The Book of Joe (6 page)

eight

Time slows to a crawl in my father's hospital room. Try as they might, the seconds are unable to overtake the measured beeping of the heart monitor. The day is a run-on Henry James sentence that makes no sense, punctuated by small talk, bathroom breaks, and trips to the temperamental coffee machine down the hall. It is unclear to me whether we're waiting for our father to wake up or to die, but it's almost beside the point, as the machinery seems specifically engineered to allow neither but to simply sustain him in this mechanical purgatory. Cindy, who left to take the twins to school soon after I arrived, returns around noon to bring us some pizza. Having never been married, I'm not equipped to decipher the nature of the glances that pass between Cindy and Brad, quick, intense looks bursting with angry nuance. Brad leaves to walk her back to the elevators and returns looking troubled and even further deflated. Something is definitely going on there.

At around five-thirty, some imperceptible variation in the beeps and hisses of our father's life support systems apparently signals to Brad that it's time to knock off for the evening. He conducts a quick conference with the nurse on duty, and then we leave.

“Nice car,” Brad says, getting into the passenger seat of the Mercedes, the leather farting impudently against his jeans.

“Thanks,” I mumble self-consciously.

“Must have set you back some.”

I groan inwardly. No good will come of this conversation. Mercedes dealerships should have a back room they take you to after you sign the papers in the showroom, with plush carpeting and sofas upholstered in the same rich leather used in the cars, where an instructor gives a small workshop, over gourmet coffee and muffins, on the social intangibles of owning a luxury car, the etiquette and so forth. For sixty-eight thousand dollars, it's the least they can do. Then maybe I would feel equipped to handle the predicament it is my fate to continually confront as a novice Mercedes owner. If I agree with my brother's assessment, I'm being patronizing. If I say “not really,” I'm showing off. Until you have money, you think it's the answer to everything, and only once you have it do you realize that it's just a whole new set of questions, the only difference being that now you have to keep them to yourself, because no one's going to sympathize. I grunt something unintelligible and hope we can leave it at that.

“You hungry?” Brad says.

“I could eat.”

There are only two places worth eating at in Bush Falls. One is the Duchess Diner, right on Stratfield Road, and the other is the Halftime Pub, a combination sports bar and pub frequented primarily by the many former athletes living in the Falls. The Halftime Pub has the added distinction of serving the best steaks in northern Connecticut.

“You want to get a steak?” I ask, since we're fairly close to Halftime.

“Nah,” Brad says. “I'm more in the mood for something light. Let's just hit the Duchess.”

“Come on,” I say. “My treat.”

“You can treat me at the Duchess,” he says, looking uncomfortable.

I can't remember a time when Brad preferred anything to a Halftime steak, but I let it go, reminding myself that when you haven't been around for seventeen years, it's probably prudent to operate under the assumption that things might have changed somewhat while you were gone.

The Duchess is decorated in classic Diner. The benches in the booths are upholstered in maroon vinyl, the tables laminated in a shiny, speckled Formica finish. Beyond the booths is a long bar with nine spinning stools for single diners, and behind that is the kitchen. If the place has changed at all since I left, the differences are too subtle for me to detect.

The waitress behind the counter is Sheila Girardi, who was a grade behind me in school and who played the lead in every school play and sang and danced in every talent show. “Hey, Goff,” she says with a familiar smile. “Goff” has been Brad's nickname ever since junior high. Whenever Brad executed a particularly spectacular move or hit a clutch basket, the nickname would reverberate against the walls of the gymnasium in a vocal frenzy.
“Goff! Goff! Goff! Goff!”
I'd sit in the stands, cheering Brad on, dreaming of the day when it would be me to whom the frenzied cheers referred. But I never made the team, and no one ever shouted
Goff
for me. And so I remain Joe Goffman, which sounds as if it betrays just the slightest hint of failure. Meet Joe Goffman, the somewhat disappointing brother of the great Goff.

“Hey, Sheila. You remember my brother, Joe?”

“Sure,” she says. “Hey, Joe. It's been a long time. How are you?”

“Pretty good. And you?”

“Great.” Sheila was voted most likely to succeed as the next Madonna, and if she's at all bitter that the gods chose Britney Spears instead, there's no trace of it in her expression. “Listen, I'm so sorry about your dad. How's he doing?”

“No change,” Brad says, and steers us to a booth. As we make our way through the diners, I notice that I'm getting a lot of stares from the patrons, none of them particularly friendly. “I guess you're famous,” Brad says as we slide into opposite sides of the booth.

“I guess so.”

We look awkwardly across the table at each other, and I suddenly miss my father's unconscious form between us, which served wonderfully as a distraction. “So,” I say. “How's business?”

He grimaces. “It's been tough for a while.”

“Porter's closing must have hurt you, huh?”

He sighs deeply. “It sure didn't help matters, but the truth is, we were hurting before that.” He leans back as Sheila brings us some water. She was pretty in high school, I remember, tall and winsome, and she's still quite attractive, but in a more rugged, plastic sort of way, her hair flight-attendant blonde, her teeth Texas white.

“I'll have a deluxe burger and a chocolate milk shake,” I tell her.

“Just like your brother,” she says, raising her eyebrows at Brad.

“Is that what you usually have?” I ask him.

He shrugs. “I guess so.”

As she turns away to see about our food, I think I catch a quick glimpse between her and Brad, something knowing and flirtatious, something private.
Hello,
I think to myself, italicized and in a British accent.

I look sharply at Brad, who quickly looks away and says, “We're being fucked by China.”

“China?”

“Yeah. Everyone's buying their displays overseas now, for half the price. You want to do business with the big boys, you'd better be manufacturing overseas.”

“Isn't your quality better?”

“Quality is a twentieth-century concept.” He takes a sip of his water and grins bitterly. “Here in the twenty-first, being the low bidder is all that counts. Doesn't matter that you're offering warehousing, fulfillment, installation, and a slew of other domestic services that the importers can't handle. If you're employing American labor, you're priced right out of the market.”

“So, what are you going to do?”

“Right now,” he says wearily, pulling himself up from the table, “I'm going to take a piss.”

The food comes while Brad is gone. I grab a fry off my plate and look up just in time to see a grayish older woman approach me and hurl her milk shake in my face. No matter how many times you've seen this happen on television, you're still utterly unprepared when it actually happens to you in real life. On television it's usually wine or some other clear drink. The milk shake is thick chocolate, cold as hell, and ounce for ounce a much more effective choice.

“You bastard!” the lady spits at me as I shoot out of my seat, the thick, icy fluid oozing down my neck and under my collar. “You can't just walk in here!”

Words fail me, and all I can do is stare at her face, now crimson with rage, as I wipe my soaking face and hair with my hands. “You've got no right to come here, after the pain you've caused!” she shouts.

“Lady,” I finally stammer. “What the hell's your problem?”

“You're my problem!” she shrieks, and I become conscious of how quiet the other diners have become. “You and that goddamn book of lies you wrote.”

Just then Brad returns from the bathroom, his eyes wide with alarm. “What the hell's going on here?” he demands of me.

“Ask her,” I say, grabbing some napkins off the table to wipe my face. The shake is becoming dry and sticky on my skin.

“What's the problem, Franny?”

Franny?

“I'm sorry, Brad,” she says to him, her voice still trembling with anger. “But he's got a lot of nerve coming in here.”

“You're not exactly lacking in that department,” I point out. Brad impatiently waves his hand to shush me, and I'm twelve years old again.

“I'm sorry, Franny,” my brother says soothingly. “I know how upsetting it must be. But my dad's in the hospital; I don't know if you heard.”

“I hadn't,” she says, turning to face him. “What's wrong?”

Brad tells her, his voice remaining steady and conciliatory as he gradually steers her away from me and toward the door. They speak for a moment or two, and she leans forward and gives him a quick hug. Then, with one last, baleful glare back at me, she exits the Duchess. Brad comes back, shaking his head from side to side, and suddenly notices the seven or eight diners sitting stock-still, staring at us with their mouths agape. “Show's over, folks,” he announces testily, meeting each gaze one by one until they look away. “At least for the time being,” he mutters to me under his breath as we sit back down in the booth. I feel my shirt sticking to me as I lean against the back of my seat. The milk shake seems to have dripped all the way down to my waist and is making inroads further south.

“Who the hell was that?” I say.

“You don't know?”

“I thought I covered that with ‘who the hell was that.' ”

“That was Francine Dugan. Coach's wife.”

“Oh,” I say, nodding stupidly. “I didn't recognize her.”

“Does it make a little more sense now?”

“It does,” I say. “Except for the part where you call her Franny and she hugs you. When did you get so tight with Dugan's wife?”

Brad looks at me. “I'm the assistant coach for the Cougars. I thought you knew.”

“Since when do high school basketball teams need assistant coaches?”

Brad sighs. “They don't, really. But Dugan's getting up there, you know? He's almost seventy already. It's supposed to be a transitional thing. I assist him for a year or two, run the weekly practices, and do all the yelling and floor drills. Then he retires and I take over.”

“You want to be the coach?” It's never occurred to me that Brad might be interested in coaching.

“It's a good job,” he says defensively. “Decent pay and a great pension. That's a lot more than I could say for the display business these days.”

Now that he says it, it makes perfect sense. High school stars are forever living in the past, as if no other part of their life before or after were as real as the four years they spent playing the game. The rest of their life is just the time after basketball, soldiers missing the war. I recall the tensions I intuited between Cindy and Brad back at the hospital. It isn't difficult to surmise that Brad yearns for those days, when he was the town hero worshipped by all, including his wife.

“So how long have you been the assistant coach?”

“Five years.”

“That's a pretty long transition, isn't it?”

He sighs. “No shit.”

“Dugan doesn't want to quit,” I say.

“Bingo.”

That makes sense too. If the Bush Falls basketball players are the town's shining knights, then Dugan is their king, universally revered. He is greeted everywhere he goes with “Hey, Coach,” “Great game, Coach!” “Give 'em hell, Coach,” or some variation on that theme. His special table is always waiting for him at Halftime, where he traditionally goes with his wife after every home game. The restaurant is typically packed with former Cougars, and he invariably receives a round of applause when he enters, no doubt waving it down with feigned embarrassment well after it peaks.

This kind of blind reverence affords him no small amount of power in Bush Falls, especially as his former players grow into positions of affluence in the community. Ex-athletes rarely leave their hometowns. Anywhere else, they would be just anyone else, an unthinkable fate after four glorious years playing for the most dominant high school basketball team in the region. The graduates from Dugan's basketball program are a fraternity unto themselves, and he is their sovereign leader, the nucleus serving as the single link to their glorious past. If an ex-Cougar needs a job, Dugan makes sure he gets one. If an ex-Cougar runs for local office, Dugan makes sure he gets the necessary votes. Because of his relationships throughout the Falls, Dugan is also a highly effective fund-raiser for Bush Falls High, which lends him significant leverage with the administration and the school board.

Not surprisingly, Dugan is an arrogant, manipulative son of a bitch. And in my novel, he is also a chronic masturbator, a habit I rather artlessly connected to his nightly obsessive review of game tapes. The coach in his boxers, watching teenaged boys run and sweat as he pulls and twists his way to violent, angry orgasm. It's pure fiction, petty and mean-spirited, but I've never felt an ounce of remorse for writing it, in part because I hold Dugan responsible for what happened to Sammy and in part, I guess, because I am petty and mean-spirited.

I look at Brad. “So you work for Dugan.”

“That's right,” he says pointedly.

“I imagine he wasn't too pleased with my book.”

“You think?”

“His wife either, I guess.”

“Seems that way.”

“I'm sorry,” I say to Brad, although I'm not sure I am. “I guess it couldn't have been too comfortable working for him when the book came out.”

“He didn't take it out on me,” Brad says evenly. Then, looking directly at me, he adds, “Most people didn't.”