The Book of Joe (18 page)

“Hi, Cindy,” I say to break the silence. “What's up?”

In a burst of intuition, I know why she's there before she says anything. My father's come out of his coma. It's a miracle, really; the doctors don't know what to make of it. The nurse just walked past his room and there he was, sitting up in his bed, looking slightly perplexed but no worse for wear. And when the respirator came out, he asked in a raspy voice for his sons, the plural form, meaning both of them. There will be recovery and awkwardness, occupational therapy, and halting discussions of our damaged past, recriminations and veiled apologies, but through it all a sense of renewal, a second chance. I will not shy away from it; I will let go my bitterness and my strong proclivity toward sarcasm and embrace this opportunity to be whole again.

Cindy holds my glance for a moment and then directs her gaze over my shoulder. “Your father's dead,” she says.

         

Memories surface in a montage: my father teaching me to ride my new two-wheeler, then chasing me frantically when I suddenly get the hang of it and take off down our street, my mother and Brad laughing hysterically on the front lawn. My fourth-grade diorama project on Mount Saint Helens, when he stays up half the night with me trying to concoct the right mixture of baking powder and vinegar to simulate eruption from the crude papier mâché volcano I'd built. Helping me reel in a fifteen-pound striped bass on a chartered fishing boat on the Long Island Sound, cursing and shouting encouragement, then pounding my back in triumph when we finally land the sucker. Washing his car in the driveway and then turning the hose on Brad and me, chasing us around the yard and then tackling us so we all go down in a wet, muddy tangle of arms and legs . . .

But here's the thing. None of this ever happened. Or maybe it did. I can't tell anymore. I've spent so much time reliving and rewriting those years that I can no longer discern which vignettes are the result of which process. In my reckless anger, I've managed to fuck up a vital area of memory to the point where I will never again be able to isolate reality, and so whatever good there might have been has now been lost to rambling fiction. And the worst part of it is this: I think I did it on purpose.

One soft infested summer me and Terry became friends
trying in vain to breathe the fire we was born in
Catching rides to the outskirts, tying faith beneath our teeth
sleeping in that old abandoned beach house
getting wasted in the heat
and hiding on the backstreets . . .
With a love so hard and filled with defeat
running for our lives at night on them backstreets.

—“Backstreets,” Bruce Springsteen

twenty-three

The caskets all have names like Wilton, Exeter, Balmoral, and Buckingham, suggesting that the dearly departed will enter the afterworld as British nobility. Features include brass tone accents, hand-cast bronze handles, and tailored champagne crepe with matching pillows and throws. The higher-end caskets come with the patented Eterna-rest adjustable bedding system, and a number of caskets have artwork on their interiors, illuminated grottos with renderings of the Madonna or reproductions of
The Last Supper.
Only the acutely pervasive attendance of death prevents the whole business from crossing the line into comedy.

Brad is home, glumly working the phones, entangled in the myriad details involved in putting a body underground, so I've volunteered to pick out a casket, which turns out to be more complicated than I anticipated. I am now expected to choose between wood finishes and decorative trims for something that will be buried in the dirt almost immediately. And by the way, which features are most vital to a corpse?

The casket showroom, located in the basement of the funeral home, has the unreal feel of a sitcom set, with gleaming, lacquered caskets mounted on discreet black pedestals, all meticulously buffed to a showroom shine; a car dealership for the freshly deceased. In the air is the light smell of varnish and lemon Pledge. I make my way dazedly between the caskets, thinking it really doesn't matter which one I pick but still terrified of picking the wrong one. You can't go through life making as many wrong choices as I have without developing a certain wanton fearlessness toward decision making, but we are talking about eternity here, and it has me spooked.

My salesman, Richard, is obese and high-strung, with a frown of profound sympathy etched permanently into his features. I remember him from the neighborhood, a sad, chubby kid who could only ever manage to keep one side of his shirt tucked into his pants at any given time. He chases me nervously around the showroom, sweating and panting dangerously as he expounds on the virtues of the higher-end coffins, looking slightly pained when I bluntly ask for pricing, as if he finds the discussion of money vulgar and inappropriate. He works on commission, no doubt, which strikes me as being in poor taste, given the circumstances of his profession. The collective grief of Bush Falls will put his kids through college.

I finally settle on the Exeter in a mahogany finish, which comes to fifty-six hundred dollars before sales tax. I briefly consider haggling over price but decide that it would be a serious breach of etiquette, and besides, I just want to be gone from here already. Richard nods obsequiously at my choice and plants his considerable girth down at the laughably small black desk in the back of the room to write up the purchase. “There's also a sixty-dollar charge for refrigeration,” he advises me.

“Excuse me?”

He looks up from his papers. “The body. We refrigerate it until the interment. It's thirty dollars a day.”

“Oh, okay.” I'm sorry I asked.

“And there's the seven percent Cougar discount.”

“What?”

Richard looks up at me. “Your father was a Cougar, wasn't he?”

“He was,” I say.

“He gets seven percent off.”

“Lucky him.”

Richard stands up from behind the desk, his chair letting out a hissing sigh of relief, and hands me my receipt. “Once again, I'm terribly sorry for your loss.”

“Thanks,” I say, thinking that at a ten percent commission he's just made six hundred dollars for fifteen minutes of work, so how sorry can he really be. But then again, after almost seventeen years of not speaking to my father, I've just picked out his home for all eternity, so I just shake Richard's fat, clammy hand and get the hell out of there.

         

The funeral is attended by a good portion of the Bush Falls community, who don't view my father's death as any reason to stop staring at me with eyes that range from clinically inquisitive to outwardly hostile as they mill about the greeting hall before the service. It's one thing to know that I am generally despised by the bulk of the population, but to have so many of them under one roof at the same time is another thing entirely. It feels like those childhood dreams where you show up to school and realize too late that you're not wearing any pants. The nakedness might be metaphorical, but the arctic frost in my intestines is inarguably real.

Looking around the crowd, I see that a significant percentage of the men are wearing their old Cougars team jackets in a show of solidarity for their departed teammate. Like firemen or policemen, they are here to bury one of their own, fallen in the line of duty, as it were. There is something oddly grand in this gesture, even if the faded jackets looked silly on the balding, fleshy, potbellied men who wear them over button-down shirts and ties. I know it's ridiculous, but I can't help bitterly observing that even in death my father has managed to remind me one last time of my exclusion from the privileged inner circle he and Brad inhabit as Cougars.

Thank god for Owen, who arrives from Manhattan in the obnoxious white stretch limo he has hired for the occasion. He strides purposefully into the hall, looking spectacularly and inappropriately dapper in a tan poplin suit, mint green shirt, and a speckled bow tie. For years, Owen struggled with whether his wardrobe should exude the sharp, clean lines of corporate confidence or the finer, softer dimensions of intellectual and literary perspicacity. Over time, his atrocious attempts to reflect this dichotomy yielded a dreadful, polychromatic style, which he'd ultimately embraced as an affectation. “I thought you could use some moral support,” he announces grandly, basking in the stares he's generating. “But as I am famously bereft of anything resembling morals, you'll have to settle for my unmodified support.”

“Thanks for coming,” I say as he briefly embraces me. It's the first time he's ever hugged me. He smells like Old Spice and baby powder.

“Please,” Owen says, stepping back to stare around at the gathering crowd with unconcealed curiosity. “How could I not?”

Wayne shows up looking shockingly healthy in his Cougars jacket and borrowed suit pants that manage to somewhat conceal his wasted frame. He gives me a light hug and we grin at my own borrowed suit, as if any further evidence of our alien status is actually necessary. “You too?” I say, indicating his jacket.

“I've always been a sucker for tradition,” Wayne says with a smirk. “Except as it pertains to lifestyle, of course.” I introduce him to Owen, who nods in recognition and hugs him suddenly and dramatically, Wayne patting his back in bemused surprise.

Carly arrives as the last guests are filing into the chapel for the service, and I realize that I've been waiting to see if she'll come. She walks over and kisses me lightly on the cheek. I was hoping for something a bit more dramatic: a lingering hug, maybe some tears. “I'm so sorry, Joe,” she says. She is wearing a sleek black pantsuit with a white blouse opened at the neck to reveal a small triangle of pale flesh and the delicate protrusion of her collarbones.

“Thanks for coming,” I say.

I want to say something more, but the sudden tightness in my throat makes it impossible. Carly squeezes my hand, her eyes wide and knowing. “I'll sit where you can see me,” she says. I nod mutely, and she moves ahead of me through the twin doors into the chapel.

After that, everything is a blur. A rabbi reads some psalms in Hebrew, and then a parade of middle-aged men in faded Cougars jackets take turns at the podium paying tribute to Arthur Goffman, threatening to drown us in a deluge of basketball metaphors. Brad speaks last, dividing my father's life into four quarters and explaining what his contributions were in each one, and I want to stand up and shout that it's just a fucking game. But when he steps down from the pulpit, he looks teary and spent. I know that he loved our father, and for a moment, I feel deeply sorry for him. Then I go back to feeling sorry for myself.

Only a handful of cars accompany us in the procession behind the hearse to the cemetery, which is on the other side of town. Once there, Brad, Jared, and I are joined by three older men in Cougars jackets, buddies of my father's, in bearing the coffin to the grave, beside which lies a high mound of dirt and the telltale tracks of the backhoe that prepared the grave yesterday. We place the coffin on the two two-by-fours that cross the open grave, and as the gravediggers begin lowering the coffin, I realize with a jolt that I'm standing right beside my mother's tombstone. I turn to read the gray marble stone—E
LLEN
G
OFFMAN, 1945
–
1983,
B
ELOVED
W
IFE,
M
OTHER, AND
D
AUGHTER
—and then I'm on my knees, pressing my fingers into the grooves of the letters that spell her name, weeping uncontrollably while behind me, they cover my father's coffin with dirt, and then something hits my head, cool, smooth, and unyielding, the glazed marble of the tombstone, and maybe I pass out, I'm not sure, but I distinctly feel myself being carried, a live person borne over the scattered graves for a change, and the last thought I have is that I never thought of her as his wife before, and that wasn't fair because he lost something too, maybe even something larger than I did.

twenty-four

1987

It took a while for me to believe that Wayne wasn't coming back. Every day I expected to pick up the phone and hear his voice, or walk into school and see him leaning against his locker in his team jacket, greeting me with his usual wry grin. I drove past his house daily, slowing down to peer intently through the curtained windows as if I might discern some clue as to his whereabouts. Mrs. Hargrove had installed an answering machine and taken to screening her calls, and my regular inquiries apparently didn't make the cut.

“I don't think he's coming back,” Carly said gently to me one afternoon. It was one of the first warm days of spring, and we were sitting on the bleachers overlooking the football field during a free period, enjoying the freshness of the weather. Wayne had been gone for over a month.

“Of course he is,” I said. “Why would you say that?”

She folded her fingers into mine and looked out onto the field. “Would you?”

I shook my head. “But where is he? I mean, you would think he'd give me a call or something. Just to let us know where he is. I'm supposed to be his best friend, for god's sake.”

Carly leaned against me and kissed the side of my jaw. “He will when he's ready.”

I rested my head on hers, kissing her scalp where her hair parted. “I wonder if he called Sammy,” I said.

Since Wayne's disappearance, Sammy had devoted himself to a strict regimen of invisibility. His attendance in school became highly sporadic, and when he did come, he moved through the halls like a phantom, keeping close to the walls, slipping unobtrusively in and out of classrooms. His hair, no longer sculpted into a pompadour, grew long and lay flat against his skull, and he always appeared rumpled and slightly askew, as if he'd slept in his clothing. On those rare occasions when I did run into him, he offered short, perfunctory conversation, scrupulously avoiding eye contact.

I dropped by his house on a few isolated evenings, motivated less by friendship than by the possibility that maybe he'd heard from Wayne. But Sammy was sullen and uncommunicative, and after sitting in his room for ten minutes or so, the conversational well would run dry. “He's in trouble, Joe,” Lucy said to me on one such night as she walked me down the stairs to my car. “I can't get through to him.”

“Me neither,” I said. “It's like he's pissed at everyone.”

She leaned against my car, smoking a cigarette and shivering slightly in the cool night air, looking small and vulnerable. On the pedestal in my mind, she always loomed larger than life, and it was a revelation every time I noticed how much taller than her I was. It would be so easy, I thought, to just step forward and wrap my arms around her. “It's driving me out of my fucking mind,” Lucy said, shaking her head. “He barely eats; he won't talk to me. I don't know what the hell to do about it anymore. I think I've been a good mother to him, you know? I mean, Sammy's no picnic, let me tell you.” She blew out some smoke and then waved it away in quick, nervous motions. “And I know I'm nobody's idea of mother of the year; I have no illusions about that. I was just a little older than you when I had Sammy. Just a kid, really. I always said we were better off without his scumbag father, but I don't know. Maybe if he had a father . . .” Her voice trailed off, and she looked up at me with a sad grin. “I'm going a little crazy, aren't I?”

“It's okay.”

“I'm sorry, Joe. I don't mean to lay this all on you. It's just—I don't know. I'm so frustrated.”

In that moment I understood something new about Lucy. Until she'd given birth to Sammy, she'd sailed through life on the wind of her looks. Then she got divorced, and her life became filled with a new breed of tribulations that were largely impervious to her beauty. She seemed to feel unqualified to help Sammy, and despised herself for feeling that way.

“It's okay,” I said again. “I just wish I could do more to help.”

“Just don't stop coming here,” she said. “He needs a friend so badly right now.”

“He doesn't want me around. He barely talks to me.”

She reached out for my arm and held it with both of her hands. “Don't stop trying, Joe. He'll come around. He always does.”

“Okay,” I said. “I won't.”

But I did. I couldn't stop blaming Sammy for what had happened to Wayne, and every time I saw him staring forlornly into space, I was seized by a fury so raw it threatened to overwhelm me. I wanted to scream at him, pound him into a bloody pulp, and tell him how much I wished he'd never come to the Falls. I had offered him friendship, and he'd repaid me by shredding the very fabric of my life. On some level, I knew that I was taking a childish view of things, that there were greater and more complex truths in play here, but that knowledge did nothing to dissipate my anger.

“Stop hounding Mrs. Hargrove,” my father said to me one night, sticking his head into my bedroom as he passed by on the way to his own. He was slouched and sweaty from work, his eyelids sagging with exhaustion. His chinos were worn nearly to transparency in the knees and frayed at the cuffs, and I felt a brief flash of intense sympathy for him. It wouldn't have occurred to him to buy some new pants without my mother there to tell him to do so.

“What?”

“That poor lady's been through enough. She doesn't need you calling her night and day and reminding her.”

“I don't call her night and day,” I said.

“Well, she practically attacked me in the parking lot at Stop and Shop and told me you were making her crazy.”

“She was already crazy.”

“You show some respect,” he said sternly, stepping fully into my room for what had to be the first time since Reagan was elected. “If I found out one of my sons was a homosexual, I don't know if I'd handle it any better.”

“Well then, take it from me,” I said bitterly. “You wouldn't.”

I saw the anger flare up briefly behind his eyes, but he was too tired to fight with me. “Wayne left of his own accord. If he really wanted to hear from you, he'd let you know how to reach him.”

“You're glad he's gone,” I accused him.

My father nodded. “Wayne needed to leave. It was best for everyone, including him. He understood that. And when you get a little older, maybe you will too.” He turned to leave.

“That's bullshit,” I said.

He stopped in his tracks for a second but didn't turn back around. “Just leave her alone,” he said. “I don't want to have this conversation again.”

When he was gone, I punched my wall repeatedly until my knuckles were scraped and swollen, and then did it some more, the small streaks of my blood smearing like chocolate onto the flat finish of the ivory paint. He no doubt heard the racket but apparently didn't feel compelled to investigate.

         

A few days later, my father left for an overnight business trip and Carly came over to have sex in my bed. The luxury of making love in an actual bed without the constant fear of discovery inhibiting our every move was rare, and we never missed an opportunity to take advantage. We'd been going at it for something like two hours when the doorbell rang. “Who's that?” Carly said. I was lying on my back and she was lying on top of me on her back, her arms and legs spread precisely over mine. She liked to lie like that sometimes when we'd just finished, her goal being to have our bodies touching at as many points as was physically possible.

“No one,” I said. “Just ignore it.”

But the doorbell continued to ring insistently, so I slid out from under her and threw on some shorts. “I'll be back in a minute,” I said.

“I'll keep your spot warm.” She stretched out on the bed, affording me a full view of her naked body still glistening in the sweaty afterglow of our lovemaking. “Joe.”

“Yeah.”

“I love you.”

“I love you too.”

My smile faded when I opened the door to find Sammy sitting on my front stairs, fiddling with his car keys. “Hey, Joe,” he said, standing up. “I didn't think you were home.”

Then why did you stay?
“How's it going?” I said.

“It's okay.”

“That's good. What's up?”

“What's up?” he repeated, pondering the question. He was dressed in jeans and a blue windbreaker, his hair greasy and limp against his scalp, clearly lacking the benefit of a recent shower. On the edge of his chin and below his sideburns were small, asymmetrical patches of dark stubble, the first evidence I'd ever seen that Sammy was capable of growing facial hair. “I don't really know what's up,” he said. “I was sitting in my room, listening to ‘Bobby Jean' for like the millionth time, and I just couldn't breathe anymore. I had to get the hell out of my house.”

“Why ‘Bobby Jean'?”

“Have you ever listened to the lyrics?”

“Maybe. I don't know.”

Sammy flashed his customary disdainful frown reserved for those philistines who didn't fully appreciate the complex beauty of Springsteen. “The song is about someone whose best friend leaves town without saying good-bye,” he said. “You should listen to it again sometime.”

“Maybe I will.”

Sammy nodded, lost deeply in thought. “Joe,” he said, “before all of this happened, we were friends, weren't we?”

“Sure.”

“So why aren't we anymore?”

The naked directness of his question caught me off guard and I had to look away for a minute before answering. “I don't know. I've tried to stay your friend,” I said, my words ringing false in my own ears.

“Do you hate me?”

“Of course not.”

“Because I would understand it if you did,” Sammy said. “I wouldn't agree with it, but I would understand it.”

I sighed deeply. I didn't want to be talking about this right now. “I don't hate you, Sammy.”

He looked into my eyes intently, trying to measure the level of truth behind my statement. After a few moments, he nodded. “Good,” he said. “I don't think I could stand to be hated by you right now.”

“Let me know when would be good for you,” I said, belatedly flashing him an exaggerated smirk so he would know I was joking.

He smiled. “I will.” He turned to go down the stairs and stopped midway, started to say something, stopped, and then looked up at me. “You know, I never meant to be like this,” he said hesitantly.

“Like what?”

He smiled and waved his hand around to indicate himself. “Like this. A fag. Believe me, I tried like hell for a while not to be one. Even when we moved here, I still thought maybe in a new town where no one knew me, I could change.” He flashed me a small, sheepish smile. “Obviously, I couldn't,” he said. “And neither could Wayne.”

“I don't think Wayne's really sure about what he is or isn't,” I said, sounding a bit more defensive than I'd intended. “I think he's probably gone somewhere to work it all out.”

Sammy looked at me for a long moment and then shook his head. “If Wayne wasn't sure, Wayne wouldn't have left,” he said.

“Whatever,” I said, and quickly changed the subject. I didn't need to hear Sammy speaking like an expert on my best friend. “Where are you headed?”

“I don't know,” he said with a shrug. “I think I'll just drive around for a while.” He looked up the stairs to me. “You want to come along?”

I almost said yes. Since Wayne's departure and Sammy's subsequent depression, I hadn't really had any friends to just hang out and be stupid with, and I realized that I missed it. But Carly was waiting, naked and primed, on my bed upstairs, and it was really no contest. “Maybe tomorrow,” I said. “I'm kind of in the middle of something.”

Sammy looked past me into the house and then grinned. “I should have figured.” He turned and stepped into the street, heading around the front of his mother's Chevy.

“Sammy,” I called out to him.

“Yeah?”

“I'll see you around.”

He swung open the door and looked over the roof of the car at me. “Take care, Joe,” he said.

The finality of his salutation struck me as somewhat odd as I made my way back upstairs, but I didn't have long to contemplate it, because when I stepped into my bedroom, I found Carly jumping up and down in the center of my bed, still magnificently undressed, and all thoughts of Sammy, like my blood, fled rapidly from my brain. “I got a little bored,” she said sheepishly.

“So I see.”

“Are you particularly attached to those shorts?”

“Not really. Why?”

“Because if they're still on five seconds from now, I'm going home.”

I smiled and charged the bed, and for the next few hours the world faded to black and nothing existed beyond the universe contained within my four bedroom walls.

         

Later that night, after Carly had gone home, I pulled out my cassette of
Born in the U.S.A.
and played “Bobby Jean” on the stereo. Sammy was right. I'd never really paid attention to the lyrics, and it amazed me how well they articulated what I'd been feeling ever since Wayne had left town. Springsteen carefully avoided referring to Bobby Jean as male or female, leaving the listener free to associate as needed. When he sang the last verse, about Bobby Jean's being out on that road somewhere, on some bus or train, and how he wished he could have just seen him or her one last time, I began to tremble.
“I miss you,”
came the Boss's voice mournfully through my speakers.
“Good luck, good-bye, Bobby Jean.”
He lingered on the name for an extra beat, and then Clarence's sax came on strong, wailing and rasping with a chilling despondence, and I sat down on my bedroom floor, rocking back and forth to the music, only aware after the fact that I had started to cry.

         

I didn't know yet that Sammy was dead when I got to school the next morning and found Carly giggling with some girlfriends near her locker. When she saw me, she excused herself and came running over to give me a kiss. “Hey, stud,” she said, falling easily into step with me. “I had a lot of fun last night.”