This Is Where I Leave You

officially ratified your personal tragedy. As usual, seeing Jen, I am instantly chagrined, not because she’s obviously found out that I’m living in a crappy rented basement, but because ever since I moved out, seeing her makes me feel like I’ve been caught in a private, embarrassing moment - watching porn with my hand in my pants, singing along to Air Supply while picking my nose at a red light.
    “Hey,” she says.
    I toss my suitcase into the trunk. “Hey.”
    We were married for nine years. Now we say “Hey” and avert our eyes.
    “I’ve been leaving you messages.”
    “I’ve been busy.”
    “I’m sure.” Her ironic inflection fills me with the familiar impulse to simultaneously kiss her deeply and strangle her until she turns blue. Neither is an option at this juncture, so I have to content myself with slamming the trunk harder than necessary.
    “We need to talk, Judd.”
    “Now’s not a good time.”
    She beats me to the driver’s-side door and leans against it, flashing me her most accomplished smile, the one I always told her made me fall in love with her all over again. But she’s miscalculated, because now all it does is remind me of everything I’ve lost. “There’s no reason this can’t be amicable,” she says.
    “You’re fucking my boss. That’s a pretty solid reason.”
    She closes her eyes, summoning up the massive reserves of patience required to deal with me. I used to kiss those eyelids as we drifted off to sleep, feel the rough flutter of her lashes like butterfly wings between my lips, her light breath tickling my chin and neck. “You’re right,” she says, trying to look like someone trying not to look bored. “I am a fl awed person. I was unhappy and I did something inexcusable. But as much as you might hate me for ruining your life, playing the victim isn’t really working out for you.”
    “Hey, I’m doing fi ne.”
    “Yeah. You’re doing great.”
    Jen looks pointedly at the crappy house in which I now live below street level. It looks like a house drawn by a child: a triangle perched on a square, with sloppily staggered lines for bricks, a lone casement window, and a front door. It’s flanked by houses of equal decrepitude on either side, nothing at all like the small, handsome colonial we bought with my life’s savings and where Jen still lives rent-free, sleeping with another man in the bed that used to be mine. My landlords are the Lees, an inscrutable, middle-aged Chinese couple who live in a state of perpetual silence. I have never heard them speak. He performs acupuncture in the living room; she sweeps the sidewalk thrice daily with a handmade straw broom that looks like a theater prop. I wake up and fall asleep to the whisper of her frantic bristles on the pavement. Beyond that, they don’t seem to exist, and I often wonder why they bothered immigrating. Surely there were plenty of pinched nerves and dust in China.
    “You didn’t show up to the mediator,” Jen says.
    “I don’t like him. He’s not impartial.”
    “Of course he’s impartial.”
    “He’s partial to your breasts.”
    “Oh, for God’s sake, that’s just ridiculous.”
    “Yes, well, there’s no accounting for taste.”
    And so on. I could report the rest of the conversation, but it’s just more of the same, two people whose love became toxic, lobbing regret grenades at each other.
    “I can’t talk to you when you’re like this,” she finally says, stepping away from the car, winded.
    “I’m always like this. This is how I am.”
    My father is dead! I want to shout at her. But I won’t because she’ll cry, and if she does, I probably will, and then she’ll have found a way in, and I will not let her pierce my walls in a Trojan horse of sympathy. I’m going home to bury my father and face my family, and she should be there with me, but she’s not mine anymore. You get married to have an ally against your family, and now I’m heading into the trenches alone. Jen shakes her head sadly and I can see her lower lip trembling, the tear that’s starting to form in the corner of her eye. I can’t touch her, kiss 12her, love her, or even, as it turns out, have a conversation that doesn’t degenerate into angry recriminations in the first three minutes. But I can still make her sad, and for now, I’ll have to be satisfied with that. And it would be easier, so much easier, if she didn’t insist on being so goddamned beautiful, so gym-toned and honey-haired and