Джонатан Троппер - This Is Where I Leave You

Lately, I get inexplicably angry around pretty girls.

The girls around the bar shake themselves lightly in time to the music, pouting the way girls do when they dance, like they’re experts in something we’ll never understand. I need to stop looking at these girls. No good will come from it. You keep looking at girls like this and then one day you catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror behind the bar, and if you’re not yet too old, you’re on the borderline, and the last thing you ever want to be is the old guy in the bar. There’s no dignity in it.

“Isn’t that Horry?” I say, looking over to a corner table. Horry is there, chatting up some hot young thing. I catch his eye and he waves uncertainly. When I look back a few minutes later, he and the girl are gone. I guess I can’t really blame him. I wouldn’t feel comfortable hitting on women in front of the brothers of the married woman I recently slept with. You need GPS to follow the sex lives of this family. I wonder if love is this twisted for everyone or if our family is uniquely talented at making such a mess of it.

Paul slams a dollar bill down on the table. “I’d like to perform a demonstration,” he says. “Phillip. Please go over to the jukebox and choose a song.”

“You get two for a dollar.”

“Then go crazy.”

“Anything in particular you’re in the mood for?”

“Surprise me.”

Phillip hops off his stool and makes his way across the crowded room. “Watch,” Paul says.

“What?”

“He won’t be able to get there and back without touching at least three women.”

There’s a girl at the jukebox, in a little black halter top, her jeans doing that thing where they ride so low on her hips that you wonder what’s holding them up. He leans over and whispers something to her. She looks up at him and laughs. And then she teeters a little bit, maybe because of her high heels, or possibly it’s the free Jell-O shots for women between eight and ten o’clock. I don’t know what makes women teeter. She grabs Phillip’s arm to right herself. It’s simple, effortless even, and the kind of thing that never happens to me. Her fingers continue to clutch his elbow as they chat. How does a simple wisecrack turn into bodily contact?

On his way back he is stopped by two girls who seem to know him. He leans in to accept a kiss from each one, his hands resting lightly on their exposed hips, just above the waist of their jeans, as he chats briefly. He’s about ten feet away from us when he bumps into another girl, graciously guiding her past him with his hand on the small of her back as they trade smiles.

“Four,” Paul says.

“Four what?” Phillip says.

“Nothing.”

Phillip looks mildly irked and then shrugs. When the world is your sexual buffet, you don’t sweat the small stuff. He takes a generous swig of beer. “So, Paul. I think it’s great you and Alice want to have a kid.”

Paul looks up at him and then down at the dwindling foam of his beer. “She’s driving me crazy with it. We’ve burned through our savings on her quest for fertility.”

“I find it interesting that you call it ‘her’ quest and not ‘our’ quest.”

“And I find it interesting that you’re sleeping with a woman in spitting distance of menopause, but I figure that’s your own business.”

Phillip puts down his beer, looking hurt. “You’re an asshole, Paul. You’re an asshole to me, you’re an asshole to Judd. I hope to hell you turn out to be a better father than you are a brother.”

“I’m the lousy brother?” Paul says, raising his voice. “You think it was just Dad who paid to keep you out of jail when you decided to take up marijuana farming? I didn’t take profits for three years so that we could pay off your legal fees. And, Judd? Don’t get me started on you.”

“No need,” I say. “I know all about your great sacrifice. You’ll never let me forget it.”

“What did you just say to me?” Paul says, getting to his feet. His stool clatters to the floor behind him.

I stand up to face him. “It was your own damn fault, Paul. You dragged me to Rusco’s house. I kept telling you I didn’t want to go, but you were going to show everyone what a tough bastard you were. I didn’t ask you to do it, and I’m sick and tired of paying for it. The price is just too damn high.”

“I think we should all just take a beat here,” Phillip says, but it’s too late.

Paul brings his beer mug crashing down on the table. He is seething now, his face red, his fists clenched. Around us, people move away quickly, anticipating a brawl. “I lost my scholarship. I lost everything. You went off to college and never looked back.” He sinks his teeth into every word, and they come out chewed. “And now you want to tell me that you paid a price? You ungrateful prick!”

“You could have gone to college. You chose to stay home and get drunk for two years. Should I have done that with you, pissed away my future out of gratitude?”

“Okay, this is good. We’re all talking here, getting everything out on the table.” Phillip.

The bouncer is suddenly standing behind Paul, giving us a hard look with his one real eye. He’s a retired boxer. There are framed clippings of his fights behind the bar. It’s anyone’s guess what kind of punch the guy might pack today, but he’s got presence, and his expression carries a certain tired wisdom unique to people who have known violence intimately. He places a hand like a meat hook on Paul’s shoulder. “Paul,” he says in a hoarse, surprisingly gentle voice. “You either need to sit down or take this outside.”

Paul nods, still looking at me, and then pats the bouncer’s belly. “It’s fine, Rod. I’m leaving anyway.”

Rod the prizefighter looks pointedly at Phil and then me, visualizing the cataclysmic damage he’ll do to us if it comes to that, before heading back across the bar. Paul throws a few bills down on the table.

“Paul,” I say, feeling remorseful. “I’ve always felt bad about what happened.”

“Just tell me this,” he says, his voice low, his anger spent. “How many surgeries have I had?”

“What?”

“I don’t mean when it happened. I mean since you moved out. How many operations?”

I think about it for a moment. “Three, I guess. Or four if you count the one you had right after I got married. The skin graft thing.”

Paul shakes his head slowly. “Eight.”

“What?”

“I’ve had eight surgeries. Skin and nerve grafts, tissue grafts, surgical pins. And how many times did you visit me in the hospital, or even call the house to see how I was doing?”

“I don’t know. A bunch?”

He holds up two fingers. “Twice. You came to see me twice. That’s it.”

“That can’t be right.”

“It’s not right, but it’s the truth.” He starts heading for the door.

“Paul,” I say. “Wait a minute.”

He turns to face me, and I’m shocked to see a tear running down his cheek. “Going to Rusco’s house was stupid,” he says. “Believe me, I spend time every day wishing I could go back there and stop myself, picturing the world I’d be living in now if I hadn’t gone. But stupid or not, I went there for you. You want to call me a lousy brother? I guess maybe I am. I’ll own up to it. But maybe you are too.”

I sit back on my stool, watching him leave. I should call out to him, stop him, now that we’re finally talking. But we are not a family of communicators. It took five shots and a decade’s worth of repressed anger just to say this much tonight. I’m tapped out, and so is he.

“Well, I think you two had a real breakthrough there,” Phillip says.

“Yeah? Then why do I feel so shitty?”