The Book of Joe (29 page)

Death starts at his face and works its way down, like someone closing up shop, turning off the lights as he goes through the building. First Wayne's eyes stop flickering, and then his mouth closes, his lips coming together in a mild frown. His chest continues to rise and fall lightly for another half hour or so, the movement becoming increasingly harder to detect until it becomes clear that it's stopped. During this time, Carly and I sit in silence on either side of him, gently rubbing his arms to keep him company. At the very end, Wayne's legs lock together in a quick, surprising spasm, and Carly lets out a small shriek in spite of herself, quickly bringing her hand up to her mouth the way a little kid will when she's said something she knows she shouldn't have.

thirty-six

You can have all the sex you want, make declarations of love until you're hoarse, but all it really takes to feel like a couple is arriving together to a formal function, dressed appropriately, walking in step. I take an extra second to revel in this feeling as Carly and I ascend the stone steps of Saint Michael's Church for Wayne's funeral, to breathe it in and exhale it through my pores, knowing that such consciousness is fleeting and that it inevitably gets processed in the same thoughtless manner as oxygen.

The sky is a violent, ominous gray, the air humid and thick with the threat of an approaching storm. It's perfect funeral weather, and I know it would have appealed to Wayne's sense of drama. “I don't get this at all,” Carly says as we approach the tall, forbidding doors of Saint Mike's. “Why would Wayne ask for a traditional funeral mass? He hates the Church.”

“I don't think it has anything to do with the Church,” I say, pulling on the wrought iron door handle and entering the church. “He's doing it for his parents.”

“Maybe. But still, this doesn't feel like him at all.”

It's been three days since Wayne's death, and we are still doggedly referring to him in the present tense, unwilling to allow his inevitable shift into the past to occur.

We are the first ones here, and the sound of our footsteps on ancient stone tiles echoes in triplicate off the high arched ceilings of the foyer. We walk through a low arched doorway and into the church proper, making our way through the rows of empty pews to the front of the sanctuary, just below the raised altar. I gaze around the cavernous chamber, taking in the stained glass windows, the exposed wooden ceiling beams, the molded crucifixes that adorn the ceiling on either side of the vast iron chandelier. “Do you know what?” I say. “This is the first time I've ever been in a church.”

“Really?” Carly says. “This is actually my third time. One wedding and one funeral.”

“Aren't we the heathens.” We're speaking in hushed tones now, even though it's just the two of us in the vast chamber, two neophytes overcompensating with exaggerated deference.

“We're not heathens. We're lapsed Jews.”

We sit down in one of the forwardmost pews, the wooden bench creaking under abused vermilion upholstery that has absorbed decades of baby puke and the discarded remnants of illicit candies and gums. “Nothing like being in a church to make you feel the Jew in you,” I say.

Of course, it's not as if the Goffmans have ever been devout practitioners of Judaism anyway. The only time I can recall seeing the inside of a synagogue was on the occasion of Brad's Bar Mitzvah. He stumbled through some blessings over the Torah in the Reform Temple on Churchill, and then we had a party. There were little matchbooks and mints with his name on them, the table centerpieces were miniature basketball hoops with Styrofoam basketballs, and there was a seedy-looking DJ with a perm, still languishing in denial over the death of disco. I suppose that if my mother hadn't died before my thirteenth birthday, I would have had a Bar Mitzvah too, but she did, so I didn't. According to Jewish tradition, as I understand it, this means I've never officially become a man.

The doors swing open behind us, and we turn to see Wayne's parents enter, escorted by Father Mahon, a burly, amiable priest who's been with Saint Mike's for over thirty years and is known to Catholics and heathens alike for his theatrical, old-school umpiring style in the Bush Falls Little League. Another two couples that I don't recognize but presume to be relatives from out of town follow the Hargroves down the aisle. I nod in greeting to Mrs. Hargrove and am perfectly content to leave it at that, but Carly steps forward and shakes her hand somberly, leaving me no choice but to follow suit. “Mrs. Hargrove,” she says, “I am so sorry. We loved him so much.”

Mrs. Hargrove nods and then looks at me, her eyes aggressively probing mine like a retinal scan, daring me to evince the slightest glimmer of judgment. Her hand is limp and dry in mine, a small dead animal wrapped in tissue paper, and I nod once and recite a perfunctory condolence. Wayne's father's handshake is hard and clammy, and he holds on for an extra second, forcing me to look him in the eye. “Thank you, Joe,” he whispers, his voice hoarse and unsteady and, I realize now, so much like Wayne's. “Thank you for everything.”

His eyes well up with tears, and for one terrifying moment I worry that he's going to pull me into a grieving embrace. Mrs. Hargrove, clearly not happy with the direction this is taking, clamps her hand firmly on his arm and leads him forward toward the front row. “Pull yourself together, Victor,” she admonishes him. “For heaven's sake.”

Brad and Jared join us a few minutes later. Brad is wearing suit pants and his Cougars jacket, and Jared is wearing a navy suit without a tie. He's pulled his hair back behind his ears in a miniature ponytail for the occasion, and his eyes look slightly puffy, as if he's been crying. Brad drops Jared off at our pew and then steps forward to offer his condolences to Wayne's parents. When he walks back to our seats, I see him discreetly brush a tear from the corner of his eye and feel another one of the inexplicable rushes of affection for him that have been catching me by surprise ever since I got to the Falls. “Hey, Joe,” he says, leaning over to shake my hand, “I'm really sorry.” We haven't spoken since that night at his house, and he must know that Jared and I have still been spending time together, but if he's still upset with me, he's keeping it well concealed.

“That's a nice gesture,” I say, indicating Brad's basketball jacket. “Wayne would have appreciated it.”

Brad shrugs. “It's a tradition.”

A few more random guests file in over the next few minutes. I recognize Paul Barrow, Wayne's doctor, and Dave Sykes and Stan Rydell, two guys who'd been in our class back in high school, and a small assortment of men and women who are either colleagues of Mr. Hargrove's or fellow parishioners.

Wayne had requested a small ceremony for just family and a few friends, so after a quick whispered conversation with Mrs. Hargrove, Father Mahon ascends the altar and starts flipping through his prayer book. I remember how Father Mahon used to do a little dance when he called a strikeout, lifting his knee high into the air and then lunging forward with his fist as he yelled, “Steerike three!” I look over at Brad and see that he's smiling. He turns to me and mouths the words
steerike three.
I nod and we smile, like brothers.

Two solemn men in matching mustaches and black suits wheel the casket down the aisle and bring it to a stop at the front of the sanctuary. Wayne was adamant in his refusal to be embalmed, and thus a closed casket is the only real option, which is fine with me, and judging by the relieved expressions on Carly's and Brad's faces, I think they feel the same way. Only Jared frowns and seems mildly disappointed, having come with the intention of glimpsing his first dead body, of confronting death and his own notions of mortality.

Just as Father Mahon is about to begin, there is a sound from the back of the church and we all turn as one to see Coach Dugan come striding down the aisle, his weather-beaten basketball jacket on over a white oxford and a wine-colored paisley tie. He walks to the front of the room and holds a brief, quiet discussion with Wayne's mother. After a moment she nods, and Dugan steps to the foot of the altar and conducts a shorter discussion with Father Mahon. Apparently, Dugan's jurisdiction extends to the church as well, because the priest nods and smiles, and Dugan turns and walks back up the aisle. Our eyes meet for a second, and I'm surprised to see him nod in a friendly manner. I nod back and then feel like an idiot when I realize that I've inadvertently intercepted a smile intended for Brad.

“I know that Wayne requested an intimate ceremony,” Father Mahon announces. “But there's been a slight . . . wrinkle. I explained to the coach that this service was intended just for family, and he pointed out—rightly so, I think—that by broadening our definition of the word family, we can accommodate this change without the danger of doing Wayne any disservice. As a matter of fact, I'm sure he would have been quite pleased.”

“What's going on?” Jared whispers to me.

“You got me.”

“Look,” Carly says.

We turn to the back of the church, where Dugan has propped open the double swinging doors, and suddenly a virtual parade of men in blue and white Cougars jackets begins filing through the doors. Their ages run the gamut, from men in their sixties to kids who are probably on Dugan's current roster. The older men walk with the same peculiar gait my father owned, each step informed by bowed legs and ruined knees. They have their funeral faces on, grave, awkward expressions that bespeak a deep-seated discomfort, not with death itself but with being in the presence of the bereaved. The younger boys look uncomfortable but grimly determined, and you can see the fire of Dugan's instruction in their eyes. Gradually, amid the sound of groaning floorboards, creaking benches, and the deep rumble of their collective shuffling, the current and former Cougars fill the pews until the church is at capacity. Standing by the back doors, overseeing this somber procession, is Coach Dugan, his expression impatient and severe, as if he's ready to inflict forty laps around the church on the entire squad if they don't get it done right the first time.

And now the entire rear of the church is a standing sea of blue and white, and however contrived the whole thing might be, there is something grand and majestic in it, something undeniably real, and it works. I look at Jared and Brad sitting to my right and see that they're both wiping away tears. On my other side, Carly's eyes have welled up as well, so I feel a little better about my own constricted throat and the abundant wetness on my cheeks. I take Carly's hand and pull her into me. “He would have liked this,” I whisper.

“I know.” She squeezes my hands and sniffles, wiping her tears softly against my blazer.

Father Mohan clears his throat to begin the service, but his voice breaks at the first syllable and he has to take a minute to collect himself. He has no sooner done this than he is interrupted by a loud wail as, in the front pew, something in Mrs. Hargrove that can bend no more finally snaps, and she collapses against her husband in a fit of hysterical weeping. I'm glad for Wayne and hope that wherever he is, he can see that his mother has finally broken through. I feel my own chest spasm involuntarily and Carly cries into my shoulder while Jared breaks down and leans into Brad's embrace. Wayne's voice, unbidden, suddenly speaks up in my head.
Now this,
he says enthusiastically,
this is a funeral.

thirty-seven

We exit the church into an epic thunderstorm, the rain descending in thick sheets, furiously battering the steps of the church and swallowing both light and sound, lending our surroundings the grainy, muted texture of a newspaper photo. In the movies, black umbrellas would sprout everywhere in a funereal manner, but here they come up red and yellow as well, bright, deliberate globs of color superimposed on the subdued gray hues of the day.

The six of us who have been selected by Wayne as pallbearers descend to the foot of the stairs to wait at a discreet basement door, where we will meet the casket and wheel it over to the waiting hearse. The pallbearers are Brad, Jared, Victor Hargrove, a nondescript uncle, Coach Dugan, and me. I am somewhat taken aback by this posthumous show of respect for Dugan, and experience a twinge of indignant rage toward Wayne over his apparent forgiveness of the man, abandoning me to cling alone to my vestigial anger.

There isn't very far to bear the pall, but with both hands on the casket, there is no way to hold an umbrella, and in the minute or so it takes us to wheel Wayne from the basement door to the curb, we all get effectively soaked. The hearse stands idling at the curb, its driver and a second attendant standing by the open back door with a matching set of professionally sorrowful expressions. I picture them in some back room, trying out these expressions on each other, maybe even naming each variety, and then bursting out laughing. They step forward to help us guide the casket onto the steel tracks in the car, giving us hushed directions like stage cues, and I feel the lump in my throat shudder and dissolve into hot liquid as Wayne is transformed into cargo.

We stand in the rain watching as the hearse drives away. There will be no procession, since its destination is the crematorium in Noank, two towns over. Carly and I will go there tomorrow to pick up Wayne's ashes. Between now and then, we'll try to figure out what to do with them. There is a tap on my shoulder and I turn, expecting Carly but instead find Dugan, stooped under a compact blue umbrella. “Goffman,” he says. “I'd like a word with you.”

A reflexive shiver runs through me, but I face him and even manage some guarded eye contact. The skin around his eyes is cracked and chapped, the hardened folds of skin lining up to form deep crevices, but the eyes themselves, dark and intense, still command your attention. “Thanks for what you did in the gym the other night,” I say, not so much to thank him as to vent some of the nervous energy pouring into my chest cavity. “It meant a lot to Wayne.”

He dismisses my remark with an impatient frown. “I had some long talks with your father when your book came out,” he says with no preamble, his eyes squinting forcefully, his face burnished with a wet sheen from the rain. “We talked a lot about Wayne, about the extent to which we might have mishandled the situation back then. Art was hurt by your book, but he thought you made some good points, and he was proud of you.”

I nod and comb my soaking hair back with my fingers. “Thanks. I appreciate that.”

“I thought the book was a load of horseshit,” Dugan continues without missing a beat. “The malicious work of one miserable son of a bitch looking for someone to blame.”

I nod again and attempt a sardonic grin, but I can feel it coming out wrong, my facial muscles all out of whack, reflecting frayed nerves instead of confident wit. “You'll understand if I don't ask you for a blurb on my next book jacket.”

“You're an asshole, Goffman.”

“Well, it's always a pleasure to hear from my readers,” I say, searching desperately through the sea of umbrellas for Carly to come rescue me.

“I'm an asshole too,” Dugan says. He produces a cigar from his jacket pocket and lights it with a gold butane lighter that bears the embossed logo of the Cougars. The lighter is not standard issue, but clearly a gift, and I find myself idly wondering what other Cougar paraphernalia Dugan has accumulated over the years: neckties, shirts, pocket watches, gold pens. He blows out a few puffs, and we both watch the smoke float out from under the shelter of his umbrella and fade quickly like a ghost between the raindrops. “Nothing wrong with being an asshole as long as you do it responsibly.”

“So I'm doing it wrong?”

“You wrote a lot of shit in that book to cut me down personally.” Dugan looks right into me, daring me to contradict him.

I shrug. “If the shoe fits . . .”

He grimaces, an expression somewhere between a grin and a sneer, nodding as if to say he'd expected as much. “I'm not going to say you weren't right about some of the things you said. But the problem was, you threw in all that other perverted crap and character assassination, and whatever truth you might have had there was buried under it. If you'd just written it straight, people might have been able to accept what you had to say. But you showed no respect, so you just pissed everyone off and you lost your credibility.” Dugan takes a deep breath, and to my immense surprise, I see his jaw trembling. “Not a day goes by that I don't regret the way I handled Wayne's situation,” he says. “I didn't think I was doing something wrong at the time, but that's no excuse. One of my boys was in trouble, and I let him down. It took me a while to understand that, but I know it now.”

A fat lot of good that does now, I think angrily, but don't say it. Anything I say at this point will come out wrong, or it will come out too right, and either way it will blow up in my face. So I just look up at him, trying to discern from his expression what this conversation is truly about.

“When he came back to town, sick like he was, I couldn't shake the notion that somehow, in some way, I might be to blame, that if I'd handled it differently back then . . .” Dugan's voice trails off and, impossible as it seems, he appears to be fighting back tears. “Wayne must have hated me for a long time. But I guess dying slow gives you time to think things through, and he decided that he didn't want to leave this world looking back in anger, so he forgave me. I've been teaching basketball for going on fifty years. When you teach anything for that long, you get so used to teaching, you kind of forget how to learn. But I'm going to learn something from Wayne's death, and that is that holding on to anger is a waste of fucking time. It's a waste of life.”

Now there are actual tears in his eyes. After all these years, Dugan and I are sharing an Oprah moment. Later, I know I'll come up with a million things I would have liked to say, things that would have assuaged various aspects of the anger and guilt I've been harboring protectively for all these years, but the only part of me that seems to be operational for this historic meeting are the muscles in my neck that enable me to nod.

“Anyway,” Dugan says, clearing his throat and looking over my shoulder, “I'll tell you the same thing I told your father. We make mistakes. They don't make us. If they did, we'd all be royally fucked, especially a couple of assholes like us.”

I grin at his last remark, and finally find some words to say, even though I'm not sure I possess the conciliatory feelings to match my tone. “You could learn a lot from an asshole.”

Dugan smiles at that, and it's the first time I've ever seen him do it. “I guess so.”

I watch him walk away, still chomping on his cigar. From behind, his age is considerably more apparent, in the stoop of his posture and the sag of his crumbling shoulders under his basketball jacket. Later, I'll replay this conversation and be somewhat unsure of what exactly transpired. Is it my forgiveness or his own we've just been negotiating? But at this moment, I felt vaguely satisfied that a rapprochement of sorts has been reached, and a long-raging battle has been ended. I don't like him any more than I did before, but maybe I hate him a little less, and I guess that's something.

When Carly finds me a few minutes later, I'm still standing in the same spot, staring up into the rain. “You're soaked,” she says, pulling me under her umbrella and wiping at my face with her fingers. The underside of her umbrella has a reproduction of the Sistine Chapel's ceiling. “I always wondered who bought these things,” I say.

“What was that all about?”

Her eyes are black and smudged with ruined mascara, and she looks like a little girl who's been playing with her mother's makeup. I kiss her cheek and we press our foreheads together. “Nothing,” I say. “I don't know.” I am suddenly exhausted, and want nothing more than to just climb into bed with her and sleep the wet chill out of our bones. Carly hugs me, and it's a good, tight fit, and at some point we finish crying, although, with the constant spray of the rain on our faces, it's impossible to tell exactly when.