This Is Where I Leave You: A Novel

by Jonathan Tropper

  Jen looks intently at me. “You had stopped looking at me, stopped touching me. It was like I had failed you, failed to keep our baby safe, and until we had a new baby, I had nothing to offer you. You lost sight of me.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “You wouldn’t hold me, or cry with me. You just looked away and talked about how it would all be fine, how we’d try again when I was ready.”

  “I was trying to reassure you. I knew how much having a baby meant to you.”

  “You may not have meant to make me feel that way, but it was how I felt. And I guess, as wrong as it was—and I know it was wrong—Wade was someone I hadn’t disappointed. He wanted me, and it had nothing to do with a baby. And that made him appealing.”

  I consider what she’s saying, try to place myself back there, in those days after she’d delivered our strangled baby, but that time has become a dark blur, and I can’t recall very much about it. “You never said anything to me.”

  “We were in such different places. I was grieving our dead child.”

  “So was I.”

  “You were looking at the calendar, asking the doctors when we could try again. You say you were trying to reassure me, and that’s probably true. But to me, right then, it felt like you were moving on, leaving me behind. And somewhere along the way, you stopped seeing me as your wife; you just saw me as the mother of your dead and maybe future child.” She clasps her hands together, shakes her head, and offers up a sad little smile. “It’s tragic, really, when you think about it. I needed you to see me as your wife and all you could see was the failed mother. And now I need you to see me as the mother of your child, and all you can see is the failed wife.”

  “You’ve thought about this a lot.”

  “I don’t get out much.”

  “You should have told me.”

  “I did. You didn’t hear me.”

  “You should have kept telling me until I did. I would have eventually.”

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  “We could have fixed this!” I am suddenly, violently furious. “We could have fixed it. But you gave up. You found someone else before I even knew anything was wrong. This could have been our baby.”

  “It’s still our baby. You and me.”

  “There is no you and me,” I say, getting up to leave. “We are strangers. And I don’t see how I can raise a child with a stranger.”

  “Judd,” she says, beseeching. “We’re finally talking. Please sit down.”

  I can sense the flight attendants shutting up to tune in to the little drama playing out in their midst. I take a long, last look at Jen, at her tired eyes, her desperate expression.

  “I can’t do this.”

  “Please don’t leave,” she says, but I’m already moving, weaving through the tables to get out of there. The last thing I hear her say is “This isn’t going to go away.” And it’s that very fact, obvious though it may be, that squeezes the air from my lungs and makes me run. Because, more than anything, what I want is for it to go away. I am not ready to be a father. I have nothing to offer: no wisdom, no expertise, no home, no job, no wife. If I wanted to adopt a child, I wouldn’t even qualify. What I’ve got is a great big bag of nothing, and no kid will respect a father like that. This was my chance to start over, to find someone who would defy the odds and love me, to figure out the rest of my life. Now any chance of a clean break is gone, and as a single father I have become, by default, even more pathetic.

  I’m heading down a wide, carpeted hallway toward the parking lot when my legs give out on me. I stumble against the wall and slide down until I’m sitting on the floor. A group of tuxedoed guys in their early twenties emerge from a conference room, bustling with nervous energy. They pass around a silver flask and smack each other a lot; the groom and his groomsmen. The groom is differentiated with tails and a white tie. He’s in his early twenties, handsome in an almost pretty way, his face scrubbed, his hair gelled. The groomsmen file into another room at the behest of the photographer, who is ready to shoot the wedding party, and for a moment it’s just the groom and me in the hall. Our eyes meet and he smiles a greeting.

  “You okay, bro?” he says, brimming with benevolence and goodwill.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Good luck.”

  “Thanks. I’m going to need it.”

  “You have no idea.”

  I am not real to him. This is his wedding day, and nothing is real to him. And I am in mourning, and in shock, and he is not real to me. We are ghosts, passing each other in a haunted house, and it’s hard to say who pities whom more. He straightens his tie and heads back into the conference room to record his cocky naïveté for posterity, and I get up on shaky feet and walk out to the parking lot.

  4:40 p.m.

  I MAKE THE two-hour drive back to Kingston, to the house Jen and I used to share. I let myself in through the front door, like I do from time to time when I know she and Wade aren’t around. If I had a shrink, he would ask me why I feel the need to burglarize my former home, and I would tell him the same thing I’m telling you: I have no idea. I just know that sometimes, without any premeditation, I go there and poke around. Technically, the house is still half-mine, and if Jen truly didn’t want me there, she’d have changed the locks, or at least the alarm code.

  I let myself into the front hall, taking note of the mail table that no longer has the picture of Jen and me on it. The kitchen is unchanged, except for the fridge door, which no longer has the pictures of Jen and me at Martha’s Vineyard or the old black and white of me from college that she always loved, sitting on a railing in my Bob Marley hat, smiling at her as she snapped the photo. There are no photos anywhere of her and Wade, which I’d like to read as a sign that she’s not that invested yet, but when you’ve been carrying on a yearlong illicit affair, there just aren’t a lot of photo ops.

  I climb the stairs and swing open the door to our bedroom, the scene of the crime. There’s the bed, there’s the reading chair, there’s the dresser, the mirror, nothing to indicate that this was any kind of marital ground zero. I walk over to my old dresser and pull open a random drawer. Inside are a handful of Wade’s boxer shorts and undershirts and a pile of dark socks. The drawer beneath it has a selection of polo shirts and T-shirts. In the closet, there are a few pairs of jeans and two suits. From what I can tell, Wade has moved in the essentials, but not everything. He’s still keeping his own place. I pull out the trousers from his suits and then go into the medicine chest for a pair of tweezers. I grab a six-pack of his beer from the fridge and take it with me to the den, where I watch Mad Max without sound on the plasma television while gently pulling the stitches out of his pant seams, leaving just enough to hold the pants together, so that they won’t fall apart until he moves around in them a little, preferably at work, in front of a large crowd. After I put the pants back, I open the night table drawer. There’s a billfold with a few hundred-dollar bills, a prescription bottle that says naproxen but that I know from past visits contains his Viagra stash, a checkbook, some loose change, receipts, a Sports Illustrated, a cell phone charger, and the spare key to his Maserati. I pocket the Viagra and three hundred dollars.

  Down in the basement there’s a carton full of our old photo albums. I pull one out and flip through it. Our trip to the Caribbean a few years ago, in the aftermath of our dead baby; a two-week consolation prize. We splurged on a private villa. There was the beach, a pool, a water slide, and a casino. We made a rule: no talking about the baby, about home, about anything of consequence. We lay on the sand for hours, baking in the sun, staring out at the blue water until we could see it with our eyes closed. We read our novels and retained nothing. The sun turned our brains to Jell-O. Jen bought some new bikinis that showed off her tan and let a fat native woman braid her hair in cornrows like Bo Derek’s. In the evenings, we would have sex before dinner, urgently and desperately, bruising our groins, kissing our lips raw.

  There was another couple, Ray and Tina from Chic
ago, on honeymoon for their second marriage. Ray had a Chrysler dealership. Tina had big hair, a pierced navel, and store-bought fingernails. She’d been his secretary for years. You didn’t need much of an imagination to guess what had ended his first marriage. We all went on a midnight cruise, getting drunk on red rum drinks. There was a reggae band and we tried to dance but it’s hard to dance to reggae unless you’re very stoned. Ray stared at Jen’s tight ass. Tina was shorter and a little bottom heavy, but she had these sexy bee-stung lips and she grazed my arms with her fake nails when she talked. Ray and I got drunk and he confided in me that he’d give anything to have sex with someone who looked like Jen. We joked about swapping for the night. Back in our villa, Jen and I made fun—but not in a mean way—of Ray’s Tom Selleck mustache and thick gold necklace, of Tina’s nails and that she wore heels to the beach.

  After they went back to Chicago, we felt the silence between us even more. We read, we swam, we lay out on the beach, watching happier people. I went parasailing one day, and Jen rode in the speedboat, taking pictures of me in the sky. A day later, Jen was bitten by something in the ocean and her knee swelled up like a balloon. By the time we flew home, we could barely look at each other. Was she already seeing him then? Or maybe not yet seeing him, but flirting with him? Already redrafting the boundaries of her life? When, exactly, did she cross that line and stop being mine? The only thing more painful than not knowing would be knowing. Having to go back to every picture in every album and stamp it real or a lie. I don’t have the stomach for it.

  In the back of the album there’s a single orphaned photo out of its sleeve, and I recognize it from our honeymoon in Anguilla: Jen in a pool—looking seductively at the camera while, in the background, whitecaps dapple the blue ocean. It’s one of those accidentally perfect pictures you take, when the sun is just where it needs to be, and the focus is perfect, and you’ve caught your subject at her absolute best. I look at the photo for a long time, at Jen when she was still Jen, when we were still us. I put the album back in the box and make it as far as the second stair before turning around and pulling it back out.

  Back in the car, I place the photo faceup on the passenger seat, where it stays for the drive back to Elmsbrook. I couldn’t begin to tell you why.

  7:45 p.m.

  HOME, FOR LACK of a better word, or option. Fireflies flicker and glow in front of my windshield as dusk thickens into another humid summer night on Knob’s End. I can smell barbecue. I follow the sounds of voices around to the backyard. Everyone is gathered on the patio eating, while Barry mans the grill. Wendy is sprawled on a lounge chair with Cole asleep on her chest. Everyone else is at the table, eating burgers and minute steaks, dipping chips and washing them down with Diet Coke. Paul is pitching a wiffle ball to Ryan, who whacks every third pitch or so. Horry plays the field while Phillip stands off to the side, providing the play-by-play through cupped hands. “The pitch . . . Oh, he got a piece of that one, it’s going deep, sending Callen to the warning track. That ball is out of here! Ryan Hollis’s two thousandth career home run. The crowd goes wild. You know he’ll be getting some tonight, Bill . . .”

  Mom and Linda are at the head of the table, sipping chardonnay out of plastic wineglasses and playing Rummykub. Alice sits with them, idly reading the weekend paper. I stand around the corner of the house, watching these people, these strangers, this family of mine, and I have never felt more lost and alone. My cell phone vibrates softly in my pocket, and I step back around the house to answer it.

  “Hey,” Penny says. “Want to go to a movie?”

  My last trip to the movies didn’t work out so well. It was a few weeks after I’d moved into the Lees’ basement, and I could feel the walls closing in. So I took myself to the movies. Back when I lived with Jen, I had some friends. In the aftermath of our separation, Allan and Mike had met me for drinks and we’d all raised our glasses in agreement that Jen was a cheating bitch and I was the good guy here. I didn’t know it at the time, but that night was actually my good-bye party. Jen would retain custody of our friends and I’d be wordlessly discarded. A few weeks later, as I circled the multiplex parking lot, I saw Allan and Mike with their wives, leaving the theater along with Jen and Wade, all walking in standard formation, talking and laughing in the cinematic afterglow, like it had always been just so. I tried to tell myself it was simply a chance encounter, but it was clear from their body language that they were all together, and probably not for the first time. It’s a sad moment when you come to understand how truly replaceable you are. Friendship in the suburbs is wife-driven, and my friends were essentially those husbands of Jen’s friends that I could most tolerate. Now that I’d been sidelined, Wade had stepped in for me like an understudy, a small note was inserted into the program, and the show went on without missing a beat.

  8:30 p.m.

  THE WRITER IS pretty, beautiful even, but in a toned-down way; neurotic and accessible. She kisses her fiancé good-bye in their beautifully cluttered apartment and travels to a comically unpronounceable seaside village in Scotland to do a story for the travel magazine she writes for. There she falls for a local widower who trains sheepdogs. The townsfolk are kindly eccentrics, the widower is rugged and built like an Olympic swimmer, and we forgive the ingénue her dalliance, since her eyes well up so beautifully when she talks about her recently deceased sister, and also because her fiancé is a cad who flirted with his sexpot secretary in the opening scene and likes his red sports car a little too much.

  Penny and I sit in the back row, holding hands. She softly runs the fingers of her free hand up and down the inside of my forearm, playing with the short hairs on my wrist. I lean my head against hers, and we’re seventeen again. We make out for a while, our tongues cool and sugary from the soda, and I never want the movie to end, not because it feels so good, although it certainly does—Penny kisses with passion and depth and just the right amount of tongue—but because when the movie ends the house lights will come back up, and real life will materialize around us like hidden creatures in the horror movie we should have gone to instead.

  And even as we kiss, my hand now under the hem of her short skirt, rubbing her smooth thighs, her fingers in my hair as her tongue dances across my lower lip, I am aware of the on-screen plot resolving itself. The fiancé has shown up unannounced, there’s some kind of sheepdog festival, a chase through a crowded farmers’ market on motor scooters. The fiancé rides his scooter off an embankment and into the duck pond. Happily-ever-after is just a dramatic gesture and a heartfelt speech away. We stop making out and tune in for the last ten minutes. The girl is at the airport, alone, having broken it off with the fiancé, but too late to save her relationship with the widower. But here he comes, zipping through the airport on a stolen luggage cart. He delivers a loud speech about what he’s learned about grief and love and second chances, proclaiming his love even as the cops handcuff him. Somehow, his trusty dog is there too, along with half the village, who have all had a hand in bringing him here to stop her from leaving. She kisses him while he’s still handcuffed, and so he falls over and they kiss some more on the floor. Next to me, Penny sniffles at the happy ending. Then she leans over, takes my earlobe between her teeth, and says, “Take me home.”

  10:45 p.m.

  PENNY LIVES IN a ground-floor apartment in a complex downtown, just a few blocks from Dad’s store. There are framed movie posters on the walls—Audrey Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe, Julia Roberts—and not very much in the way of furniture: a mucous-green leather couch that she must have gotten a deal on because no one would choose that color in a vacuum. There’s no matching love seat, which I find somewhat symbolic. A fat cat with yellow demon eyes is curled up on the couch, and the potpourri scattered in little bowls around the room almost manages to cover the smell of the unseen litter-box.

  I’m nervous, the kind of nervous that leads to flop sweat and flaccidity. Too late I remember the Viagra I stole from Wade, now sitting worthlessly in my glove compartment. I have n
ot had sex with a woman other than Jen in over ten years, if you don’t count my bizarre sixty seconds with Alice earlier today, and you’d better believe I’m not counting it. I’m treating it like a dream or a UFO sighting, something maybe you’ll talk about one day when you’re drunk and among friends, but nothing that has any bearing on your actual life. But when your wife spent the last year of your marriage going elsewhere for her sexual gratification, it’s only natural to have some performance anxiety.

  Penny steps into the apartment, tossing keys and flipping off lights. I stand uncertainly in the doorway, my thighs trembling a little. I can feel all the crap I ate at the theater burrowing through my intestines, making me feel bloated and queasy. “Should I come in?” I say. My voice sounds hollow and scared.

  She gives me a sharp, knowing smile. “If I were you, I would.”

  The bedroom is a mess, clothes everywhere, towels draped over an armchair to dry. Penny undresses in the light of the desk lamp, not sultry, not like a stripper, but the same way she would if I wasn’t here, letting her clothing fall where she stands. She presents herself to me, her body lithe and smooth, breasts full and buoyant on her too-thin frame. I am self-conscious about my own soft body, with its budding love handles and lack of abdominal definition, but she doesn’t seem to mind, kissing my thighs as she pulls down my pants and then falling down onto the bed with me, licking her way up my belly to my chin and then into my mouth. “You taste good,” she murmurs. I worry that I have bad breath, that my ass will feel flabby in her hands when she grabs it, that I’m rubbing her breasts like a high school kid, that my dick won’t get hard enough, that it won’t measure up to other dicks she’s seen, that I’ll come too soon, that she won’t come at all. I should go down on her, just to make sure she gets something out of the deal, but I’m intimidated by the thought of an uncharted vagina, terrified that after a few minutes of fruitless exploration she’ll gently pull me back up by my ears and tell me it’s okay when we both know it’s not, that it felt good anyway when we both know it didn’t.