This Is Where I Leave You (12 page)

“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

 

T
he 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

W
ade 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

 

T
he 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.