One Last Thing Before I Go

the girls, pretending to read a magazine. All around the pool, other men sit, alone and in clusters, and they are all the same, all sad and depleted, abusing themselves with stolen glances at forbidden fruit.
    “Will you look at those girls,” Jack says, probably for the third time. Silver tends to tune him out.
    They don’t need him to tell them. They are men after all—not the men they once might have been, and not the men they maybe could be—but men, after a fashion. And these girls, these women . . . well, they glisten with nubile perfection under their SPF 15, baking their soft, unblemished skin to a honeyed glaze as they read from textbooks and tabloid magazines, tap away at texting devices encased in pink and red rubber, or listen to their iPods, their bare, manicured feet twitching to the music. They do that thing with their lips that girls do when they feel the music, puckering their lips, kind of kissing the air as their heads bob up and down.
    The pool is supposed to be exclusively for residents of the Versailles
,
an efficiency hotel just off the interstate, but the girls come daily as Jack’s guests, and no one ever complains. They come from Hudson College, situated just four blocks away on the other side of Route 9. The semester is just starting up again, and the proximity of so many young, ripe women to a place like the Versailles is like keeping your matches and blasting caps in the same drawer.
    Yes, he is living in an efficiency hotel. Mistakes.
    The Versailles
,
a drab monolith that rises like a tombstone fourteen stories above the sailor’s knot of parkways and connecting ramps that feed into I-95, is the only apartment building within the Elmsbrook city limits. Years ago, it was converted into a residential hotel, where rooms can be rented at a weekly or monthly rate. As such, it has become the inevitable destination of all the sad, damaged men of Elmsbrook, banished from their homes in the wake of disintegrating marriages. An aura of failure hangs over the place—middle-aged men living on their own in small, sparsely furnished, subdivided hotel rooms. “He’s living in the Versailles
,
now,” people say, and everyone knows exactly what they mean. It is
that
building. The pool, the gym, the concierge, the plush lobby furniture; none of these amenities can obscure the fact that this is a place where broken men come to lick their wounds as the battles over marital assets and custody arrangements are slowly lost at a rate of roughly six-fifty an hour plus expenses.
    In the framed architectural drawing that still hangs in the lobby, the building is rendered in a soft white that glints in the sun, surrounded by emerald lawns and a lush canopy of ash and oak trees. But the zoning board required a larger parking lot, so the lawn and trees and the little kids flying their red and yellow kites never made if off the drawing board, and the diesel exhaust rising off the nearby expressways has gradually turned the Versailles into a vertical slab the color of a thunderhead. It’s hard to fathom the logic of displaying this picture of the building in all its unrealized splendor, someone’s idea of a cruel joke, maybe, a blunt metaphor designed to effect a kind of subliminal torture on the residents.
    Back when Silver was married, the building, in better shape then, was still something of a punch line, fatuously tacked onto the end of arguments.
“If I’m so horrible, why don’t you just move out? I’m sure there’s a vacancy at
the Versailles
. . .”
Like that. Cut to seven years later and here he is, the sum total of his existence confined to a two-bedroom efficiency eight floors up, alongside his brothers in arms, the men exiled from Elmsbrook’s tree-lined residential streets, from the carpeted and curtained warmth of solid, creaking Tudors and colonials, stripped of marriage and family but still paying for it in ways large and small. Paying the mortgages on houses in which they are no longer welcome, paying for their ex-wives’ new wardrobes and haircuts and facials and body waxings and gym memberships, all to tone, smooth, and buff bodies that they no longer get to touch, paying for the personal trainers who are probably fucking their wives and for their wives’ lawyers who are fucking them, and for their own lawyers who seem powerless to do anything about any of it except explain in lay terms exactly how they’ve been fucked. Paying for Little League and soccer and piano lessons