This Is Where I Leave You

by Jonathan Tropper

  None of this was very serious, obviously, just the minor aches and pains of a living marriage. And every so often we’d get into a fi ght over something larger, and we’d scream and vent all of our gripes, tears would fall, hurts would be validated, and sex would get good again for a while, passionate and intense, and then the cycle would repeat. So we lay there fucking through our resentment, our thoughts wan­

  dering as we rubbed mechanically against each other—for warmth, or intimacy, or maybe just base gratification, our minds a frenzy of discon­

  nected thoughts and festering gripes, each of us too distracted to realize that the other was equally self-absorbed. And there was no hazy after­

  glow when we were finished, no lingering in each other’s arms as the sweat slowly dried on our skin; just peeing, washing, and the donning of sleepwear, and then the warm, numbing glow of the television. Chapter 20

  10:12 a.m.

  So, you’re going to be a father,” Jen says gingerly.

  “How is that even possible?”

  We are standing on the patio in the backyard, overlooking the pool, which is brimming from yesterday’s rain. Today the skies are clear, and the August sun is burning through what’s left of the morning fog.

  “I’m almost three months. Think about it.”

  “You can’t possibly know that it’s mine.”

  “Yes, I can. Trust me.”

  “Trust is not my first impulse when it comes to you.”

  “It’s your baby, Judd.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “It is.”

  “You can keep saying that, and I can keep saying ‘bullshit,’ or you can say something else.”

  She looks at me for a long moment and then shakes her head, giving in. “It turns out, Wade is sterile.”

  The sound of my laughter surprises me. There is nothing remotely funny about the wife who betrayed me, the wife who is no longer mine, with whom I have already buried one baby, telling me, after our mar­

  riage has been ruined, that she is carrying our baby. There are very seri­

  ous, life-altering implications hovering in the air between us. But right 136

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  at this moment, all I can think about is the fact that Wade Boulanger is all cock and no sperm. He may have destroyed my marriage and un­

  seated me in my own home, but I’d unwittingly left behind a booby trap that just blew his legs off. So I laugh. Hard.

  “I thought you might like that,” Jen says wryly.

  “You have to admit there’s a certain karmic poetry to it.”

  “I’ll only admit it if you stop laughing.”

  But I can’t. It’s the first time I’ve laughed in months, and it feels strange doing it, but I can’t seem to stop. And soon Jen is laughing with me, while inside of her, cells replicate in an organized frenzy as the seed of our bad timing takes hold.

  “Wade couldn’t have been too happy about this.”

  “It was a blow. But we talked about it. He’s okay with it. He supports me.”

  “Imagine my relief.”

  She closes her eyes, taking the hit, and then looks at me. “Th at was

  officially your last shot, okay? This is going to be tricky enough without you constantly punishing me.”

  “How exactly have you been punished? You have the house, you have Wade, and now you have the baby you’ve always wanted. I missed the part where life got so rough for you.”

  “People stare at me. I’m the town whore.”

  “If the shoe fits . . .”

  “And now I’m a pregnant whore. You think this is easy for me?”

  “I think it’s a lot harder for me.”

  She looks at me for a moment, and then looks away, twirling her hair with her fingers. “Point taken.”

  Jen is allergic to the words “I’m sorry.” She concedes with little ex­

  pressions like “Point taken” or “Understood,” or, my personal favorite,

  “Okay, let’s drop it, then.” But I know Jen, and I can tell she’s feeling

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  sorry, for me, for her, for the little fetus that will be unwittingly born into our broken lives.

  “Please,” she says. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

  It’s an absurd request. Our minds, unedited by guilt or shame, are selfish and unkind, and the majority of our thoughts, at any given time, are not for public consumption, because they would either be hurtful or else just make us look like the selfish and unkind bastards we are. We don’t share our thoughts, we share carefully sanitized, watered-down versions of them, Hollywood adaptations of those thoughts dumbed down for the PG-13 crowd.

  What am I thinking?

  I’m thinking I’m going to be a father, and I am not excited. I know I should be excited, and maybe at some point in the near future I will be excited, but at this moment, I feel numb, and if you were to peel away the numbness you’d find a thick mucous membrane of trepidation, and if you were to slice through that membrane, you would find a throbbing cluster of outrage and regret. We were supposed to be a family. We fell in love, our parents shook hands, we hired a band and a caterer and ut­

  tered vows, and now Jen will live in one place and I will live in another and this child of ours, this inconceivable progeny of our corrupted mar­

  riage, will live in a house with no siblings, thanks to his sterile, dipshit stepfather, and will be shuttled sadly between us, subject to the vagaries of our schedules, and he will be lonely and quiet and not quite sure of his place in the world. He will start dressing in black and experimenting with drugs and reading magazines devoted to firearms by the time he’s thirteen. No matter how hard I try, he will prefer Jen to me, which hardly seems fair, given the circumstances. I’ve always wanted to be a father, but not like this, not with the deck already stacked so badly against me. If I marry someone else and we have a child, that will make sense, but this doesn’t, this is a flesh-and-blood shackle that will keep Jen and 138

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  Wade in my life long after I should be free and clear of them. And if I do have children with someone else, this child will feel jealous and dis­

  carded and no doubt gravitate toward his sterile, dipshit stepfather, and Wade’s already stolen my wife and home, I’ll be damned if I’m going to let him walk off with my unborn child too, but he’ll have the homecourt advantage. Any thoughts of moving somewhere new and starting over will have to be shelved, because I don’t know exactly what kind of father I’ll be, but it won’t be the kind who lives in another state and sends shitty cards with a ten-dollar bill in them. Now, in addition to alimony, I’ll have to pay child support, which will be a neat trick considering the cur­

  rent state of my fi nances, and I’m going to be a father, I’m going to be a father, I’m going to be a father . . . I should be happy, should be thrilled, should be seeing the miracle in all of this, the silver lining, should be passing out cigars, should be hugging and kissing and thinking of names, but instead, thanks to my whore of a wife, the moment is marred by com­

  plication and despair and that’s not fair to my child and it’s not fair to me, and as soon as the kid is old enough, I’m going to sit him down and ex­

  plain to him that none of this was my fault, that she did it to both of us. And while I’m thinking all of that, another part of my brain is simul­

  taneously thinking that Jen looks so damn beautiful right now, and she wore that little blue dress, and she knows how she looks in that dress, and I can’t believe that she’s not mine to touch anymore, because all I want to do is lift that dress up over her hips, slide into her, and stay in there until things change back, until we can once again be the family we were supposed to be.

  And even as I’m thinking about her taste and her smell and her skin, I’m trying to figure Jen out, trying to glean if maybe she thinks this baby is a reason to rethin
k things, to maybe get rid of Wade and ask me to come back, and she’s maybe here trying to get a read on me, to see how receptive I might be to that proposition. We lost something vital in our marriage after we lost the baby, after it became known that the odds of

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  another pregnancy were long, and now here we are, expecting, but the damage cannot be undone. Wade cannot be unfucked, and neither, it seems, can we.

  That is a quick distillation of the myriad random thoughts fl ashing through my mind, but all I say is, “I wish this had happened before . . . be­

  fore you and Wade.” Which I think is a pretty fair summation. Without moving a muscle, Jen starts to silently cry, like those stat­

  ues of the Virgin Mary that are always turning up in South American villages. “I know,” she says, her voice low and trembling. “I do too.”

  I look at Jen. Jen looks at me. It’s an electric moment, and later on I will wonder if that moment was a last chance blown by two people too tied up in their uncertainty and resentment to seize it. But as it happens, Tracy has picked this moment to step out into the yard, in leggings and a tank top, with a yoga mat slung over her shoulder. Her hair is back in a youthful ponytail, and maybe I’m reading into this, but it seems to me that, after seeing Phillip’s ex-girlfriends last night, she is trying to look particularly youthful. “Hey, guys,” she calls to us, all carefree and breezy, walking over to extend her hand to Jen. “We haven’t been formally in­

  troduced. I’m Tracy.”

  “Jen,” Jen says, shaking her hand.

  “Don’t mind me,” Tracy says, scoping out a flat patch of yard and tossing down her mat. Then she bends over and starts to stretch.

  “And who, exactly, is that?” Jen says.

  “Th

  at’s Tracy.”

  “So she says. Quite the firm grip, too.”

  “She’s with Phillip.”

  “Oh. I won’t get too attached, then.”

  “Don’t do that.”

  “What?”

  “Make fun of my family like you’re still a part of it.”

  Jen looks stung. It’s a good look for her. “Fair enough.”

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  We stand there watching Tracy’s rising ass as she descends into her Downward-Facing Dog, out of things to say. We are going to be parents. I’m going to be a father. I wonder if Wade will be in the delivery room, holding her hand while I sit off to the side like a spectator, waiting for my child to emerge from the spread legs that got us into this mess in the fi rst place.

  Phillip comes ambling out a moment later, in gym shorts and a tank top. “Namaste,” he says to us with a wink and a little bow.

  “Hey, Phillip,” Jen says.

  “Jen.” Phillip considers her as he unrolls his yoga mat next to Tracy’s.

  “I always suspected there might be something of the heartless slut in you.”

  “Takes one to know one, I guess.”

  Phillip nods and goes into a loose approximation of Tracy’s pose.

  “True that. But know this, my profoundly disappointing sister-in-law. Your looks may be a matter of public record, but let’s face it, your hottest years are behind you. As soon as we wrap this shiva, I am going to per­

  sonally see to it that my brother here gets laid on a nightly basis by women ten years younger than you, ripe young honeys who will make him eternally grateful that you trashed your marriage.”

  Before Jen can respond, Tracy abruptly pulls out of her yoga pose and kicks Phillip’s leg out from under him, causing him to fall on his ass.

  “Prick!”

  She yanks her mat up and storms disgustedly back toward the house while Phillip calls after her. “What the fuck, honey?!” Then, still sprawled on his ass, he turns to us. “She’s usually very congenial. I don’t know what bug crawled up her ass today.”

  “That remark about ripe young honeys,” Jen says. “She may have taken that a bit personally.”

  “Huh,” Phillip says, considering it. “In retrospect, that was probably insensitive of me.”

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  “I mean, what is she, fi fty?”

  “She’s forty-three and that was a cheap shot. I’d expect more, even from an adulteress.” He rolls to his feet. “On the plus side, no yoga this morning.” He reaches into his sock and pulls out a cigarette and lighter.

  “You’re not going to go after her?” I say.

  “I’m gathering my wits about me,” he says, flipping the cigarette into his mouth. “So, what were you guys talking about?”

  “Nothing,” I say.

  “I’m pregnant,” Jen says.

  Phillip looks at Jen, then looks down at his freshly lit cigarette and pinches it out. “Mazel tov,” he says, smiling widely. I am going to be a father, just when I’ve lost my own. There are some who would see a certain divine balance in that, one soul departing to make room for another, but I’m not that guy. I don’t believe in God when I’m in trouble, the way so many people do. But at times like this, when the irony seems too cruel and well crafted to be a coincidence, I can see God in the details. Due to some mental hiccup I can’t explain, when I think of God, I picture Hugh Hefner: a thin, angular man with a prominent chin in a maroon smoking jacket. I don’t know where that image came from or why it stuck the way it did. Maybe when I was a kid I was thinking about God and I happened upon a picture of Hef in a magazine and some neurons fired and a permanent association was made. But when your vision of God is America’s horniest senior citizen in his pajamas, it’s probably fair to say that you’re not the kind of guy who sees miracles in the mundane coincidences fate lobs at your unsus­

  pecting head like water balloons from a high terrace. Chapter 21

  Ialways imagined I’d be one of those cool dads, the ones you see with long hair and trendy clothing and a leather wrist cuff. One of those guys who change diapers and never yell and buy all the overpriced snacks at the ballpark and carry the kid on their shoulders all the way home. I spent a good deal more time picturing myself as a father than as a husband. I figured I’d be a husband first, and certainly, I imagined what sort of woman I might marry—a smart, sensitive, good-natured lingerie model—but I didn’t picture myself as any particular type of hus­

  band. Just me, married, basically. A smarter man might have seen that as cause for concern, a big red fl ag flapping noisily in the wind. Looking back, which is what you do when your life goes to shit, of­

  ten and obsessively—I can’t really say if Jen and I would have made it if we hadn’t lost the baby. I know it’s the zenith of stupidity to count on a baby to save a failing marriage. The kid can’t even burp on his own, and you want him to repair a relationship that you’ve spent years twisting and tying into hard, salt-crusted sailor’s knots. But still, I can’t help won­

  dering if that baby might have saved us, the same way that losing it ac­

  celerated our downward spiral into the thorny underbrush of marital decay. Losing him. Not it. “Losing it” is how you’d refer to your virginity or your wallet, but not your baby; even if you never did get to hold him, and smell his scalp, and wipe his white spittle off your shoulder. Yes, it was a boy. Baby Boy Foxman, it said, on his death certificate. He would

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  have had untamable curly hair like me, and maybe Jen’s luminous green eyes, and he and I would have gone to ball games and to the park, and I would have taught him to ride his bike and throw a curveball. I don’t know how to throw a curveball, but you’d better believe I would have learned. And when he got older I’d have taught him to drive, and he wouldn’t have felt the need to rebel, to do hard drugs or mutilate his smooth, handsome face (Jen’s graceful cheekbones, my prominent chin) with studs and bolts, because there’d be nothing to rebel against, but if he had I would have
given him his space, and then he’d have come back and we’d have bonded again, maybe over his first-ever beer—and who am I kidding, did I really believe he and his friends weren’t scoring beer already from someone’s older brother? But he was a smart kid with a good head on his shoulders and sometimes kids were going to act out, test their boundaries, but I trusted him to make the right decisions, and he knew he could always come to me, and . . . Damn. I’m off, just like that.

  My point is that it would be too easy to say that losing the baby is where we went off the rails. People love to do that, to point to some single phenomenon, assign it all the blame, and wipe the slate clean, like when overeaters sue McDonald’s for making them fat pigs. But the truth is always a lot fuzzier, hiding in soft focus on the periphery. When it comes down to it, you’ve either got the sort of marriage that will with­

  stand trauma, or you don’t. Jen and I had still loved each other, maybe not with the same hormonal ferocity that we did back when we’d fi rst started dating, but no one really stays that way, do they? We still enjoyed each other’s company, had enough in common, found each other suit­

  ably attractive. We were content enough on a daily basis. But there was no denying that certain colors had faded and levels had fallen, like when a plane loses one engine but still has another three to carry it across the ocean.

  It took a long time for us to finally conceive. Jen had an asymmetrical 144

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  uterus that only the most nimble of sperm could navigate, but we perse­

  vered. When Jen finally got an uncontestable blue line on her home pregnancy test, we did a little dance in the bathroom doorway, Jen wav­

  ing the pee stick above her head like a lighter at a concert. And for a little while there, it was like new life had been breathed into us. We would stay up late into the night, talking about neighborhoods, and schools, and names, and how we wouldn’t let it change us, while deep down hoping to hell that it would, that this would be the thing that fi lled the hole left by all the other unnamable things we had somehow lost along the way. We started having sex more frequently, hotter, nastier sex than we’d had in some time, especially in the later months, as the grow­