“Could you explain to me how that was nice?”
“Some might say,” she continues, easily ignoring me, “that you're doing it deliberately.”
“And why would I do that?”
“I don't know,” she says, turning back to my cut. She pulls out some gauze and tape from a drawer under me and begins carefully wrapping the cut. “Some misguided form of penance, maybe.”
“That's a neat theory,” I say. “But what's my sin?”
“Everyone's got something.”
“What have you got?”
She considers the question. “I'm not sure,” she confesses, biting on her lip thoughtfully. “But I know I've already done all the penance I'm going to do.”
“I heard about that—your marriage, I mean. I'm sorry. I just—I don't know what to say.”
“That's actually perfect,” Carly says, standing up brusquely and lowering my now-bandaged foot. “Because we are so not going to discuss it.”
“I'm sorry,” I say again.
“Don't be.”
“What should I be?”
Carly fixes me with a look in which bitterness and resigned warmth mingle awkwardly, like guests early to a cocktail party. “You should be going,” she says.
Jared and I sit in a subdued silence on the short drive home, the last remnants of the weed diffusing from our bloodstream like bubbles from champagne going flat. I replay my conversation with Carly, trying to recall its exact tone, but it's already fading to fuzzy unreality. I still have no clue as to what she feels toward me, but I'm developing the strong suspicion that her ambivalence is probably not cause for uncontained optimism. We pull up to the house and Jared cuts the engine, leaning back as he hands me my keys. “So, how'd that work out for you back there?” he asks.
“Okay,” I say. “Not too good. I don't know. Lousy.”
“As long as you're clear on it.”
“What about the window girl?”
“Kate.”
“Kate. You think you'll talk to her anytime soon?”
“I don't know,” Jared says. “As frustrating as it is, there's something nice about this stage.”
“She doesn't know you exist. I don't think you can legally call that a stage.”
“I know. But I haven't fucked anything up yet.”
“Point taken.”
We step out of the car and trudge across the lawn toward the front porch, two battle-weary soldiers back from the trenches, when Jared suddenly tenses up. “Busted,” he whispers to me through his teeth. I looked up and follow his gaze to find Cindy standing on the porch, looking tired and mightily pissed. She takes in our ragged, limping, paint-spattered appearance with angry, disapproving eyes that burn with unbridled hostility when they come to rest on me. Her face contracts briefly as she sniffs, and I have no doubt that she can smell the weed on us. I steel myself for the inevitable tongue-lashing, but the night has one more surprise in store for me. Cindy comes down the stairs, nodding slowly as if I've done nothing more than fulfill her worst expectations.
“Hi, Cindy,” I say to break the silence. “What's up?”
In a burst of intuition, I know why she's there before she says anything. My father's come out of his coma. It's a miracle, really; the doctors don't know what to make of it. The nurse just walked past his room and there he was, sitting up in his bed, looking slightly perplexed but no worse for wear. And when the respirator came out, he asked in a raspy voice for his sons, the plural form, meaning both of them. There will be recovery and awkwardness, occupational therapy, and halting discussions of our damaged past, recriminations and veiled apologies, but through it all a sense of renewal, a second chance. I will not shy away from it; I will let go my bitterness and my strong proclivity toward sarcasm and embrace this opportunity to be whole again.
Cindy holds my glance for a moment and then directs her gaze over my shoulder. “Your father's dead,” she says.
Memories surface in a montage: my father teaching me to ride my new two-wheeler, then chasing me frantically when I suddenly get the hang of it and take off down our street, my mother and Brad laughing hysterically on the front lawn. My fourth-grade diorama project on Mount Saint Helens, when he stays up half the night with me trying to concoct the right mixture of baking powder and vinegar to simulate eruption from the crude papier mâché volcano I'd built. Helping me reel in a fifteen-pound striped bass on a chartered fishing boat on the Long Island Sound, cursing and shouting encouragement, then pounding my back in triumph when we finally land the sucker. Washing his car in the driveway and then turning the hose on Brad and me, chasing us around the yard and then tackling us so we all go down in a wet, muddy tangle of arms and legs . . .
But here's the thing. None of this ever happened. Or maybe it did. I can't tell anymore. I've spent so much time reliving and rewriting those years that I can no longer discern which vignettes are the result of which process. In my reckless anger, I've managed to fuck up a vital area of memory to the point where I will never again be able to isolate reality, and so whatever good there might have been has now been lost to rambling fiction. And the worst part of it is this: I think I did it on purpose.
One soft infested summer me and Terry became friends
trying in vain to breathe the fire we was born in
Catching rides to the outskirts, tying faith beneath our teeth
sleeping in that old abandoned beach house
getting wasted in the heat
and hiding on the backstreets . . .
With a love so hard and filled with defeat
running for our lives at night on them backstreets.
—“Backstreets,” Bruce Springsteen
twenty-three
The caskets all have names like Wilton, Exeter, Balmoral, and Buckingham, suggesting that the dearly departed will enter the afterworld as British nobility. Features include brass tone accents, hand-cast bronze handles, and tailored champagne crepe with matching pillows and throws. The higher-end caskets come with the patented Eterna-rest adjustable bedding system, and a number of caskets have artwork on their interiors, illuminated grottos with renderings of the Madonna or reproductions of The Last Supper. Only the acutely pervasive attendance of death prevents the whole business from crossing the line into comedy.
Brad is home, glumly working the phones, entangled in the myriad details involved in putting a body underground, so I've volunteered to pick out a casket, which turns out to be more complicated than I anticipated. I am now expected to choose between wood finishes and decorative trims for something that will be buried in the dirt almost immediately. And by the way, which features are most vital to a corpse?
The casket showroom, located in the basement of the funeral home, has the unreal feel of a sitcom set, with gleaming, lacquered caskets mounted on discreet black pedestals, all meticulously buffed to a showroom shine; a car dealership for the freshly deceased. In the air is the light smell of varnish and lemon Pledge. I make my way dazedly between the caskets, thinking it really doesn't matter which one I pick but still terrified of picking the wrong one. You can't go through life making as many wrong choices as I have without developing a certain wanton fearlessness toward decision making, but we are talking about eternity here, and it has me spooked.
My salesman, Richard, is obese and high-strung, with a frown of profound sympathy etched permanently into his features. I remember him from the neighborhood, a sad, chubby kid who could only ever manage to keep one side of his shirt tucked into his pants at any given time. He chases me nervously around the showroom, sweating and panting dangerously as he expounds on the virtues of the higher-end coffins, looking slightly pained when I bluntly ask for pricing, as if he finds the discussion of money vulgar and inappropriate. He works on commission, no doubt, which strikes me as being in poor taste, given the circumstances of his profession. The collective grief of Bush Falls will put his kids through college.
I finally settle on the Exeter in a mahogany finish, which comes to
fifty-six hundred dollars before sales tax. I briefly consider haggling over price but decide that it would be a serious breach of etiquette, and besides, I just want to be gone from here already. Richard nods obsequiously at my choice and plants his considerable girth down at the laughably small black desk in the back of the room to write up the purchase. “There's also a sixty-dollar charge for refrigeration,” he advises me.
“Excuse me?”
He looks up from his papers. “The body. We refrigerate it until the interment. It's thirty dollars a day.”
“Oh, okay.” I'm sorry I asked.
“And there's the seven percent Cougar discount.”
“What?”
Richard looks up at me. “Your father was a Cougar, wasn't he?”
“He was,” I say.
“He gets seven percent off.”
“Lucky him.”
Richard stands up from behind the desk, his chair letting out a hissing sigh of relief, and hands me my receipt. “Once again, I'm terribly sorry for your loss.”
“Thanks,” I say, thinking that at a ten percent commission he's just made six hundred dollars for fifteen minutes of work, so how sorry can he really be. But then again, after almost seventeen years of not speaking to my father, I've just picked out his home for all eternity, so I just shake Richard's fat, clammy hand and get the hell out of there.
The funeral is attended by a good portion of the Bush Falls community, who don't view my father's death as any reason to stop staring at me with eyes that range from clinically inquisitive to outwardly hostile as they mill about the greeting hall before the service. It's one thing to know that I am generally despised by the bulk of the population, but to have so many of them under one roof at the same time is another thing entirely. It feels like those childhood dreams where you show up to school and realize too late that you're not wearing any pants. The nakedness might be metaphorical, but the arctic frost in my intestines is inarguably real.
Looking around the crowd, I see that a significant percentage of the men are wearing their old Cougars team jackets in a show of solidarity for their departed teammate. Like firemen or policemen, they are here to bury one of their own, fallen in the line of duty, as it were. There is something oddly grand in this gesture, even if the faded jackets looked silly on the balding, fleshy, potbellied men who wear them over button-down shirts and ties. I know it's ridiculous, but I can't help bitterly observing that even in death my father has managed to remind me one last time of my exclusion from the privileged inner circle he and Brad inhabit as Cougars.
Thank god for Owen, who arrives from Manhattan in the obnoxious white stretch limo he has hired for the occasion. He strides purposefully into the hall, looking spectacularly and inappropriately dapper in a tan poplin suit, mint green shirt, and a speckled bow tie. For years, Owen struggled with whether his wardrobe should exude the sharp, clean lines of corporate confidence or the finer, softer dimensions of intellectual and literary perspicacity. Over time, his atrocious attempts to reflect this dichotomy yielded a dreadful, polychromatic style, which he'd ultimately embraced as an affectation. “I thought you could use some moral support,” he announces grandly, basking in the stares he's generating. “But as I am famously bereft of anything resembling morals, you'll have to settle for my unmodified support.”
“Thanks for coming,” I say as he briefly embraces me. It's the first time he's ever hugged me. He smells like Old Spice and baby powder.
“Please,” Owen says, stepping back to stare around at the gathering crowd with unconcealed curiosity. “How could I not?”
Wayne shows up looking shockingly healthy in his Cougars jacket and borrowed suit pants that manage to somewhat conceal his wasted frame. He gives me a light hug and we grin at my own borrowed suit, as if any further evidence of our alien status is actually necessary. “You too?” I say, indicating his jacket.
“I've always been a sucker for tradition,” Wayne says with a smirk. “Except as it pertains to lifestyle, of course.” I introduce him to Owen, who nods in recognition and hugs him suddenly and dramatically, Wayne patting his back in bemused surprise.
Carly arrives as the last guests are filing into the chapel for the service, and I realize that I've been waiting to see if she'll come. She walks over and kisses me lightly on the cheek. I was hoping for something a bit more dramatic: a lingering hug, maybe some tears. “I'm so sorry, Joe,” she says. She is wearing a sleek black pantsuit with a white blouse opened at the neck to reveal a small triangle of pale flesh and the delicate protrusion of her collarbones.
“Thanks for coming,” I say.
I want to say something more, but the sudden tightness in my throat makes it impossible. Carly squeezes my hand, her eyes wide and knowing. “I'll sit where you can see me,” she says. I nod mutely, and she moves ahead of me through the twin doors into the chapel.
After that, everything is a blur. A rabbi reads some psalms in Hebrew, and then a parade of middle-aged men in faded Cougars jackets take turns at the podium paying tribute to Arthur Goffman, threatening to drown us in a deluge of basketball metaphors. Brad speaks last, dividing my father's life into four quarters and explaining what his contributions were in each one, and I want to stand up and shout that it's just a fucking game. But when he steps down from the pulpit, he looks teary and spent. I know that he loved our father, and for a moment, I feel deeply sorry for him. Then I go back to feeling sorry for myself.
Only a handful of cars accompany us in the procession behind the hearse to the cemetery, which is on the other side of town. Once there, Brad, Jared, and I are joined by three older men in Cougars jackets, buddies of my father's, in bearing the coffin to the grave, beside which lies a high mound of dirt and the telltale tracks of the backhoe that prepared the grave yesterday. We place the coffin on the two two-by-fours that cross the open grave, and as the gravediggers begin lowering the coffin, I realize with a jolt that I'm standing right beside my mother's tombstone. I turn to read the gray marble stone—ELLEN GOFFMAN, 1945–1983, BELOVED WIFE, MOTHER, AND DAUGHTER—and then I'm on my knees, pressing my fingers into the grooves of the letters that spell her name, weeping uncontrollably while behind me, they cover my father's coffin with dirt, and then something hits my head, cool, smooth, and unyielding, the glazed marble of the tombstone, and maybe I pass out, I'm not sure, but I distinctly feel myself being carried, a live person borne over the scattered graves for a change, and the last thought I have is that I never thought of her as his wife before, and that wasn't fair because he lost something too, maybe even something larger than I did.
twenty-four
1987
It took a while for me to believe that Wayne wasn't coming back. Every day I expected to pick up the phone and hear his voice, or walk into school and see him leaning against his locker in his team jacket, greeting me with his usual wry grin. I drove past his house daily, slowing down to peer intently through the curtained windows as if I might discern some clue as to his whereabouts. Mrs. Hargrove had installed an answering machine and taken to screening her calls, and my regular inquiries apparently didn't make the cut.
“I don't think he's coming back,” Carly said gently to me one afternoon. It was one of the first warm days of spring, and we were sitting on the bleachers overlooking the football field during a free period, enjoying the freshness of the weather. Wayne had been gone for over a month.
“Of course he is,” I said. “Why would you say that?”
She folded her fingers into mine and looked out onto the field. “Would you?”
I shook my head. “But where is he? I mean, you would think he'd give me a call or something. Just to let us know where he is. I'm supposed to be his best friend, for god's sake.”
Carly leaned against me and kissed the side of my jaw. “He will when he's ready.”
I rested my head on hers, kissing her scalp where her hair parted. “I wonder if he called Sammy,” I said.
Since Wayne's disappearance, Sammy had devoted
himself to a strict regimen of invisibility. His attendance in school became highly sporadic, and when he did come, he moved through the halls like a phantom, keeping close to the walls, slipping unobtrusively in and out of classrooms. His hair, no longer sculpted into a pompadour, grew long and lay flat against his skull, and he always appeared rumpled and slightly askew, as if he'd slept in his clothing. On those rare occasions when I did run into him, he offered short, perfunctory conversation, scrupulously avoiding eye contact.
I dropped by his house on a few isolated evenings, motivated less by friendship than by the possibility that maybe he'd heard from Wayne. But Sammy was sullen and uncommunicative, and after sitting in his room for ten minutes or so, the conversational well would run dry. “He's in trouble, Joe,” Lucy said to me on one such night as she walked me down the stairs to my car. “I can't get through to him.”
“Me neither,” I said. “It's like he's pissed at everyone.”
She leaned against my car, smoking a cigarette and shivering slightly in the cool night air, looking small and vulnerable. On the pedestal in my mind, she always loomed larger than life, and it was a revelation every time I noticed how much taller than her I was. It would be so easy, I thought, to just step forward and wrap my arms around her. “It's driving me out of my fucking mind,” Lucy said, shaking her head. “He barely eats; he won't talk to me. I don't know what the hell to do about it anymore. I think I've been a good mother to him, you know? I mean, Sammy's no picnic, let me tell you.” She blew out some smoke and then waved it away in quick, nervous motions. “And I know I'm nobody's idea of mother of the year; I have no illusions about that. I was just a little older than you when I had Sammy. Just a kid, really. I always said we were better off without his scumbag father, but I don't know. Maybe if he had a father . . .” Her voice trailed off, and she looked up at me with a sad grin. “I'm going a little crazy, aren't I?”
The Book of Joe Page 18