Джонатан Троппер - This Is Where I Leave You

Jen’s towel has come unraveled in her sleep, and a lone breast peeks out like a sentry, standing guard. I run my finger gently across her collarbone, around her shoulder, and down her arm. The years fall away from her in her sleep, her brow smooth, her mouth slightly open, like a little girl watching a magic trick. I have loved her for so long. Our past trails behind us like a comet’s tail, the future stretched out before us like the universe. Things happen. People get lost and love breaks.

I want to forgive her, and I think I can, but it’s not like issuing a certificate. I’ll have to keep forgiving her until it takes, and knowing me and knowing her, that’s not always going to come easy. But at this moment, as she lies beside me, growing our baby girl inside of her, I can forgive her. I lean down to kiss her on the spot where her cheekbone meets her temple and let my lips rest there for a moment, inhaling the clean smell of her scalp. Then I whisper to her, my lips grazing the soft flesh of her earlobe. I hover in the doorway like a ghost, half-lit by the hallway lights, watching her sleep. Then I’m running, down the hall and then the stairs, which creak in all the familiar spots, and out the front door, where the cool evening air fills my nostrils like a drug.

Phillip is up on the roof. Not on the wide area we sometimes sit on, but on the topmost gable above the attic, perched like a gargoyle. There’s a black Town Car parked in the driveway, its trunk open like a gaping mouth. A portly driver in a black suit leans against the car having a smoke. I jump out of my car and join Paul, Alice, Horry, and Wendy at the edge of the lawn. Serena, slung over Wendy’s shoulder, sucks happily on a pacifier. Tracy stands in the middle of the lawn, looking up at Phillip.

“Please get down!” she calls up to him. “You’ll kill yourself!”

“That’s the general idea,” Phillip shouts back. He stands up, one foot on either side of the gable, and spreads his arms out for balance. “Send the limo away.”

“What’s going on?” I say.

“Phillip proposed to Tracy,” Wendy says. “In front of us all.”

“And what did Tracy say?”

Wendy smirks at me. “Where have you been?”

“I went to see Jen.”

“Really? How’d that go?”

I look up at Phillip, trembling on the roof, arms spread like Christ. “Everything’s relative, I guess.”

“He’s taking it like a man,” Paul says.

“I swear to God, if you get in that car I’ll jump!”

Tracy turns to us. “You don’t think he’d really jump, do you?”

Wendy looks up at Phillip and shakes her head. “Only one way to find out, I guess.”

“I love you!” Phillip shouts.

“You’re being childish and manipulative!”

“Whatever works.”

Mom and Linda come running up from across the street. “What in the world is going on?” Linda says.

“Tracy’s not going to marry Phillip,” I say.

“Tracy’s not a fool,” Mom says. She steps out onto the lawn and faces Tracy. “There’s only one way to treat a tantrum and that is to ignore it.”

“Ignore it?”

“Yes.”

“But he’s not a four-year-old.”

“Honey, we’re all four-year-olds.”

Tracy appears conflicted. “What if he jumps?”

“Then I’ll have to rethink my thesis.”

Tracy looks at Mom for a long moment, her eyes growing wet. “You must think I’m such an idiot.”

Mom looks at her with great tenderness. “You’re no idiot. You’re not the first woman who wanted to believe in Phillip. But you’re far and away the best one, and I’m very sorry to see you go.” She steps forward and pulls Tracy into a warm hug.

“What’s going on?” Phillip shouts from above.

Tracy looks up to him. “I’m going to leave now.”

“Please don’t.”

Tracy turns to us and smiles. “Well, it was very nice to have met you all. I’m very sorry if my being here caused any problems.” She steps over to me and gives me a hug. “Let me know how it all turns out,” she whispers.

“Don’t go!” Phillip shouts.

But Tracy goes. She casts a last regretful look back up at Phillip and then climbs gracefully into the car. The driver tosses his cigarette to take her bag and slams the trunk. We watch the car drive slowly down Knob’s End and then turn back to the roof, where Phillip is now sitting dejectedly. “I can’t believe she really left,” he says.

“Will you come down now?” Mom says.

“I guess so.”

But when he stands up to pull his leg back over the gable, his pants catch on one of the snow guards. He loses his footing and slides down the side of the roof, scrambling in vain to grab on to the slate shingles. There is time for him to gasp, “Fuck me!” as he slides down the roof and then over the gutter. He is briefly airborne, arms flailing, before landing hard in the hedges that line the side of the house. We all run around the corner of the house to find him lying flat on his back atop a crushed bush, looking up at the sky like he’s stoned.

“Philly!” Mom shouts, falling to her knees in front of him. “Don’t try to move.”

“You ever notice how much closer the sky looks when you’re lying down?” he says.

“Can you move your legs?” Wendy says.

“If I feel like it.” He closes his eyes for a second. “That really hurt,” he says.

“I’m going to call 911,” Mom says.

He opens his eyes and looks at her. “Mom.”

“Yes, honey.”

“So what, you’re like, a lesbian now?”

MOM WAS TAKING care of Dad around the clock. When the stairs became a problem, they had a hospital bed installed in the den. Mom would put him to sleep and then go upstairs to sleep alone in their bed. She was tired and bereft and so Linda started spending the nights with her. One night, more as a distraction than anything else, Linda confessed to Mom that she’d had numerous female lovers in the years since her husband had died. Mom had never kissed another woman, a fact of which she was instantly ashamed. What kind of celebrity shrink hasn’t experimented? She owed it to her readers. “We were both sad and lonely and sexually deprived, and within minutes we were making out like a couple of high school kids.”

No one really wants to hear the detailed story of how their mother became a lesbian, do they? That’s not bigotry. I never wanted to hear the details of her heterosexual sex life either. But Mom is ready to unload. She perches herself on one fat arm of the leather easy chair in the living room and tells us her story. Linda sits on the other arm, for purposes of symmetry. They have clearly imagined this moment before.

“It started out as something purely surreal and physical.” Mom speaks in her TV voice, like she’s narrating the documentary of her bisexual awakening. “But Linda and I have been so close for so long. It was only natural that a physical relationship would evolve into something more.”

“You make it all sound so perfectly normal,” Paul says.

“Well, yes. That’s how it felt, I suppose.”

“Except for the part where you were cheating on your dying husband.”

“Paul,” Alice says.

“No, it’s okay,” Mom says. “He knew.”

“Dad knew?” I say.

“Your father was a very enlightened man, sexually speaking.”

“Our father?” Phillip.

“Let me tell you a story about your father.”

“Please don’t.” Wendy.

Linda clears her throat. “Your father was always so good to Horry and me. He accepted us as family, he took care of our finances. When Horry was injured, and I was paying for all of his care, your father made our mortgage payments for a full year, so we wouldn’t lose the house. I would never have betrayed him. Hillary was the love of his life, and he died knowing she wouldn’t be alone. He told me that many times toward the end.”