by Wally Lamb
“Is she a swallower or a nonswallower?”
I told him it was none of his goddamned business.
“Which means she’s a nonswallower, right?” he said.
“Which means it’s none of your business,” I said. “Fat boy.”
That shut him up. His jaw stopped moving. His Whopper dropped back onto the paper in his lap. “What’d you just call me?” he said.
“Fat boy.”
“That’s what I thought you said.” He crammed his food back in the bag and threw it down on the floor. Stared out the side window. Didn’t say anything for the next five or six exits. Fucking Leo, man. I mean, the guy had to go to a therapist because he was turning forty.
I put my dirty dishes in the sink without rinsing them. Fuck it, let Joy do them tomorrow. What’s that called? Passive-aggressive? I opened the last of the beers.
Call Ray back, call Ray back, I kept telling myself. Maybe he knew why they’d switched doctors on Thomas. Why they’d switched him to Hatch. Maybe Ray had talked to Dr. Ehlers. Doubtful, though. Ehlers almost always called me, not Ray. I closed my eyes. Heard my brother’s “Jesus! Jesus!” Saw the wet stain spreading on the front of his pants. . . . I could have gotten my head blown off in that cruiser when I’d reached out to grab Mercado’s arm and he’d gone for his gun. Cowboy. Cops were all cowboys—that’s why most of them got into it in the first place. This one’s crazier than the brother. . . .
I picked up the phone, intending to dial Ray’s number. Dialed Leo’s instead.
It’s not that Leo’s a great listener or anything. Far from it. But at least he knows the complete deal with Thomas—the whole sordid history. . . . The summer we were all nineteen? When Leo and Thomas and I were on a city work crew together? That’s when Thomas started falling apart at the seams. Thomas and me, Leo, Ralph Drinkwater. It was weird, come to think of it. I hadn’t seen Drinkwater for years and years and then, bam—there he is at Hatch, with a mop and a bucket. It was like one of those crazy guest appearances people make in your dreams. . . .
Leo always asks about Thomas; I’ll give him that much. Goes to see him every once in a while down at Settle. He even stopped in at Shanley Memorial after Thomas’s accident, but they wouldn’t let him go up because I hadn’t thought to put him on the list.
Angie answered the phone. She said Leo was in New York, auditioning for something. She puts up with it—all those jaunts to New York when he should be going to work and getting home at a decent hour and helping her out with the kids. It’s sad, in a way. Not all of those “auditions” of Leo’s are auditions.
“How’s your brother, Dominick?” Angie said.
Not so good, I said. I told her about Hatch.
“Oh, my God,” she said.
“Police escort, leg chains,” I said. “Like he’s Lee Harvey Oswald instead of my stupid, screwed-up brother.”
“Oh, my God,” she said again.
“Tell Dessa, will you?” I said. “That he’s down there?”
“Okay. Sure. She and Danny went camping for a few days, but I’ll let her know when she gets back.”
I twisted the phone cord around my hand. Cinched it, cut off the blood. She’s been living with the guy for two years and she can’t go camping with him? Because it bothers me? “How are the kids?” I said.
“They’re great, Dominick. Great. Amber just won the fire prevention poster contest. Just for her school, not for the whole district.”
“Yeah? That’s cool. Tell her congratulations.”
“Shannon’s got a walkathon coming up for soccer. You want to sponsor her?”
“Sure,” I said. “Put me down for ten bucks.” Shannon’s already in high school—a freshman. She was about six when Leo and that “hostess with the mostest” down in Lyme got caught with their pants down. Amber’s nine. The post–marriage-counseling baby.
“Okay, Dominick. Thanks. Hey, you should come over for dinner sometime.” There was a pause. “Both of you.”
Come over sometime: one of those noninvitations.
“Yeah, thanks,” I said. “We will. Once things calm down with my brother.” Which was going to be when? Never? It was a nonrefusal for a noninvitation.
“I’ll tell Leo you called,” she said. “You want him to call you back if he gets in before eleven or so?”
“Nah, that’s okay. I’ll get ahold of him tomorrow. What’s he auditioning for?”
“Some movie. I don’t know much about it. You hang in there, now, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Hey, Dominick?”
“Hmm?”
“You’re a good brother. You know that?”
How stupid is this? She tells me that and I start crying. Have to hang up the phone. Oh, great, I thought to myself. Just what we need: the other Birdsey brother cracking up. The identical twin cruising into the breakdown lane. Both of us down there.
The real estate booklets were in our bedroom, on my pillow—a Post-it note stuck to the cover: “Dominick, what do you think of these???” She gets those things every week: The Realty Shopper, Gallery of Homes. I’m starting to recognize the smiling face of every goddamned realtor-bandito in eastern Connecticut. Joy puts stick-on notes all over the ads she wants me to look at. It’s an ongoing pipe dream is what it is—her doing that. She still owes eight thousand bucks, and with what I’ve got saved, I could probably just about swing a down payment on a doghouse. I don’t know; we might not even stay together. I go back and forth on that one.
Joy’s got liabilities. Things you can’t see right off the bat, when you’re staring at her assets. Her bad credit rating, for one—her whole attitude about money. The second month we were living together—after it dawned on me that she didn’t have a clue when it came to finances—I had to sit her down and show her how to do a budget. It wasn’t that she was stupid, she said; it was just that no one before me had ever taken the time, made the effort on her behalf. Both her husbands had always paid all the bills, which was why she’d gotten so messed up with plastic. After we had her output and input mapped out, I took all her credit cards out of her wallet, laid them end to end on the kitchen table. Handed her the scissors. “Here,” I said. “Cut.” 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 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 h
er. 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 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.
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.
“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 me plenty. Miss Open
ness. 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-rainbow 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.”