We stare at each other for a few seconds, the air between us electrically charged. “You know what the saddest part of this conversation is?” Jed says.
“What’s that?”
“It’s that we’re both right. But you know what? That doesn’t make you any less wrong.” He grabs some bills from his pocket and throws them onto the table. “Congratulations on being cancer free,” he says with a nod. “If you even care.” And with that, he grabs his jacket and storms out of the restaurant.
I sit back down and sip at my drink, waiting for the acid rage in my stomach to simmer down. I am cancer free, and that’s great news, but what Jed would never understand is that the cancer—or, rather, the threat of it—was like a free pass to initiate drastic change. No one questions the actions of someone with cancer. It’s like diplomatic immunity. While I was worried about it, I became a more daring version of myself. I told my boss to fuck off. I got into a fistfight. I kissed the girl. I’m relieved beyond measure to be healthy, but I could have used the threat of it for a little while longer. Now I’m left here wondering what my excuse will be.
Chapter 31
Hope returns from London with sex on her brain. She’s waiting for me in her apartment in violet mesh lingerie, and throws me roughly against the door to kiss me when I step in. “Miss me?”
“You know it.”
She leads me through the darkened apartment to her candlelit bedroom, where she starts kissing me again, her tongue pushing aggressively past closed lips and teeth to wrap itself around my own, her fingers tucked possessively into the waistband of my pants. “How was your trip?” I say.
“Less talking, more undressing,” she says, breathing heavily as she tears open my shirt. My hands find her ass out of habit as I return her kiss, but I can feel myself not responding. She’s only been gone three days, but it feels like I’ve been on a much longer trip, and the shock of being yanked back into her reality is disorienting. She goes down on her knees to take off my pants, her tongue on my lower belly as she pulls them down. Her fingers encircle me, coaxing me to stiffness, but even as she stands back up to kiss me, I can already feel myself softening. I may have only kissed Tamara once, but the damage has been done, because now, as I stand naked in Hope’s writhing embrace, I feel like I’m cheating on both of them simultaneously. Nothing like a guilty conscience to hamstring the anatomy.
She pushes me down onto her four-poster bed and climbs on top of me, kissing me with liquid urgency, her fingers kneading and stroking me all the while, trying to resuscitate me below. “I want your cock in me,” she moans into my ear. Hope has a number of sexual personas, and this one likes to talk dirty, which, I’ll admit, was a turn-on when we first started dating, but now never fails to make me feel self-conscious, like we’re filming an amateur porno film. “Put your cock in me,” she whispers, grinding her wetness against me to no avail.
“What’s wrong?” she says, momentarily breaking from character.
“Nothing,” I say, trying to hide behind another kiss.
“Are you still sore down there?”
“No. I just need a little time.”
But Hope will not be so easily dissuaded. Sex, to her, is another arena in which to excel, and she has worked energetically to cultivate this particular skill set, so failure is not an option. She tears into me, bringing to bear the full weight of her work ethic, sucking, licking, stroking, and pulling, and after a while she stumbles upon the right combination and the stalemate is broken. She pulls me into her, her nails digging sharply into my ass, throwing her head back to cry out as our pelvises meet. We couple fiercely, with great concentration, and it’s like an athletic event, complete with grunts, sweat, and the very real risk of a groin injury. When she finally comes, her pleasured cries are tinged with the relish of sweet victory. Afterward, she lies on her back, reveling in the satisfaction of a job well done, while I lie in the jumble of my own contradictions, having compounded my crimes, a feckless spectator to the growing farce of my own life. So much for the afterglow.
Hope talks to me, about London and our engagement, about wedding halls, bridesmaids’ gifts, and guest lists, and this is my Hope, beautiful, animated, and ever so slightly anal, unabashed in the unrelenting pursuit of her agenda. I listen with an impending sense of dread, peering out from behind the veil of my secret thoughts while she rambles on, oblivious to the growing distance between us. I’m terrified that despite everything, I’ll still go through with it, and yet I’m equally afraid of losing her, a middleman through and through, waiting for nothing less than an act of God to move me one way or another, to unseat the incumbent inertia.
She turns over and grabs my hand, and I wince involuntarily at the pain. “Oh my God!” she says, studying the colorful damage. “What happened to you?”
“I got into a fight,” I say as if it happens all the time.
“What do you mean, you got into a fight?”
And so I tell her about Pete’s Mustang and our encounter with Satch, as well as our subsequent arrest and release. I get so absorbed in the telling that I almost start to include today’s excitement, but then catch myself, remembering that she knows nothing of the biopsy. “You know,” she says when I’m done, “I thought it was a good thing that you were spending time with your father. Now I’m not so sure.”
“What are you talking about?” I say. “Norm didn’t start the fight.”
“I just don’t think he’s a good influence.”
“I haven’t been influenced by him in twenty years. Why would I start now?”
“Oh, please. Here or not, he’s been influencing you your whole life.” She sits up in the bed, pulling a sheet up in the name of modesty, a funny switch for the woman passionately demanding cock just a few minutes ago. “And you can’t deny that you’ve been acting very strange since he got here.”
“Define strange.”
“Did you go to work today?”
“No.”
“Okay, so that’s what, three days you’ve skipped work for no apparent reason. And with all that free time, you couldn’t be bothered to call me in London. No, wait, you did call me once, and you were stoned at the time. And now you’re getting into fistfights.”
“It’s got nothing to do with Norm,” I say defensively. “It’s just been a crazy week.”
She frowns and looks away. “What’s going on with you, Zack?”
This is my chance. The critical moment is sitting there, ready and waiting to be seized, but somehow, lying in the wet spot with my thighs still sticky from our dried juices doesn’t seem like the right time to be confessing my sins and doubts. “I may have quit my job,” I say.
“What do you mean, you may have?”
“I left on Tuesday and I haven’t been back. I haven’t answered my cell, checked my e-mails, nothing.”
“Why the hell would you do that?” she demands, the plucked tips of her eyebrows almost touching underneath her angrily furrowed brow.
“It’s a shitty job.”
Hope shakes her head exasperatedly. “Don’t you think we should have discussed it first?”
“I wasn’t under the impression I needed your permission.”
Hope’s eyes well up as if she’s been slapped. “Oh, for God’s sake!” She rolls off the bed and throws on a short satin robe. “It’s bad enough that you didn’t think to call me while I was away. You were obviously too busy smoking dope and getting into fights. But you made a major decision, one that affects me too, whether you like it or not, and you didn’t call me to discuss it.” She’s in tears now, her mouth quivering as she speaks. “What could you possibly have been thinking?”
“You would have told me to stay.”
“I would have helped you make a plan.”
“I don’t want a plan!” I shout at her, shocking us both with my vehemence. “I’m tired of having a plan. I’ve been planning my whole life, and it isn’t working. I just want to sit back and breathe for a minute, figure out who the hell I a
m.”
Hope stands stock-still, head cocked, aghast at my juvenile outburst. I steel myself for her response, but none is immediately forthcoming. She just nods her head slowly, wiping the tears off her face with the knuckles of her open hand. And looking into her moist eyes, it suddenly becomes clear to me that Hope gets it, that despite all the things I’m not saying, she’s registered my festering ambivalence along with my inability to change course. But even though she sees it, she’s not going to be the one who derails things, and she’ll back down every time if that’s what it takes. She understands that this will be a battle of attrition, and she has no intention of losing. “I already know who you are,” she says softly. “I love who you are. I don’t want to fight about this.”
“Me neither,” I say, feeling like an asshole.
I watch her as she walks into her bathroom to wash her face. From my vantage point I can see the smooth backs of her long legs, the soft curve of her behind peeking out from under her robe as she leans over the sink, and I can see her face in the mirror, red, wet, and resolved. She doesn’t deserve this, and I feel terrible for her that I’m not working out according to plan. Up until a few weeks ago, I’d shown so much promise.
In the middle of the night, she wakes me up to make love again, and we do so wordlessly, in that ethereal state where sleep and consciousness dance. Only as we finish, and I taste the wet salt of her cheek on my tongue, do I realize that she’s been crying again.
Chapter 32
“What are you doing?” Norm says to me in my room as I’m dressing for the engagement party.
“Hope wants me there early,” I say.
He shakes his head. “I mean, why are you doing this? You don’t want to marry her.”
I look at him. “Of course I want to marry her.”
“What about Tamara?”
“Tamara’s a friend.”
“That’s not how you explained it to me a few days ago.”
I start knotting my Burberry tie, a gift from Hope. “Forget about that,” I say. “I was all messed up about the cancer thing. I wasn’t thinking straight.”
“Cancer or not, I think you’re still messed up, and that’s no way to go into a marriage.”
“Now you’re a marriage expert?”
“I’m an expert on failed marriages, and I can see yours coming from a mile away.”
My tie knot skews to the left, and I undo it to start again. “I’m fine, Norm.”
“Here, let me.” He steps in front of me and starts fussing with the tie. “When I married your mother, I didn’t have a doubt in the world that she was my soul mate. I went in with no reservations, not a single one.”
“And we all know how that worked out.”
He keeps his eyes fixed resolutely on the tie as he adjusts the knot, his forehead furrowed with concentration. “That’s my point,” he says. “I was as sure as I could humanly be, and still, I failed. So what do you think your chances are if you’ve already got serious doubts?”
“You’re forgetting something.”
“What’s that?” he says, looking up at me.
“I’m not you.”
He meets my gaze, nodding sadly. “That’s right, Zack. You’re not me. You’re all about responsibility. You’ll stay at the same cruddy job for, what is it, eight years? Because you’re not like your flaky father. And you’ll stay with your woman even while you know, in your gut, that maybe you’ll never love her the way you could love someone else. Because you’ve made your commitment, and that’s what matters.”
“What do you want me to do, Norm?” I say, my voice shaking. “You want me to be like you, is that it, a chip off the old block? You figure if I fuck this up it will be one more thing we can have in common, like grilled cheese sandwiches? You’ve never lived up to a commitment in your life. You were always sure there was something better out there for you. Maybe there is something better out there, and maybe there isn’t, but I’m not going to end up broke and alone when I’m sixty because I never saw the value in what I had right in front of me until it was gone.”
He pulls back, stepping away from me to study my face. “You think I don’t know what I’ve lost?” he says. “You think I don’t lose it again, every day?”
I shake my head at him. “We loved you, Norm. We were your kids, your family. And you tossed us away like we were nothing. What did you think was out there that could be better than your own sons?”
I can see his face twitching, under his eyes and at the corners of his mouth, ancient hurts hurtling up to the surface, only to be batted down at the last second like insects by the sheer force of his will. Finally, with great effort he looks back at the tie and steps forward to put the finishing touches on my knot. “There,” he says, stepping away from me to admire his work. “Perfect every time.” He turns me to see it in the mirror. “You know what I worry about, Zack?”
“What?” I say, fingering the knot.
“I worry that trying not to become me, while certainly a worthwhile pursuit in its own right, has prevented you from actually becoming yourself.”
“Well, maybe this is just who I am,” I say weakly, sitting down on the bed and burying my head in my hands.
“I don’t think so. There’s something in you, something stronger and better than me. I think you’re just scared.”
“Of what?”
“Of disappointing people, like I did.” He sits down on the bed beside me. “Listen, Zack, I know you think you’re already committed, but you’re not. You haven’t taken those vows yet. If you’re not sure this is the right thing for you, you need to stop it, as soon as possible. The hurt you may cause now is nothing compared to what it will be like if it happens after you’re married.”
I collapse back on the bed with a groan, covering my eyes. “What’s wrong?” Norm says.
“I have a splitting headache.”
“Why don’t you take something?”
“I took some Aleve a little while ago.”
“Wait a minute,” he says. “Did you get them from the medicine chest in your bathroom?”
“Yeah. Why?”
Norm sighs. “Those are my Viagras.”
I sit up, eyes wide. “What are you talking about?”
“The bottle was practically empty, so I figured I’d use it.”
“Jesus, Norm! My party’s in an hour!”
“Then you’d better find some aspirin, because if you think you’ve got a headache now, the Viagra’s going to bury you.”
“I can’t walk around my party with a hard-on.”
“Just don’t think any sexual thoughts. The drug works in conjunction with arousal.”
“But you’re hard all the time when you take it.”
Norm grins. “I’m just a dirty old man.”
Chapter 33
The Seacords have transformed the main hall of their penthouse into a party room with a harvest motif. Rust, gold, crimson, and brown banners descend in long arcs from the chandelier to the four corners of the room, creating a tented effect. Carving stations featuring all manner of meats have been set up along the far wall behind the staircase, while lighter fare like pasta and sushi is served from behind crescent-shaped tables scattered along the perimeter of the room. A circular wet bar manned by two bartenders has been established in the center of the room, between two large potted trees with multihued leaves. Tuxedoed waiters stand ready to circulate hot appetizers on polished silver trays. On the first landing of the staircase, members of the four-man band have finished setting up their instruments, and are now hanging out in the loose manner of musicians as they fasten their ratty cummerbunds and clip-on bow ties. The grand double doors on both sides of the anteroom have been opened, allowing access to the living room and dining room respectively. As with their lesbian daughter, Hope’s parents are compensating for their disapproval with an extravagant demonstration of acceptance, and into the chaos of this charade I stride, with the mother of all headaches throbbing in my temples.
“It looks amazing,” I say.
“The banners aren’t draping the way they were meant to, but there’s nothing to be done about it now, I suppose. They’ve already dismantled the scaffolding.”
“I think they look great,” I say. “And the trees are a very nice touch.”
“Aren’t they? They were trucked down from a nursery in Vermont.”
“Where’s Hope?”
“She’s in her room, touching up. She asked me to send you up when you got here.”
I find Hope sitting in front of her vanity, blotting her lipstick, her hair done up in a French braid to show off the graceful lines of her neck. “Hey there,” she says to my reflection. “You look sharp.”
“Thanks,” I say, straightening my tie in the mirror. I walk up behind her and place my hands on her shoulders, studying our reflection in the mirror. There we are, the happy couple, ever after, till death do us part. The bride glowing, the groom blushing, either from excitement or from the inadvertent Viagra dose that even now renders the skin of his face hot and prickly, like a sunburn. I have somehow pulled this off, landed this gorgeous, vibrant woman, and there is a whole life out there waiting for us. There will be travel, and children, and ultimately a house of our own. We can have a room for Pete, who will be an adored uncle and who will probably come to stay for longer intervals as Lela gets older. We’ll make friends in the neighborhood, become active in the school, immerse ourselves in the wonder of our growing family, and through it all I’ll wake up every morning to the flawless beauty of Hope’s face, go to bed at night enveloped in the soft warmth of her naked embrace. All I have to do is dismiss the delusion of a higher love with Tamara; this ephemeral fantasy triggered by nothing more than an untimely attraction and sublimated fears.
Jonathan Tropper Page 21
