“People change, big brother.”
Paul’s eyes settle on Tracy for a long, uncomfortable beat, and a bitter smile slowly spreads across his face. “Oh. It all makes sense now. Engaged to be engaged.” He shakes his head. “You’re a whore.”
“What did you just call her?” Phillip says, jumping to his feet.
“Not her, you. You’ve always been a whore.”
“Why don’t you come a little closer and say that?”
“Not in the house!” Mom says. She never broke up our fights, thought it was healthy for brothers to pound on each other every now and then, just not where they might break her things.
Paul steps right over to Phillip, where his height and weight advantage is more readily apparent. He’s about two feet away when Tracy steps between them.
“Okay, men. This is good, really good,” she says, her voice loud and clear, like she’s running a seminar. “You’ve each expressed a valid point of view that the other now needs to consider and internalize in a non-confrontational manner. Nothing has to be resolved immediately. And nothing can be resolved until each of you has come to appreciate the other’s position. So let’s agree, shall we, to table this discussion until everyone has had time to assimilate the new information and reconsider his own position. Okay?”
We all stare at Tracy as if she just started jabbering in ancient tongues. We have always been a family of fighters and spectators. Intervening with reason and consideration demonstrates a dangerous cultural ignorance. Paul looks her up and down as if he can’t quite believe she’s there. Then he nods and looks over at Phillip.
“Stupid. Little. Whore.”
Phillip smiles like a movie star. “Infertile limp-dick.”
Paul moves so fast that it’s impossible to say whether Alice’s shriek is in response to Phillip’s remark or the sudden ensuing violence. His hands latch on to Phillip’s neck and the two of them spin backward into the antique buffet, knocking over platters, candlesticks, and Tracy, who was still between them when Paul attacked.
“Not in the house!” Mom shrieks, smacking at their backs. “Take it outside!”
And who knows how much damage they might do, how badly Paul will beat Phillip’s ass, if right then Jen doesn’t appear like some kind of mirage, floating in from the front hall with an awkward smile. “Hi, everyone,” she says.
At the sight of Jen, every person in the room freezes, along with most of my internal organs. Paul looks up at her in shock, his hand still cocked to punch Phillip, who has fallen to his knees against the wall.
“The door was open,” Jen says. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”
“Jen, dear,” my mother says, suddenly composed. “What a nice surprise.” These are the moments when you really have to wonder what reality my mother is living in. She can go from casually watching two of her sons pummeling each other to graciously welcoming the woman who ruined her other son’s life without missing a beat.
As for me, I’m shocked and self-conscious that Jen is here, that our broken marriage is now, in effect, on display. But I also feel an unbidden rush of excitement at her arrival, wondering at the speed of light if this somehow means we’ll be getting back together. In that instant, it doesn’t seem so far-fetched; the pregnancy was a false alarm, she’ll stay for the shiva, we’ll have some hard talks, I’ll yell and she’ll cry, but she’ll still bunk with me on that pitiful sofa bed in the basement. And when the shiva is over, we’ll go home and start again. I won’t even go back for my stuff at the Lees’, just bequeath it to the next desperate tenant. I’ll start fresh, all new things.
Jen looks at me. I look at her. And then I remember the money, sixteen thousand dollars sitting at the bottom of my duffel bag, the money she threatened me with in her voice mail. She’s not here to get me back or even to pay her respects. She has Wade’s baby in her belly and our money on her mind. And now the rage is back, along with a healthy measure of self-loathing for being the pathetic cuckold who wants his cheating wife back.
“I’m so sorry about Mort,” Jen says, hugging my mother.
“Thank you, dear.”
And before things can get any more surreal, Phillip, seeing his opening, hauls off from under Paul and sucker punches him right on the chin and Paul goes down hard. Phillip jumps to his feet and stands over Paul, wincing as he shakes off his fingers. Jen looks at me, eyebrows raised in surprise. I look back at her with a light shrug, and for that single instant, we are us again. And then I remember we’re not and look away. Alice is on her knees, pulling up a dazed Paul, while Tracy hustles Phillip out of the room. “Who’s the little whore now, bitch?” Phillip says, cradling his hand.
We should all just face reality and stop taking our meals together.
Chapter 19
10:00 a.m.
I’m so sorry about your father,” Jen says to me once the room has cleared out. She moves to hug me, but I step back like she’s contagious. She lowers her hands and nods sadly. She is wearing a navy dress that hangs effortlessly on her, stopping at midthigh. Her perfume reminds me of our bedroom, and it makes me homesick. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Are you seriously asking me that?”
“No, I guess not,” she says. “This must be hard for you.”
“It’s not like he died suddenly. I’ll be fine.”
“When will you be coming home?”
“I don’t have a home.”
“I mean, when will you be back in Kingston?”
“In about a week.”
She gives me a funny look. “You’re going to spend a week here? Every time you were here with me, you couldn’t wait to be out that front door.”
“We’re sitting shiva.”
“Oh. I didn’t think—”
“Yeah. Dad wanted it.”
She is momentarily distracted by a half-trashed platter of smoked salmon on the table. “Wow, that really reeks.”
“It’s lox. That’s how it’s supposed to smell.”
“Well, could we go outside for a little bit? I can’t handle the smell of fish ever since . . . you know.”
“I don’t mind it. And you won’t be here for very long anyway.”
“Judd, please. I know it’s a bad time, but I really need to talk to you.”
“What, Jen? What could you possibly have left to tell me? Are you and Wade getting married? Is that it?”
“No. It’s nothing like that.” She is looking around at the discarded food all over the dining room table, the half-eaten bagels and Danishes, the sliced vegetables, the maple syrup and waffle fragments smeared across the tablecloth by Ryan and Cole.
“Good, because, you know, adultery is probably not the best foundation upon which to build a marriage.”
“Oh, crap.”
“What?”
She looks at me and then covers her mouth and bolts from the room.
I find her in the powder room, vomiting into the toilet. When she’s done, she flushes the toilet and sits on the floor with her back against the wall, wiping her mouth with a torn strand of toilet paper. “Jesus, I hate this part,” she says.
She looks up at me, and there’s something in her eyes that I don’t like. When you’ve been married to someone for a while, you occasionally share these brief psychic moments, and right at that instant I know what she’s going to say just before she says it, even while I’m thinking that it can’t possibly be true.
The last time I had sex with Jen, as near as I can figure, was around three months ago. It was exactly the kind of rote, forgettable sex we’d been having at that time, the kind we’d sworn, back in the day, that we would never have. There was nothing technically wrong with it; tumescence and lubrication were both achieved on cue, his-and-hers orgasms distributed on schedule like party favors. It’s just that after you’ve been married for a while, it becomes much harder to lose yourself in sex the way you used to. For one thing, you’ve become a bit too efficient, you’ve learned what works and what doesn’t,
and so foreplay, entry, and orgasm can often be condensed into a five-to-seven-minute span. Good sex requires many different things, but in most cases, efficiency isn’t one of them.
Also, when you share all of the administrative headaches of life with someone else, small piles of unaddressed, quotidian resentments build up over time like plaque, lingering on the fringes of your consciousness even as you kiss, lick, and fondle each other. So even as Jen panted in my ear and rocked her hips beneath me, some part of her brain would be consumed with the basement lightbulb she’d been asking me to change for going on a week now, or how I never managed to fully close my dresser drawers in the morning, which didn’t bother me but somehow threatened the delicate balance of her entire universe, or how I considered a cereal bowl washed even if all I did was rinse it with hot water and leave it in the sink, or how I never remembered to give her phone messages from friends who had called while she was out. And as I slid into Jen and felt her long smooth thighs clamp down on my hips, I might be thinking that she’d been a little bitchy tonight, that she had a tendency, at times, to react with a disproportionate amount of bitchiness, which only served to exacerbate things, digging whatever marital hole we were standing in a little deeper. Or maybe I’d be thinking about the latest American Express bill, how Jen had once again exceeded our budget by over a thousand dollars, and how I knew, if confronted, she’d have a rationale for every single line on the statement and then assure me that there had been returns made, that significant credits would appear on the next statement. I already knew from experience that these phantom credits would never materialize, or, if they did, Jen would use them to justify the next bill as well, effectively applying a single month’s credit to two bills. When it came to profligate spending, Jen was a demon accountant, bending the laws of mathematics to her will. And even as she shuddered through her orgasm, Jen might have been thinking about how I couldn’t, for the life of me, get my underwear from my body to the hamper without a stopover on the bedroom floor, or how I wasn’t as warm as I should have been when her mother called, and maybe, as I came (after her—let the record show), I would probably be thinking about how much goddamn time she spent on the phone with her mother and girlfriends every night, or the way she spit large chunks of toothpaste out into the sink and left them there to harden into little winter-fresh slugs that had to be scraped off the porcelain. She couldn’t handle a slightly opened dresser drawer, but a sink full of crusty, expectorated toothpaste was apparently not an issue.
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 fight 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 wandering as we rubbed mechanically against each other—for warmth, or intimacy, or maybe just base gratification, our minds a frenzy of disconnected thoughts and festering gripes, each of us too distracted to realize that the other was equally self-absorbed. And there was no hazy afterglow 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 marriage has been ruined, that she is carrying our baby. There are very serious, life-altering implications hovering in the air between us. But right 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 unseated 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. “That 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 expressions 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 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 uttered 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 marriage, 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 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 discarded 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 home-court 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 current state of my finances, 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 complication 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 explain 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 simultaneously 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 rethink 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 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.
This Is Where I Leave You: A Novel Page 12
