Jonathan Tropper Read online

  “Of cancer?”

  “Of the procedure.”

  I think about it for a minute. “Yes,” I say. “I guess I am.”

  “Do you want me to come with you?”

  I do. Not because I need her to but because her offer underscores our closeness and, since I’m such a geek, this casual recognition thrills me even though I know it in no way validates my other, secret feelings. For a moment I can fantasize about living in a world where it would make sense that Tamara accompany me to the doctor. She has always been highly discerning, stingy even, in the doling out of her affections, which makes it doubly sweet to make it over the walls and through the gates into the fortress of her concern. But, of course, she can’t come with me because of Hope. I love Hope and Hope loves me, and when I’m not in Riverdale, that arrangement suits me just fine. That’s my reality. So what the hell is it about Tamara that challenges it all every time I see her?

  “It’s okay,” I tell her. “I don’t think it’s the sort of thing I really want an audience for.”

  “I understand,” she says.

  Here’s an interesting thing: by some tacit agreement, neither of us ever mentions Hope. No matter what the topic, we will phrase things in such a way so as to keep any trace of her out of our conversation. As far as Tamara knows, Hope may not even be aware of my weekly visits to her. And she’s fine with that. It’s as if we exist in our own little world, and we’re reluctant to allow anyone else with any claim on either one of us into the circle. So we never mention Hope. Rael, who, being dead, is only slightly less of a threat, is most often referred to in the pronoun form. “Him” or “he.” I know why I do it: because I’m a sick bastard who, for the brief moments I’m with Tamara, is preserving a fantasy that is highly inappropriate, at best. But why is she doing it? What secret agenda is she protecting?

  For some reason this line of reasoning, obtuse and flawed though it may be, sends an exhilarated shiver up my spine. We sit there watching Sophie sleep, and I take in Tamara’s scents, the slightly fruity bouquet of her shampoo and the scented moisturizer she uses. I imagine pulling back her wild dark hair and burying my face in the hollow of her neck, my lips on her skin, engulfing myself in her scents. Probably, it wouldn’t go over too well.

  “Look at her,” Tamara says, staring lovingly at Sophie. “She looks like such an angel when she sleeps. You’d never know what a demon she is.”

  “She does have a lot of energy,” I say.

  “She’s so demanding now. If she doesn’t get her way, she cries in this really loud voice and just doesn’t stop. I can understand those mothers who get arrested for throwing their babies against the wall.” I give her a look. “I’m not saying I would do it. I’m just saying I understand the impulse. You just want to stop that damn noise.”

  “Maybe don’t repeat that to anyone else,” I say.

  She laughs. “I know. I’m just thinking out loud.”

  My leg is our rudder, rocking us gently back and forth on the swing. “I get so mad at him sometimes,” she says, “him” being Rael. “It’s just so typical of him, to have this baby and then leave me with the mess. I mean, I love her to death, but how the hell am I supposed to get on with my life when I’ve got her? You know, if you’re going to die on someone, you ought to leave her with no strings attached, so she can move on, start something new. Instead, I’ve got a daughter to take care of, and I’ve got his parents on my back every day checking up on me because they don’t think I’m fit to be a mother. It’s like he locked me into his world and then he got the hell out. And so I hate him, and then I feel guilty for hating him and I freak out about that for a while.”

  “You’re doing okay,” I say.

  “I’m a shitty mother.”

  “It’s pronounced ‘single.’ You’re a single mother.”

  “I curse too much, I don’t give her a schedule, I don’t change her diaper nearly as often as I should, she eats whatever she wants, and I resent her for tying me down. What’s going to happen when I start to date again?”

  Alarm bells go off in my head. Warnings lights spin.

  “Did someone ask you out?”

  “Come on,” she says. “Look at me. Who’s going to want to date this?”

  A powerful sense of relief courses through me when she says this, and with it the guilty realization that my own misdirected possessive feelings and Tamara’s needs will soon be at cross-purposes.

  “Who wouldn’t?” I say, forcing myself to play the role that until recently I thought I’d been doing for real. I’m not really a concerned, platonic friend, but I play one on TV. “When the word gets out, you’ll have more guys than you know what to do with.”

  She frowns. “I wouldn’t know where to begin. Rael was the only guy I ever trusted. I never really had a serious relationship before him.”

  “There’s no rush,” I say. “You’ll know when you’re ready.”

  I’m picturing the men that Tamara will date. They will all be taller and broader than me, with perfect, low hairlines, the kind that come to a point in the middle of each temple, like arrows, forming a rectangular forehead under a muscular bush of thick dark hair. They will be thick-necked men of independent means who manage hedge funds and drive German sports cars. Men who can wear Armani suit jackets over dark silk T-shirts without seeming like hopeless poseurs and who will think nothing of inviting her for a weekend escape to wine country after only two or three dates. Men who will be conspicuously respectful of the role I’ve played for Tamara even as they propel me to the perimeter, marginalizing me with their condescending chumminess.

  She leans her head against my shoulder and squeezes my arm. “You’ll have to screen them for me,” she says. “Anyone who wants a date will have to go through you.”

  If so, none will make the cut. I will lay down a perimeter of land mines and bear traps, the kind you have to gnaw your own leg off to get out of. Let’s see how great you look in your Armani hopping around on one leg.

  I pat her leg companionably and lean my head on hers. “You’ll be fine,” I tell her. “You’re smart, beautiful, and compassionate. Any guy would kill to have you.” I would kill to have you.

  “Zack,” she says softly, changing the subject.

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t be sick. You’re all I’ve got.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” I say.

  “I mean, God’s already screwed me. He wouldn’t do it again so quickly. It would just be too much.”

  Tamara’s theology is all over the map, from God to horoscopes, the one consistent thread being an uncompromising certainty that there are unseen forces at work shaping our fate and that every action has potentially cosmic consequences.

  “Okay. Then I’ll try not to let you down.”

  She gives me a gentle shove. “You know what I mean.”

  “I do,” I say. “Thanks.”

  She looks up and gives my chin a quick, friendly kiss before settling back down on my shoulder. We sit on the swing in silence, rocking to the rhythm of Sophie’s light snoring, and I’m thinking that I’ve mind-fucked myself something fierce here, and wondering how the hell I’m going to undo it.

  Chapter 7

  The day Rael died, he called me at work. “Vegas, baby,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Let’s go to Vegas.”

  “Okay,” I said. “When do you want to go?”

  “Tonight.”

  “Yeah,” I said, absently responding to an e-mail. “That’s not going to happen.”

  “Come on, Zack,” he said. “Live a little. You’re young and single.”

  “And you’re old and married,” I said. “I still can’t go.”

  “Zacky.”

  “Raely.”

  “I’ve spent the better part of our lives talking you into enjoying yourself,” Rael said. “You always say no, then I go to work on you, and in the end you agree and, nine times out of ten, end up having a better time than me. So why don’t you
save us both the time and pretend I’ve already spent a half hour talking you into it, and let’s book our flights.”

  “Well,” I said. “At least I can save you the half hour, because I can tell you that barring an act of God, there’s no way in hell I can get on a plane to Vegas tonight. I’m working on about seven different deadlines, and I’m having dinner tomorrow night with Hope’s parents.”

  “Fuck ’em,” he said. “It’s Vegas, baby.”

  “And I’ll have to confiscate your copy of Swingers.”

  He sighed. “Zacky.”

  “Raely.”

  “I knew you were going to say no,” he said.

  “Good. You know how I hate to disappoint.”

  “And that’s why we’re going to the Borgata Hotel Casino and Spa in Atlantic City!” He delivers this last line as if I’ve just won a living room set on Wheel of Fortune. Thanks a lot, Pat. I just wonder how the hell we’re going to fit that into our trailer.

  “Are you serious?” I said.

  “As a heart attack.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come on. It’ll be just like the old days.”

  “We didn’t gamble in the old days.”

  “It will be the old days we should have had,” he said.

  “I hate gambling.”

  “It’s not about gambling.”

  “Atlantic City is not about gambling?”

  “It’s about us, Zack. You and me on the open road. Hanging out, talking, listening to music, eating shitty rest-stop food, and staring at hot women we’ll never sleep with.”

  “Did you ask Jed?”

  “He’s got a date.”

  “So you let him off the hook, and I get the hard sell.”

  “Jed’s too much of a high roller, anyway. You know you want to come.”

  I sighed. Rael could go on like this all day. “Okay,” I said.

  “Great,” he said. “I’ll pick you up at seven.”

  “Raely.”

  “Zacky.”

  “What if I’d said yes to Vegas?”

  Rael laughed. “Are you kidding? Tamara never would have gone for it.”

  The average man, when contemplating a trip to Atlantic City, pictures two things: money, and hotel sex with a stranger. There’s absolutely no reason to believe he’ll score in either category. On the contrary, the smart money has him dropping five hundred to a thousand dollars at the twenty-five-dollar blackjack tables, getting drunk on watered-down drinks, and ogling the desiccated cocktail waitresses through smoke-stung eyes as they scurry about in comically tailored uniforms that showcase raised, tired cleavages, legs clad in skin-hued panty hose to hide their varicose veins. And even after he’s realistically adjusted his standards, he doesn’t dare hit on them, because the carefully vacant look in their eyes seems to be a front for something infinitely more volatile, something that could spill over, in an instant, to a dangerous, man-hating rage, and if there’s anything worse than rejection, it’s loud, violent rejection involving security personnel. So instead he simply overtips, nonchalantly pressing his ten-dollar chip into her hand with a polite smile, as if in contrition for the brief but sordid fantasy of hotel sex in which he was engaged just moments before, because, honestly, he’s not one of those guys. The average man will show up to work the next day throbbing, unsexed, and hungover, his throat scratchy from secondhand smoke, his wallet empty because he’s never completely internalized when to and when not to double down. But ask him a few months later, and he’ll be ready to go again, eyes glazing over at the prospect of the financial and sexual windfalls that await. I don’t begin to understand this phenomenon, but someone in the marketing department somewhere deserves one hell of a raise.

  The average man is an idiot to think that his night at Atlantic City will end with pornographic acts in a comped suite at the Borgata, but he’s nonetheless justified in the presumption that he won’t end the night suspended upside down in a demolished BMW, his chest crushed by the steering column, his vital organs pierced by his own splintered bones. I mean, what are the odds?

  It’s nice to think, in view of what happened, that Rael spent his last living hours living it up with his best friend. Nice, but not particularly true. I wish I could say otherwise. That we won big, or lost but laughed our way through it, or had some wildly memorable experiences along the way, that Rael was ebullient and talked about how happy he was to be married and have Sophie, that we bonded and reminisced and cracked inside jokes and bantered with sexy women and had a boisterous good time. That in his few remaining hours, he was bursting with the vim and vigor of life. But really, it was just your typical, average working stiff’s ill-advised weeknight trip to Atlantic City, utterly forgettable were it not for its tragic conclusion. We dropped a few hundred at the blackjack tables in the first hour we were there, then set off on what would prove to be a fruitless search for cheaper tables. Rael grumbled about not being able to take full advantage of the free table drinks because he was going to have to drive home at some point, and I annoyingly pointed out that he should have thought of that before we left. We sat among the damaged and the elderly at the slot machines, our vision fuzzy from smoke and exhaustion. Tamara called his cell frequently—Sophie was giving her a hard time—and he would excuse himself to find a spot where he could hear her above the din of the machines. When we’d lost all that we were willing to lose, we found an ATM and lost a bit more, and then we found a nightclub to sit in, sipping cocktails and staring at women who didn’t stare back. Both of us wanted to go home already, but neither wanted to be the one to suggest it, to put voice to the depressing mediocrity of the evening.

  I don’t remember leaving the casino. There are small chunks of time in there that are missing. It was around two a.m., and I know we stopped for gas and to stock up on Drake’s Cakes and extra-large coffees for the ride home. I remember how the white powder from the doughnuts formed a thin Clark Gable mustache on Rael as he sang along to the Ramones, driving down the Garden State Parkway, one hand on the wheel, one hand clutching his 7-Eleven coffee cup. I even remember the song, “Bonzo Goes to Bitburg.” A few months later that same song came over the radio in my office, and I spent the rest of the afternoon shaking and crying in the corner bathroom stall.

  But that’s all I remember, which means either I fell asleep in the passenger seat or else I’ve blocked it out. The next thing I can recall is the screaming of the BMW’s tires chewing up the grassy embankment at high speed, the crumpling steel, so much louder than I ever would have imagined, the imploding windows showering us with glass, and the engine roaring like a wounded bear as the car corkscrewed into the forest that lined the parkway.

  When I came to, we were upside-down.

  Rael was unconscious, and appeared to be sitting in the backseat, except that didn’t make any sense, since his head was hanging just inches from the steering wheel. He also seemed to be hanging in more of a reclining position, while I was hanging in a perfect, seated position.

  “Rael,” I said. It came out as a hoarse rasp, and my entire chest hurt from the effort. The seat belt was digging painfully into my chest and thighs, and I couldn’t move at all. “Rael,” I tried again. This time my voice came out stronger, but my ribs convulsed and I thought I might vomit. The silence in the car seemed starkly wrong after the deafening noise of the crash, but other than the occasional sound of a car speeding by on the parkway below us, and the odd, hissing sigh from the destroyed engine, I heard nothing at all. I realized that our accident might have actually gone unobserved, since the parkway was basically deserted at that hour, and that our wreckage might not be visible from the road. I craned my neck to get a better look at Rael. It was pretty dark, but the geometry of his body, and the car, for that matter, didn’t look right to me. It was like the car had swallowed him, and I was seeing way too much cracked dashboard and not nearly enough Rael.

  Then, with a jolt, he came to life, coughing and spitting out a horrifying amount of blood. “Zack,” h
e gasped, the sound forcing itself through the liquid in his throat.

  “Yeah,” I said, my voice cracking with relief.

  “I’m fucked up, man.”

  “I know. Me too.”

  “I can’t really breathe.”

  “Just take it easy, man. Don’t panic.”

  “It’s hard,” he wheezed.

  “I can’t find my cell phone,” I said. “Where’s yours?”

  “On my belt.”

  “Do you think you can pass it to me?”

  A strained, wet sob. “Zack.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I can’t move my arms.”

  “It’s okay,” I said idiotically. “I’ll try to reach it.”

  “I can’t move my fucking arms, Zack. I’m fucking paralyzed.”

  “You’re not paralyzed,” I said, feeling around for the release on my seat belt. “You’re just pinned by the car.”

  “I can’t feel a fucking thing!” he shouted, his head writhing from side to side. “I can’t feel my legs! I can’t fucking move.” He started to scream, but he was coughing up gobs of blood and the sound kept getting forced back down his throat and he started to bang his head against the steering wheel.

  “Rael!” I screamed, my torso trembling in agony as the wind from my voice brushed past the raw edges of a thousand wounded muscles. “Calm down!” But by then he’d passed out again.

  I don’t know how long it took for me to get out of my seat belt. It might have been five minutes, it might have been a half hour. When I finally hit the clasp right, I fell headfirst onto the car roof, and when I rolled over, I vomited. As I lay there, involuntarily contorted into a ball, gagging on the stench of my own vomit, the temptation to go to sleep and let someone else sort out this mess was so great that I actually closed my eyes and took a little nap. Someone would find us, and take us out properly, on stretchers, with those yellow boards to immobilize our necks, and say comforting things to us in the ambulance as they hooked up our morphine drips. It might be a trick getting Rael out, but they’d use the Jaws of Life if they had to, right? I mean, this was clearly a job for the professionals, and I was supremely unqualified, would probably do more harm than good.