The Book of Joe

by Jonathan Tropper

  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.”

  “Glad to hear it,” I say, getting to my feet. “Are you done?”

  “Yeah. But you barely touched your burger.”

  “It tastes like milk shake,” I say.

  nine

  Memory is never beholden to chronology. Even though I know my nephew, Jared, is now eighteen, in my mind he's still the scared fourteen-year-old I last saw that night in my apartment a few years ago. So when I come upon him stripped down to his underpants, rolling around on my father's living room couch with a girl in an equal state of undress, I am doubly surprised. The girl, upon hearing me enter the room, lets out a piercing shriek and dives gracelessly behind the couch for cover while Jared reflexively yanks up the tangled pile of clothes from the floor and pulls them onto his lap.

  “Shit, I'm sorry,” I say, spinning on my heel and quickly leaving the room. I seem oddly predestined to be continually interrupting my relatives in midcoitus. There's a pattern forming here that might merit future study: the observation of lovemaking rather than the making of love. Always the bridesmaid and so forth.

  “It's cool,” Jared says, and I realize that he's talking to the girl behind the couch. “It's not my dad.” A minute later he joins me in the hall, pulling up his jeans as he walks. “Hey, Uncle Joe,” he says. “How are you doing?” Now horny, naked teenagers are calling me uncle.

  “Not as good as you, I guess,” I say. He snorts and casually buttons his fly one-handed, then stands up straight and looks at me. He's grown significantly since I last saw him and is now over six feet tall, lean and broad like his father. He tucks his long dark hair behind his ears, the lobes of which are marred with a wide assortment of gold and silver hoops and studs. Seeing the earrings, and the small patch of hair just beneath his lower lip, I instantly understand the quiet frustration Brad expressed earlier.

  “I'm sorry,” I say. “I didn't think anyone would be here.”

  Jared runs his fingers through his hair and shrugs. “We were just . . .”

  “Yeah.”

  “I thought you were my dad,” he says. “I would have been totally fucked, man.”

  “From where I was standing, you looked about five minutes away from that anyway,” I say.

  He smiles at me. There's an easygoing manner about him, a relaxed cool. He speaks in short, soft bursts and exudes a charismatic intelligence. There are no outward signs of anger in him, like you see in so many teenagers with a laundry list of things to prove to the world, but only a slightly sullen impatience typical of his age, evidenced in the way his eyes distractedly wander around me without ever coming to rest. “I hope you're not pissed,” he says.

  “What red-blooded American teenager can resist an empty house?” I say. “It's practically your patriotic duty to be in here with a girl.” I hook the strap of my duffel bag over the head of the banister as I did a million times before, a lifetime ago. The act, completely instinctive, sends a flutter through my stomach, and for the briefest instant I can smell my childhood again.

  “What happened to your shirt?” Jared says.

  “A woman poured her drink on me.”

  My nephew grins. “Chicks.”

  “This chick was upwards of sixty years old.”

  “Why did she do it?”

  “She had her reasons.”

  “Hey,” he says, absently rubbing his impressive abs. “I really liked your book.”

  I raise my eyebrows. “Well, that would put you in the minority in this town.”

  “Literacy in general puts you in the minority in this town,” he says. It is, I think, an unexpected comment, coming from someone who moments earlier was dry humping the girl who is still hiding, naked and trembling, behind the couch in the living room. There is more to Jared than meets the eye. As if on cue, the girl now emerges, cute and colorful as a Gap ad in her green and blue striped crew neck and jeans, with negligible hips and those perfect high school breasts, not large but commanding attention by their sheer exuberance, like a pair of frisky puppies.

  “This is Sheri,” Jared says, pulling on the shirt she hands him. “My uncle Joe.”

  “Nice to meet you,” I say.

  “Hi,” she says, staring at the floor. She won't be recovering from my untimely intrusion anytime soon.

  “So, just by way of summary,” Jared says. “You won't be mentioning this little incident to my dad.”

  “Your secret's safe with me.” I think Jared might appreciate the irony if I were to tell him about how I discovered Brad and Cindy in the garage way back when, but most well-adjusted boys don't want to hear anything that even remotely connects their mother to oral sex, so I keep my mouth shut. “Besides,” I say, “I think he's got more important things on his mind right about now.”

  “I guess so,” Jared said. “If you're here, Gramps must really be in bad shape, huh?”

  “It seems that way.” His eyes widen with what looks to me like fear, and I realize that he and my father share a special relationship. I experience the same stab of jealousy that I felt at the hospital, watching Brad adjust Dad's blankets.

  “Damn,” Jared says softly.

  There follows a brief moment of silence in honor of the things we're thinking but won't say, about death and its proximity to my father. We're interrupted by the electronic chime of my cell phone, which I snatch off my belt with the apologetic smile of an addict. “Hello,” I say.

  “You're a lying, egotistical son of a bitch,” comes Nat's voice. I put my hand over the mouthpiece and look at Jared and Sheri. “I have to take this. Be a minute.”

  “Jared,” Sheri says, chewing her lip. “I've got to go.”

  “I'll walk you,” he says. “Later, Uncle Joe.”

  “I'll be here,” I say, putting the phone back to my ear to catch the rest of Nat's remarks. “. . . used me, you asshole. And when you were done . . .” I watch Jared and Sheri from the living room picture window as they shuffle down the walk, his arm around her, their hips gently bumping. It makes me suddenly feel old and used up. Nat finishes and hangs up, and I close the phone and slide it back into the plastic holster on my belt. With a heavy sigh, I grab my duffel bag and head upstairs to my old room to get that part over with. Coming home, I think. It's never quite how you pictured it would be.

  ten

  1986

  At night, Lucy swam naked.

  Not actually, although for all I know she really did, but in my mind, where every night she habitually doffed all constraints and plunged naked into the pool, swimming languidly then floating on her back in the hazy glow of the submerged pool lights. The fantasy was born, and no matter where I was or what I was doing, it played continuously in my mind. She stands there on the diving board, luminous in her nakedness, and just before she dives, she sees me standing across the pool from her. Instead of being surprised, she flashes a warm, knowing smile full of seductive promise and then plunges into the water. I step in from the shallow end and am waiting for her when she surfaces. We stand there, the water just above our waists, and she says, “I've been wondering when you'd come.” “I know,” I say, and then she envelops me in her arms, and I feel those magnificent, bulbous breasts, hot and damp, pressed against my chest, and her warm lips open up over mine as she probes me with her tongue. Below the waterline, our groins brush lightly and then with greater force, and she pulls me deeper into the water to make love to me while in the background there's a radio playing Peter Gabriel's “In Your Eyes.” Che
esy as hell, but at the time it seemed as magical as the alluring concept of pool sex.

  Pool sex, for Christ's sake. A tenuous, complicated coupling, more strenuous than pleasurable, where every move and thrust must be compensated for in order to maintain a precarious semblance of balance, and for all of that extra work, sensitivity in the vital areas is actually diminished rather than enhanced. This was not the popular view embraced by late-night cable television, but that very fact proves the point that pool sex is a primarily visual phenomenon. It looks much better than it feels. But for a seventeen-year-old virgin, pool sex felt just as good as all of the other kinds of sex I wasn't getting, just another entry in my expanding journal of the unattainable.

  Aside from my immense sexual frustration, which threatened to cross the line into obsession on a daily basis, I was having a pretty good summer. To have two friends is to have something greater than the sum of its parts. Sammy's introduction into the mix meant that I now had a group. A crew. “The guys.” I reveled in our easy camaraderie, in the running jokes and understandings that developed among the three of us as the summer progressed. Me and the guys. I developed a spring in my step, a quicker grin, a wider eye. I was suddenly, unaccountably happy.

  And for as long as I could, I ignored the larger, unspoken thing that was happening ominously on the periphery, the stray secret looks and the nonverbal signals that I was inadvertently intercepting with increasing frequency. I was determinedly unwilling to rock the boat. We listened to Springsteen and watched MTV, drank too much beer and went swimming, raced golf carts across the Porter's campus in the dark of night, talked back to the screen at the Megaplex, ate burgers and pizzas at the Duchess Diner, and very occasionally scored some weed from Niko, who ran the Sunoco station downtown. And somewhere, in the middle of it all, Wayne and Sammy became something far more than friends.

  How long can you remain oblivious to a love affair going on right in front of you? It's all a question of determination, actually. On some level, I must have registered the furtive glances and knowing smiles, the disappearing hands in the movie theater, the quick, jerky redistribution of bodily masses when I entered the room suddenly, and the slow general thickening of the atmosphere surrounding my two best friends. But I clung steadfastly to my oblivion, determined to ride out this new insanity like a powerful virus. I naïvely believed it was nothing more than a bizarre behavioral phase, a rebellious experimentation they would outgrow.

  This was 1986, after all, and we hadn't yet been trained to deal with this sort of thing. We knew about homosexuality the same way we knew about god; we'd heard it existed, but didn't necessarily accept the reality of it. We speculated about Michael Jackson's alleged use of female hormones, and Boy George's lipstick, and we labeled them fags, but we didn't really believe, deep down, that they truly were gay. It was all just marketing. There were widespread rumors about Andrew McCarthy, but he made out so convincingly with Ally Sheedy in St. Elmo's Fire, he couldn't possibly have been gay. We derided one another with terms like “cocksucker” and “faggot,” but we never meant it literally. We took our cues primarily from Hollywood, and they, too, denied the reality. For the suburban boys we were, homosexuality existed on a purely conceptual plane, like algebra or the corkscrew shape of the universe.

  So for a while I was able to pretend not to see what I saw, and remained convinced that the best policy was to treat it like a stray dog: as long as I didn't make eye contact, it would eventually go away. I needed badly to believe this, not only because the alternative was unthinkable to me but because these were my best and only friends, and I desperately feared losing them. Their homosexuality, viewed head-on, might have been offensive to my sheltered sensibilities, but even that paled in comparison to the suffocating loneliness I had known since my mother's inauspicious plunge into the Bush River.

  So I knew, and they knew I knew, and without ever discussing it, we arrived at a collectively silent acceptance of the situation. It was amazing, really, how quickly it grew to feel normal in the vacuum of that hot, empty summer. It was understood that I might sometimes arrive at Sammy's to find Wayne already there, or that at the end of a given night Wayne might stick around at Sammy's for a while after I went home. Somehow I never made them feel the oddness of their relationship and they never made me feel that three was a crowd. I suppose we all had separate reasons for minimizing the magnitude of what was happening and maintaining the status quo. And the summer rolled along, unobtrusively gathering its own silent momentum as it went.

  One night, while we were all hanging out in Sammy's pool, I stepped inside to get a drink and flirt a little with Lucy, who was curled up on the living room couch in a pair of hospital scrubs, reading a People magazine. “Hi, Joe,” she said, lowering the magazine to look at me. “How are you doing?”

  “Fine.” I was still damp from the pool, and I shivered as the central air-conditioning freeze-dried the moisture on my skin. “I just thought I'd say hello.”

  Lucy smiled, a warm, kind smile that I thought might have betrayed the faintest amused hint that my infatuation wasn't at all lost on her. “You're such a sweetheart,” she said. “How come you don't have a girlfriend?”

  “I have a problem with commitment.”

  “How's that?”

  “Nobody wants me to commit.”

  She laughed. “Oh, come on. A handsome guy like you?”

  “Go figure,” I said with a grin.

  She sat up and I took note of how the line of her cleavage appeared at the bottom of her V neck. It was absurd, really, how a simple vertical line could set off such volatile chemical reactions in my nether regions. She considered me somberly for a moment, seemed about to say something, and then changed her mind, biting her lip thoughtfully. All of a sudden, she looked bone-weary. “I'm glad you and Sammy became friends,” she said.

  “Me too.”

  “No. I mean I'm glad he'll have a friend like you going into school.” She looked over her shoulder and leaned forward, and I could now see where the line split, heading off in two symmetrical curves. An erection, at that point, would have been instantly visible, raising my wet swimsuit and announcing itself like a rowdy, unwanted houseguest. Lucy spoke in a light whisper while I prayed desperately for continued flaccidity. “He's always had problems in school,” she said. “Kids can be remarkably cruel when they want to.”

  “It'll be okay,” I said awkwardly.

  “You'll watch out for him, won't you?”

  “We both will.”

  I didn't like where this conversation was headed, and Lucy seemed to sense that. She nodded lightly and leaned back on the couch. “Don't tell him I said anything.”

  “No worries there,” I said more emphatically than I'd intended, and she chuckled.

  “Well, I don't want to keep you,” she said.

  “You and every other woman I meet.”

  “If I were fifteen years younger . . .” she teased.

  “You'd be out of my league,” I said, and she laughed again.

  When I stepped outside, Wayne and Sammy were in the water, kissing deeply under the diving board, Wayne's muscled arm resting lightly on Sammy's scrawny shoulder. Their heads were rocking in a slight circular motion as their jaws worked rhythmically against each other. Sammy's hand came up and lightly brushed Wayne's face. My knees buckled, and I felt an overpowering urge to flee. I wanted to be the kind of guy who could come running out, yell “Get a room!” and launch myself in a wicked cannonball into the water right beside them. I knew that they'd appreciate the gesture, but I just couldn't do it. Knowing was one thing; witnessing the concentrated passion of their kiss was something else entirely.

  I backtracked quietly and walked back into the living room, where Lucy was lying on the couch, smoking and staring at the ceiling with a troubled frown. “I think I'll hang out in here for a while,” I said.

  She stared intently at me for a small eternity, her expression a pained mixture of consternation and resignation, and then sat u
p, patting the spot on the couch beside her. “Have a seat,” she said with a smile, stubbing out her cigarette in the ashtray on the coffee table. “I'll go get you a Coke.” She moved around the couch and then stopped, lightly patting my bare shoulder, her hand lingering there for a moment. “Joe,” she said from behind me.

  “Yeah.”

  “You really are a sweetheart.”

  “Yeah.” I didn't turn around, because I didn't want her to see me cry.

  Labor Day crept in with the stealth of a cat burglar in the dead of night, and when we woke up, summer had been stolen right out from under us. The Habers' pool was drained, winterized, and covered, and so was Lucy, whose bikinis, to my eternal dismay, had been put away for the season. The first day of our senior year loomed totemic on the horizon, like an indecipherable storm cloud.

  The night before our freshman year, Wayne and I had broken into the fire stairs that ran down the back side of Bush Falls High and climbed up to the roof. We'd sat together, perched on the large white cupola that looked out over the front lawn of the school, smoked a pack of Dunhills, and meditated on the upcoming school year. That evening evolved into an annual ritual for us, modified only slightly the night before our junior year started, when Wayne replaced our customary Dunhills with a bag of marijuana purchased from the stuttering pump jockey at the Sunoco station. This proved to be an almost fatal lapse in judgment, when Wayne nearly toppled off the cupola, pulling me with him, our collective balance impaired by the weed. We ended up sitting there into the wee hours, clinging fearfully to the smooth plaster walls of the cupola until the stars above us stopped flitting around like a galaxy in desperate need of Ritalin. Afterward, we agreed that next year we would go back to using regular cigarettes.

  I didn't expect Wayne to join me for our annual smoke, but that Labor Day, a deep melancholy having to do with the vague notion of time's racing ahead unchecked compelled me to climb up there on my own. Once safely ensconced on top of the cupola, I lit a cigarette and looked out thoughtfully over the town. Despite the addition of Sammy to my pitiful roster of friends, I was feeling more alone than ever. I leaned back, studied the stars and thought about my mother, wondered if she was looking down at me, and felt bad about her seeing me in such a sad and lonely state, if she was.