This Is Where I Leave You

Chapter 10

I have a recurring dream in which I’m walking down the street, all footloose and fancy-free, when I look down and realize that beneath my pants, one of my legs is actually a prosthesis, molded plastic and rubber with a steel core. And then I remember, with a sinking feeling, that my leg had been amputated from the knee down a few years back. I had simply forgotten. The way you can forget in dreams. The way you wish you could forget in real life but, of course, can’t. In real life, you don’t get to choose what you forget. So I’m walking, usually out on Route 120 in Elmsbrook, past the crappy strip malls, the mini golf, the discount chains, and the themed restaurants, when I suddenly remember that I lost my leg a few years ago, maybe cancer, maybe a car accident, whatever. The point is, I have this fake leg clamped to my thigh, chafing at my knee where my calf used to descend. And when I remember that I’m an amputee, I experience this moment of abject horror when I realize that when I get home I will have to take off the leg to go to sleep and I can’t remember ever having done that before, but I must do it every night, and how do I pee, and who will ever want to have sex with me, and how the hell did this even happen anyway? And that’s when I will myself awake, and I lie there in bed, sweaty and trembling, running my hands up and down both legs, just making sure. Then I get up to go to the bathroom, even if I don’t have to, and the cold bathroom tiles against my heels are like finding fifty bucks in a jacket pocket from last fall.

These are the rare moments when it actually still feels good to be me.

And sometimes during my waking hours I think, wouldn’t it be something if this life was just a dream too? And somewhere there’s a more complete and happy and slimmer version of me sleeping in his bed, next to a wife who still loves him, the linens twisted up around their feet from their recent lovemaking, the sounds of their children’s light snoring filling the dimly lit hallway. And that me, the one dreaming of this version, is about to shake himself awake from the nightmare of my life. I can feel his relief like it’s my own.

THERE IS NOTHING more pathetically optimistic than the morning erection. I am depressed, unemployed, unloved, basement-dwelling, and bereaved, but there it is, every morning like clockwork, rising up to greet the day, poking out of my fly cocksure and conspicuously useless. And every morning, I face the same choice: masturbate or urinate. It’s the one time of the day where I feel like I have options.

But this morning I can hear the low groan of the floorboards above me, the rhythmic creak of the sofa bed in the den—Phillip and Tracy enjoying some early morning, pre-shiva coitus—and my options are whittled down to none. I can hear Tracy’s muffled voice groaning something over and over again as they gather momentum. The first song that comes to mind is “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and I hum it loudly to drown out the muffled cries and grunts seeping through the ceiling as I flee to the linoleum safety of the closet-sized bathroom. I’m still pissing when I reach the home of the brave, so I loudly hum the theme to Star Trek in a continuous loop until I’ve washed my hands and brushed my teeth. When I emerge, the noise has subsided, and my mother is sitting on the edge of my bed in the kind of short, satin bathrobe you’d want to see on your twenty-three-year-old girlfriend.

“Sleep well?” she says.

“Not really.”

Upstairs the creaking begins again. Mom looks up at the ceiling and smiles at me. “That boy,” she says, shaking her head fondly. “Tracy must be forty-five if she’s a day. Obviously, he’s working through some mother issues.” She leans forward, and the satin lapels of her robe spread, revealing the large D cups she had installed about fifteen years ago. She’d discovered a lump that turned out to be benign and somehow converted the experience into an excuse to upgrade her breasts. She hasn’t worn a bra since.

“Mom!” I say, looking away. “Cover up, will you?”

She looks down, lovingly surveying the promontories of her age-inappropriate breasts like she would an infant grandchild, before unhurriedly refastening her robe. “You were always something of a prude,” she says.

“It’s a mystery to me why anyone in this house might have mother issues.”

“They’re breasts, Judd. The same ones you suckled at.”

“Those are something other than breasts.”

“Your father didn’t see it that way. When we made love, he used to love to—”

“Shut up, Mom!”

“Why is it so hard for you to accept that your mother is a sexual being? Do you think you were immaculately conceived? I should think it would make you happy that your father and I were still fucking.”

Yes. That’s what she said. My mother is a sixty-three-year-old bestselling author with a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and Pamela Anderson’s breasts, who talks about fucking her late husband like she’s discussing current events.

“Let’s pretend, for the sake of argument, that that was a remotely normal thing to say to your son. It still doesn’t mean I want to hear the intimate details of your sex life.”

“Judd. I’m your mother, and I love you.” That’s what she always says, what she advises the millions of mothers who read Cradle and All to say, just before eviscerating or emasculating their offspring. The next word is always “but.” According to Doctor Hillary Foxman, the patron saint of frustrated mothers, this is called softening, rendering the child receptive to correction. What I’ve learned, after nine years of marital spats, is that everything before the “but” is bullshit.

“But,” she says, “your sorrow has become malignant.”

I nod slowly, as if considering her words. “Thanks, Mom. That wasn’t even the slightest bit helpful.”

She shrugs and pulls herself up off the bed, stopping at the foot of the stairs to consider me. Dust mites dance in the sunlight pouring down from the opened door upstairs, and I can see the bags under her eyes, the gray roots at her scalp, and the acute sadness in her eyes as she looks at me. Somewhere in there, underneath those ridiculous breasts and the psychobabble, is a real mother, hurting for her child, and for reasons I probably couldn’t begin to explain without years of therapy, her pain fills me with a quiet, relentless rage.

“I miss your father,” she says.

“I miss him too.”

“Do you?”

“I missed him while he was still alive.”

She nods. “He was never comfortable expressing himself. But he loved you very much.”

“Not like he loved you.”

She smiles and massages the back of her neck. Upstairs, Phillip and Tracy have finally, mercifully finished, and a welcome quiet fills the room.

“I’m sorry you couldn’t have your old room,” she says. “I thought Paul and Alice could use some privacy. They’ve been trying to conceive, you know.”

“Wendy mentioned something.”

“That sofa bed is fine for sleeping, but it’s simply not built for procreation. The springs creak like a couple of fighting cats. You can hear it throughout the house.”

“I don’t suppose I can stop you from telling me why you know that.”

“Your father and I made love on every bed in this house.”

“Of course.”

“Anyway, I found an ovulation test kit in the wastebasket in the hall bathroom, so I’m thinking these are key nights for Alice.”

Mom never had any use for discretion, never even had the sense to fake it. She habitually went through our drawers and coat pockets, inspected our sheets, listened in on our phone calls, and read Wendy’s diary so often that we started composing entries just for her to find.

Mr. Jorgenson, my phys ed teacher, still says I can’t call him Ed, even after I had a three-way with him and Mike Stedman, who swears the whole genital herpes thing was just a nasty rumor started by his ex-girlfriend who was pissed at him for sleeping with me and Ed.

Liz Coltrane gave me these awesome pills that make you vomit after every meal, so I don’t have to use my finger anymore. It’s much more civilized, and I can finally grow my nails again. Thin and manicured! Win-win!

I know incest is wrong. I just figured I’d do it once to see what all the fuss was about. But now Paul wants to do it with me all the time and it’s starting to get creepy. It would have been so much easier with Judd, if only he wasn’t gay.

Mom believed that intrafamily secrets were unhealthy, and because of that, we spent the better part of our childhood lying our asses off to her.

When I was twelve years old, she unceremoniously handed me a tube of KY Jelly and said that she could tell from the laundry that I’d begun masturbating, and this would increase my pleasure and prevent chafing, and if I had any questions, I should feel free to come to her. My siblings did joyous spit takes into their bowls of chicken soup, and my father grunted disapprovingly and said, “Jesus, Hill!” He uttered those two words so often that for a long time I thought Jesus’s last name was actually Hill. In this particular case, I was unsure if it was masturbation my father condemned or the relative merits of discussing it over Friday-night dinner. I fled upstairs to sulk and didn’t stop hating her even after discovering, a short while later, to my eternal chagrin, that she’d been right about the lube.

Chapter 11

A shower in the morning is an imperative for the Foxman men, whose bed-head is legendary in this region. Our pillow-bent curls, sculpted by scalp oils, stand up in large, coiled clumps, making us look like electrocuted cartoon characters. The problem is that the water boiler cannot accommodate so many showers at the same time, and within minutes, the water goes from hot, to lukewarm, to chilled. Adding to the confusion, Tracy and Alice are both blow-drying their hair while Wendy is microwaving frozen waffles for the kids, so the circuit breakers trip, knocking out half the power in the house, including the basement lights.

You would think the home of a former electrician would be wired better, but it’s a classic case of the cobbler’s children going barefoot. Having been in the “trade,” as he called it, Dad was much too stubborn to spend money on electricians. He did everything himself, refusing to file any work he did with the city, which saved him the trouble of having to bring things up to code. Having spent years laboring under the restrictions of the power company, he took a certain pride in outwitting them in his own home. He was always fishing lines through the walls, splicing and rewiring, creating a dense maze of circuitry behind our walls to the point where even he lost track of where everything went. The house gradually became something of an electrical puzzle, with too many lines on overburdened fuses and patchwork wiring that doesn’t always hold up. Slamming the doors of certain rooms can actually turn off the lights, and there are extra wall switches everywhere, some redundant and some that do nothing, so it always takes a few tries for the uninitiated to turn on or off the light they want. When he had central air installed a few years ago, he was supposed to upgrade the house from two hundred to four hundred amps, but that would have involved filing with the power company, so instead, he rewired the electric panels in the basement to make room for the compressor and air handlers. As a result, the house is more than a little electrically temperamental, and Mom always jokes that one day she’ll flip a switch and the house will explode. Until then, the circuit breakers will bravely go on tripping to protect the overloaded wires.

I rush through my shower, cold and blind and cursing a blue streak, then step shivering into the basement, where I find Alice in a white bathrobe, fiddling with the electric panel in the sparse morning light filtering down from upstairs.

“Hey,” she says when she sees me. “I’m sorry to invade your space like this.”

It’s the invading of my old bedroom upstairs that she should be apologizing for, but I just say it’s fine, suddenly self-conscious. The last time Alice saw me undressed was in this very room, several lifetimes ago. I looked better shirtless then, although I’m sure she did too. Time hasn’t necessarily been unkind to us, but it hasn’t gone out of its way either. And for the last two months, I’ve been living on a diet of delivered pizza and fried Chinese takeout. I suck in my gut and fold my arms strategically below my chest.

“I can’t find the switch,” she says.

I stand dripping beside her, studying the circuit panel. It’s too dark to see the little orange tab that shows on a tripped fuse, so I run my hand down the line of switches until I feel one that has more give than the others. “It’s this one,” I say, flipping the switch. The lights flicker back on at exactly the same instant my towel falls. “Whoops!” I say, doubling over to catch it and pull it back up to my waist. “Sorry about that.”

Alice smiles as I fumble with my towel. “Nothing I haven’t seen before,” she says, heading back upstairs; a rare lighthearted moment for Alice, which, if nothing else, confirms for me that I’m the only Foxman brother who didn’t get any last night.

“IT WAS A Saturday morning,” Wendy says, “and, Mom, you were on a lecture tour. Dad was up on the roof, hammering the rain gutters back on or something. He was making a racket, so I was down in the basement, watching TV. It was a Brady Bunch movie, I still remember. The one where they go to Hawaii.”

“I remember that one,” Phillip says. “Alice hurts her back having a hula lesson, because of Peter’s bad luck charm.”

“Right,” Wendy says. “That’s not really germane to my story.”

“I remember thinking it was nice that Alice got to go on vacation with them,” Phillip says. “I mean, she was the housekeeper. You got the feeling that she hadn’t really gone anywhere before.”

“Phillip remembers every show or movie he’s ever seen,” Tracy says proudly, like we might not know.

“Now if only that were a marketable skill,” Wendy says.

Tracy looks miffed, but Phillip laughs. He and Wendy have a long history of insulting each other. They don’t even hear it anymore.

Tracy and Alice are on the couch; Linda is in an armchair, her feet up on one of the plastic folding chairs; and Barry is reading the Wall Street Journal in the backyard while the boys run around. The rest of us are back in our low shiva chairs, steeling ourselves for another ass-numbing day of greeting visitors at crotch level. Mom has asked us all to remember personal stories about Dad, which she is scribbling into a large brown journal.

“So, anyway, that’s where I was, watching television, when I got my first period.”

“I have one daughter, and I wasn’t here the day she became a woman,” Mom says. “I’ll never forgive myself for that.”

“Hardly your worst offense,” Wendy says with a smirk. “So I run upstairs and I scream out the window to Dad, but he can’t hear me over the hammering. So I step outside and call up to him, but he still can’t hear me. So I grab a baseball off the lawn—Paul was always leaving baseballs on the lawn—and I throw it up to the roof. I only meant for it to hit the roof and roll down, just to catch his attention, but I guess I didn’t know my own strength, and the ball hits Dad square on the back of his head, and he loses his balance and falls off the roof, pulling the rain gutter off with him as he goes.”

“I don’t remember this at all,” Phillip says.

“Because it didn’t happen on a television show,” Wendy says. She turns to Tracy. “Phillip was their last child. He was basically raised by the television. We don’t hold it against him.”

“Spiteful bitch,” Mom says with a smile.

“So Dad’s lying on the ground, flat on his back. His arm is broken, and he’s got this big gash on his forehead, and his eyes are closed, and I’m sure I’ve just killed him. So I scream, ‘Daddy, wake up!’ And he opens his eyes and he says, very calmly, ‘I spent all morning putting that gutter on.’ Then he gets up, and we get in the car, and he drives one-armed to the emergency room. And the nurse at the desk looks him up and down and says, ‘What in the world happened to you?’ and he says, ‘My daughter got her period.’”

Everyone laughs.

“That’s such a perfect story,” Mom says, scribbling. “That’s so very Mort.”

“Victoria—that was the nurse’s name—took me to the bathroom and taught me how to put in a tampon while they set Dad’s arm, and I still see her face every time I use a tampon. She was a big old Jamaican woman with little black freckles like Morgan Freeman, and she said, ‘Just ease it in, child. Don’t you be scared. Bigger tings dan dis goin to go in dere. And come out.’ I had nightmares for weeks.”

“That was great. Can you tell another story about your period?”

“Shut up, Judd. Why don’t you tell your favorite memory now?”

“I’m still thinking.”

“I’ve got one,” Phillip says. “When I was in Little League, I had trouble catching. So they put me out in right field. And in the last inning, I dropped two balls that cost us the game. Our coach was this fat guy, I forgot his name. He got all crazy and started screaming at me. He called me worthless. So Dad stepped between us and I didn’t see what he did, but next thing I know, the coach is on the ground, and Dad is stepping on his chest. And he says, ‘Call my son worthless again.’”

“That’s fantastic,” Alice says, clapping. “I never heard that one.”

“This might sound twisted, but I hope, when I have a kid, that someone calls him a name, just so I can do for him what Dad did for me.”

“That’s beautiful, Phillip,” Mom says.

“Yes,” Tracy says. “But why not just hope that no one calls your child a name?”

Phillip looks at her. “Don’t do that.”

“What?”

“You know damn well what.”

“I was just saying that as long as you’re being theoretical, why not aim higher?”

“My dad stood up for me. I want to stand up for my kid.”

“And teach him that violence is a legitimate means of conflict resolution?”

“He’s going to have to learn it sometime.”

“A few well-chosen words might have shamed your coach into apologizing.”

“But if he had, I wouldn’t have had a story to remind me of how my father took care of me, and you wouldn’t have been able to suck all the joy out of it, and where would we all be then?”

Tracy blinks repeatedly, blushing as she gets to her feet. “I’m sorry, you’re right. I was being insensitive.”

“Apology accepted,” Phillip says without looking at her.

“I’m going to take a walk and return some calls.”

“You meant well, honey,” Linda says to her as she leaves.

Once she’s gone, Phillip looks around at us sheepishly. “She takes a little getting used to.”

“Well, you shouldn’t have dressed her down like that, in front of your family,” Linda says. “She’s still a guest here.”

“I thought you were completely justified,” Mom says.

“We’ll just have to agree to disagree then,” Linda says.

Mom casts a dark look at Linda before turning to me. “So, Judd, what do you have for me?”

What I have is nothing. I’ve been wracking my brain, but every memory I have of my father is tied up with everyone else. I know there must have been times when it was just the two of us, but I can’t remember any of them. I can only see him in the context of everyone else. Phillip’s story, in particular, made me think of riding home in Dad’s car after Paul’s games.

Paul was a standout pitcher, the only one of us with true ability, and driving home from his games, Dad would relive the highlights out loud, shaking his head in disbelief that one of his children was capable of anything other than disappointing him. Having a brother who was the school’s most acclaimed athlete was not without its perks. It may not have been enough to land me a girlfriend, but being Paul’s untalented runt of a brother was still better than being just another pimply underclassman with bad hair and an ass to kick. Still, I hated those car rides after the games, the Cadillac littered with samples and torn packaging, the next month’s sale signage shifting and grinding in the trunk like tectonic plates every time Dad braked, listening to him come out of his customary shell to praise Paul in a way he would never praise me. Wendy would sit directly behind Dad, lip-syncing to his soliloquy, trying to get me to laugh, while Phillip whined about always having to sit between us on the hump, and Mom looked out the window, humming along to the oldies station on the radio.

In his senior year, Paul was awarded a full baseball scholarship to UMass. Now, not only was he the talented son, he was also paying his own way. Paul was golden. He spent his summer celebrating with his buddies and having sex with a rotation of baseball groupies. It was a busy time for him, and on those rare occasions he was home, he was either passed out in his basement bedroom or hungover at the kitchen table, reading the sports pages and sipping at a black coffee.

Simmering with envy, I wondered what I could do to distinguish myself as anything other than a waste of space. Athletics were out—I played hockey in a local league, but there was no school team, and I wasn’t particularly gifted anyway. I briefly considered joining the debate team, but I knew my father wouldn’t see the point to a group of kids putting on striped red and blue ties to argue in public. As far as I could see, my best shot at gaining his approval was to get wounded while foiling an armed robbery at the 7-Eleven. Instead, I spent my summer in the 7-Eleven parking lot, smoking pot and wishing for something bad to happen to Paul.

And then something did.

Chapter 12

Mr. Applebaum is all over Mom. He clasps her hand between his, he pats her arm, his fingers snaking around her wrist, his eyes darting back and forth across her chest like a tiny tennis match is being played across the line of her cleavage. He’s pulled his folding chair up close to her, and with Mom down in the shiva chair, he is perfectly positioned to ogle.

“I’ve been through this, Hillary,” he says. His dark, bushy eyebrows call to mind political cartoons as they arch compassionately under his wiry silver hair. “When I lost Adele, the community was very supportive. Mort was wonderful. You remember, he came over and fixed the air conditioner during my shiva? All those people in the house, and the air handler crapped out.”

“He knew machines,” Mom says.

“Look at that,” Wendy whispers. “He’s staring at her breasts, and her head is practically between his knees.”

“It’s just the angle,” I say. “These low chairs.”

“These chairs are a practical joke. And Mom should wear less revealing shirts.”

“She doesn’t own less revealing shirts.”

“I feel like I’m watching the opening scene of an AARP porno,” Phillip says.

Mr. Applebaum rubs Mom’s wrist. He’s the only visitor right now, and so he’s got her cornered. Not that she seems to mind the attention. “If you ever need to talk, Hill. Day or night. Just call, and I’ll be there.”

“I bet he will,” Wendy says.

“Just call my name,” Phillip sings in a head voice. “And I’ll be there.”

“Thank you, Peter. I appreciate that.”

“It can be very lonely.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

Applebaum sighs and looks down at her, reluctant to let go of her hand. “I’ll be back tomorrow to check on you.”

“Okay.”

He stands up and then pulls her up by her hand to clutch her in a full-bodied embrace. “You’re going to be fine, Hillary.”

Mom pats his back while he holds her tight.

“The old guy just copped a feel,” Paul says, joining in.

“Give him a break,” I say. “They’ve known each other for years.”

I remember Applebaum’s wife, Adele, a tall, vivacious woman with big teeth and a resounding laugh. She would grab my hair when I was a kid and say, “Oh, Hill, the girls are just going to go wild over this one!” Then she’d wink at me and say, “Look me up when you’re legal. We’ll run away together.” She started having strokes a few years ago. I remember him pushing her around at Paul’s wedding in a wheelchair. She could only smile with half her face and couldn’t reach my hair with her withered arm. I thought she may have winked at me, but it was hard to tell.

Applebaum finally lets go of Mom and turns to face the rest of us. “You kids take care of your beautiful mother, okay?”

“I believe he had an erection,” Wendy says once he’s gone.

“Oh, stop it. He did not,” Mom says.

“Pushing seventy and he’s still getting it up,” Phillip muses. “The man’s a keeper.”

“You’re all being horrible. You’ve known Peter forever. He’s a fine man.”

“That fine man was hitting on you.” Paul .

“He was totally hitting on you.” Wendy.

“He was most definitely not hitting on me,” Mom says, flushed with pleasure.

Linda sticks her head in from the kitchen. “Is that horny old goat gone yet?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Mom says. “He was being compassionate.”

“Not as compassionate as he’d like, I’m sure.”

“So, he’s lonely. You and I, at least, should be sympathetic,” Mom says. “At our age, loneliness can seem so permanent.”

“Ah . . . Look at all the lonely people,” Phillip sings.

“Well, he might have had the decency to wait until you were through sitting shiva before groping you like that, that’s all.”

“He’s a tactile man. That’s just his way.”

That’s just his way. Jen used to say that. Like the first time she met Wade, at the WIRX holiday party, where he couldn’t seem to stop rubbing her arms and touching her back as they talked. “That’s just his way,” she said, which was how she excused all manner of bad behavior except for mine. Once, when she was pissed at me, I went so far as to try it out as an argument for the defense. “That’s just my way,” I said. She smiled sweetly and told me to fuck off. God, I miss our fights.

Linda is looking at Mom, shaking her head. “You don’t actually believe half the things you say, do you?”

“I don’t know,” Mom says, sitting back in her chair. “I can be pretty convincing.”

Chapter 13

The bank teller has a great ass. I know this because she had to get up and go to her boss’s office when I told her I wanted to withdraw sixteen of the just under twenty thousand dollars remaining in mine and Jen’s joint checking account. When she returns, I see that she has nice lips too—full and pouty—and she has a dimple in one cheek, and something about her eyes and the way she chews her gum makes me think she’s a very sexual person. Her name is Marianna, which I know because it’s on the little badge she has affixed just beside her breasts, which aren’t particularly large but come together nicely in her push-up bra to form a perfectly adequate suntanned cleavage in the V-neck of her blouse. My guess is that she didn’t go to college, at least not a four-year college. Probably community college for her associate’s degree, and then right into the bank’s training program. She is the kind of girl who dates the kind of guys who will ultimately screw around on her, guys like her brothers, who work with their hands and drink too many beers while watching football, and have a stupid tattoo of a dragon or the Rolling Stones’ lips on their scapulas, guys upon whom she projects more romance and ambition than is actually there, and then she asks her girlfriends, who are hairdressers and medical technicians and tanning salon clerks and secretaries, why she can’t find a nice guy. And I’m dying to tell her that I’m a nice guy. I’m the last nice guy. And I haven’t been kissed or rubbed in months, and I’m as horny as a high school kid, but I’m also dying to fall in love, and if you let me, I’ll fall in love with you, and cherish you, and listen to your dreams and your hurts and I’ll be faithful and funny and I’ll never forget your birthday or make out with your girlfriend and blame it on too many shots, or come home from guys’ night out drunk and smelling of strippers. That’s what I want to tell her, but instead I say, “Can I have an envelope for that?” and if you want to know where all the good guys are, we’re standing right in front of you, lacking the balls to actually make ourselves heard.

This is something that’s been happening to me more and more lately. The world is suddenly brimming with young, nubile women, and I can’t leave the house without falling in love. I intuit whole personalities from a single smile, live out entire relationships with the woman sitting in the next car at a red light. Legs and lips hypnotize me. I am smitten by skin and breasts and hair, by smiles and frowns, by the freedom of an unhurried gait, the grace of a shrug. I imagine myself not only having sex with these women, but living with them and meeting their parents and sharing the Sunday paper in bed. I am still raw and soft from losing Jen, still missing a level of detachment and discernment, undersexed and lonely and not yet fit for mixed company.

Marianna carefully loads sixteen thousand dollars into a large manila envelope for me, and she has a yellow sunset painted onto the red nail of each ring finger, and her skin is creamy and immaculate, and I know that I will never kiss those plump lips, never see her naked, never even make her smile. We are separated by three inches of bulletproof glass and a million other barriers that I can’t articulate or overcome. So I take my envelope and file away her generic smile for further worthless review. I leave the bank more heartbroken and deflated than when I entered it, and that is saying something.

Chapter 14

Wade made it perfectly clear that he wasn’t firing me.

“I want to make this perfectly clear,” he said. “I am not firing you.” It had been six or seven tear-fused panicky days since I’d walked in on him and Jen, days spent curled up in a ball in the Lees’ basement, still ensconced in a hollow daze, alternately enraged, grief-stricken, terrified, and shitfaced.

Wade was sitting behind his large Asian desk in his large corner office. He didn’t need a desk; he did no paperwork. He didn’t need an office either. The running joke was that the sole reason for the office was so that he had a place to screw the hot interns. Ha ha.

He pulled his lips back into a thoughtful grimace, revealing a symmetrical wall of large, bleached white teeth. If you were to draw a caricature of Wade, you would emphasize those supernaturally perfect teeth, his ridiculously broad shoulders, and, of course, his unrepentant cock. “Obviously, this is a very difficult situation. You hate me right now. Of course you do. I’m sure you’d like nothing better than to bludgeon me to death with a blunt instrument. What I did was inexcusable, and I feel terrible about it. I know you probably don’t believe that, but it’s true.”

He smiled sheepishly at me, as if he’d just admitted something mildly embarrassing about himself, like he suffers from constipation or gets regular pedicures. Then he shrugged those broad spherical shoulders that throbbed like organs beneath his expensive dress shirt. I guess I’d always been somewhat envious of Wade’s shoulders, because when you get right down to it, mine are just your basic, stripped-down version, while Wade’s are the fully loaded models that fill a shirt perfectly and look just as good out of one. I could hope they’re obscenely hairy, the way some men’s are, but it would be futile, because Wade is the kind of guy who would never stand for shoulder hair. He’d have it permanently removed by laser, and even though results vary, he’d be the guy for whom it worked. I’d probably get burned or develop a permanent discoloration. This stuff is all preordained.

Like most guys with genetically superior shoulders, Wade was an asshole, an alpha male who asserted his presence physically, through viselike handshakes and powerful backslaps, the kind of guy who needed to win at everything. His tone now was carefully apologetic, conciliatory even, but still, his expression radiated the smug satisfaction of having asserted his sexual dominance. I fucked your woman, his eyes said. Better than you ever could.

“Are you going to keep fucking her?” I said.

“What?”

“Are you going to keep fucking my wife?”

Wade looked over to Stuart Kaplan, who sat unobtrusively behind us on the couch. Stuart was the station manager and default head of human resources. It was something of a workplace irony that they couldn’t seem to hire the right person to run H.R., and after the last woman quit, Stuart had simply absorbed the department. Wade made fun of him ceaselessly on the air, called him Stuart the Suit. They had clearly met in anticipation of this meeting, to discuss the hairy legal ramifications of the marquee radio host sleeping with the wife of one of his staff. And now Stuart was sitting in to serve as a witness that I wasn’t being dismissed or subtly urged to resign in any way.

“Listen,” Stuart interjected. “I don’t think that’s a constructive approach to take here—”

“You said you feel terrible about it,” I said, staring at the small patch of stubble between Wade’s eyes where he shaved his unibrow. “So, that being the case, do you think you’re going to stop? I think it’s a fair question, and not at all irrelevant to this discussion.”

“I think we should confine this talk to our professional relationship.”

“So you’re going to keep fucking her.”

Wade looked to Stuart for some help.

“I know this is hard,” Stuart said.

“How do you know that, Stuart the Suit? Did he fuck your wife too?” Stuart was sixty years old, had a closet full of identical pin-striped suits and a rattling chest full of phlegm from years of chain-smoking. His moods swung to whatever extent they did on the basis of his increasingly erratic bowel function. If he even had a wife, the odds of Wade or even Stuart himself wanting to sleep with her were probably quite low.

“Judd,” Stuart said resignedly, which was how he said pretty much everything.

“Stuart,” I said.

He slid a document in front of me. It was a contract, acknowledging a significant raise, provided that I would indemnify Man Up with Wade Boulanger and WIRX from any future legal proceedings.

“How are your testicles, Wade?”

“They’re fine.”

I hoped they were blistered and peeling, or at least caked in A&D Ointment and sticking uncomfortably to his underwear.

“Listen, Judd,” Wade said, returning to his prepared script. “You’re a fantastic producer. You’re integral to the show. Regardless of how things shake out personally, we don’t want to lose you.”

I was being offered a consolation prize. Numbers had been crunched, risks assessed, and they had estimated the value of my broken marriage at another thirty thousand dollars a year before taxes. My life had just become inordinately expensive. I was going to have to pay alimony and keep up the mortgage on the house while renting my own apartment. Even with this raise, things would be tight, but it would certainly help. The only smart choice was to accept the offer and soldier on while I looked for another opportunity. The idea of working for Wade sickened me, but this was not a time to be unemployed on top of everything else.

I looked up at Wade, at his furrowed brow, his pursed lips, those goddamn shoulders. He met my gaze as he exhaled, long and slow. And then he said, “I love her, Judd.”

“Wade!” Stuart shouted, making us both jump.

I jumped to my feet. “Fuck you.”

“Judd,” Stuart said.

“Stuart!” I shouted back, startling all three of us. And then I tore up the document. And then I grabbed my chair and hurled it across the desk at Wade, who jumped up and fell back in his own chair, knocking over magazines, souvenir beer mugs from sponsors, and the glass rectangle filled with neon blue liquid that, when turned on, created the soothing impression of waves. “You’ll be hearing from my lawyers,” I said, even though I didn’t have a single lawyer, let alone lawyers, even though I had no idea where to get a lawyer or what kind of lawyer you needed when your boss climbed into bed with your wife. The good ones were probably not listed in the Yellow Pages. But I had just torn up a contract and hurled a chair across the room, and that sort of violence required punctuation with a coherent statement of some kind, and “You’ll be hearing from my lawyers” is what came to mind.

I stepped out of Wade’s office, into the large common area. Assistants and interns sat frozen at their desks, staring; ad sales executives hovered in cubicles, awakened from their corporate stupor by the commotion. I saw the truth in their averted gazes. They all knew. Everybody knew. Under their scrutiny, my rage dissolved almost instantly, replaced with the hot shame of public emasculation. My wife had slept with another man, so what did that make me? A limp, flaccid, inadequate lover, possibly a premature ejaculator, or maybe even gay. The array of possibilities was breathtaking.

“His balls caught fire,” I announced in the quivering voice of a very small man. Then I walked down the corridor to the elevators as slowly and proudly as possible, which wasn’t terribly slow or proud, when you got right down to it.

Chapter 15

The house is filled again, thirty or forty visitors, sitting in the plastic chairs, crammed around the buffet in the dining room, spilling over into the front hall and kitchen. The smell of perfume and instant coffee fills the air. Random fragments of conversation fly back and forth across the room like shuttlecocks. Our shiva is quite the scene for the over-sixty set. Outside on the cul-de-sac, two men back out of opposing parking spots and lightly crash into each other. A small crowd gathers outside and everyone looks out the window as hands are wrung and fingers pointed, and a short while later the red swirl of police lights dances across the living room walls as reports are filed. And the visitors keep coming, old friends and distant relatives, the new seamlessly replacing the old, walking in somber and unsure, walking out satisfied and well fed. By now, we see them not as individuals, but as a single coffee-swilling, bagel-chomping, tearfully smiling mass of well-wishers and rubberneckers. We can all nod and smile and carry on our end of the conversation in an endless loop while our minds float somewhere outside our bodies. We are thinking about our kids, our lack of kids, about finances and fiancées and soon-to-be ex-wives, about the sex we’re not having, the sex our soon-to-be ex-wives are having, about loneliness and love and death and Dad, and this constant crowd is like a fog on a dark road; you just keep driving and watch it dissipate in your low beams.

The energy changes a little when some girls show up to visit Phillip. There are three of them, in their early twenties, and they breeze into the room in a whirling miasma of bronzed legs and bouncing asses, trailing sexuality like fairy dust as they make their way to Phillip’s chair. They instantly become the center of attention, and while other conversations are still going on, these girls, as they flex their smooth calves to go up on the tips of their high espadrilles to kiss Phillip’s cheek, seem to be followed by their own spotlight. After the kisses, the hugs, the dramatic expressions of condolence punctuated by the flipping of hair and batting of lashes, three empty chairs magically materialize in front of Phillip’s shiva chair, and the girls sit down. They are accustomed to seats appearing for them wherever they go; they assume it’s probably like that for everyone. I recognize these girls, old high school friends of Phillip’s, all of whom he slept with repeatedly, two of whom, it was rumored, he slept with together on more than one occasion.

“Oh my God, Phillip,” Chelsea says. She is a long-legged redhead in a skirt that would be appropriate for tennis. She and Phillip were on and off for years. “I haven’t seen you since that boat party, you remember? That Russian kid with the yacht? Oh my God, we got so messed up that night.”

“I remember,” Phillip says.

“I’m so sorry about your father,” Janelle says. She has a pretty face underneath her spray-on tan and is slightly chunky, but in that way men like.

“Thank you.”

“He was such a nice man,” Kelly says. Kelly has a platinum pixie cut and a come-hither smile, and you can just picture her drinking too much and dancing on the pool table in the frat house.

“So, Philly,” Chelsea says. “What have you been up to?”

“I’ve been doing A&R work for a record label.”

“That’s so cool!”

“It’s a small, independent label, a boutique,” Phillip says modestly. “Nothing too exciting. You guys remember my brother Judd?”

They turn to me as one and say hi. I say hi back and try to decide which one I would most want to sleep with. The answer is, all of them. Line them up and I’ll knock them down. They are pretty and sexy and friendly and easy and exactly the kind of girls I never had a chance with back in the day. But now . . . now I’m divorced and damaged, and aren’t these the kind of girls who like damaged men?

“So what have you all been up to?” Phillip says, and what follows is ten minutes of giggles and banter, repeatedly tossed hair, and some really bad grammar. They laugh at pretty much everything Phillip says, and Chelsea, in particular, seems to hang on his every word, her chair gradually inching closer until her ankles rest easily against his. And then Tracy comes back, having spent the afternoon out of the house after her argument with Phillip. I watch her enter the room, see her register these hot young things surrounding her man as she makes her way through the chairs to Phillip’s side. “Hey, babe,” she says, smiling first at him and then at the girls. I have never heard her say “babe,” and it rolls clumsily off her tongue like a hasty lie. “How’s it going?”

“Great,” he says. “These are some old friends of mine from high school.”

“And college,” Chelsea reminds him with a smile.

“That’s right. Chelsea and I were also in college together.”

“I love the name Chelsea,” Tracy says.

“Thanks.”

“This is Tracy,” Phillip says. He doesn’t say “my fiancée,” or any other designation, and the omission lands with a resounding thud in our midst. But Tracy clings admirably to her gracious smile, and for the first time since I’ve met her, I feel bad for her. She’s a smart woman, and on some level, she has to know that this thing with Phillip will never work. Still, she leans forward to graciously shake hands and repeat each girl’s name as she’s introduced, like she’s at a business meeting. The girls flash their whitened teeth and extend their hands, their French-manicured nails catching the light and slicing the air like razor blades.

“LONG DAY, HUH?” Linda says to me. She’s sitting on a stool at the center island in the kitchen, peering down through her bifocals at the Times crossword puzzle.

“I thought I might go pick up Horry again.”

“I thought you might, too,” she says, sliding her car keys across the marble countertop. “You’re blocked in again.”

“Thanks.”

She takes off her reading glasses. “How does he seem to you?”

“Horry? I don’t know. Fine I guess.”

“He does not seem fine, Judd. Don’t be diplomatic with me.”

I nod and think about it. “He seems angry, maybe. Frustrated.”

“He hates me.”

“I’m sure he doesn’t hate you. But he’s a thirty-six-year-old man living with his mother. That can’t be healthy.”

“He’s not healthy.”

“He seems fine.”

“He has seizures. He wets his bed. He forgets things, important things, like locking the door or turning off the oven or putting out his cigarette before he falls asleep, or, once in a while, putting on his pants before he goes out. Sometimes he goes into these trances where he just stands there staring at the wall. I can’t bear the thought of him living alone and staring at the walls for hours on end, with no one there to snap him out of it.”

“On the other hand, he might need some independence.”

“What he needs is to get laid,” Linda says sharply. “That boy always had a girlfriend, remember? I lived in fear that he’d call me from college to tell me he’d knocked up some twit.” She leans forward and lowers her voice. “It’s never easy for him, seeing Wendy like this.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

“You think you’re lonely now, Judd, but you’ve got nothing on that boy.”

“No. I guess I don’t.”

“Which reminds me, you should go into the store when you pick him up and say hello to that Penelope Moore.”

I stare at her, nonplussed. “You’re just full of surprises, aren’t you?”

She puts her glasses on and turns back to her puzzle, a small smile playing across her lips. “You have no idea,” she says.

Chapter 16

There was always something of a little girl about Penny Moore, with her pale skin and wide eyes, and that hasn’t changed in the years since I last saw her. When she sees me, her face lights up, and she leaps athletically over the counter to hug me. She’s dressed in jeans and a button-down oxford, her long dark hair tied loosely behind her head. From twenty feet away, she could pass for a college student. Only as she draws closer do you see the slightly looser flesh beneath her eyes, the soft commas at the corners of her mouth.

“Hey, Judd Foxman.” She feels thin in my arms, less substantial than I remember.

“Hi, Penny.”

She kisses my cheek and then steps back so we can look at each other. “I’m so sorry about Mort,” she says.

“Thanks.”

“I saw you at the funeral.”

“Really? I didn’t see you.”

“I avoided you. I never know what to say at funerals.”

“Fair enough.”

Penny’s honesty has always been like nudity in an action movie: gratuitous, but no less welcome for it.

“So, how long has it been?” she says. “Seven, eight years?”

“Something like that.”

She gives me the once-over. “You look like hell.”

“Thanks. You look great.”

“Don’t I, though?” she says, smiling.

What I’m thinking is that she looks fine, pretty even, but nothing like the ripe prom queen she was back in high school. I wanted her so badly then; everybody did. But she was out of my league so I settled for becoming her best friend, a form of masochism unique to underconfident teenage boys, our time together spent with her telling me about all the assholes she chose to have sex with instead of me. Time and troubles have sharpened her softer edges, and now her face is a knife, her breasts like two clenched fists under her tight blouse. She’s a sexy street-fight of a woman, and I have been alone and untouched for a while now, and just watching her lips slide against her teeth as she smiles is enough to get me going.

“So, I heard about your wife,” she says. “Or lack thereof.”

“Good news travels fast.”

“Well, your brother is my boss.”

“And how’s that working out for you?”

She shrugs. “He flirts a little, but he keeps his hands to himself.”

Penny’s plan was to get married and move to Connecticut when she grew up, have four kids and a golden retriever, and write children’s books for a living. Now she’s thirty-five, still living in Elmsbrook, and considers the fact that she doesn’t get groped in the workplace a perk worth mentioning.

“You’re feeling sorry for me,” Penny says.

“No.”

“You never were any good at covering up.”

“I’m feeling much too sorry for me these days to worry about anyone else.”

“Your wife left you, Judd. It happens every day.”

“Jesus, Penny.”

“I’m sorry. That was harsh, and totally uncalled for.”

“And what’s your story?”

She shrugs. “I don’t have one. No great traumatic event to blame my small life on. No catastrophes, no divorce. Plenty of bad men, but plenty of good ones too, that simply didn’t want me in the end. I tried to make something of myself and I failed. That happens every day too.”

“Horry says you’re still skating.”

She nods. “I teach over at Kelton’s.”

“I used to love watching you skate.”

“Yes, you did. Do you remember our pact?”

“I do.”

We look at each other and then away. An awkward silence descends between us, which Penny fills by saying, “Awkward silence.”

“Yeah.”

“So, you’re sitting shiva.”

“Yes.”

“I’ll have to make it over there one of these days.”

“You’ve got five left.”

“You’re really doing all seven days? That’s hard-core.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Well, I still skate every morning at eleven, if you want to come by.”

“They’re open that early?”

“They open at one, but the owner lets me have a key in exchange for sexual favors.”

“That’s good.”

“That was a joke, Judd.”

“I know.”

“You used to laugh at my jokes.”

“You used to be funnier.”

She laughs at that. “They all can’t be gems.” Penny looks at me for a long moment, and I wonder what she sees. I was plain-looking back in high school, when we were best friends and the sexual tension was mine alone. I’m still plain-looking, only now I’m older, thicker, and sadder.

“Listen, Judd,” she says. “I think we’ve reached that point where this conversation runs the risk of devolving into small talk, and I don’t think either of us wants that. So I’m going to give you a kiss and send you on your way.” She leans forward and kisses my cheek, just grazing the corner of my lips. “I did that on purpose,” she says with a grin. “Give you something other than your ex-wife to think about while you sit all day.”

I smile. “You were always so good at not covering up.”

Penny’s smile is sad and a little off. “It’s the antidepressants. They’ve obliterated whatever filters I have left.”

We made the pact when we were twenty. We were on summer break from our respective colleges. Her boyfriend was backpacking through Europe, and my girlfriend was as of yet nonexistent, and miraculously, after years of seeing me as nothing more than a friendly ear and a sympathetic shoulder, Penny finally seemed ready to recognize other parts of my anatomy. I spent my days working in the flagship store and my nights coming up with places to almost but not quite have sex with Penny, who had arrived at a moral rationale concerning her boyfriend that grandfathered me in as long as there was no actual intercourse. One night, as we lay naked and sweaty in the darkness of my basement while my parents slept upstairs, she stopped her moaning and grinding against my erection to press her damp hands against the sides of my face. “You know you’re my best friend,” she said.

“I do.” It was infinitely less painful to hear it then, with the full length of her hot skin pressed wetly against mine.

“This could be the last summer we ever spend together. The last time at all that we’re even here.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Real life, Judd,” she said. “It’s coming for us. Who knows where the hell we’ll end up? So we should make a pact.”

“What kind of pact?” We were still moving lightly against each other, maintaining our rhythm, like joggers at an intersection.

“Two-pronged. First: We always speak on our birthdays, no matter where we are, no matter what’s happening. No exceptions.”

“Okay.”

“And second: If neither one of us has someone by the time we’re forty, we get married. We don’t date; we don’t have long, annoying talks about it. We just find each other and get married.”

“That’s a serious pact.”

“But it makes sense. We love each other, and we’re clearly attracted to each other.” She pressed her damp groin into mine for emphasis.

And what I wanted to say right then was, If it makes so much sense, why do we have to wait until we’re forty? Why can’t we be together right now? But there were backpacking boyfriends and separate colleges to consider. This was summer fun, sweet and loving, but if Penny thought I was falling for her, she’d have put an end to it right then and there, and that was unthinkable to me.

“Come on, Judd,” she said with a grin, running two fingers down the groove of my slick spine. “Will you be my fail-safe?”

I smiled right back at her, like someone who totally got it. “Of course I will.”

And then, to seal the pact, she spit onto her fingers and reached down between us, and for a while there was nothing but the soft wet sounds of lubricated skin on skin and thrashing tongues, until I shuddered and came violently across her soft, pale belly. She smiled at me as I finished, kissed my nose, and then grabbed my hand and pressed it between her spread thighs.

“Now you do me,” she said.

WHEN I STEP out of the store, Horry is sitting in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead, trembling. His hand is suspended out the window, the cigarette in it long burned down to the butt.

“Hey, man,” I say.

He doesn’t answer. His head bobs up and down on his neck, and his lips tremble with exertion, like weights are holding his mouth closed. “Unggh,” he says.

His arm is dead weight as I maneuver it back through the window and onto his lap. I drive slowly, but on the first right turn he falls sideways, his head landing on my shoulder, so I pull over and we just sit there for a while, Horry’s head resting on my shoulder as his body trembles like there’s a small electrical current running through him.

Gradually, the trembling subsides, and then, after a little bit, Horry grunts and sits up, wiping the drool off of his chin with the back of his hand. He looks over at me and nods. “You see Penny?”

“Yeah.”

He nods and clears his throat and I can hear the loose smoker’s phlegm rattling around in his chest.

“Can you hear me when you’re, you know, out of it like that?”

“Yeah. Usually. I just can’t talk. It’s like part of me blows a fuse, but the rest of me is there, waiting for the lights to go back on.”

I start the car. “You ready?”

He looks out the window. “This is the block, isn’t it? Where you and Paul got attacked.”

I hadn’t really been paying attention to the scenery, but now I can see we’re on Ludlow, just a few driveways down from Tony Rusco’s house. Paul and I ran for our lives down this sidewalk, the Christmas jingle of the rottweiler’s tags coming up fast behind us. I close my eyes against the sidewalk, but I can still hear his screams, still feel the cold terror crushing my bowels.

Horry leans back in his seat and lights up a cigarette. “I hit Wendy once.”

It takes me a minute to register what he’s said. “I remember.”

“I don’t know if I ever even said I’m sorry for that.”

“She forgave you.”

“I really clocked her good.”

Wendy had taken off a semester to help Linda and Mom care for Horry when he came home from the hospital. Back then they hadn’t yet found the right dose to take the edge off his anger, and he would descend into fits of rage where he tried to destroy anything he could get his hands on. Wendy, who had seen too many movies, decided the best thing to do would be to throw her arms around him and hold on until her love calmed him, but he hurled her across the room, and then when she came back he landed a solid punch, hard enough to break two of her teeth. Wendy didn’t hold it against him, but I think she became a little scared of him after that, and when Linda insisted she go back to school and get on with her life, she didn’t object. The next time Wendy came back to Elmsbrook, it was with Barry in tow.

“That was a long time ago, Horry. You weren’t yourself.”

He nods and blows his smoke out into the night, watching it dissipate in the amber glow of the streetlight. “I’m still not,” he says.