“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.
“How's he doing?” I say, indica
ting the room.
Brad frowns. “No change.”
“What do his doctors say?”
The frown deepens. “Not much. They should be along soon, though, and you can ask them yourself.”
I nod and look again at the door to the ICU. “Why don't you go in and see him,” Brad says, glancing over at Cindy and the twins. “I'll join you in a few minutes.”
It takes a few seconds to locate my father through the morass of tubes and wires that have colonized his supine form, entering and exiting his limp body at every juncture. He is intubated through his nose and mouth, has an IV line descending into his arm, a catheter hose poking out from under the blankets near his hips, and various wires attached to electrodes on his chest that feed unchanging data to the beeping heart monitor to the left of his bed. He lies there, dehumanized, like something out of Isaac Asimov, all of his deeply personal living processes now co-opted by the machinery, which breathes, farts, shits, and swallows for him, the tube in his mouth robbing him of even the illusion of expression.
I look above the tubing at his hair, which has changed from the jet black I remember to a charcoal flecked with silver highlights. There are small dark patches of stubble on his chin, forming like poppy seeds in odd patterns that remind me of Homer Simpson. My father lies in critical condition while his estranged son thinks of cartoon characters. His eyebrows have grown bushier, but I'm still able to locate the scar above his left eye, the badge of honor from the elbow he took in the '58 state championship game. He tells the story often, to anyone who will listen, about how they came back in the fourth quarter from sixteen down. With less than ten seconds to go, he went up for the tying layup, got elbowed in the face, and still managed to finish the play. They won on his foul shot, which he sank with blood dripping down into his left eye from the gash on his forehead, all but obscuring his vision. The story, and a grainy picture of his bloody visage, appeared in The Minuteman, a framed yellowed copy of which hung conspicuously in the den of our house.
There is no sound in the room save for the beeping of monitors and the steady, mechanical hiss of the respirator. I sit in the chair beside his bed, not sure what to do with myself. Small talk is clearly out of the question. If he were conscious, that would no doubt be my defensive weapon of choice, but the coma puts me at a distinct disadvantage. I consider talking to him anyway, the way they always do it on television, in a low, trembling voice fraught with emotion, exhorting the patient to just hold on. Because he will hear me. Somewhere in the haze of his coma, my voice will circulate through his benumbed mind, images of me will flash in rock video fashion behind his eyes, and some as-yet untried combination will open the lock on his brain and his fingers will twitch in mine as his eyes tentatively blink open, and his first word, uttered in a hoarse, dry whisper, will be my name. But I know I don't have it in me. His hand lies by his side on the bed, and I reach out furtively and wrap my own around it. It's much larger than mine, hard and callused on the edges, but surprisingly soft in the center, like a slice of toast pulled out of the toaster just as it begins to burn. I can't remember ever having felt my father's hand before. I squeeze it lightly. It doesn't squeeze back. I hear the door behind me and quickly retract my hand, like a shoplifter.
“Hey,” Brad says, coming up behind me.
“Hey.”
“How have you been?”
“Pretty good. And you?”
He sighs. “Been better.”
“I guess so,” I say. We both turn and looked at our father's unconscious form. Brad walks past me and gently straightens the blankets on the bed. He does it slowly, with a good deal of tenderness. As I watch him, it occurs to me that Brad is devastated. In my ambivalence over my own feelings toward my father, I've forgotten that he is someone else's father, and grandfather, and that he is loved. I turn away as Brad finishes straightening the covers, feeling ashamed and more than ever like an interloper.
Brad steps back from the bed and grins at me uneasily. “So . . .” he says.
“What's the prognosis?” I say.
“Pretty lousy. They don't know that he'll regain consciousness, and even if he does, there's no way to know what shape his brain will be in.”
“How long do they think he can just hang on like this?”
“They don't know.”
“They don't know much, do they?” I say.
I look at my father again. He seems drastically reduced, his frame smaller and his color duller than I remember. We've seen each other very infrequently over the years, and I haven't thought to age my mental picture of him. There is no way, in his current state, to assess the natural toll the last seventeen years have taken on him, to see how he's aged up until the stroke. It occurs to me that even though I am finally in the same room with him, I will probably never really see my father again.
Brad sits down on the windowsill, and I take the chair beside the bed, the vinyl cushion emitting a whistling sigh as my weight descends into it. What happens now? I wonder.
“How long do you plan on staying?” Brad asks after a bit.
Staying? “I don't know.”
He nods, as if this is what he expected, and then clears his throat. “I'm glad you came. I wasn't sure you would.”
“I had to come,” I say vaguely.
He looks at me. “I guess so.”
We sit quietly as the conversation limps off to wherever it is that conversations go to die.
“Where's Jared?” I say.
Brad frowns and looks away. “I told him to stop here on his way to school, but he's not what you would call reliable these days.” Jared is Brad's son, my nephew, who by my calculations should be sixteen or seventeen by now. I figure this because he was fourteen when he ran away from home, took the Metro-North into Manhattan, and showed up at my apartment at ten-thirty that night, hungry, out of cash, and simmering with righteous anger at the unspecified offenses that had led to this defiance. We ordered in some sandwiches and I made him call his father. Then we watched Letterman, and the next morning I put him on a train back to Connecticut, and that was pretty much that. Brad left me a message the following night thanking me, but I was out, and although I distinctly recall wanting to call him back, I never got around to it.
“What's he, seventeen?”
“Eighteen,” my brother says. “He's a senior.” So much for my math.
“Is he captain of the Cougars?”
Brad looks away. “Jared doesn't play ball.” Those four words, layered with the grist of untold tension and regret, indicate that my lame efforts at innocuous chitchat have nonetheless managed to zero in on what is clearly a sore topic, and I resolve from here on in to let Brad steer the conversation. Brad, though, seems perfectly content to sit back and crack his knuckles as he watches the drip of fluids in and out of the beeping and hissing mess that was once our father.
“I read your book,” he finally says, effectively ratcheting up the tension a few notches.
“Really,” I say. “Did you enjoy it?”
He frowns, considering the question. “Parts,” he says.
I shrug noncommittally. “Well, that's something, I guess.”
He looks at me thoughtfully, as if debating whether or not to say something. Finally he sighs and looks away. “Yeah,” he says. “Your book made quite a little splash around here.”
I wait silently for him to elaborate, but he appears to have said all he plans to say on the subject. Between us, my father suddenly shivers, his entire body vibrating in a wave from his chest to his toes. I jump up, startled, but Brad puts his hand out, beckoning me to relax. “It's okay,” he says, leaning forward to fix the corner of the blanket. “He does that.”
seven
1986
In Bush Falls, the vast emptiness of suburban night led to all manner of delinquency and sexual advancement. We were bursting with the preternatural angst and boredom that coursed through our throbbing teenaged veins, keeping our blood at a constant simmer. There were only so many nights you
could hang out at the mall, so many new releases to see at the Megaplex, so many cheeseburgers and tuna melts you could scarf down at the Duchess. Beyond that, all we had left was drinking, fucking, and random acts of senseless vandalism.
Sammy, Wayne, and I developed the habit of occasionally sneaking over the chain-link fence of P.J. Porter's vast corporate campus at night and hot-wiring the electric golf carts left charging overnight near the loading bay doors. The carts were used by executives to traverse the acres of perfectly manicured grass between the main building and the distribution center on the far side of the campus. Working there as an intern, Wayne had learned that in lieu of a key, all you needed to do was lift the driver's seat, under which the battery was cased, and use a paper clip to close the crude circuit and start the cart. There was something pleasantly surreal about piloting those silent carts across the grassy back acres of the Porter's campus in the dark of night. We would race each other all over the campus, first driving forward and then in reverse, or attempt half-baked movie stunts like jumping from one moving cart to the other. Afterward, we would hang out on the manicured bank of one of the artificial ponds that glistened in the shadow of the office complex, lazily skipping stones at the spotlit automated geyser that shot fifty feet into the sky from the pond's center, while we chugged discounted beer purchased over in New Haven with Wayne's fake ID.
We were sitting on the lawn by the pond one hot, muggy night, buzzed on beer, staring at the kaleidoscopic spray of the geyser, when Wayne suddenly got clumsily to his feet. “I'm too damn hot,” he said. “I feel like I'm on fire.”
The Book of Joe Page 5