This Is Where I Leave You: A Novel

by Jonathan Tropper

  “I live in California,” Cole informs me solemnly.

  “Yes you do.”

  “Good-bye, Uncle Judd,” Ryan says.

  The next time I see them, Cole will be speaking in full sentences and Ryan will be a sullen adolescent sports fan with the first dusting of hair on his legs. He probably won’t let me kiss his cheek anymore. The thought fills me with sadness, and I give him a second kiss.

  “Donkey-hole,” he says, and we share a conspiratorial laugh. Cole’s not sure what’s funny, but he laughs along with us, because he’s two and why the hell not.

  Wendy hugs me. “Go have some fun while you still can,” she says. “Have meaningless sex. Crush women like beer cans. A little misogyny will be good for you.”

  “Have a safe trip.”

  “You’re a wuss, Judd. But I love you. I’ll come in when you have the baby.” She kisses me brusquely and then moves on to Phillip, then Paul and Alice, and then hoists up Serena, sleeping in her little car seat, and climbs into the back of the van. As the van drives down Knob’s End, I see Horry standing on his porch, raising one still hand in farewell. The van lurches to a stop in front of his house, and Horry comes down the stairs. The windows are tinted and don’t open. Horry puts his hand on the glass, peering intently in. I can’t see inside the van, but I imagine Wendy placing her hand on the glass, lining her fingers up with his for a long moment, before leaning back and telling the van driver to floor it, because she has a flight to catch.

  9:25 a.m.

  IN THE TOP drawer of my father’s ancient mahogany dresser is a clutter of mementos. An expired passport; his high school ring; a monogrammed Swiss Army knife; a worn-out wallet; some loose cuff links; the old Tag Heuer watch he always meant to get fixed; a stack of our creased report cards wrapped in rubber bands; assorted souvenir key chains; an expensive-looking fountain pen; a gold butane lighter—also monogrammed; an assortment of loose screws, bolts, and plastic wire connectors; a wire stripper; and, in a small silver frame, a black-and-white nude portrait of my mother in all her young glory, before kids and breast implants would change the topography of her body. She is slim and fresh-faced and there’s something awkward in her pose, like she hasn’t fully grown into herself yet. I can tell from her smile that it was my father behind the camera. The frame gleams without a hint of tarnish. Dad took care of this picture.

  I’ll leave the Swiss Army knife for Paul and the lighter for Phillip. I slip my Rolex off of my wrist and into my pocket, and I pick up Dad’s old Tag Heuer. When I was a kid I would hold on to his wrist and turn the diving bezel, enjoying the way it clicked around the face of the watch. I give the bezel a few turns. The clicks feel different without his wrist anchoring the watch. I flip it over and see that the back of the case is engraved. YOU FOUND ME. My mother’s words, her naked love cut into steel. It’s hard to imagine her ever having felt lost, but it’s impossible to know the people your parents were before they were your parents. They really did have something, though, my parents. I don’t think I ever fully appreciated that until right now. At first the steel is cold against my wrist, but it warms quickly against my skin, like a living thing. I slide the drawer closed and sit on his side of the bed for a minute, looking down at the watch. My wrist isn’t nearly as thick as his was, and I’ll have to have some links removed from the band when I get the watch fixed. For now the hands are motionless on the white face—the watch stopped working years ago—but I don’t have much of a schedule to keep to these days.

  9:40 a.m.

  MOM, PHILLIP, PAUL, Alice, and Horry are at the table, eating a lavish brunch comprised of shiva leftovers. Phillip is telling a story that has them alternately gasping and laughing. He has many stories that can do that, and some of them might even be true. I watch them for a moment, unseen from the hallway, and then step quietly down the hall to the front door. For reasons I don’t fully understand, being at the center of another tangle of good-bye hugs and well-wishes is more than I can handle right now. Alice will be weird, Paul awkward, Phillip exuberant, and Mom will cry, which will make me cry, and I have cried enough.

  “Making good your escape, I see.”

  I turn to see Linda, standing at the foot of the stairs, watching me.

  “No. I was just—”

  “It’s okay,” she says softly. “Seven days is a lot of togetherness. Come give me a hug.” She wraps her arms around me and kisses me once on each cheek.

  “I’m happy for you and Mom,” I say.

  “Really? It’s not too weird for you?” She blushes a little, looking younger and suddenly vulnerable, and I can see her a little the way Mom does.

  “It’s a good weird.”

  “That was a perfect way to describe it,” she says, hugging me again. “Thank you.”

  “So, are you going to move in?”

  “We’ll see,” she says, offering up a small, wry smile. “We’re taking it very slow. Your mom hasn’t dated in such a long time. This is all very new to her.”

  “I would imagine it is.”

  “Oh. Well, yes, that too.”

  She looks me over fondly, appraising me. “You look better than when you first got here.”

  “Then I was a cuckolded husband. Now I’m an expecting father.”

  She grins. “Don’t be a stranger, Judd.”

  “I won’t.”

  Outside, the sun lights up the red leaves of the dogwoods, casting the yard in soft amber hues. Across the street, two gardeners with noisy leaf blowers send up a twister of multicolored leaves swirling off the lawn, blowing them in a slow, graceful procession to the curb. A cat suns itself in a picture window. A woman jogs by pushing a baby in a running stroller. It’s amazing how harmless the world can sometimes seem.

  9:55 a.m.

  I SIT IDLING in a gas station just before the interstate junction, drawing maps in my head. I can be at the skating rink in ten minutes. I can be back in Kingston in ninety. According to the GPS, I can be in Maine in seven hours and seven minutes. My car doesn’t have GPS, but Phillip’s Porsche does, and that’s what I’m driving. I left him a note with the keys to my car. This morning, on a hunch, I counted the money in my bag and found it light two grand, not one, so I figure a little collateral is in order.

  Penny. Jen. Maine. None of the above. There are options, is my point.

  The girl gassing up her blue Toyota has piles of kinky brown curls held off her face with a black headband. She has great skin and funky black glasses that convey a sexy intelligence. She’s a magazine writer, or maybe a photographer. When she looks over at me looking over at her, I smile. She smiles back and I fall briefly, passionately in love with her.

  Options.

  I want very badly to be in love again, which is why I’m in no position to look for it. But I hope I’ll know it when it comes. My father’s watch jingles loosely on my wrist, my mother’s words resting unseen on my skin. YOU FOUND ME. It gives me hope.

  I pull onto the interstate, grinding the transmission once or twice on the way to fourth. Dad made us all learn on a manual, his massive forearms flexing as he worked the stick. Clutch, shift, up, gas. Clutch, shift, up, gas. I hear him in my head and smile. We can all drive stick. We can all change a flat. We can all repress our feelings until they poison us. It’s a complicated legacy.

  I’m not a fan of country music, but there’s no better music to drive to. Turn the right song up loud enough on the Porsche’s sound system and it will swallow you whole. The past is prelude and the future is a black hole, but right now, hurtling north across state lines for no particular reason, I have to say, it feels pretty good to be me. Tonight I’ll sleep in Maine. Tomorrow is anybody’s guess. I’ve got a baby girl on the way, a borrowed Porsche, and fourteen grand in a shopping bag.

  Anything can happen.

  • • •

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  CHAPTER 1

  This is Tuesday,
just under three weeks before his wife will be getting married, and a few days before Silver will tentatively decide that life isn’t necessarily worth living when you’ve been doing it as poorly as he has. It is seven years and four months or so since Denise divorced him for a host of valid reasons, and roughly eight years since his band, the Bent Daisies, released its only album and became rock stars overnight on the strength of their solitary hit, “Rest in Pieces.” For one blessed summer it seemed as if the entire world was singing that song. And then they weren’t, and then he couldn’t get arrested—although, actually, Silver did get arrested twice; one DUI and once for solicitation, and he would tell you about it if he could, but he was, at best, fuzzy about the details back then, and now it’s like an oral history long forgotten. Then, with a little back-channel manipulation from the record label, Pat McReedy, their lead singer, quit the band to launch his now epic solo career, dropping Danny (bass), Ray (lead guitar), and Silver (drums) back home in Elmsbrook to stare down the barrel of the rest of their painfully unglamorous lives. With nowhere else to go, Silver went back home to discover that Denise had already changed the locks and retained counsel.

  But that was then, and this is Tuesday, eight years and countless mistakes later. Silver is forty-four years old, if you can believe it, out of shape, and depressed—although he doesn’t know if you call it depression when you have good reason to be; maybe then you’re simply sad, or lonely, or just painfully aware, on a daily basis, of all the things you can never get back.

  And, this being Tuesday, Silver and Jack are on their way to jerk off.

  “Is that a wedding ring?”

  They are speeding down the highway in Jack’s ten-year-old BMW convertible when Jack notices the band on Silver’s finger. Jack is blasting hip-hop music and pretending to know the words, while Silver absently taps along on his knees to the automated beat. They are the same age, seasoned veterans of epically bad decisions and poor follow-through.

  He forgot to take off the ring. God only knows how long he’s been wearing it. Hours? Days, maybe. His finger still bears the groove from when he was married, and whenever he slips it on, it slides into place like a machined part, and he forgets about it. Chagrined, he pulls it off his finger and sticks it into his pocket, to jingle around with his other loose change.

  “What the fuck, Silver?” Jack says. He has to shout to be heard above the din of the interstate, the hip-hop, and the incessant ringing in Silver’s ears. Silver suffers from a moderate to severe case of tinnitus. There is no cure and, as far as he knows, no one is running any triathlons to raise awareness or fund research. He suffers alone.

  “I was just playing with it.”

  “Is that your actual wedding band?”

  “As opposed to what?”

  “I don’t know, I thought maybe you went out and bought one.”

  “Why the hell would I buy a wedding ring?”

  “Why would you wear your old one, ten years after your divorce?”

  “Seven years.”

  “Sorry. Seven years. I stand corrected.”

  Jack flashes him a sly little smile, the one that says I know you better than you know yourself, the one that generally makes Silver want to plunge his index finger through Jack’s eye socket, around the back of his nose, and out the other eye, creating an effective handle with which to rip his face off.

  “Something wrong there, Silver?”

  “What could be wrong? I’m a forty-four-year-old man on my way to masturbate into a cup for seventy-five dollars. Living the dream.”

  Jack grins. “Easiest money you’ll ever make.”

  A good amount of his time with Jack is spent wondering whether Jack actually believes his own particular brand of bullshit. They are two middle-aged divorced men, their friendship born of mutual inconvenience, because they happened to live on the same floor of the Versailles. Jack thinks Silver is depressed and Silver thinks Jack is an idiot and, at any given moment, both of them are generally right.

  They are on their way to a satellite office of the Blecher-Royal Medical Research Facility, where they will check in, submit to the prick of a blood test, then submit their own pricks to a quick, sterile flurry of self-abuse and gracelessly come into specimen jars. They will accomplish this without the aid of any chemical lubricants, in the name of science, and for the weekly seventy-five-dollar stipend.

  The drug trial in which they are enrolled—Jack found it online—is purported to be a new nonhormonal treatment for low sperm motility. Possible side effects include mood swings; dizziness; and, strangely, decreased libido, a fact the test administrator told them during the twenty-minute orientation without the slightest hint of irony.

  You don’t want to hear about his deposit, about the small room overwhelmed by the liberal spraying of industrial-strength disinfectant, about the weathered porn magazines he won’t touch because of all the sticky hands that have already handled them. About the depressing little television on its teetering IKEA stand, and the small stack of DVDs, each case marked with either an H(etero) or a G(ay). Or about how he doesn’t sit in the chair or watch the discs, but just kind of stands in the center of the room with his pants around his ankles, calling up the images of girls he slept with back when he was young enough to be wholly consumed by a deep, passionate kiss, the sight of a freshly unsheathed breast, the smoky half-closed eyes of a girl in heat, looking up at you as she hungrily takes you in below.

  But as always, just before his ejaculate hits the bottom of the specimen cup with a soft plastic burp, no matter how determined he is to avoid it, he sees Denise, frowning at him with her customary scorn, depleting the moment of whatever lingering molecular pleasure it may have retained.

  A last sad grunt and squeeze, the cold damp of the baby wipe, and then the warmth of his semen against his fingertips through the thin plastic walls of the cup, more alive than anything coming out of him has any right to feel.

  CHAPTER 2

  Out in the lobby, Jack, already finished, is chatting up the receptionist. She isn’t his type—mousy-looking with a light smattering of adult acne across the edge of her jaw—but Jack likes to stay sharp. You never know who might be in the market for a house.

  Jack is a real-estate agent, always with a business card tucked between two fingers, slipping it into your hand like a reverse pickpocket before you even realize he’s done it. He carries himself with the cocky swagger of someone who is always closing, whether he’s trying to talk someone into bed or a center-hall colonial. In fact, he is somewhat famous for often accomplishing both simultaneously. This went on back when he was still married, so it was only a matter of time, really. There was a Puerto Rican bartender. She showed up to his house at dinnertime, cursing at him in Spanish. His wife went after him, first with a meat tenderizer, and then with a team of lawyers from her father’s white-shoe law firm.

  “There he is!” Jack says, announcing Silver’s presence to the entire office. “What, did you have to buy yourself dinner first? I was about to send Vicki here in to expedite things.”

  Vicki smiles, embarrassed, maybe even offended, but somehow flattered too. That is Jack’s gift.

  “I’m fine.” He hands Vicki his deposit without making eye contact, she hands him his check, and just like that, he has sold his seed. The cup is opaque, but still, the act of handing your sperm to a woman is one of those things that will never stop feeling creepy.

  “Good job,” Jack says, slapping his back as they step out of the office into the afternoon sun.

  This is my life, Silver thinks to himself, and, as always, tries like hell not to panic.

  * * *

  Mistakes have been made.

  It’s hard to know where to start. Things have been a mess for so many years that trying to pin down a starting point is like trying to figure out where your skin starts. All you can ever really know is that it’s
wrapped around you, sometimes a little tighter than you’d like.

  But clearly there have been some mistakes. Bad ones. You can tell that just by looking at him.

  For one thing, he has gotten fat. Not obese, not People magazine fat, but still. He has been on an extended hiatus from any kind of physical fitness. Do they even say “physical fitness” anymore? He isn’t sure. He hasn’t quite fallen apart yet, but the cracks are fast becoming fissures: an increasingly pronounced gut, incipient jowls, and the strategic application of baby powder in the warmer seasons to avoid chafing.

  So as not to smell like baby powder, he uses excessive amounts of deodorant and generous helpings of Eternity, by Calvin Klein. He applies the cologne by spraying it into the air and then walking through the vapor, like he saw his mother do when he was a boy. So, yeah, now he’s the fat guy who smells like baby powder and too much cologne, who sits alone in Manny’s Famous Pizza leaving greasy fingerprints all over the book he isn’t actually reading while blotting the oil off his poorly shaved chin with a napkin, keeping an eye on all the pretty girls who come in.

  You could be excused for thinking he is somewhat pathetic. Or maybe a pedophile.

  Which is why lately he has gotten into the habit of wearing his old wedding band. Not because he misses Denise—he doesn’t at all, which is maybe a sad confirmation of what she always suspected about his overall emotional wherewithal—but because that gold band around his finger alters the whole picture, confers upon him some faint glimmer of respectability. It implies that he goes home to someone who finds redeeming qualities in him, who is ostensibly not averse to at least occasional physical contact with him, and that makes all of his obvious flaws seem more superficial, less ingrained. It could complicate things if he happens to strike up a conversation with an attractive woman, but the women he tends to engage these days are not, generally speaking, the sort who are going to blanch at a wedding band.