I Know This Much Is True (17 page)

Which she did.

Another of Joy’s liabilities surfaced three or four months after that.

She was out that night—shopping up at the Pavilions. Leo was over at the house. We were watching the NBA championship, I remember—the final game where Worthy and the Lakers took it away from the Pistons. The phone rings and it’s Joy, talking so low I couldn’t even understand her at first. She was at the Manchester police station—that much I got. At first, I thought she’d been in an accident, but that wasn’t it. They’d caught her shoplifting.

Stealing fancy underwear at Victoria’s Secret. She’d just gotten arrested for petty larceny. It was weird, man. I stood there, not quite getting it, part of me still watching the game.

Before I drove up and got her, I made Leo promise not to say anything to Angie. I didn’t want it getting back to Dessa that my girlfriend had just gotten arrested. Leo said he’d drive up there with me, but I said no.

After Joy and I got back to the condo that night, it was true confession time. She told me she’d been stealing on and off since high school. That she
liked
doing it. This was only the third time she’d ever gotten caught—the first time here on the East Coast. She started going through our drawers and closets, throwing stuff onto our bed that she’d fingered: perfume, jewelry, silk scarves, even a I Know[001-115] 7/24/02 12:21 PM Page 107

I KNOW THIS MUCH IS TRUE

107

coat—a goddamned winter coat. She was acting weird about it—charged up or something. She
liked
doing it and she
didn’t
like doing it, she said. It was a little scary. We were both scared, I guess. But the thing was, she was a little cocky about it, too. Proud of herself—of that pile she’d made on the bed. She starts kissing me, pawing me all over the place. We ended up screwing right there in the middle of all that stolen merchandise—Joy on top and me on the bottom, this pair of stolen earrings digging into my back. She was hotter that night than I’d ever seen her. Like I said, it was weird.

The lawyer we hired got her off with community service: fifty hours helping out with girls’ gymnastics at the Manchester YMCA.

Joy never talked about any of the kids or anything when she came back. Just drove every Saturday morning to Manchester, put in her hours, and came home. She’s funny that way—a little emotionally absent. A little indifferent. With schizophrenics, they call it flat affect. I mean, I think
I
felt worse about Joy getting arrested than she did.

She went to this psychologist for a while afterwards—after the big lingerie heist. The guy’s name was Dr. Grork. She saw him until her insurance ran out. I’m not a big believer in shrinks—all that probing and prodding into my brother’s potty training and puberty never did
him
any good. Not that I could see. Did harm, actually. Harmed Ma. I remember this one shrink right at the beginning—this old guy with hair in his nose—who tried to pin the rap for Thomas’s illness on
her.

He told her the research suggested that mothers who couldn’t love their sons enough sometimes kick-started manic-depressive disorder and/or schizophrenia. Which was pure horseshit. Ma gave the both of us everything she could and then some—
especially
Thomas. Her “little bunny rabbit.” She lived and breathed for that kid, sometimes to the point where it got a little sickening. Where it was like,
Yoo-hoo. Hey,
Ma? Remember
me
?
Believe me. I was there. Not loving him enough was
not
the problem.

But anyway, Joy and this Grork guy got to the bottom of things pretty quickly. The breakthrough came one day when he asked her to describe what she felt like when she stole and she told him she felt I Know[001-115] 7/24/02 12:21 PM Page 108

108

WALLY LAMB

turned on. That she’d get wet when she did it—sometimes even play with herself in the car driving away. It embarrassed me when she’d go into it like that—come home from Dr. Grork’s and tell me everything she’d just told him. One time, she said, she stole a purse at G.

Fox, then got in the car and started rubbing the merchandise against herself while she was driving out of the parking lot. Began finger-fucking herself and came right there on the entrance ramp to I-84—it was so intense, she said, she almost rammed right into the back of a Jag. “Okay, okay,” I told her. “That’s enough. Spare me the details.”

According to Dr. Grork, Joy’s compulsion had to do with the fact that she’d been sexually abused when she was in junior high. By her mother’s brother. Well,
half
-brother, I guess he was, technically.
Is.
He was stationed at the naval base in San Diego; he lived with them for a while. He was ten years older than Joy, in his early twenties when it started; she was thirteen. It wasn’t rape or anything. Well, it was and it wasn’t. Statutory rape, I guess. It had started as fooling around, Joy said—water fights, wrestling matches. Then one thing led to another.

They were alone a lot, she said. After a while, she just stopped moving his hands away. Stopped telling him to stop. Joy’s mother worked second shift.

It went on until “Unc” got transferred to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Here’s the sickest part: they kept it going for a while.

Through the mail. He’d write her these dirty letters and enclose little pieces of himself: fingernail clippings, beard trimmings, even dead skin from a sunburn. It was
her
idea, she told me; she’d beg him to. She’d take them out of the envelope and eat them. Sit there chewing on the guy’s fingernails. Then he got a girlfriend and stopped writing.

Stopped answering her letters and accepting the charges when she’d call him collect after school. Then the new girlfriend got on the phone and told her off. Screamed bloody murder at her. That’s when Joy started shoplifting. Dr. Grork said stealing made Joy feel powerless and powerful at the same time. The same as her uncle had. The same as her two husbands, too, I guess. Really, she’d just come home from those sessions with Dr. Grork and lay everything right out there, whether I wanted to hear it or not.

I Know[001-115] 7/24/02 12:21 PM Page 109

I KNOW THIS MUCH IS TRUE

109

She was eighteen when she married the first guy. Ronnie. Graduates from high school and—bam!—elopes out in Las Vegas before the end of the summer. She’s always talking about what a big mistake that was—how she’d gone right after graduation to Disneyland and had a job interview to be a cast member there. She’d make a perfect Cinderella, the woman told her. That’s one of the big disappointments of Joy’s life—that she never got to be Cinderella at Disneyland. That Ronnie guy was just a kid, too, I guess—twenty or twenty-one. That’s how she came east: he was transferred to the sub base in Groton. They lived down in Navy housing on Gungywamp Road. I’ve painted houses there. It’s depressing: house after house, all of them just the same. Joy and her
second
husband lived there, too—different house, same street. Dennis, the chief petty officer. She started sleeping with number two while number one was out at sea.

That’s what I’d identify as Joy’s third liability, I guess. Her
major
one. The fact that I can never quite trust her. Not 100 percent anyway. Not that she ever cheated on me—at least not that I know of.

Just that she might. With some guy closer to her own age. That’s how I picture it happening, anyway: Joy and some superficial asshole in his twenties—some idiot who isn’t able to see beyond his own dick. There are plenty of those guys strutting their stuff down at Hardbodies, where she works. All those young guys with the gelled hair and the weight-lifting belts and the one earring. They’re coming out of the woodwork at that place. It’s like a fucking epidemic.

Which is not to say there’s trouble between us in bed. We’re still okay in that department, Joy and me. We’re fine. It’s not off the chart the way it was at first in those Ramadas and Best Westerns, but it’s still pretty damn satisfactory. It’s work sometimes, though.

On my part. It’s probably stress—my brother and the business and shit. Joy’s always telling me to get down to the club and work out more. She’s always trying to get me to get a massage from her buddy, the Duchess. “He’s a genius,” she told me once. “His fingers, his rhythm—you can feel him actually drawing the tension out of you.”

“That’s just what I’m afraid of,” I said.

I Know[001-115] 7/24/02 12:21 PM Page 110

110

WALLY LAMB

“Stop it,” she said. “You’re just being homophobic.”

“Yeah, well,” I told her, “whatever.” That time we went over to their house for dinner? Thad and Aaron’s house? . . . Aaron’s somewhere around my age. They live over on Skyview Terrace in one of those glass-walled contemporaries that look out onto the river. Land of the big bucks out there, folks; land of the high-altitude tax brackets. Skyview Terrace used to be part of the old mill complex, and before that, it was part of the Wequonnoc reservation lands. We used to fish out there sometimes before they developed it—Leo and me, Thomas and me. You should see the views of the river, especially in early June when everything’s just come out—the leaves on the trees and the mountain laurel. You look out there and you can almost believe in God.

Aaron’s an architect.
He’s
the one with the Porsche and the deed to the house. On the way over there that night, we had to stop at two package stores before we found this twenty-four-dollar bottle of special wine that Thad said would go perfectly with what he was making: scallops in cream sauce with those stupid duchess potatoes. The theory was that Aaron and I were supposed to have something in common because of our age and because we were both “in the building industry.” I had to laugh at that one. An architect and a housepainter are both in the building industry the same way Roger Clemens and the guy who sells the Fenway franks are both part of the Red Sox organization. That dinner lasted forever. I sat there all night, drinking Danish beer and listening to Aaron talk about jazz fusion and mutual funds. Trying to be cool about all this gay art they had hanging up all over the place. Joy and Thad spent the whole night gossiping about people they knew from work. Joy says Thad wants to phase out his massage therapy and get into the catering business. Aaron will put up the money if it’s what he really wants to do, Joy says, but first Thad has to learn the business: marketing and management courses, not just the fun stuff like mixology. Thad told Joy that when he opens his business, he wants her to be his bartender. Joy says she’s never had a girlfriend she could trust as much as she trusts Thad. She says she can tell him things she can’t even tell me. Which is sort of scary, because she tells I Know[001-115] 7/24/02 12:21 PM Page 111

I KNOW THIS MUCH IS TRUE

111

me
plenty.
Miss Openness. Miss Finger Fucks Herself on Interstate I-84 and Eats Guys’ Fingernails.

Joy has this idea that, once she gets all her debts paid off, we can start saving and buy a house and get married. Live in one of those places in the real estate books. “I’m fifteen years older than you,” I told her one time. “I stopped believing in somewhere-over-the-rain-bow a long time ago. I’m damaged goods.”

“I’m damaged goods, too!” she said, cheerfully, like it was some happy coincidence—me and her discovering we had the same birthday or something. . . .

I changed my mind, did the dishes after all. Put away the pans.

Passive-aggressive: what’s the point?

Joy keeps her distance from Thomas; she’s afraid of him, I know that much. She was afraid of him
before
he cut off his hand—right from the beginning. When she first moved in with me, I used to bring him over to the house on Sunday afternoons. Dessa and I had always done that, and then, after the divorce, I’d kept it up. It was a pattern, a ritual. Joy didn’t say anything about it one way or the other for a while. She was on her best behavior. Then one Sunday morning—we’d been together for about six months by then—she asked me out of the clear blue not to go get him.

“But he
always
comes over on Sunday,” I said. “He
expects
me.”

“Well, I just thought it would be nice for once to spend the whole Sunday alone—just you and me. Just call and tell him you’re sick or something. Please?”

We were both naked together in the bathroom when she said it, I remember. We’d just had some pretty intense sex and I was about to grab a shower. Before Joy, I didn’t even know they made women who liked that much of it.

“Just you and me,” she repeated. She took my hand in her hand and slid my fingertips over her breasts, across her stomach, down to the stickiness we’d just made. Steam clouds rolled in the air around us. I’d already gotten the shower just the right temperature. “Please?” she said.

“But he
expects
me, Joy. He
waits
for me. Sits out in the solarium with his jacket zipped up.”

I Know[001-115] 7/24/02 12:21 PM Page 112

112

WALLY LAMB

She let go of my hand and put herself against me—reached up under my balls and stroked me there. Smiled. Watched me blink.

Watched me swallow. Good sex with Dessa was something we’d taught each other, but Joy came into the thing we had already
knowing
what would drive me crazy. Same things that had driven her two husbands crazy, I guess. And her uncle.

“What about what
I
expect?” she said. “Doesn’t that count for anything?” Her finger kept stroking. In another ten seconds, she’d get whatever she wanted.

I took her hand by the wrist and held it away from me. Stared at her. Waited.

“It’s not . . . ,” she said.

“It’s not what?”

“It’s not that I don’t
like
him. I
do
like him, Dominick. He’s a nice guy, in his own weird way. But he scares me. The way he acts sometimes. The way he looks at me.”