Джонатан Троппер - This Is Where I Leave You

A number of the regulars are back, women mostly, friends and neighbors who have to have their morning coffee somewhere anyway, and those husbands who are retired. Peter Applebaum is back again, and you have to admire his tenacity. He’s playing it a bit cooler this time, but he watches Mom intently, waiting for the right moment to pounce. I feel a surge of empathy for him. You can do everything right and still end up alone, watching time run off the clock.

Horry comes by to bring Paul some papers he requested. He shows no ill effects from this morning’s seizure, taking a seat in front of Wendy to talk to her. They run out of conversation pretty quickly, self-conscious around the rest of us, but he makes no move to leave, and she seems happy to have him there.

The women are talking about a dangerous intersection in town. There’s a short light and no left-turn lane, and there was another crash there just last week. Someone should do something about it. This leads to car crash stories, to speeding tickets, to the Paleys’ lawsuit against the city over the maple tree that fell through their roof in the last rainstorm, to the new, ostentatious houses that are being built around the neighborhood in defiance of the zoning laws, to the Elmsbrook courthouse, to the mall they were building behind the courthouse but the project stalled when the bottom fell out of the real estate market and now it’s a hangout for skateboarders and drug dealers, and someone should do something about it. The conversation unfurls through endless random associations, never lingering for very long on any one subject. No one asks questions or really even listens to anyone else, but just waits for them to finish so they can jump in with their own entry to the canon.

And it is right in the middle of this conversational jamboree that Mom suddenly stands up and looks over the crowd of visitors toward the front hall. We follow her gaze to see Linda closing the front door behind her, rubbing her shoes vigorously on the mat. Mom’s smile is small and tentative, completely out of character for her. Linda looks up at Mom and grins a wry apology. Mom moves through the chairs, picking up speed as she goes, hits the hall at a slow jog, and runs into Linda’s arms. They embrace fiercely for a moment and then press their foreheads together, whispering to each other, tears flowing. Mom takes Linda’s face in her hands and, with great tenderness, plants a soft, lingering kiss on her mouth. Then she takes her by the arm and they walk out the front door, leaving the rest of us to figure out how to breathe in a room in which the oxygen supply has suddenly, inexplicably been depleted.

Peter Applebaum is the first to react. He clears his throat and rises to his feet. “Well,” he says. “That was unexpected.” He turns and walks sadly to the door, his head bowed in defeat. He was up for the challenge, maybe even invigorated by it, but this . . . he is too old for this. I get up and catch him at the front door.

“Mr. Applebaum.”

He turns around, surprised. “Peter.”

“Peter. You didn’t need that kind of headache anyway.”

He shakes his head and smiles faintly. “I’m seventy-two years old. I drink my coffee alone every morning, and I fall asleep with the TV on every night.” He smiles. “There are headaches, and there are headaches.”

“There will be other widows. I mean, have you seen some of these husbands?”

He has clear blue eyes and the wry smile of a much younger man. “Your mouth to God’s ear.”

“They’ll be dropping like flies, I’m telling you.”

He laughs a little, then pats my cheek. “Don’t get old, kid. That was where I went wrong.” I watch him as he heads somberly down the street. At seventy-two years old, women can still run roughshod over your heart. That’s something that never occurred to me, and I find it terrifying, but oddly reassuring.

My parents had an active and noisy sex life. Years of Dad’s puttering in our walls had rendered them porous and poorly insulated, and we could hear them, as we lay in our beds at night: the steady bump of their headboard, Dad’s low grunts, Mom’s over-the-top porn star cries. We tuned it out like all the other noises a house makes: the clanging of the old steam radiators, the creak of the stairs, the hum of the refrigerator compressor, the plumbing gurgling in the walls. Dad never talked to us about sex. I guess he figured we’d pick it up through osmosis.

I was six years old when I walked in on them. I had woken up with a headache and padded down the hall to their room, the attached slippers of my pajamas whispering against the wood floor. Mom was on top, her back to me, rocking up and down, and I thought she must be exercising. Sometimes she exercised in front of the television, in tights and leg warmers that made her look like a cat. “I’m trying to look as good as her,” she explained, nodding her head at the woman on the screen, who, like Mom, was on all fours, raising her leg behind her like a dog about to pee.

“She looks like a dog,” I said.

“That’s Jane Fonda, and she is no dog.”

Jane Fonda had her hair piled up in a headband, which made her look like Mrs. Davenport, my kindergarten teacher. Mom, in her high ponytail and sports bra, looked like the genie in I Dream of Jeannie, whom I considered to be the most beautiful woman on the planet and whom I intended to marry one day. We would live in her blue bottle, which would stay on a shelf in Mom’s kitchen, so we could emerge in a funnel of smoke every evening to have dinner with my family. When we were done Jeannie would blink and all the dishes would be done.

“You’re prettier than Jane Fonda,” I told Mom.

“Of course I am, sugar,” she said, grunting as she lifted her leg. “But she has a better butt.”

I laughed at the notion of a better butt. “But no one can see your butt.”

“Women like to have nice butts even if no one sees them.”

“That’s silly.”

“Isn’t it?”

On the TV, Jane lifted her other leg. When it became apparent that she wasn’t going to pee, I lost interest.

Mom was moving up and down on her bed, but there was no Jane Fonda on the television, just a steady panting. Also, she was naked. I looked at her butt and wondered if it was as nice as Jane Fonda’s.

“Mommy?”

When she turned to see me, I saw my father’s disembodied head, crammed awkwardly against the headboard, his hair mussed, his forehead dripping with sweat. He looked like he’d been buried up to his neck in the sand.

“Hey, Judd,” Mom said, still rocking slightly, each breast bouncing lightly to a different rhythm.

“Are you exercising?”

“No, sweetie. We’re making love.”

“Jesus, Hill,” my father said, trying to get her to cover up.

“My head hurts.”

“Okay. Go back to your bed. I’ll bring you some water and a drink in a little while.”

“Can I come in bed with you?”

Dad said, “Jesus Christ,” and pulled up their comforter, while Mom laughed the way she did sometimes at things I didn’t intend to be funny. Normally I didn’t mind—it felt good to make her laugh—but tonight I had a headache and I wasn’t in the mood. So I padded back down the hall to my bed and promptly blocked out the entire event, the way you do.

YOU CAN SEE your parents have sex, you can see your wife in bed with your boss, and still, none of it packs quite the same surreal punch as seeing your mother kiss another woman. Wendy ushers out the shiva callers— “Thank you all for coming. We hope to see you again under happier circumstances” —while Phillip handles the stragglers and those who can’t quite take a hint somewhat less tactfully: “Okay there, Mr. and Mrs. Cooper. Don’t let the door hit you where the good lord split you.” And then it is just us, Wendy, Phillip, Paul, Horry, Alice, Tracy, and me, sitting in the living room, coming to terms with the new reality.