Джонатан Троппер - This Is Where I Leave You

“I’m fine,” Jen says.

“Good. Good.” He rubs her shoulder lightly and then stops, too aware of me in the room. There’s no choice but to turn and face me.

“Hey, Judd. How’s it going?”

“It’s going swell, Wade.”

There’s a knock on the door, and a bearded doctor enters the room, carrying Jen’s chart.

“Jennifer Foxman?”

“Yes,” she says.

My last name, still attached to her, is a kick in the crotch.

“I’m Doctor Rausch, from ob-gyn.” He turns to Wade. “Mr. Foxman?”

“No,” Wade says.

“I’m Mr. Foxman,” I say.

“Nice to meet you,” Doctor Rausch says perfunctorily, before looking at Wade. “And you are?”

“He’s my wife’s lover.”

“Shit, Judd,” Jen says, covering her eyes. “Not now.”

“Wade Boulanger,” Wade says, extending his hand. “It’s complicated.”

“Not the radio jock.”

“I’m afraid so.”

Doctor Rausch smiles. “My wife hates you.”

“The wives generally do.”

“Not mine, unfortunately,” I say.

Doctor Rausch looks at me like I’m spoiling his good time. “Okay,” he says, pulling some latex gloves out of his pocket. “I’ve got an ulcer and a long shift to get through. Whatever’s going on here, you’re not going to make it my problem. You two can wait outside.”

“But I’m the father,” I say.

“Congratulations. Now get the hell out of my exam room.”

“SO, THIS IS some predicament we find ourselves in,” Wade says.

We are standing against the wall in the crowded waiting room. There is what appears to be an entire Little League team and their parents sitting around, waiting for an injured teammate. Two construction workers prop up a third whose foot is wrapped in a blood-soaked towel. On a small television mounted too high for effective viewing, someone is cooking a soufflé.

“This predicament, as you call it, is my life. My family.”

“Jen is my family too now.”

“Jen is where you’re presently parking your cock.”

“Don’t talk about her like that.”

“I’m not, you dumb shit. I’m talking about you.”

“You don’t know anything about me.”

“I know you’re shooting blanks.”

“Fuck you.”

“Um, excuse me, guys,” one of the Little League dads says, indicating the children present. But this train has already left the station.

“I know you pretty much fuck anyone who will have you. You fuck the interns, you fuck the sales reps, you fuck the sponsors, or, in one case that I know of, the sponsor’s daughter, who at the time was not quite eighteen yet, was she? I know you won’t last with Jen, because the last thing you want is to be saddled with someone else’s kid. I know you’ve been praying for a miscarriage ever since you got the call and that now you’re weighing your options, looking for the fastest way out of this mess. I know you want to think that underneath it all you’re really a decent guy, but you’re not so sure, are you, and for what it’s worth I can pretty much confirm for you that underneath it all, you’re not a decent guy at all. You’re just an empty soul, devoid of any real substance. So you’ll keep getting laid and getting paid to be the voice of the lowest common denominator, until, as inconceivable as it seems, someone even lower then you comes along, and then you’ll get old and obscure, and you’ll die alone.”

It’s safe to say we’ve got everyone’s attention now. The Little League parents are horrified. The kids can barely contain their exhilaration that a grown-up said “fuck” so many times in one sentence. The construction guys are unimpressed.

“You feel better now?” Wade says with a shit-eating grin.

“Not even a little.”

“That’s too bad. It was a good speech.”

“Let’s just not talk, okay? Can we do that?”

“I didn’t turn her, Judd,” Wade says. “I didn’t seduce her or come on to her, or anything.”

“And by not talking I meant exactly what you’re doing right now.”

“She was lonely and angry and lost, and I didn’t do that to her. You did that, all by yourself.”

“And you saw an opening.”

“Yes, I did. I’ll admit it. She’s beautiful, and I’m human. I crossed the line. But I didn’t fuck her any more than she fucked me. It takes two, my friend. And believe me, no one was more surprised than me when it became something more. So you can go on hating me for it; I certainly would if I were you. But she came after me, Judd. Not the other way around. She came after me. You know that’s true, and that’s the thing you can’t get past.”

“That doesn’t make me want you any less dead.”

“Yeah, well, get in line.”

And that’s when I decide to hit him. I’ve already assaulted him twice before, but neither time was really that satisfying. I need the intimacy of direct violence, the blunt force of bone on bone. But moving from conversation to violence is just as hard as moving from flirting to kissing. There’s that leap you have to take, to shed your inhibitions and expose your naked impulses.

This is how I do it. I bridge the distance between us by pointing at him and saying, “You don’t get it, you dumb bastard,” until my finger is inches from his eye. He swats the finger away, as expected, and that’s my trigger. But I’ve used my right hand to point, so it’s my weaker, less reliable left hand that swings around with the punch, and Wade reflexively turns away, so that my fist glances impotently off his goddamn shoulder. “Asshole!” he shouts, and shoves me back against the wall, not attacking back, just kind of getting me off of him. But that’s when Phillip finally shows up, and all Phillip sees is Wade shoving me, so he steps in and coldcocks Wade with a high arcing punch he learned from watching mixed martial arts matches on television. The punch hits Wade in the nose and he goes down hard. Phillip stands over him with one foot on his chest and says, “Call my brother an asshole again.”

A fat security guard materializes and pins Phillip’s arms behind him. A second one comes up behind me, grabbing my arm tightly. “Let’s go,” he says, and they hustle us toward the exit.

“My wife is in there.”

“We’ll deal with it outside.”

It’s raining outside, a hard rain that makes a racket against the fiberglass awning of the emergency room. The guards release us beside a parked ambulance. They hold a quick, whispered conversation, and then one of them heads back inside. The other, a large black man with a shaved head and thirty-inch forearms, turns back to us. “Is that the Man Up guy in there?”

“That’s him,” I say.

“Which one of y’all hit him?”

“Nobody hit him, he just fell,” Phillip says.

The guard smiles widely and extends his hand. “Shake my hand, man. I hate that loudmouth motherfucker.”

Phillip shrugs and shakes his hand. “And if you hadn’t pulled me off of him when you did, I’d have really kicked his ass.”

PHILLIP DOESN’T QUITE remember where he parked, so we get soaked walking around the lot. When he finally locates the Porsche, it’s parked a few cars away from Wade’s silver Maserati, with its MAN UP vanity plate. Before I have time to talk myself out of it, I climb up onto the roof of the car and jump up and down on it, screaming obscenities into the rain like a madman. I jump up and land hard on my knees, feeling the metal crumple satisfyingly beneath me. Phillip pops the trunk of the Porsche and pulls out an L-shaped tire iron. “Here,” he says, tossing it up to me. “Go crazy.”

But I’m suddenly out of steam. I slide down the front windshield and sit on the hood. Phillip joins me, and we sit there in silence for a few seconds as the rain pummels us.