Джонатан Троппер - This Is Where I Leave You

“So our money is your money?” Jen said, her eyes lighting up with the joy of indignation, and just like that, she had seamlessly transitioned us into a different fight. This was a skill she’d perfected over time, like a boxer who jabs and moves before the counterpunch can arrive. Arguing with her never failed to make me dizzy.

In the end, I kept the watch; there was never really any question. The Citizen was relegated to the little compartment in my sock drawer that held a set of keys to our old apartment, a couple of obsolete cell phones, my college I.D. card, a couple of Japanese throwing stars from my brief ninja phase in junior high, the foul ball I’d caught off Lee Mazzilli at Shea Stadium when I was a kid, and a handful of other artifacts from versions of myself long since dead and buried.

And now the Rolex said three o’clock in the afternoon. I needed some time to think, to consider the situation, figure out my next move. I fingered the buttons on my cell phone, flipped through my list of contacts, but I already knew I wouldn’t call anyone. Maybe Jen and I could still fix this thing, and if we did, we wouldn’t want anyone looking at us funny. I knew irrevocable damage had been done, innocence had been lost, trust slaughtered, but still, it was the age-old conundrum: If a wife sleeps with a boss, but no one finds out about it, did it actually happen? There was no one to call, no friends who weren’t also connected to Jen. I thought about calling my mother, but my father was in a coma and she had enough to deal with. My life was in a free fall, and there was nowhere to turn. A cold sense of desolation lodged itself somewhere in the base of my throat, and suddenly I was no longer enraged or devastated, but terrified of the immense, throbbing loneliness that was only now closing like a vise on my internal organs.

I drove through Kingston’s small business district, past the train station, to the I-87 overpass. I pulled over and watched the interstate for a while, the eighteen-wheelers and early commuters speeding past just ahead of the afternoon rush that would soon choke the northbound side. I considered getting on the highway and driving north, stopping only for gas and donuts until I reached Maine. I would find a small seaside town, rent a little house, and start over. The winters would be rough, but I’d trade in my Lexus for a rugged pickup truck with chains on the tires. I’d get a job, maybe something where I worked with my hands, drink at the local pub, adopt a one-eyed Labrador, and make friends with the fishermen. They’d tease me about my roots, maybe even affectionately refer to me as “New York.” In time, I would develop the faintest down-east accent. There would be a woman there, also from somewhere else, also running from an ugly past. She would be pretty and vulnerable and we would know each other instantly, would love each other fiercely, the way only two damaged people can. Nothing else would matter. Everyone in town would come to the wedding, held in the gazebo on the lawn of the town square. We’d be congratulated on the marquee of the local diner, right above the blue-plate special.

But then reality reasserted itself. There would be no small house in Maine, no one-eyed Labrador, no pretty, dark-eyed woman to make me whole again, and for a moment I sat there and mourned them. Then I turned the car around, still trembling—I hadn’t stopped since I’d left the house—and headed back into town, telling myself the interstate would still be there tomorrow, but for now, I was going to have to find something a little closer to home.

There’s not very much I’m proud of when it comes to the weeks that followed. I went into hibernation in the Lees’ dank, rented basement, growing roots on the sagging couch that the advertisement had called a “daybed.” The room smelled of mildew and laundry detergent, and when it was quiet, I could hear the lone, bare lightbulb humming in its socket. I watched television pretty much nonstop. I rarely showered and grew a beard. I masturbated joylessly. I shaved the beard into a goatee and gained fifteen pounds. I composed long, humiliating e-mails to Jen, rage-filled diatribes and pathetic entreaties, tapping away furiously on my BlackBerry until my thumbs burned, cursing, excoriating, imploring, begging, and, ultimately, deleting. I lay there at night, staring at the ceiling as the house’s ancient plumbing shook and clanged violently behind the thin drywall, picturing Jen and Wade going at it like porn stars to the rhythm of the banging pipes. Bang! Bang! Bang! And then climax, to the rumble of water through the walls every time one of the Lees flushed, which was pretty much every fifteen minutes or so. My God, it was like those two never stopped urinating. All night, at regular intervals I could hear them above me, Mrs. Lee’s quick pitter-patter, the hiss of Mr. Lee dragging his slippers, the heavy plastic smack of the toilet seat, and then the flush, which sounded like white-water rapids behind the scraped gypsum walls of the basement. I was thirty-four years old and homeless, lying awake in the dead of night on a lumpy sofa bed in a rented basement, listening to my landlords piss and shit while my former wife and former boss sixty-nined in my head. Rock bottom rose up to meet me.

The gravedigger looks like Santa Claus, and I don’t believe for a minute he doesn’t know it. With his long white beard and stout build, he has to know the effect of wearing a red and white anorak and how inappropriate the whole getup looks in the Mount Zion Cemetery. When you spend your days putting corpses into the ground, I guess you have to find the fun where you can. But this morning, as we bury my father in a teeming downpour, Saint Nick is all business, even as his ridiculous raincoat makes him stand out like a bloodstain against a sky the color of a dead tooth. He quietly directs the pallbearers in the placement of the coffin onto the hydraulic frame rigged over the freshly dug grave. Paul and I are at the head of the coffin, and Wendy’s husband, Barry, is in the middle, across from the empty spot where Phillip would have been if he’d shown up. My uncle Mickey and his son Julius, fresh off the plane from Miami, carry the foot of the coffin. We haven’t seen Mickey in decades—he and Dad had a falling-out over some money Dad lent him—and Julius is all but a stranger to us. They look like suntanned gangsters, this uncle and cousin, in their unnecessary designer sunglasses, their slicked-back hair, their matching diamond pinky rings.

“To the right,” Saint Nick says. “All together now. No one lower him yet. You in the back, come up about six inches . . . there you go. Now on my mark, we’re going to lower him. Gentlemen at the feet, you’re out first, and watch your fingers . . .”

Movie directors often shoot funerals in the rain. The mourners stand in their dark suits under large black umbrellas, the kind you never have handy in real life, while the rain falls symbolically all around them, on grass and tombstones and the roofs of cars, generating atmosphere. What they don’t show you is how the legs of your suit, caked with grass clippings, cling soaked to your shins, how even under umbrellas the rain still manages to find your scalp, running down your skull and past your collar like wet slugs, so that while you’re supposed to be meditating on the deceased, instead you’re mentally tracking that trickle of water as it slides down your back. The movies don’t convey how the soaked, muddy ground will swallow up the dress shoes of the pallbearers like quicksand, how the water, seeping into the pine of the coffin, will release the smell of death and decay, how the large mound of dirt meant to fill the grave will be transformed into an oozing pile of sludge that will splatter with each stab of the shovel and land on the coffin with an audible splat. And instead of a slow and dignified farewell, everyone just wants to get the deceased into the ground and get the hell back into their cars.