The Book of Joe (4 page)

In the factory, Sammy and I toiled in pools of our own sweat, the heating beds from our presses adding a good ten degrees to the already sweltering temperature. We took our breaks outside, on the concrete stairs that ran down the side of the building to the parking lot, sipping lazily at cherry Cokes as the sweat evaporated off our bodies. “Have I mentioned,” he said to me during one such break, “that we have a pool?”

I looked at him severely. “No, you haven't.”

He grinned. “I meant to.”

It was starting to look as if my summer might actually not suck after all.

         

The Habers had bought an old white Dutch colonial on Leicester Road, a remote, hilly street that worked its way up to the highest point in Bush Falls, but that wasn't the important thing. The large, marbleized pool that glinted like a kidney-shaped jewel in their sizeable yard was all that mattered. Through eight hours of cutting and pressing hot styrene in the scorching heat, it seemed as if the image of its cool blue waters was permanently tattooed on the insides of my eyelids. But Sammy's pool represented far more than a relief from the summer heat. There were other factors. My house, which had the added distinction of not having a pool, was hardly a desirable destination for me in those days. A gloomy silence had settled over the family in the years since my mother's death, and rather than working our way through it, we seemed to have buckled under its weight, like a house with a latent flaw in its construction. Conversation was rare, laughter an anomaly. At least Brad and my dad could talk basketball, once in a while even step into the driveway for some one-on-one, which gave the illusion of familial ease, but that summer my brother was off on a cross-country trip with some of his college buddies. That left just me to watch my father come home, his expression grim, his massive shoulders stooped from a general exhaustion that went much deeper than a hard day's work. I considered offering to play some one-on-one with him, but never actually did, so sure was I of the sardonic, condescending grin that would alight instantly on his face, the ironically pointed arch of his bushy eyebrows as he looked down to me and said, “You?” It was my sorry fortune to know that my father preferred to sit in the dim, air-conditioned privacy of his den, washing down his TV dinner with Bushmills in the nuclear glow of the television until he passed out, over stepping outside to spend some quality time with the runt of his inconsiderable litter.

Factory hours were seven to three, and with Wayne working at Porter's until after six every evening, my afternoons stretched out before me with a bleakly comprehensive lack of options. A girlfriend would have come in pretty handy in those days, but in three years of high school I'd proven to be remarkably inept in that arena, and sadly not for lack of trying. The closest I'd come to sex up until that point was the night of my eighth-grade graduation, when Morgan Hayes had let me feel her up under the shirt over the bra while she shredded my lips with her braces.

So it was a lonely, motherless, bored, and sexually frustrated teenager who accepted Sammy's invitation to submerge himself daily in the cool waters of the Haber swimming pool. And it was that same boy who discovered, much to his hormonal glee, that Lucy Haber, Sammy's long-limbed, ridiculously sexy mother, spent her afternoons alternately swimming laps and sunning herself in various two-piece swimsuits whose every fiber strained to contain her glorious assets.

Sammy wasn't much of a swimmer. He went through the motions briefly, as if to justify his inviting me over to swim, but he would always climb out after five or ten minutes, pull a towel over his skinny torso, and retreat to the air-conditioned house, where he would reconfigure the soaked strands of his pompadour and read music magazines. After the first few days of this, we settled into a comfortable routine wherein Sammy hung out in the house reading and I stayed in the pool, nursing a shameless submarine erection as I chatted with his mother. Lucy, so unlike any mother I'd ever met, seemed to enjoy having someone to spend the afternoon with, and quizzed me incessantly about my own life, occasionally digressing into stories about hers. As far as I was concerned, she could have been discussing quantum physics and I would have been equally transfixed, so caught up was I in the constant inspection of her lush lips, her trim, tanned thighs, and the droplets of water that trickled down her glistening chest and into the crevice of her miraculous cleavage as she sunned herself beside the pool. Her husband's repeated infidelities now seemed not only wrong but baffling and incomprehensibly greedy. What could he possibly have yearned for that he didn't already have? It was all I could do to keep my hand out of my swim trunks as I floated around the pool, basking in Lucy's company. I developed the habit of leaving my towel by the pool's edge so that when I eventually, regretfully climbed out, I could artfully hide the rampant monster in my trunks.

Showering at Sammy's house after swimming became a daily necessity, my lone opportunity to spank out my excess sexual tension. Afterward, Sammy and I would head into town in Brad's car, which I'd been grudgingly lent for the summer while he was away. We'd meet Wayne for burgers or pizza and then see a movie or hang out.

Sammy and Wayne had hit it off right away. I could see how Sammy's frenetic nature and constant chatter might rub some people the wrong way, but Wayne's steady, easygoing demeanor was perfectly suited for it. Sammy seamlessly merged into our rhythm like a traveling musician sitting in with the band, and we became a merry little threesome.

The days of that blistering summer were fused together like something mass-produced, each one identical to the one before and after it. Long, smoldering afternoons spent in masturbatory fascination with every languid movement Lucy made, each luscious curve and mysterious crevice, and nights hanging out with Sammy and Wayne. Even knowing everything that happened afterward, that was already happening, I remember how much I enjoyed that summer: a hazy, wet, shimmering eternity of thoughtless, menial labor, the splash and smell of chlorinated pool water, and Lucy's deliciously pornographic body. As far as summers went, you could do a lot worse.

six

I thought that I'd recalled Bush Falls rather well when I wrote the book, but as I drive through the town for the first time in seventeen years, I realize that all I've had are superficial recollections, cardboard stand-ins for real memories that are only now finally emerging. The corporeal experience of returning is the trigger to long-dormant memories, and as I gaze around my hometown, I'm stunned by the renewed clarity of what I'd buried in my subconscious. Memories that should have long since crumbled to dust from seventeen years of attrition turn out to have been hermetically sealed and perfectly preserved, now summoned up as if by posthypnotic suggestion. There is a sense of violation in learning that, unbeknownst to me, my mind has maintained such a strong connection with the town, as if my brain's been sneaking around behind my back.

Bush Falls is a typical if smaller version of many middle-class Connecticut towns, a planned and determinedly executed suburbia where the lawns are green and the collars predominantly white. Landscaping in particular is taken very seriously in Connecticut. Citizens don't have coats of arms emblazoned above their front doors; they have hedges, fuchsia and pachysandra, flower beds and emerald arborvitae. A neglected lawn stands out like a goiter, the telltale symptom of a dysfunctional domestic gland. In the summer, the hissing of the cicadas, invisible in the treetops, is matched by the muted machine-gun whispers of a thousand rotating sprinklers, some dragged out of the garage after dinner, others installed beneath the lawns and set on timers. Soon, I know, the sprinklers will be put away for the season, replaced by rakes and leaf blowers, but for now they remain heavily in evidence as I drive down Stratfield Road, the main artery connecting the residential section of Bush Falls with its commercial district.

Even though everything looks pretty much as it did when I left, I know the Falls is suffering. P.J. Porter's went bankrupt five years ago, resulting in over a thousand lost jobs. While the majority of people in the Falls were able to find new jobs in Connecticut's then still-solid market, many of them ended up at Internet start-ups, only to be savaged by the overdue collapse of the whole industry at the end of 2000. Now the town is solidly immersed in recession, and every block has at least one
FOR SALE
sign planted on the front lawn. Even though the houses generally look well maintained and the lawns immaculate, there's a sense of desperation in this quotidian tidiness, as if now, more than ever, these carefully tended homes are nothing more than facades concealing unknowable and irreparable damages.

I turn left onto Diamond Hill Road and drive past my father's house, which concealed its own share of damage long before Porter's went belly-up. I slow down to take in the slightly sloping front lawn, at the top of which sits the square two-story colonial in which I grew up. The aluminum siding, a pale shade of blue when I was a kid, is now a dirty eggshell color, and the hedges growing beneath the dark picture window of the living room aren't nearly as tall or dense as I remember, but otherwise the house is exactly the same. I stop the car and take a deep breath, anticipating some sort of emotional reaction to my childhood home, and I come up empty. I haven't always been this dispassionate; I'm fairly certain of that. Is it a function of time and distance, or have I simply shed over the years what general sensitivity I once possessed? I try to recall a time in recent memory that I expressed any heartfelt emotion to another person, and can't come up with a single instance of sentiment or passion. Turning right onto Churchill, I'm troubled by the notion that while I wasn't looking, I seem to have become an asshole. This leads to a brief, syllogistic argument. The fact that I suspect I'm an asshole means I probably am not, because a real asshole doesn't think he's an asshole, does he? Therefore, by realizing that I'm an asshole, I am in fact negating that very realization, am I not? Descartes's Asshole Axiom: I think I am; therefore, I'm not one.

It is debates like this one, and the sneaking suspicion that I'm losing the overall capacity to give a shit, that led to my brief and ill-fated stint in therapy. One of the drawbacks I've discovered to being a fiction writer is that I seem never to fully inhabit the moment at hand. Part of me is always off to the side, examining, looking for context and subtext, imagining how I'll describe the moment after it's gone. My therapist, Dr. Levine, felt it had nothing to do with being a writer and everything to do with being egocentric and insecure, which I thought, true or not, was a pretty harsh judgment to arrive at twenty-five minutes into our second session.

“What's more,” he informed me at the time, “your penchant for self-analysis—which is, by the way, another manifestation of your egotism—is further complicated by immense feelings of inferiority. You don't allow yourself to become fully engaged because deep down you feel undeserving of approval, love, success, et cetera. All of the things you crave.”

“Don't you think you should get to know me better before making such categorical statements?” I said, somewhat put off by his remarks.

“Don't be defensive,” he chided me. “It just slows down the process. You're not paying me to be gentle.”

“I'm not being defensive.”

“You sound defensive.”

“That's because it's patently impossible to deny being defensive without sounding defensive.”

“Exactly!” Dr. Levine said enigmatically, sitting back in his chair and scratching the ridiculous little goatee that made his mouth look suspiciously like a vagina. I wondered if he'd grown it for just that reason, being such a resolute Freudian and all. He pulled off his gold-rimmed spectacles and cleaned them absently with his necktie. Then, replacing them on his nose, he asked me the question that all therapists invariably fall back on when creativity fails them before the hour's up. “Tell me about your father.”

“Oh, come on. You can do better than that.”

“Don't you think it's a legitimate question?”

“Now who's getting defensive?”

“I am not—” He caught himself and flashed me a pitying smile. “Very clever, Joe. I'm sorry you feel the need to best me in these verbal jousts of yours. It demonstrates a lack of respect for me and my abilities as a professional.” My therapist was actually pouting. “I wonder why you bother coming at all.”

So I stopped coming.

Churchill curves around to the right, rejoining Stratfield Road just as it widens to two lanes in each direction and enters the town's retail district. Upscale strip malls and expansive parking lots appear on both sides of the road. The next five blocks are packed with stores geared toward meeting just about every manner of suburban need. Radio Shack, K•B Toys, Blockbuster Video, Carvel, Party City, Home Depot, Barnes & Noble, Super Stop & Shop, a CVS drugstore, Coconuts Music, two jewelry stores, a plant nursery, and the Duchess Diner. On the last block, I see what used to be P.J. Porter's flagship store, now being torn down.

One block later, I turn right onto Oak Hill Road and pull into the parking lot of Mercy Hospital, a red brick two-story building that seems too cheerful and not nearly institutional enough to be a hospital. I deliberately take up two spots to prevent anyone from parking too close, an embarrassing habit I developed after buying the Mercedes. Parking lots are a breeding ground for door dings, the bane of the luxury car owner's existence. It occurs to me once again that I hate my car. It's like a high-priced whore. The minute you're finished with it, you want it to vanish without a trace.

A cool October breeze touches down on me like a benediction as I step out of the air-conditioned confines of the Mercedes. The sky is crammed with thick, dust-colored clouds, and the baby elm trees planted at exact intervals throughout the lot have their leaves turned upward in supplication. A small group of young doctors are taking a smoking break on the front stairs, which strikes me as somewhat blasphemous, like rabbis eating pork. I brave the gauntlet of their fumes, holding my breath until I'm through the revolving door, and follow the signs to the intensive care unit.

Cindy is looking bored, sitting with her twins on a bench in the hall outside of the ICU. All twins are cute. I've never seen an ugly set. It's as if there's some stopgap measure in place, biological or divine, expressly there to prevent the duplication of ugliness. And Brad's girls are way beyond cute. Between him and Cindy, these girls have hit the genetic mother lode. They're twelve years old, with their mother's dark flowing hair and creamy complexion, wearing identical plaid skirts and white polo shirts. Just from looking at them it's clear that as they mature, they will never worry about pimples or how fat their thighs and asses are. Like their mother, they will be perfect, until that very perfection becomes their ultimate flaw. They swing their legs back and forth together, linked at the foot, creating an almost perfect mirror-image effect.

“Hello, Cindy,” I say formally. It's been twenty years since the fellatio incident, but it's still the first thing to pop into my head. Men tend never to forget things like blow jobs, even those that happened to someone else.

Cindy looks up. “Hey, Joe,” she says evenly. She stands up and gives me a dry kiss on the cheek, and I find myself unwittingly appreciating her body, which, even after three children, is still lithe and toned. There is nothing you could point to that's changed in her face, other than perhaps the slight weathering of the skin immediately beneath her eyes, and yet somewhere a light has gone out. The structure is still in place, exquisite as ever, but the engine that propels it has been compromised, its powerful throb reduced to a dull, vacillating hum. Men will still notice her walking down the street, will hungrily catalogue her toned stomach and buoyant breasts, her lean, lightly muscled legs and the soft, heart-shaped curves of her ass, will get reprimanded by their wives or girlfriends for staring a bit longer than the legal time limit, and will mollify them by declaring that they prefer more meat on their women and other masculine lies, but it will end there. They won't take her home in their minds as they once might have, to superimpose over reality as they thrust their way to mundane, household orgasm. Cindy's beauty, while still intact, has become of the forgettable variety.

She steps back and points to the girls, who are eyeing me with wide-eyed curiosity. “You remember Emily and Jenny.” She doesn't bother to indicate which is which, as if it really doesn't matter for my purposes—which is true enough, I guess. In their entire lives, I've actually seen them only a handful of times, on those rare occasions when Cindy and Brad visited New York. “Girls, this is your uncle Joe.”

“Hi, Uncle Joe,” they say in perfect unison, and then look at each other and giggle. It's the first time I've ever heard myself referred to as an uncle, and I shiver, feeling conspicuously empty-handed. Uncles are supposed to have magic tricks or silver dollars or candy, aren't they? The only uncle I ever had—my mother's brother, Peter—used to squeeze my shoulder, slip me five dollars, wink, and say, “Don't shit a shitter,” even though I hadn't said anything at all. I routinely withstood the abuse, because it seemed like a small price to pay for five bucks. I consider giving each twin a twenty, but decide against it—wisely, I think.

“Hello,” I say weakly. “Do you two always dress alike?”

“We aren't dressed alike,” Emily or Jenny says with a smirk.

“Yeah, we aren't dressed alike,” the other one concurs, and they giggle as one again. Clearly, I've stumbled upon some inside joke.

“Sorry,” I say. “My mistake.” For whatever reason, my apology triggers another paroxysm of laughter from the twins, who lean back on the bench, chuckling gleefully.

“Keep it down, girls,” Cindy says, so habitually that I'm willing to bet she doesn't even know she's spoken.

“Where's Brad?” I ask.

“He's in there with him.” She indicates the door of the ICU just as my brother emerges.

Most people decompose after they die, but for athletes and rock stars, the process begins years earlier. With rock stars, it starts in the face; just look at any picture of Mick Jagger taken in the last ten years. With athletes, it's the legs that are affected first. There's a walk aging athletes have, a slight side-to-side rocking motion, as if they're favoring each leg as they step onto it. The legs take bold strides with the memory of effortless muscled power, and then, as if suddenly remembering that those muscles have deteriorated, a slightly pigeon-toed foot comes down early, hitting the ground gingerly to cut the stride short. It's a reality check, reminding the legs that they can't afford to be as ambitious as they once were, because with those muscles now atrophied, their ruined knees won't withstand the abuse. The shoulders rock as well, hunching up slightly with each step as if in anticipation of an arthritic jolt of pain. There's an awkward grace to this walk, the paradoxical blending of age and youth. Bush Falls being the basketball town that it is, there are many men who walk like that. My father is one of them, and now, as Brad steps through the swinging door of the ICU, looking greasy and fatigued, I see that he's grown into the walk as well.

He comes toward me and says, “Hey, Joe.”

“Hey.” We fall into each other's arms and hug tightly. No, we don't, we never have, but it would be nice, I think, to be the kind of brothers who hug. Instead, we shake hands thoughtlessly, like flicking a light switch, and the reunion is complete.

“I'm glad you made it.” I search his voice for the rebuke that I'm sure will be there, but fail to detect any antagonism in it. He seems to be utterly sincere, without inflection.

If you took my five-ten frame and stretched it out to six foot three, you would get something pretty close to Brad. There is no denying the shared DNA, but his has received the benefit of a rolling pin, rendering him long and wiry where I'm shorter and considerably denser. But we both have the same straight brown hair and dark eyes of our mother, and our father's square, Polish jaw.