This Is Where I Leave You (25 page)

 

 

 

 

 

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.”

 

 

 

 

 

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 not 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.

The sex is as good and bad as first times tend to be, like a play rehearsal full of missed marks, botched lines, bad lighting, and no calls for an encore. We don’t do it up against the wall, on the kitchen sink, in the shower, from behind while she’s bent over the bed. It’s just paint-by-numbers missionary sex: kiss, rub, lick, stroke, enter, rock, moan, and come, all at the proper time. I’m playing scared, letting her set the rhythm, trying my best to banish the image of Wade humping Jen that hovers in the background of my mind. Thanks in part to my earlier release with Alice, I’m able to hold out until Penny finishes, gasping and digging her teeth into my chin hard enough to leave a mark. And it occurs to me, as I surrender to my own somewhat subdued orgasm, that I’ve come twice today, and as sad and twisted as each occasion was, both involved actual, live women, one on top of me, and one beneath me, and maybe that’s a cause for some small measure of optimism, even if we’re not counting Alice. Which we’re not.

When we’re done, I roll off of Penny, feeling ridiculously accomplished and wondering how soon I can leave.

“That was nice,” Penny says drowsily, throwing a leg over mine, splaying out her fingers against my chest.

“Okay. Give it to me straight,” I say. “I can take it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Why did my wife need to have sex with someone else?”

“Because she’s an evil bitch.”

“Come on. Really.”

Penny lies back on her pillow and removes her leg from mine. I grab it and put it back. I like it there. “In my limited experience, women rarely leave because the sex is bad. The sex becomes bad because something else has gone wrong.”

“Really?”

“Nah. He probably just has a world-class schlong.”

“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.”

Penny laughs. “Judd Foxman. Naked in my bed. This is beyond surreal.”

“Surreal is my new reality.”

She kisses both my eyes and wraps her arms around me in a way that brings me dangerously close to tears. I should tell her about the baby. It’s on the tip of my tongue.

“Judd Foxman.”

“What?”

“Nothing. I just like to say your name.”

Penny pulls me closer and burrows her head into the hollow of my neck, lazily repeating my name a few more times as she drifts off to sleep. I open my mouth to say any number of things, but in the end I just lie there, telling myself that no one can feel this disconnected forever.

 

 

 

 

 

WENDY AND BARRY are standing on the front walk, having an argument. Wendy gesticulates wildly while Barry stands there absorbing it, swatting away gnats as he waits her out. I wonder, as I often do, why they stay together, what it is they offer each other that keeps them locked in this bloodless stalemate. But I suppose if I understood anything about marriage, I’d have understood my own a little bit better.

“I’m sorry, babe, it’s the eleventh hour,” Barry is saying. “I need to be there to close this deal now, or it’s all going to go up in smoke.”

“You’ve had a death in the family. Can’t they understand that?”

“Yes, but I can’t be gone for seven days. They need me there.”

“And what about your family? We need you too.”

“I’m doing this for my family.”

“Right. That old load of crap.”

They fall silent when I step out of the car.

“Where the hell have you been?” Wendy says.

“Clearing my head.”

“You didn’t tell anyone where you were going.”

“There’s actually a good reason for that.”

“What?”

“I didn’t want to.”

Barry snickers. Dumb move. Wendy turns on him with a baleful stare, and I use the distraction to slide past them and into the house.

Mom and Linda are in the living room, playing Scrabble at the coffee table and drinking tea. Paul, Alice, and Tracy are on the couch watching Jon Stewart, while Phillip sits on the floor, thumbing through a shoebox of old photos. They all look up at me. Alice smiles, but I can’t look at her, can’t be anywhere near her. The monitor in the hall is broadcasting Serena’s cries in stereo. No one seems terribly concerned.

“Where have you been?” Mom says.

“Out and about.”

“Don’t be evasive. Just say you’d rather not tell me.”

“I’d rather not tell you.”

“But now you have me curious. Did you see Jen today?”

“Yeah.”

“And . . . ?”

“And now I’m going to bed.”

Alice flashes me a meaningful look, and I try to remember if there’s a lock on the basement door.

“Look at this picture,” Phillip says.

I squat down to see the photo he’s holding. I’m around eleven, Paul twelve, and Phillip is two years old. Paul and I are throwing him to each other, playing catch with our little brother in this very living room, twentysomething years ago. Phillip loved that, would laugh hysterically, his eyes wide with excitement as we launched him airborne at each other.
Pay catch, Yudd. Pay catch, Pole.
We are all smiling in the picture, three brothers having a grand old time just playing around in the living room, no agendas, no buried resentments or permanent scars. Even under the best of circumstances, there’s just something so damn tragic about growing up.

“Look here,” Phillip says, pointing to the corner of the photo. “In the breakfront.”

The breakfront has two sets of glass doors, behind which Mom keeps her crystal glasses and the good china.

“I don’t see anything.”

“Look at the glass on the last door.”

I stare at the picture and then, just as I’m about to give up, I see it, a reflection in the glass, a face and arms. Dad, watching us from off camera, smiling widely as Phillip flies between us. The breakfront still stands against the living room wall, and I look into the glass doors a moment. When I look back down Phillip is smiling at me.

“I did the same thing.”

“He’s like a ghost,” I say.

“Last night I woke up and thought I saw him walking out of the study,” Phillip says. When Phillip was little, he would put on his toy tool belt and stand beside Dad as he fixed things in the house. “The compressor is shot,” he would repeat solemnly, brimming with self-importance. He was a very cute kid, and I can remember how much we all adored him, how even then, I hated the fact that he had to grow older.

The baby is still crying her little lungs out upstairs. I lean forward to tousle Phillip’s hair. “I’m going to go check on that baby.”

“They’re letting her cry,” Mom says.

“That doesn’t make it right.”

Phillip watches me as I stand back up and head for the stairs.

“Judd.”

“Yeah.”

He grins. “You smell like pussy.”

 

 

 

 

 

SERENA STOPS CRYING the instant I pick her up. Her head is bald like an old man’s, with just a ring of dark hair around the perimeter. She feels almost weightless against my chest in her little pink pajamas. “It’s okay,” I say softly, and make other idiotic sounds like you do when you’re holding a baby. Her tiny fingers find my chin and she latches on with a surprisingly strong grip, like my chin will save her life, like my chin is exactly what she was crying out for. I sit down on the bed, cradling her little head against my shoulder, inhaling her sweet baby scent. Someday she’ll get older, and the world will start having its way with her. She’ll throw temper tantrums, she’ll need speech therapy, she’ll grow breasts and have pimples, she’ll fight with her parents, she’ll worry about her weight, she’ll put out, she’ll have her heart broken, she’ll be happy, she’ll be lonely, she’ll be complicated, she’ll be confused, she’ll be depressed, she’ll fall in love and get married, and she’ll have a baby of her own. But right now she is pure and undiminished and beautiful. I lie back on the bed as she sleeps on my chest, listening to her tiny little snores, admiring the soft nub of her unformed nose, the sucking blister on her upturned lip. After a few minutes, when her breathing becomes almost imperceptible, I gently lay her down in the crib and head back downstairs. I crawl under my covers and drift off to sleep, still feeling the warm spot where she lay on my chest.

Sunday

Chapter 32