don’t know why planes fly, and what causes lightning, and what it means to short a stock, and the difference between the Shiites and Sunnis, and who’s slaughtering whom in Darfur, and why the U.S. dollar is so weak, and why the American League is so much better than the National League. I don’t know how Jen and I became strangers in our own marriage, how we let something that should have brought us closer derail us like a couple of amateurs. We were two reasonably smart people in love with each other, and then, one day we were less so, and maybe we were headed here anyway, maybe she just got there first, because she felt the loss of our baby more acutely. For a moment, a feeling circles me, something approaching clarity, maybe even acceptance, but it fails to settle and ultimately dissipates.

I think about Jen. I think about Penny. I could probably have something with Penny, but I’d still be thinking of Jen. I could maybe try to win Jen back, but I’d still be thinking of Wade. And so would she. He’d be a ghost, haunting our bed every time we touched. So what do I do?

There are just too many things I don’t know.

The girl in last night’s movie saw the way the sheepdog trainer carried his injured daughter and she just knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that nothing mattered more than being with him. She knew. But she wasn’t a real person, that girl, she was an actress with an eating disorder who was charged with DUI last year and who slept with her married director just long enough to wreck his life before falling out of love and off the wagon. That’s love in real life: messy and corrupt and completely unreliable. I like Penny, and I still love Jen, and I hate Jen and I couldn’t leave Penny’s sad little apartment fast enough. I want someone who will love me and touch me and understand me and let me take care of them, but beyond that, I don’t know.

I just don’t know.

There’s a scraping sound behind me, and Wendy climbs onto the roof, still groggy with sleep.

“Hey there.”

“Good morning.”

She stands beside me and reaches into the chimney for a second, her hand emerging with a box of Marlboros and a lighter. “Want one?”

“No, thanks.”

“Mind if I do?”

I don’t answer because it wouldn’t matter. You can’t let your dog crap on the sidewalk, but it’s perfectly acceptable to blow carcinogens down other people’s throats. Somewhere along the way, smokers exempted themselves from the social contract.

Wendy lights up, inhaling so deeply that I can picture her lungs inflating and darkening with smoke. “So, Barry’s getting the hell out of Dodge.”

“Where to?”

“Everywhere. California, Chicago, London. His fund took a big hit last year with the whole subprime thing, and I say that with no actual concept of what the whole subprime thing actually is. But apparently everything depends on getting this deal done.”

“Are you worried?”

She shrugs. “It’s Barry. This is what he does. If I worried, that would defeat the whole purpose of being married to him.” She takes another drag on her cigarette. “So, you slept with Jen last night?”

“Penny.”

“Oh! Good for you. Right?”

“I feel like I’ll never be able to have sex with someone new without thinking the whole time about the fact that I’m having sex with someone new.”

Wendy shrugs. “You’ll get over it.”

From below comes the sound of the front door closing, and a moment later Linda crosses the front yard. She stops on the sidewalk and turns her face up to the sky, letting the morning breeze kiss her face, before heading down the block toward her house.

“She’s here early,” Wendy muses.

“She’s here late,” I say.

“Oh,” Wendy says. Then, “Oh! No!”

“Exactly.”

“No way! You think?”

“Nothing surprises me anymore.”

A quiet moment while Wendy processes the new information.

“It kind of makes sense, a little,” she says.

“Kind of.”

“If so, how do we feel about it?”

“We are numb.”

Wendy considers that for a moment, tapping her lip with the end of her cigarette. “Yes. That’s a perfect description of what we are.”

The bird that may or may not be a cardinal or a robin takes flight, swooping down toward the backyard to catch the air pocket that will take her to the next tree. It would be nice to be able to do that, I think. To just pick up from wherever you were that wasn’t working out for you and ride the winds to a better place. I’d be in Australia by now.

“You slept with Horry.”

“He told you?”

“I was up here yesterday morning too. Saw you do the walk of shame.”

She shrugs. “It’s no big deal.”

“It’s adultery.”

Wendy raises her eyebrows at me, biting back whatever it was she was prepared to say, a rare display of restraint. We are perched on a roof and you can’t be too careful.

“Horry is grandfathered in.”

“Is that how it works?”

“That’s how it works.”

“That makes half of your graduating class eligible.”

She laughs and stubs out her cigarette on a roof shingle. “In an alternate universe where Horry didn’t get his brains bashed in, he and I are married. Once in a blue moon I get to visit that universe.”

“And it’s really that simple.”

“My alternate universe, my rules.”

Behind and below us, the back door slams. We turn around to look down into the backyard. Tracy is standing at the head of the pool in a black one-piece bathing suit. Her dive is flawless, her stroke strong and graceful. She swims back and forth with machinelike precision, doing those little somersaults against the wall at each end like she’s in the Olympics. I get tired just looking at her.

“Poor thing,” Wendy says.

Tracy slices through the water like a shark, and Wendy and I watch her from our perch above the world, unaccustomed to such grace and discipline. I think, not for the first time, that she deserves better than Phillip, better than this family of ours. Someone should save her from us while there’s still time.

There are tricks to paying a shiva call. You don’t want to come during off-peak hours, or you risk being the only one there, face-to-face with five surly mourners who, but for your presence, would be off their low chairs, stretching their legs and their compressed spines, taking a bathroom break, or having a snack. Evenings are your safest bet, after seven, when everyone’s eaten and the room is full. Weekday afternoons are a dead zone. Sunday is a crapshoot. Do a drive-by and count the parked cars before you stop. If you’re lucky, there will already be a conversation going on when you come in, so you won’t have to sit there trying to start one of your own. It’s hard to talk to the bereft. You never know what’s off-limits.

And speaking of limits, there apparently aren’t any when it comes to Mom’s slinky wardrobe. The old expression goes, a good speech is like a woman’s skirt: short enough to hold your attention, long enough to cover the subject. Mom’s short denim skirt isn’t a speech, it’s more like a quick, dirty joke, the kind people are always e-mailing to you. And she’s wearing a tight black camisole with spaghetti straps. She looks like a retired stripper.