Джонатан Троппер - This Is Where I Leave You

“I can’t believe you did this,” I heard myself say.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, shivering into her arms.

“Get dressed, and get him out of my house.”

That was the extent of our conversation. Nine years of marriage gone in a heartbeat, and not very much to say about it. I stepped out of the bedroom, slamming the door behind me hard enough to dislodge something in the drywall, which could be heard rattling inside as it fell. I stood in the hall for a moment, shaken and desolate, exhaled a breath I didn’t realize I was holding, and headed downstairs to smash her grandmother’s china to smithereens, which is what I was still doing when the police and the paramedics showed up.

“So what happens now?” Jen said. We were standing in the kitchen, attempting a conversation amidst the copious ruins of the shattered china.

“Shut up.”

“I know this won’t mean anything to you right now, but I am really sorrier than I’ll ever be able to tell you.”

“Stop talking.”

It wasn’t going very well.

“There’s no excuse for what I’ve done. I’d been unhappy for so long, you know, just kind of lost, and—”

“Will you please just shut your goddamn mouth?!” I shouted at her, and she flinched as if she thought I might hit her. Her nose had already swelled considerably and was starting to turn a nasty shade of purple in the spot where Wade’s forehead had smashed it earlier. When word of our troubles spread through the neighborhood, her bruised face would be the subject of tireless speculation among the housewives as they whispered over their nonfat lattes.

I closed my eyes and rubbed my temples. “I’m going to ask you some questions, and I need you to answer them in as few words as possible. Do you understand?”

She nodded.

“How long have you been fucking Wade?”

“Judd—”

“Answer the question!”

“A little over a year.”

You’d have thought, after the events of the last half hour, that I was beyond shocking by now. A little over a year wasn’t a fling, a random sexual indiscretion. It was a relationship. It meant that Jen and Wade had an anniversary. On our first anniversary, we had checked into a bed-and-breakfast in Newport. Jen wore a lavender negligee and I read her this goofy poem that made her cry so that later I could still taste the salt on her cheeks. How had Jen and Wade marked their first anniversary? And, now that you mention it, where did they count from? Their first flirtation? First kiss? First fuck? The first time someone said “I love you”? Jen was both sentimental and meticulous with her calendar and no doubt knew the exact dates of every one of those milestones.

For the last year or so, Jen had been running off at every possible opportunity to have sex with Wade Boulanger, my overly athletic, alpha male boss. It was inconceivable to me, no different than if I’d just found out that she was a serial killer, which would have been preferable actually. I’d have attended the trial, nodded somberly at the guilty verdict, told my story to People magazine, and gone about my business. At least I’d know where I was going to sleep that night.

“A little over a year,” I repeated. “You’re some kind of liar then, huh?”

“I’ve become one, yes.” She held my gaze, almost defiantly.

“Do you love him?”

She looked away.

I wasn’t expecting that, and it hurt.

Jen sighed, a long, dramatic, self-pitying sigh, as I considered the ramifications of slitting her throat with a shard of china. “We had our problems long before things started with Wade.”

“Well, nothing like the ones we’ve got now.”

She may have said something after that, but I had stopped hearing her. There was just the crunch of bone china underfoot as I walked across the kitchen, and the wailing hinge of the front door as I swung it open, and the sudden hiss of expelled air when my body finally remembered to start breathing again.

What the hell happens now?

I sat in my car, still in the driveway, gripping the wheel tight enough to turn my knuckles white, paralyzed with indecision. There is nothing sadder than sitting in a car and having absolutely nowhere to go. Unless, maybe, it’s sitting in a car in the driveway of the home that is suddenly no longer your home. Because, generally, even when you have nowhere to go, you can at least go home. Jen hadn’t just cheated on me, she’d made me homeless. A red-hot rage colored my fear like blood in the water, made me tremble. I wanted to throttle Jen, to feel her windpipe collapse under my thumbs. I wanted to stab Wade with one of those curved knives designed by aboriginal tribes for gutting humans, in through the sternum and up behind the chest plate to puncture vital organs, watch the dark blood, thick with dislodged bits of tissue, gurgle out of his mouth. I wanted to commit a dramatic suicide, drive through a guardrail into the Hudson River, leave Jen paralyzed with a guilt that would haunt her for the rest of her life, like I knew the sight of Wade humping her would now always haunt me. But she’d probably just go back into therapy, maybe even to that shrink she’d left because he made it a practice to hug her tightly after every session, a Freudian copping a feel. He would somehow convince her that she was the victim in all of this, that she owed it to herself to be happy again, and then my death would have been in vain. The best I could hope for was that she’d cheat on Wade by sleeping with her horny therapist, but was it actually cheating if you cheated on your illicit lover? I was new to all of this and didn’t know the bylaws.

In the rearview mirror I could see the front of the house, the bottom corners of the living room picture window, the line where the stone foundation gave way to staggered red bricks. My entire life, the sum total of my existence, was contained behind that wall, and it seemed to me that I should be able to step out of the car, walk through the front door, and simply reclaim it. The door would stick; it always did in the warmer months and needed to be pressed down as the doorknob was turned while you leaned your shoulder into the heavy alder wood. I had the keys right there, jingling against the steering column that I had no idea which way to turn.

What the bloody motherfucking hell happens now?

I checked my watch, the white-gold Rolex Cosmograph Daytona Jen had bought me for my thirtieth birthday. I’d been fine with the Citizen I wore, missed it, actually, when she gave me this bulky piece of showy hardware, but things like that were important to Jen. She’d taken to the suburbs like an actress getting into character for a new role, and she was always determined that we both look the part.

“We could go on a great vacation for what this watch costs,” I’d objected.

“We can go on a great vacation anyway,” she said. “Vacations come and go. A watch like this is an heirloom.”

I was too young to have an heirloom. The word conjured up images of bedridden old men with yellow, calcified toenails and skeletal wrists, wasting away in musty rooms that smelled of Lysol and decay. “It’s five mortgage payments,” I said.

“It’s a gift,” Jen said, getting all snippy like she sometimes did.

“A gift that I paid for.”

I’d been married long enough to know that the remark was wrong and unkind and not remotely constructive, but I said it anyway. I did that sometimes. I couldn’t begin to tell you why. You get married and patterns form. Jen was genetically incapable of rendering any kind of verbal apology. I sometimes said shitty things that I didn’t quite mean. We accepted these foibles in ourselves and in each other, except at the moments they actually surfaced in real time, at which point we had to fight the urge to savagely bludgeon each other.