This Is Where I Leave You

had been only a minute or so since I’d walked through the bedroom door, and my brain had not yet adjusted to this suddenly transformed world where I no longer comforted Jen because I hated her. I was a whirling mass of outdated reflexes and violent impulses, and I had no idea what the hell I was supposed to do. The urge to flee was overwhelming, but leaving the two of them in my house seemed too much like unconditional surrender. I needed to lash out, hide, get out of there, weep, plant my thumbs in Wade’s eye sockets to crush his eyeballs, hold Jen, strangle Jen, kill myself, go to sleep, and wake up and be twenty again, all in the same instant. A complete nervous breakdown was not out of the question.
    Jen looked up at me, stricken, her eyes red with tears, blood and snot running from her nose down her chin and onto her chest. I actually felt bad for her, and hated myself for it.
    “I can’t believe you did this,” I heard myself say.
    “I’m so sorry,” she said, shivering into her arms.
    “Get dressed, and get him out of my house.”
    That was the extent of our conversation. Nine years of marriage gone in a heartbeat, and not very much to say about it. I stepped out of the bedroom, slamming the door behind me hard enough to dislodge something in the drywall, which could be heard rattling inside as it fell. I stood in the hall for a moment, shaken and desolate, exhaled a breath I didn’t realize I was holding, and headed downstairs to smash her grandmother’s china to smithereens, which is what I was still doing when the police and the paramedics showed up.
    “So what happens now?” Jen said. We were standing in the kitchen, attempting a conversation amidst the copious ruins of the shattered china.
    “Shut up.”
    “I know this won’t mean anything to you right now, but I am really sorrier than I’ll ever be able to tell you.”
    “Stop talking.”
    It wasn’t going very well.
    “There’s no excuse for what I’ve done. I’d been unhappy for so long, you know, just kind of lost, and -”
    “Will you please just shut your goddamn mouth?!” I shouted at her, 26and she flinched as if she thought I might hit her. Her nose had already swelled considerably and was starting to turn a nasty shade of purple in the spot where Wade’s forehead had smashed it earlier. When word of our troubles spread through the neighborhood, her bruised face would be the subject of tireless speculation among the housewives as they whispered over their nonfat lattes.
    I closed my eyes and rubbed my temples. “I’m going to ask you some questions, and I need you to answer them in as few words as possible. Do you understand?”
    She nodded.
    “How long have you been fucking Wade?”
    “Judd ”
    “Answer the question!”
    “A little over a year.”
    You’d have thought, after the events of the last half hour, that I was beyond shocking by now. A little over a year wasn’t a fling, a random sexual indiscretion. It was a relationship. It meant that Jen and Wade had an anniversary. On our first anniversary, we had checked into a bed-and-breakfast in Newport. Jen wore a lavender negligee and I read her this goofy poem that made her cry so that later I could still taste the salt on her cheeks. How had Jen and Wade marked their first anniversary? And, now that you mention it, where did they count from? Their first flirtation? First kiss? First fuck? The first time someone said “I love you”?
    Jen was both sentimental and meticulous with her calendar and no doubt knew the exact dates of every one of those milestones. For the last year or so, Jen had been running off at every possible opportunity to have sex with Wade Boulanger, my overly athletic, alpha male boss. It was inconceivable to me, no different than if I’d just found out that she was a serial killer, which would have been preferable actually. I’d have attended the trial, nodded somberly at the guilty verdict told my story to People magazine, and gone about my business. At least I’d know where I was going to sleep that night.
    “A little over a year,” I repeated. “You’re some kind of liar then, huh?”
    “I’ve become one, yes.” She held my gaze, almost defiantly.
    “Do you love him?”
    She looked away.
    I wasn’t expecting that, and it hurt.
    Jen sighed, a long, dramatic, self-pitying sigh, as I considered the ramifications of slitting her throat with a shard of china. “We had our problems long before things started with