This Is Where I Leave You (26 page)

 

D
ad is bent over me, fixing my wooden leg with a socket wrench. I’m on a chair and he’s on his knees in front of me, turning the wrench and humming Simon and Garfunkel.
I’d rather be a hammer than a nail. Yes I would.
I can see through his curly, gray hair to where it’s thinning at his pink scalp, can smell the grease on him, can smell the detergent coming off his favorite blue work shirt. The socket wrench clicks noisily as it spins, and I can see the long muscles in his forearms flex and move as he turns it. He has spent his life working with tools, and they fit naturally into his hands. I’m staring down at him, knowing that I can’t tell him that he’s dead, that if I do he’ll disappear. I want him to look up at me, want to see his face, but he is focused on the leg and he doesn’t look up. “Almost there,” he says. Then he puts down the socket wrench and grabs on to my knee with both hands. “Here we go,” he says. He pulls on the prosthesis, which slides off my knee and splits down the middle, and his hands come away with one half of it in each, and there is my real leg again, hairless and pink, but whole and unharmed. Then he looks up at me and smiles widely, like he might have smiled at me when I was a little boy, like he never did once I was older, a warm and loving smile, uncomplicated by my own encroaching manhood, and the love surging between us is electric and palpable. When I wake up I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to escape the dim silence of the basement to find him again, but there’s only darkness and the sad, steady whisper of the central air handler behind the wall, telling its mechanical secrets in the dark.

Chapter 33

 

U
pon top of the house. Looking over miles of roof; slate, concrete, copper, clay, all bathed in the pink glow of the sun rising over Elmsbrook. There’s a bird, maybe a cardinal, maybe a robin, I don’t know, it has a red chest. It’s chirping in the branch of a tree of equally uncertain nomenclature. Elm, or oak, or ash. I think I used to know things like that, the names of birds and trees. Now it feels like I don’t know much about anything. I don’t know why planes fly, and what causes lightning, and what it means to short a stock, and the difference between the Shiites and Sunnis, and who’s slaughtering whom in Darfur, and why the U.S. dollar is so weak, and why the American League is so much better than the National League. I don’t know how Jen and I became strangers in our own marriage, how we let something that should have brought us closer derail us like a couple of amateurs. We were two reasonably smart people in love with each other, and then, one day we were less so, and maybe we were headed here anyway, maybe she just got there first, because she felt the loss of our baby more acutely. For a moment, a feeling circles me, something approaching clarity, maybe even acceptance, but it fails to settle and ultimately dissipates.

I think about Jen. I think about Penny. I could probably have something with Penny, but I’d still be thinking of Jen. I could maybe try to win Jen back, but I’d still be thinking of Wade. And so would she. He’d be a ghost, haunting our bed every time we touched. So what do I do?

There are just too many things I don’t know.

The girl in last night’s movie saw the way the sheepdog trainer carried his injured daughter and she just knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that nothing mattered more than being with him. She knew. But she wasn’t a real person, that girl, she was an actress with an eating disorder who was charged with DUI last year and who slept with her married director just long enough to wreck his life before falling out of love and off the wagon. That’s love in real life: messy and corrupt and completely unreliable. I like Penny, and I still love Jen, and I hate Jen and I couldn’t leave Penny’s sad little apartment fast enough. I want someone who will love me and touch me and understand me and let me take care of them, but beyond that, I don’t know.

I just don’t know.

There’s a scraping sound behind me, and Wendy climbs onto the roof, still groggy with sleep.

“Hey there.”

“Good morning.”

She stands beside me and reaches into the chimney for a second, her hand emerging with a box of Marlboros and a lighter. “Want one?”

“No, thanks.”

“Mind if I do?”

I don’t answer because it wouldn’t matter. You can’t let your dog crap on the sidewalk, but it’s perfectly acceptable to blow carcinogens down other people’s throats. Somewhere along the way, smokers exempted themselves from the social contract.

Wendy lights up, inhaling so deeply that I can picture her lungs inflating and darkening with smoke. “So, Barry’s getting the hell out of Dodge.”

“Where to?”

“Everywhere. California, Chicago, London. His fund took a big hit last year with the whole subprime thing, and I say that with no actual concept of what the whole subprime thing actually is. But apparently everything depends on getting this deal done.”

“Are you worried?”

She shrugs. “It’s Barry. This is what he does. If I worried, that would defeat the whole purpose of being married to him.” She takes another drag on her cigarette. “So, you slept with Jen last night?”

“Penny.”

“Oh! Good for you. Right?”

“I feel like I’ll never be able to have sex with someone new without thinking the whole time about the fact that I’m having sex with someone new.”

Wendy shrugs. “You’ll get over it.”

From below comes the sound of the front door closing, and a moment later Linda crosses the front yard. She stops on the sidewalk and turns her face up to the sky, letting the morning breeze kiss her face, before heading down the block toward her house.

“She’s here early,” Wendy muses.

“She’s here late,” I say.

“Oh,” Wendy says. Then, “Oh! No!”

“Exactly.”

“No way! You think?”

“Nothing surprises me anymore.”

A quiet moment while Wendy processes the new information.

“It kind of makes sense, a little,” she says.

“Kind of.”

“If so, how do we feel about it?”

“We are numb.”

Wendy considers that for a moment, tapping her lip with the end of her cigarette. “Yes. That’s a perfect description of what we are.”

The bird that may or may not be a cardinal or a robin takes flight, swooping down toward the backyard to catch the air pocket that will take her to the next tree. It would be nice to be able to do that, I think. To just pick up from wherever you were that wasn’t working out for you and ride the winds to a better place. I’d be in Australia by now.

“You slept with Horry.”

“He told you?”

“I was up here yesterday morning too. Saw you do the walk of shame.”

She shrugs. “It’s no big deal.”

“It’s adultery.”

Wendy raises her eyebrows at me, biting back whatever it was she was prepared to say, a rare display of restraint. We are perched on a roof and you can’t be too careful.

“Horry is grandfathered in.”

“Is that how it works?”

“That’s how it works.”

“That makes half of your graduating class eligible.”

She laughs and stubs out her cigarette on a roof shingle. “In an alternate universe where Horry didn’t get his brains bashed in, he and I are married. Once in a blue moon I get to visit that universe.”

“And it’s really that simple.”

“My alternate universe, my rules.”

Behind and below us, the back door slams. We turn around to look down into the backyard. Tracy is standing at the head of the pool in a black one-piece bathing suit. Her dive is flawless, her stroke strong and graceful. She swims back and forth with machinelike precision, doing those little somersaults against the wall at each end like she’s in the Olympics. I get tired just looking at her.

“Poor thing,” Wendy says.

Tracy slices through the water like a shark, and Wendy and I watch her from our perch above the world, unaccustomed to such grace and discipline. I think, not for the first time, that she deserves better than Phillip, better than this family of ours. Someone should save her from us while there’s still time.

Chapter 34

 

T
here are tricks to paying a shiva call. You don’t want to come during off-peak hours, or you risk being the only one there, face-to-face with five surly mourners who, but for your presence, would be off their low chairs, stretching their legs and their compressed spines, taking a bathroom break, or having a snack. Evenings are your safest bet, after seven, when everyone’s eaten and the room is full. Weekday afternoons are a dead zone. Sunday is a crapshoot. Do a drive-by and count the parked cars before you stop. If you’re lucky, there will already be a conversation going on when you come in, so you won’t have to sit there trying to start one of your own. It’s hard to talk to the bereft. You never know what’s off-limits.

And speaking of limits, there apparently aren’t any when it comes to Mom’s slinky wardrobe. The old expression goes, a good speech is like a woman’s skirt: short enough to hold your attention, long enough to cover the subject. Mom’s short denim skirt isn’t a speech, it’s more like a quick, dirty joke, the kind people are always e-mailing to you. And she’s wearing a tight black camisole with spaghetti straps. She looks like a retired stripper.

You would think everyone we know has already been over, but apparently not. The shiva calls start bright and early, people wanting to get their obligations over with in time to enjoy one of the last warm Sundays of the season. They sit visiting with us like they’ve got all the time in the world, while their golf clubs, tennis rackets, and swimsuits lie waiting for them in the trunks of their cars.

Boner shows up with a group of Paul’s old buddies, all ex-jocks. They talk about the Yankees and the Mets and their fantasy baseball league, while their wives sit quietly beside them with looks of bored indulgence.
Better baseball than mistresses and hookers,
their expressions say. Boner is in jeans, a T-shirt, and flip-flops, every inch the cool rabbi off duty. His wife, Emily, is pretty and quiet, with nervous eyes and a flickering smile that never quite achieves ignition. The other guys have this running joke of apologizing to him every time they swear or say something off-color, which is pretty much every other minute. You can tell he’d like to swear a blue streak right back at them, but he is surrounded by his congregants, and it would be bad for business.

“Hey, Judd,” Dan Reiss says to me. “How are things with Wade Boulanger?”

“What?”

“
Man Up.
Don’t you work on the show?”

“Not anymore.”

“That’s too bad. I love that guy.” He contorts his face and says, “Man up already!” in a hoarse, nasal voice.

“That’s a good impression.”

“You think?”

“Sure.”

“What’s he like off the air?”

“He’s an asshole.”

“Well, yeah. But is he a good guy?”

They talk about high school, relive their greatest triumphs on the baseball field. Everyone is careful not to mention college, but the specter of Paul’s injury looms large over the conversation. Their very avoidance of the topic is reminder enough, like the puffy scar that snakes up the side of his neck. You can see the muscles tightening in his face, the tautness of his lips in their neutral position. His life is a daily reminder of the life he might have had. I feel a surge of pity and tenderness toward him. I want to tell him that I understand, that I forgive him for being such a total prick to me.

I think about making a list of all the things I need to tell people before it’s too late.

 

 

 

 

 

GREG POLLAN, AN old friend of mine from high school, comes by. Our friendship was based almost entirely on our mutual admiration of Clint Eastwood. We would talk to each other in Clint’s tough-guy rasp, and if we passed each other in the halls, we would squint and draw imaginary .357 Magnums.
I know what you’re thinking; did he fire six shots, or only five? Go ahead, make my day.
At some point we moved on to Sylvester Stallone. In high school, if you can find a girl who will kiss you and maybe let you touch her breasts and a guy who likes the same movies as you, your world is pretty much complete. Now Greg is fat and married and his eyes bulge in their sockets, threatening to pop out and shoot across the room. Triplets, he tells me. A goiter. He is unshaven and tired and he heard an old friend was sitting shiva in the neighborhood and made it his business to come. Even though he’s exhausted and probably could have used the time better just turning up the A.C. in his car and closing his eyes. I try to imagine a situation in which I’d have been equally decent.

“So, I hear you produce the Wade Boulanger show.”

“Yeah.”

“He’s very funny.”

“Sometimes.”

“I could do without all the farting though.”

“You and me both.”

“My wife hates him.”

“Mine loves him.”

“She thinks he’s a misogynist blowhard, calls him Rush Limbaugh with a boner.”

“That’s pretty accurate, I guess. What are you up to?”

“Well, I was doing risk assessment for a while, and now I’m kind of consulting, by which I mean I got laid off.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“So now I take care of the girls—they’re four—and Debbie sells medical supplies. Also, we have an Amway website. I’ll leave you my card.”

I wonder how he gets up in the morning.

He tells me about some of the other kids from our class he’s kept tabs on. Mike Salerno is divorced and drives a Ferrari. Jared Mathers is gay, to the surprise of absolutely no one. Randy Sawyer owns a string of bowling alleys. Julie Mehler is a state senator. Sandy Flynn’s house burned down, but they all got out. Gary Daley was arrested for having kiddie porn on his office computer. And so on. Judd Foxman’s pregnant wife left him for a popular misogynist blowhard radio personality. As a one-line update, I fit in quite nicely, actually. Better than I ever did back in the day.