This Is Where I Leave You (2 page)

“I have to go now,” I say, trying my best to sound like a guy not in the midst of an ongoing meltdown.

“Jesus, Judd. I was just expressing concern.”

“I’m sure you thought so.”

“Oh, don’t get all passive-aggressive. I get enough of that from Barry.”

“I’ll see you at the house.”

“Fine, be that way,” she says, disgusted. “Good-bye.”

I wait her out.

“Are you still there?” she finally says.

“No.” I hang up and imagine her slamming her phone down while the expletives fly in a machine-gun spray from her lips.

Wednesday

Chapter 2

I
’m packing up my car for the two-hour drive to Elmsbrook when Jen pulls up in her marshmallow-colored SUV. She gets out quickly, before I can escape. I haven’t seen her in a while, haven’t returned her calls or stopped thinking about her. And here she is looking immaculate as ever in her clinging gym clothes, her hair an expensive shade of honey blond, the corners of her mouth inching up ever so slightly into the tentative smile of a little girl. I know every one of Jen’s smiles, what they mean and where they lead.

The problem is that every time I see Jen, it instantly reminds me of the first time I ever saw her, riding that crappy red bike across the quad, long legs pumping, hair flying out behind her, face flushed with excitement, and that’s exactly what you don’t want to think about when confronted with your soon-to-be ex-wife. Ex-wife in waiting. Ex-wife elect. The self-help books and websites haven’t come up with a proper title for spouses living in the purgatory that exists before the courts have officially ratified your personal tragedy. As usual, seeing Jen, I am instantly chagrined, not because she’s obviously found out that I’m living in a crappy rented basement, but because ever since I moved out, seeing her makes me feel like I’ve been caught in a private, embarrassing moment—watching porn with my hand in my pants, singing along to Air Supply while picking my nose at a red light.

“Hey,” she says.

I toss my suitcase into the trunk. “Hey.”

We were married for nine years. Now we say “Hey” and avert our eyes.

“I’ve been leaving you messages.”

“I’ve been busy.”

“I’m sure.” Her ironic inflection fills me with the familiar impulse to simultaneously kiss her deeply and strangle her until she turns blue. Neither is an option at this juncture, so I have to content myself with slamming the trunk harder than necessary.

“We need to talk, Judd.”

“Now’s not a good time.”

She beats me to the driver’s-side door and leans against it, flashing me her most accomplished smile, the one I always told her made me fall in love with her all over again. But she’s miscalculated, because now all it does is remind me of everything I’ve lost. “There’s no reason this can’t be amicable,” she says.

“You’re fucking my boss. That’s a pretty solid reason.”

She closes her eyes, summoning up the massive reserves of patience required to deal with me. I used to kiss those eyelids as we drifted off to sleep, feel the rough flutter of her lashes like butterfly wings between my lips, her light breath tickling my chin and neck. “You’re right,” she says, trying to look like someone trying not to look bored. “I am a flawed person. I was unhappy and I did something inexcusable. But as much as you might hate me for ruining your life, playing the victim isn’t really working out for you.”

“Hey, I’m doing fine.”

“Yeah. You’re doing great.”

Jen looks pointedly at the crappy house in which I now live below street level. It looks like a house drawn by a child: a triangle perched on a square, with sloppily staggered lines for bricks, a lone casement window, and a front door. It’s flanked by houses of equal decrepitude on either side, nothing at all like the small, handsome colonial we bought with my life’s savings and where Jen still lives rent-free, sleeping with another man in the bed that used to be mine.

My landlords are the Lees, an inscrutable, middle-aged Chinese couple who live in a state of perpetual silence. I have never heard them speak. He performs acupuncture in the living room; she sweeps the sidewalk thrice daily with a handmade straw broom that looks like a theater prop. I wake up and fall asleep to the whisper of her frantic bristles on the pavement. Beyond that, they don’t seem to exist, and I often wonder why they bothered immigrating. Surely there were plenty of pinched nerves and dust in China.

“You didn’t show up to the mediator,” Jen says.

“I don’t like him. He’s not impartial.”

“Of course he’s impartial.”

“He’s partial to your breasts.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, that’s just ridiculous.”

“Yes, well, there’s no accounting for taste.”

And so on. I could report the rest of the conversation, but it’s just more of the same, two people whose love became toxic, lobbing regret grenades at each other.

“I can’t talk to you when you’re like this,” she finally says, stepping away from the car, winded.

“I’m always like this. This is how I am.”

My father is dead!
I want to shout at her. But I won’t because she’ll cry, and if she does, I probably will, and then she’ll have found a way in, and I will not let her pierce my walls in a Trojan horse of sympathy. I’m going home to bury my father and face my family, and she should be there with me, but she’s not mine anymore. You get married to have an ally against your family, and now I’m heading into the trenches alone.

Jen shakes her head sadly and I can see her lower lip trembling, the tear that’s starting to form in the corner of her eye. I can’t touch her, kiss her, love her, or even, as it turns out, have a conversation that doesn’t degenerate into angry recriminations in the first three minutes. But I can still make her sad, and for now, I’ll have to be satisfied with that. And it would be easier, so much easier, if she didn’t insist on being so goddamned beautiful, so gym-toned and honey-haired and wide-eyed and vulnerable. Because even now, even after all that she’s done to me, there’s still something in her eyes that makes me want to shelter her at any cost, even though I know it’s really me who needs the protection. It would be so much easier if she wasn’t Jen. But she is, and where there was once the purest kind of love, there is now a snake pit of fury and resentment and a new dark and twisted love that hurts more than all the rest of it put together.

“Judd.”

“I have to go,” I say, opening my car door.

“I’m pregnant.”

I’ve never been shot, but this is probably what it feels like, that split second of nothingness right before the pain catches up to the bullet. She was pregnant once before. She cried and kissed me and we danced like idiots in the bathroom. But our baby died before it could be born, strangled by the umbilical cord three weeks before Jen’s due date.

“Congratulations. I’m sure Wade will be a wonderful father.”

“I know this is hard for you. I just thought you should hear it from me.”

“And now I have.”

I climb into the car. She steps in front of it, so I can’t pull out.

“Say something. Please.”

“Okay. Fuck you, Jen. Fuck you very much. I hope Wade’s kid has better luck in there than mine did. Can I go now?”

“Judd,” she says, her voice low and unsteady. “You can’t really hate me that much, can you?”

I look directly at her with all the sincerity I can muster. “Yes. I can.”

And maybe it’s the complicated grief over my father that has finally begun plucking at my nerves, or maybe it’s simply the way Jen draws back as if slapped, but either way, the intense hurt that flashes behind the wide pools of her eyes for that one unguarded instant is almost enough to make me love her again.

Chapter 3

M
y marriage ended the way these things do: with paramedics and cheesecake.

Marriages fall apart. Everyone has reasons, but no one really knows why. We got married young. Maybe that was our mistake. In New York State, you can legally get married before you can do a shot of tequila. We knew marriage could be difficult in the same way that we knew there were starving children in Africa. It was a tragic fact but worlds away from our reality. We were going to be different. We would keep the fire stoked; best friends who fucked each other senseless every night. We would avoid the pitfalls of complacency; stay young at heart and in shape, keep our kisses long and deep and our bellies flat, hold hands when we walked, conduct whispered conversations deep into the night, make out in movie theaters, and go down on each other with undimmed enthusiasm until the arthritic limitations of old age made it inadvisable.

“Will you still love me when I’m old?” Jen would say, usually when we were in bed in her dorm room, lying drowsily on her dented mattress in the thick musk of our evaporating sex. She’d be lying on her belly and I’d be on my side, running a lazy finger down the shallow canyon of her spine to where it met the rising curves of her outstanding ass. I was stupidly proud of her ass when we were dating. I would hold open doors for her just to watch it bounce ahead of me, high and tight and perfectly proportioned in her jeans, and I would think to myself,
That is an ass to grow old with.
I looked at Jen’s ass as my own personal achievement, wanted to take her ass home to meet my parents.

“When my breasts sag and my teeth fall out, and I’m all dried up and wrinkled like a prune?” Jen would say.

“Of course I will.”

“You won’t trade me in for a younger woman?”

“Of course I will. But I’ll feel bad about it.”

And we would laugh at the impossibility of it all.

Love made us partners in narcissism, and we talked ceaselessly about how close we were, how perfect our connection was, like we were the first people in history to ever get it exactly right. We were that couple for a while, nauseatingly impervious assholes, busy staring into each other’s eyes while everyone else was trying to have a good time. When I think about how stupid we were, how obstinately clueless about the realities that awaited us, I just want to go back to that skinny, cocksure kid with his bloated heart and perennial erection, and kick his teeth in.

I want to tell him how he and the love of his life will slowly fall into a routine, how the sex, while still perfectly fine, will become commonplace enough that it won’t be unheard of to postpone it in favor of a television show, or a late-night snack. How they’ll stop strategically smothering their farts and closing the door to urinate; how he’ll feel himself growing self-conscious telling funny stories to their friends in front of her, because she’s heard all his funny stories before; how she won’t laugh at his jokes the way other people do; how she’ll start to spend more and more time on the phone with her girlfriends at night. How they will get into raging fights over the most trivial issues: the failure to replace a roll of toilet paper, a cereal bowl caked with oatmeal left to harden in the sink, proper management of the checkbook. How an unspoken point system will come into play, with each side keeping score according to their own complicated set of rules. I want to materialize before that smug little shit like the Ghost of Christmas Past and scare the matrimonial impulse right out of him.
Forget marriage,
I’ll rail at him.
Just go for the tequila.
Then I’ll whisk him away to the future and show him the look on his face . . .

 

 

 

 

. . . when I walked into my bedroom and found Jen in bed with another man.

By that point, I probably should have suspected something. Adultery, like any other crime, generates evidence as an inevitable byproduct, like plants and oxygen or humans and, well, shit. So there were no doubt a handful of ways I could have figured it out that would have spared me the eye-gouging trauma of actually having to witness it firsthand. The clues must have been piling up for a while already, like unread e-mails, just a click away from being read. A strange number on her cell phone bill, a call quickly ended when I entered the room, the odd unexplained receipt, a minor bite mark on the slope of her neck that I didn’t remember inflicting, her markedly depleted libido. In the days that followed, I would review the last year or so of our marriage like the security tapes after a robbery, wondering how the hell I could have been so damn oblivious, how it took actually walking in on them to finally get the picture. And even then, as I watched them humping and moaning on my bed, it took me a little while to put it all together.

Because the thing of it is, no matter how much you enjoy sex, there’s something jolting and strangely disturbing about witnessing the sex of others. Nature has taken great pains to lay out the fundamentals of copulation so that it’s impossible to get a particularly good view of the sex you’re having. Because when you get right down to it, sex is a messy, gritty, often grotesque business to behold: the hairs; the abraded, dimpled flesh; the wide-open orifices; the exposed, glistening organs. And the violence of the coupling itself, primitive and elemental, reminding us that we’re all just dumb animals clinging to our spot on the food chain, eating, sleeping, and fucking as much as possible before something bigger comes along and devours us.

So when I came home early on Jen’s thirty-third birthday to find her lying spread-eagle on the bed, with some guy’s wide, doughy ass hovering above her, clenching and unclenching to the universal beat of procreation, his hands jammed under her ass, lifting her up into each thrust, her fingers leaving white marks where they pressed into his back, well, it took some time to process.

It hadn’t yet sunk in that it was Jen in the bed. All I knew was that it was my bed, and the only man who had any business having sex in it was me. I briefly considered the possibility that I was in the wrong house, but that seemed like a long shot, and a quick glance over to the picture of Jen on my night table, young and luminous in her bridal gown, confirmed that I was in the right place. Which was something of a minor relief actually, because to make that kind of mistake, to actually let yourself into your neighbor’s house and walk upstairs to their bedroom oblivious to your error, was probably cause to expect the worst from a brain scan. And if I had walked in on my neighbors rutting like dogs in the middle of the afternoon, I doubt that even the most heartfelt apology would have been accepted, and I’d never be able to make eye contact with them again, let alone ask them to get the mail when we went on vacation. Also, our neighbors, the Bowens, were in their late sixties and Mr. Bowen was eating his way toward his third heart attack. Even if he was still sexually active, which I highly doubted given the circumference of his gelatinous gut, the effect of such an untimely intrusion would probably have sent him into cardiac arrest. So, all things considered, it was probably a good thing that I was in my own house.