Sean's broken arm, coupled with Wayne's disappearance, effectively crippled the basketball team. They had been easily knocked out of the play-offs in the first round, and for the first time in twenty years, the Bush Falls Cougars didn't go to the state finals.
About a week after Sammy's death, someone threw a large brick through Dugan's office window and trashed his trophy case. An investigation was launched, but the guilty party was never discovered. Looking back years later, I thought it was me, could sometimes recall the heft of the stone in my hand right before I threw it, but the memory was so vague and synthetic that I couldn't be sure. Maybe I just heard about it and wished it had been me.
twenty-five
To err, as they say, is human. To forgive is divine. To err by withholding your forgiveness until it's too late is to become divinely fucked up. Only after burying my father do I realize that I always intended to forgive him. But somewhere I blinked, and seventeen years flew by, and now my forgiveness, ungiven, has become septic, an infection festering inside me.
I stay in bed for two days, sweating feverishly beneath my blankets, stomach clenched, thighs like jelly. I don't know if what I'm feeling is genuine grief or deep, paralyzing regret over not being able to grieve, but whichever it is, it isn't screwing around. I lie motionless, flitting seamlessly between sleep and wakefulness until they become all but indistinguishable. More than once, I dream I'm crying, and wake up with swollen eyes and a damp pillow.
My thoughts assemble before me in a ragged stream of semiconsciousness. I hate my life, and up until a few days ago I didn't even know it, and how can such a seemingly important fact have escaped my attention? Why has my father's death left me feeling so alone, when he hasn't been a part of my life in seventeen years? I'm an orphan. I repeat the word out loud, over and over again, listening to it bounce off the walls of my childhood bedroom until it makes no sense.
Loneliness is the theme, and I play it like a symphony, in endless variations. I've lived more than a third of my life, and am more alone now than I've ever been. You're supposed to make your way through life becoming more substantial as you go, the nucleus of your own little universe, your orbit overlapping the orbits of others. Instead, I've shed all those who cared about me like snakeskin, slithering angrily into my small solitary hole.
On the second afternoon of my self-pity fest, Jared comes by to see me.
“What are you doing?” he says.
Moping, sulking, crying, feeling sorry for myself. “Nothing,” I say.
“You look awful.”
“I'm having a bad life.”
He nods, undeterred by my sarcasm, and tosses my clothing off the desk chair to make himself a seat. “Whatever. My father said to invite you for dinner tomorrow night, if you'll still be around.”
“Why didn't he call me himself?”
“He did. I guess the wack job downstairs didn't give you the message.”
I look at him. “What wack job?”
“Your agent, I guess. He's acting like he owns the place.”
“Owen is downstairs?”
“I thought you knew.”
“I didn't.”
“He acts as if you know.” Jared shrugs. “So that was some show you put on at the cemetery.”
“I slipped,” I say.
He stares at me intently for a minute and then frowns. “Just tell me: did you love him or not?”
I look up at my nephew. “He was my father.”
“I wasn't questioning your genealogy.”
“Listen,” I say, but he waves me down.
“A simple yes or no will do.”
“It's not a simple question.”
He scowls at my equivocation, the uncompromising scowl of youthful conviction. “Make it simple,” he says. “Boil it down to the basics.”
I'm quiet for a long moment, but Jared seems prepared to wait indefinitely. “I can't,” I say.
“Why not?”
“I just—I don't know.”
He stands up and sighs. “How did you get so fucked up?” he asks me, not unkindly.
“It takes a high level of discipline,” I tell him as he heads for the door. “And absolute commitment. It's like my own special super power.”
He stops at the door. “So I'll see you tomorrow night?”
“What's tomorrow night?”
“Um, dinner, remember?”
“Oh, yeah. Sure.”
He shakes his head and offers a sad little grin. “That is, if you can fit us into your busy schedule here.”
A little while later I pull myself out of bed and crawl downstairs to find Owen sprawled out on the living room couch in a pair of my father's sweatpants and an undershirt, looking at Asian porno sites on his laptop. “Hey,” he says by way of greeting. He sits up a little, and his white, hairless belly fat peeks out from between his undershirt and waistband like rising dough in a bake pan. Concentric circles of soiled paper plates, soda cans, crumpled junk food packages, and Chinese take-out boxes surround him like Stonehenge. Sitting there like that, a dough ball in the midst of his own refuse, he looks somewhat pitiful, and I have a sudden intuitive flash that the real Owen, the soft, unaffected one who hides behind the sharp wit and silly suits, is really just a sad and lonely little man. The spirited verbiage and outlandishness are the threads with which he constantly, desperately spins his protective cocoon, the only thing standing between him and the abyss. Or maybe that's just me projecting. “What are you doing here?” I say.
“Just holding down the fort,” Owen says.
“You're doing a great job.” I conspicuously eye the piles of litter.
“A man's got to eat.”
I sit at the foot of the stairs, rubbing my face wearily. “Owen. Why are you still here?”
He smiles and folds his laptop. “I have a better question,” he says, and then looks at me meaningfully. “Why are you still here?”
“I have some things I still need to work out.”
“What things?”
“I'm not sure. I guess that would be the first thing on the list.”
Owen nods and stands up, brushing an assortment of crumbs off his undershirt. “Well, to answer your earlier question, I stuck around to tell you something.”
“What's that?”
“I'd like to tell you why your manuscript isn't any good.”
“So now it's no good?”
“No. It was always no good.”
“I can't stress enough how not up for this I am right now.”
“Actually, you are,” Owen says. “Your business is writing, but my business is writers, and of the two of us, I'm the one who's on top of his game right now, so it would behoove you to pay attention.” He stares at me intently, daring me to contradict him. “Bush Falls came from inside you, from that place where good writers store the great narrative events of their lives. The problem is that since you left the Falls, nothing of any significance has happened to you. If I had to write the jacket copy for the book of your life, I'd be hard-pressed to come up with anything. Joe lives in Manhattan. Joe has maybe a little more than his share of what is doubtless highly conventional sex. Joe gets older. Joe gets depressed. That pretty much does it. You've had no great loves and no significant experiences. It's like you've been sleepwalking through the last seventeen years.”
“Somewhere in there, I did write a critically acclaimed best-selling novel.”
“So you did,” Owen concedes. “The single remarkable event in your post–Bush Falls life was writing a book about the Falls. Do you see what I'm getting at here?”
“That I'm a big fucking loser?”
“Besides that. Listen. You've been gone from here for seventeen years, but really you never left. The things that happened here—with your friends, and Carly, and your father—they damaged you, and from that damage came your book, but you're not going to get another one out of it.”
“Well, if you're right, what the hell am I supposed to do about it?”
&nb
sp; “You're already doing it. You've been doing it since you got here.”
“What exactly is it that you think I've been doing?”
Owen smiles. “Gathering new material.”
“You're insane,” I say. “This has been a nightmare for me.”
“I know.” He sits down next to me on the stairs. “You're in pain, and frankly I'm relieved to see it.”
“And why is that?”
“Because, to paraphrase the late Bruce Lee, pain is good. It means that you're alive. And dead people, for the most part, don't write books.”
“Fuck writing,” I say angrily. “I have nothing. There's no one in my life.” My voice trembles tellingly, and I take it down a notch for maintenance. “No one cares about me.”
“That's not true.”
“But it is,” I say sadly. “And I never even realized it until now. What kind of colossal asshole must that make me, to have gone this far through life without having made a positive difference to one fucking soul?”
“I care.”
“You get paid.”
“That just makes me care more.”
I sigh. “Whatever.”
“Wayne cares about you.”
“Wayne's dying,” I say, and immediately feel like a schmuck.
Owen looks at me severely. “We're all dying. Just at different rates.”
“Is this the first time you've tried to cheer someone up? Because, I have to tell you, you really suck at it.”
“It's not in my job description.” Owen slaps my knee as he gets up from the stairs. “Cheer yourself up. I'm going home.”
I watch him gather up his laptop and a leather overnight bag, and then follow him to the front door. Unbelievably, the white stretch is still parked outside. “You kept the limo all this time?” I say. “That's going to cost you a fortune.”
“Actually, it's going to cost you a fortune,” he says with a smirk, heading out the door and down the steps before I can thank him for sticking around. I watch from behind the storm door as the absurd limo pulls away from the curb and meanders down the block. The sunroof opens and Owen's hand pops up, comically brandishing a half-filled wineglass. He'll be good and wasted by the time he gets home. For the first time I smile, feeling vaguely cinematic as I watch until the white of the limo is absorbed into the dusky Connecticut twilight. In the kitchen, my cell phone rings. I consider ignoring it, but then think the better of it. Like Owen said, it's time to start living again, to throw myself into the mix and begin sorting things out. Feeling suddenly and irrationally renewed, I pull the phone off its charger and flip it open.
“You're a fucking asshole,” Nat says.
Owen has left a huge box in the kitchen. I open it to find a brand-new Dell Inspiron laptop, a handful of discs, and a hastily scribbled note from Owen. Don't think about it. Just turn it on and get to work. Fifteen minutes later I have the machine up and running on the desk in my bedroom, and I'm sitting pensively in front of it, its blank screen taunting me, daring me to try to fill it with something worthwhile. The idea of starting over from scratch is daunting, but not without appeal. I remind myself that I've done this before—to critical acclaim, no less—and allow my fingers to gently brush the smooth plastic keys of the laptop.
Over the last few days an idea has been forming, the bare skeleton of a story, and now I turn it around in my head, searching for the entry point that will get me started. No one was more surprised when Matt Burns came home for his father's funeral than Matt himself, I type, then pause for a moment before continuing. The sentence appears small and insignificant against the white expanse of empty screen, an unlikely springboard from which to launch an entire novel, but something in its conversational simplicity reassures me, and I begin to type some more, at first tentatively and then with greater confidence. Within two hours, I have three chapters done. It's a lyrical mystery I have in mind, about a son who returns home to investigate the suspicious circumstances surrounding his estranged father's death, excavating clues and his own troubled past as he goes. That's the basic idea, and even as I write the initial pages, I know that I'm onto something, that this is a book I can write from beginning to end. It's after nine o'clock when I finally stop typing and save my work, resisting the impulse to reread everything I've just written. It occurs to me that it's been over two days since I last showered, and I stink. I strip out of my sweats and head into the bathroom. For the first time since I returned to the Falls, things are starting to feel attainable again. I know this feeling is nothing more than the illusion of control brought on by my newly galvanized writing effort, but for now, all things being equal, I figure I'll take it.
twenty-six
There's something about being wet and naked that always makes things seem eminently doable. I shower energetically, vigorously scrubbing off two days' worth of accumulated grime, and as I do, I am a congress of one, making sweeping resolutions by the handful. I will write my new novel. I will make amends with my family and work on becoming something resembling a brother and an uncle. I've already made some promising headway toward that end with Jared, even if it has involved some felonious activities. I will find a way to get past the awkwardness between Carly and me, and will find out if there's anything there to salvage. I will be a friend to Wayne and offer all the comfort and support I can. I am baptized in the faintly green foam of Irish Spring and Herbal Essences, ensconced in a lather of possibility.
I'm just stepping out of the shower when the doorbell rings. I quickly wrap a towel around my waist, the air invigoratingly cold against my wet skin, and run downstairs, still feeling a sense of elation at my newfound direction. And then I open the door and it's Lucy, looking flushed and somewhat breathless in a short skirt and a tight scoop-necked sweater, and things take a bit of a left turn.
“Hi,” I say, stepping back to let her in.
“I'm sorry to barge in on you like this,” she says. “I thought maybe you'd gone back home already.” She pulls at a loose strand of hair that has become ensnared in her lip gloss.
“Nope,” I say. “Still here.”
She smiles awkwardly. “I'm sorry I didn't come to the funeral. I don't go out very much these days, and I just . . .”
“Don't worry about it.”
Things seem to be moving in slow motion, because I have time to dwell on her every detail: the smooth lines of her face, the way her full, impossibly red lips seem to crush against each other where they meet, becoming an entirely new and delectable organ, her breasts straining against the dark fabric of her sweater, her smooth, tanned legs, and the soft curves of her thigh muscles where the hemline of her skirt bisects them.
We say a few more things to each other, but the sound of our conversation fades, seems to be coming from off in the distance, as we draw closer. I take a step back, clutching the towel at my waist with both hands, telling her that I'll just run upstairs and put some clothing on, but Lucy lunges forward and puts a restraining hand on my arm and says don't, and her voice is the radio signal and my anatomy the receiver, and I begin to shiver and say but I'm all wet, and she presses herself up against me, pulling my hand forcefully away from my body and guiding it up and under her skirt to the junction of her legs as she presses her lips against me and whispers so am I, and the towel hits the floor only a scant second before her skirt does.
We stumble up the stairs, kissing and clinging to each other with animal intensity, but once in my room she pushes me away so that I can watch her undress. She does it slowly, illuminated in the doorway by the soft light from the hallway behind her. And then, unbelievably, she is standing before me, unabashedly naked, as my eyes greedily drink up every inch of her magnificent body. Lucy has to be over fifty years old, but her body resolutely refuses to act its age. Her skin still shines with vitality, her breasts hang remarkably firm and full, her belly smooth and flat. You would think, after years of the fantasy, that the reality can't possibly measure up, but somehow it does. The odd imperfections, the dimples and creases
and even a red birthmark in the shape of Italy just below her left hip, only serve as foils to her perfection, the exceptions that prove the rule. She walks slowly over to my bed and climbs onto it, stretching out on all fours, the upward curve of her age-defying, apple-shaped ass raised slightly as she turns to look over her shoulder and down her back at me. “Fuck me, Joe,” she moans, lifting her upper body off the bed with her arms in a push-up so that through her spread thighs I can see the tips of her breasts grazing the rumpled sheets beneath her. “Fuck me hard.”
I do. And she is warm and soft and wet and supple and smooth, and on some level it's how I've always imagined it. The soft roundness of her breasts in my hands, the cherry hardness of her nipples between my teeth, the taste of her tongue as it pushes its way into my mouth, seeking out my own, and the press of her moist lips on me. We kiss and lick and suck and stroke each other at a fevered pitch, not allowing even a moment's respite for rational thought to intrude, and when I enter her, she comes almost immediately, crying out and digging her nails into my ass as she pulls me deeper inside. Her quick finish is highly fortunate, because after six months of celibacy, I'm like an exposed nerve ending down there, and any demonstration of tantric endurance is out of the question. I follow a moment later, and as I heave with the last convulsions of my orgasm, I think of Carly and feel ashamed.
We lie absolutely still for a few moments, our mingled sweat and juices drying on us in the conditioned air and becoming sticky on our skin. Only as I roll off her do I realize that she's crying softly. I brush the hair out of her face and see tears streaming out of her eyes. I open my mouth to say something, but there's really nothing I can say that will matter, so instead I just lie on my side next to her, holding her against me as she sobs, until, after an indeterminate amount of time, she falls asleep. Once her breathing becomes slow and regular, I disentangle myself from her and go to the bathroom. My haggard, lipstick-scarred face stares back at me in the mirror as I urinate, and as I lean forward to study the jagged lines of burst blood vessels in my eyes, I find myself repeating the last thing Lucy said to me before we went to bed. “Fuck me,” I say slowly, shaking my head at the face in the mirror. The face just frowns sadly back at me, disappointed that I can't come up with anything better.
The Book of Joe Page 20
