This Is Where I Leave You (20 page)

I do, and a few seconds later I hear a light splash as she slides into the water. I turn around and see the dark pile of her dress on the ground. I pull off my polo shirt and my cargo pants. I hesitate for a moment when it comes to my boxer briefs. To doff or not to doff, that is the question. How did Penny answer it? In the dim light coming up from the depths of the pool, it’s impossible to say. I slide into the pool with my underpants on. Better safe than sorry.

She holds on to a rung of the ladder while I tread water a foot or so in front of her. After a few moments, my eyes have adjusted enough that I can look into hers. I flash back to Horry and Wendy, looking at each other in this exact spot a few hours ago, this haunted pool that seems to pull dead and buried love to its surface.

“I’ve been thinking about you, Judd.”

“Me too.”

“Do you think you’d like to kiss me now?”

I glide over to her, my hand falling over hers on the ladder rung. Up close, I can make out the tantalizing outline of her breasts, wet and glistening, where they disappear into the water. “Listen,” I say, but then, somehow we’re already kissing, deep and slow, our tongues colliding softly, gathering speed. And her taste is exactly as I remember it, brings me back in an instant to those nights of sweaty dry-humping in my basement, and I can feel her nipples hard against my chest, her fingers gliding up my back to my neck, pressing against the spot where my spine becomes my skull.

I have kissed no one but Jen in over ten years, and we have not kissed like this in a very long time, with gaping mouths and frantic tongues, where kissing is its own kind of sex. I am kissing another woman, and the awareness of these lips opening against mine in wet surrender, these fingers snaking down my chest, these smooth, naked thighs wrapped around my hips, is both exhilarating and surreal. If one woman is willing to kiss me like this, it stands to reason that, in due time, others might be equally willing, and for the first time since I walked in on Jen and Wade, I feel something approaching optimism about my future.

After a while, Penny stops to catch her breath, gasping a little as she turns around to rest her arms against the edge of the pool. I swim up behind her and put my hands on either side of her arms, pressing my chest against her back. She leans her head back to press her cheek against mine. “That was so nice,” she says.

My body falls against hers, and when my erection, straining underwater against my soaked underpants, falls lightly against the curve of her ass, she emits a low groan.

“Listen,” I say. “There’s something I want to tell you.”

“Tell me tomorrow,” she says, pressing herself hard against me. “Just do that now.”

 

 

 

 

 

PENNY LEFT A little while ago, after kissing me a few more times. Now I’m horny and throbbing and sleep is an impossibility, so, for some twisted reason, I dial Jen’s cell.

“Hello?” Wade’s voice. I should have realized he’d be there. Wade’s not the sort of guy who would pass on the opportunity for some hotel sex. I hang up, wait a minute, and dial again. “Hello?” he says with a little more emphasis, like maybe the mystery caller hadn’t understood him the first time. It’s Jen’s cell; why the hell is he picking up? I hang up and dial again. This time his voice is thin and clipped. “Judd,” he says. I listen to his breathing for a long moment and then I hang up. On my next call, Jen picks up.

“Hey, Jen.”

“Judd,” she says, probably with a sardonic, knowing nod for Wade’s benefit. I picture them lying in bed, him running his thick fingers up her naked thigh to the curve of her ass as she talks to me, his other hand fondling his thick, semi-erect cock, getting it ready for her. Wade could not get enough pancreatic cancer to satisfy me.

“So, we’re going to be parents.”

“It’s late, Judd. Can we talk tomorrow?”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Am I interrupting something, again?”

“No. I’m just exhausted.”

“Would you have left me?” I say, surprising both of us. “If you hadn’t gotten caught, do you think you would have left me or left him?”

I can hear her breath catch on the phone. “I honestly don’t know,” she says.

It is one of those questions that can’t possibly have a right answer, but hers still hurts.

“I’m sorry I disturbed you. Go back to sleep.”

“Can we talk tomorrow?”

“Yeah. Maybe. I don’t know.”

“I hope we can.”

“Bye.”

I wait about three minutes and then dial Wade’s cell phone.

“Hello?” he says.

I hang up. It’s a small victory, but you learn to take them where you can get them.

Never marry a beautiful woman. Worship them if you must, go to bed with them if you can—by all means, everyone should have carnal knowledge of physical perfection at least once in their life—but when it comes to marriage, it’s a losing proposition. You will never stop feeling like a gatecrasher at your own party. Instead of feeling lucky, you will spend your life on edge, waiting for the other stiletto to fall and puncture your heart like a bullet.

 

 

 

 

 

I AM RUNNING through darkened halls. Behind me I hear the jingle of the rottweiler’s tags, the scrabble of his paws on the floor, the low gurgle of his breath as he gains on me. I am sweating and panting, and no matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to pick up any speed. And then I round a corner and my prosthetic leg falls off, clattering woodenly to the ground. I scream as I go down, and even though the dog is not yet upon me, I lurch awake knowing he will be soon.

Chapter 28

A
lice Taylor was standing against the wall at Jeremy Borson’s house party, sipping spiked punch from a plastic cup and smiling at something one of her friends was saying. We’d gotten friendly over the last few months; she had started touching my arms when we talked and walking closer to me in the halls, so that our hips occasionally bumped. Just a few days earlier, walking home from school, I had impulsively taken her hand when it grazed mine, and she had squeezed back and we’d stayed like that for the rest of the walk, never mentioning it. For the first time in my high school career, a girlfriend appeared to be within my reach. We’d be meeting tomorrow afternoon at the mall for burgers and a movie, and I fully intended to hold her hand again, maybe even try to kiss her during the movie.

And there she was, at Jeremy Borson’s party, in cutoffs that showed off her smooth, tanned legs and a white V-neck sweater, her wavy brown hair pulled up off her forehead with a headband. Even as she laughed with her friends, I saw her eyes wandering over the rim of her cup to find mine, saw the little surreptitious smiles being aimed at me, the light dancing across the surface of her lip gloss. There was something new in those smiles, something bold and promising, and I began to make my way through the crowd, marshalling my resources and chugging down my spiked punch for courage. Maybe we’d go outside for a little while and I’d kiss her tonight. I was pretty sure she wanted me to.

The room was hot and throbbing; Tears for Fears blasting on the stereo system, girls dancing awkwardly in the square left by the prudent removal of a coffee table, kids pressed up against each other in the crowded living room, drinks held aloft at high angles to avoid spilling. Here and there couples made out against the walls, although the ones with any class went out to the yard to grope and suck in private. There were viral whispers of vomit in the powder room, of porno in the basement, of controlled substances in the garage.

I don’t know exactly what happened. Someone bumped into someone across the room, maybe clowning around, maybe completely by accident, but we were a roomful of sweating dominoes, knocking one into another, until I was thrown forward into Tony Rusco, who had a beer bottle in his mouth right at that moment. The bottle banged audibly against his teeth, and he spewed his beer all over his shirt. He turned around, wiping his face on his arm, and, with no preamble, kicked me in the balls.

If you have no balls, or have some but have somehow made it through life thus far without ever having injured them, then you’ve missed out on one of the most exquisitely nuanced variations of agony known to man. It is the piano of pain, melody, harmony, bass, and percussion all in the same instrument.

First there’s nothing. A surprising amount of nothing actually. No pain at all, just white noise and the shock of having been hit there, in your softest of places. And because the pain has yet to arrive, you dare to hope that it won’t come at all, that the impact was less direct than you first thought. And then it comes, like thunder on the heels of lightning, at first just a faint rumble, a low, steady hum of discomfort. If it were a musical note, it would be one of those bottom bass notes they use in horror films to create an ominous sense of dread, of dark, fanged things hiding, poised to spring. It’s a loaded hum, because you know a note that low only has one direction to go. And as you feel the dull, pulsating pain emanating from the center of your being, from your core, you think to yourself,
I can handle this, this is nothing, I can kick this pain’s ass,
and that’s the exact instant that you find yourself suddenly on your knees, doubled over and gasping, with no memory at all of how you got there. And now the pain is everywhere—in your groin, your gut, your kidneys, the tightly flexed muscles of your lower back where you didn’t even think you had muscles. Your body is tensed too hard to breathe right so your lungs are constricted, and you’re drooling because your head is hanging, and your heart can’t pump your rushing blood fast enough, and you can feel yourself teetering, but you have no muscles left to correct with, so you end up collapsing onto your side, your nerves fusing together into knotted coils of anguish, your eyeballs turned up into your skull like you’ve grabbed hold of a live wire in the rain.

There’s really nothing else like it.

Rusco didn’t belong at this party. He had graduated two years ago, a small miracle considering the record of suspensions he’d racked up for fighting, drugs, and vandalism. Now he operated a forklift in the warehouse at one of the furniture outlets gathered in a cluster at the top of Route 9 and lifted free weights with his buddies in his front yard. He was rumored to have pulled a switchblade on Mr. Portis, our aging phys ed teacher, who had subsequently suffered a nervous breakdown; to have punched out the bouncer at the Dark Horse when they wouldn’t serve him a beer; to have beat the shit out of his own father in the eighth grade.

So even if I could have gotten to my feet at that point to fight him, he’d have only knocked me down again, so I just curled up into the fetal position while the room spun around me and psychedelic colors swam across the insides of my eyelids, and Rusco put his boot on my head and said, “You want to watch where you’re going, shithead.”

And then he was gone, and Alice was hovering over me, helping me up, she and Jeremy taking me upstairs to Jeremy’s parents’ bedroom, where they lay me down on a paisley bedspread. “Are you okay?” she kept saying, while I tried my best not to cry. I was enjoying her concern and her proximity, her hair intimately brushing my face as she leaned over me, but I hadn’t exactly kicked ass out there, and I would be damned if I was going to compound that by crying in front of her.

“He’s such an asshole,” Alice said.

I rolled away from her and closed my eyes. I think I might have dozed off because when I woke up she was gone, and a couple of seniors were making out in Jeremy’s parents’ bathroom, their quiet moans reverberating off the tiles.

I was limping home when Paul pulled up beside me in Dad’s Cadillac. He’d been granted unlimited use of the car from the moment he was awarded his baseball scholarship, which was why, instead of being at the party, he’d been off somewhere getting laid in the backseat. “Hey!” he said. “What happened?”

“Nothing.”

“I heard you got your ass kicked.”

“It wasn’t my ass.”

I looked over at Paul and, to my surprise, saw that he was simmering with rage. “Get in,” he said.

“It’s past my curfew.”

“Fuck curfew. Come with me.”

“Where?”

Paul hit the wheel and looked straight ahead. “Just get in the car, will you?”

The Cadillac smelled of perfume and sex, and my balls throbbed with every bump and curve. “Fucking asshole,” Paul muttered as he steered across Centre Street. “Let’s see how he likes it when I stand on his head.”

I was scared and still in considerable pain, but I felt safe next to Paul and touched that he was so angry that someone had hurt me. We had drifted apart in high school, but we were still brothers, and here he was, interrupting his own evening, which surely had involved some degree of female nudity, to stand up for his little brother.