The Book of Joe (20 page)

twenty-six

There's something about being wet and naked that always makes things seem eminently doable. I shower energetically, vigorously scrubbing off two days' worth of accumulated grime, and as I do, I am a congress of one, making sweeping resolutions by the handful. I will write my new novel. I will make amends with my family and work on becoming something resembling a brother and an uncle. I've already made some promising headway toward that end with Jared, even if it has involved some felonious activities. I will find a way to get past the awkwardness between Carly and me, and will find out if there's anything there to salvage. I will be a friend to Wayne and offer all the comfort and support I can. I am baptized in the faintly green foam of Irish Spring and Herbal Essences, ensconced in a lather of possibility.

I'm just stepping out of the shower when the doorbell rings. I quickly wrap a towel around my waist, the air invigoratingly cold against my wet skin, and run downstairs, still feeling a sense of elation at my newfound direction. And then I open the door and it's Lucy, looking flushed and somewhat breathless in a short skirt and a tight scoop-necked sweater, and things take a bit of a left turn.

“Hi,” I say, stepping back to let her in.

“I'm sorry to barge in on you like this,” she says. “I thought maybe you'd gone back home already.” She pulls at a loose strand of hair that has become ensnared in her lip gloss.

“Nope,” I say. “Still here.”

She smiles awkwardly. “I'm sorry I didn't come to the funeral. I don't go out very much these days, and I just . . .”

“Don't worry about it.”

Things seem to be moving in slow motion, because I have time to dwell on her every detail: the smooth lines of her face, the way her full, impossibly red lips seem to crush against each other where they meet, becoming an entirely new and delectable organ, her breasts straining against the dark fabric of her sweater, her smooth, tanned legs, and the soft curves of her thigh muscles where the hemline of her skirt bisects them.

We say a few more things to each other, but the sound of our conversation fades, seems to be coming from off in the distance, as we draw closer. I take a step back, clutching the towel at my waist with both hands, telling her that I'll just run upstairs and put some clothing on, but Lucy lunges forward and puts a restraining hand on my arm and says don't, and her voice is the radio signal and my anatomy the receiver, and I begin to shiver and say but I'm all wet, and she presses herself up against me, pulling my hand forcefully away from my body and guiding it up and under her skirt to the junction of her legs as she presses her lips against me and whispers so am I, and the towel hits the floor only a scant second before her skirt does.

We stumble up the stairs, kissing and clinging to each other with animal intensity, but once in my room she pushes me away so that I can watch her undress. She does it slowly, illuminated in the doorway by the soft light from the hallway behind her. And then, unbelievably, she is standing before me, unabashedly naked, as my eyes greedily drink up every inch of her magnificent body. Lucy has to be over fifty years old, but her body resolutely refuses to act its age. Her skin still shines with vitality, her breasts hang remarkably firm and full, her belly smooth and flat. You would think, after years of the fantasy, that the reality can't possibly measure up, but somehow it does. The odd imperfections, the dimples and creases and even a red birthmark in the shape of Italy just below her left hip, only serve as foils to her perfection, the exceptions that prove the rule. She walks slowly over to my bed and climbs onto it, stretching out on all fours, the upward curve of her age-defying, apple-shaped ass raised slightly as she turns to look over her shoulder and down her back at me. “Fuck me, Joe,” she moans, lifting her upper body off the bed with her arms in a push-up so that through her spread thighs I can see the tips of her breasts grazing the rumpled sheets beneath her. “Fuck me hard.”

I do. And she is warm and soft and wet and supple and smooth, and on some level it's how I've always imagined it. The soft roundness of her breasts in my hands, the cherry hardness of her nipples between my teeth, the taste of her tongue as it pushes its way into my mouth, seeking out my own, and the press of her moist lips on me. We kiss and lick and suck and stroke each other at a fevered pitch, not allowing even a moment's respite for rational thought to intrude, and when I enter her, she comes almost immediately, crying out and digging her nails into my ass as she pulls me deeper inside. Her quick finish is highly fortunate, because after six months of celibacy, I'm like an exposed nerve ending down there, and any demonstration of tantric endurance is out of the question. I follow a moment later, and as I heave with the last convulsions of my orgasm, I think of Carly and feel ashamed.

We lie absolutely still for a few moments, our mingled sweat and juices drying on us in the conditioned air and becoming sticky on our skin. Only as I roll off her do I realize that she's crying softly. I brush the hair out of her face and see tears streaming out of her eyes. I open my mouth to say something, but there's really nothing I can say that will matter, so instead I just lie on my side next to her, holding her against me as she sobs, until, after an indeterminate amount of time, she falls asleep. Once her breathing becomes slow and regular, I disentangle myself from her and go to the bathroom. My haggard, lipstick-scarred face stares back at me in the mirror as I urinate, and as I lean forward to study the jagged lines of burst blood vessels in my eyes, I find myself repeating the last thing Lucy said to me before we went to bed. “Fuck me,” I say slowly, shaking my head at the face in the mirror. The face just frowns sadly back at me, disappointed that I can't come up with anything better.

Lucy is up before daybreak. I hear her furtive rustling as she moves quietly about the room, locating her discarded clothing. Once dressed, she comes over to the bed and kneels beside me, gently brushing my hair with her fingers. I would like to see the expression on her face, but I keep my eyes closed, feigning sleep. Finally, she leans forward and presses her lips softly to my temple. They are dry now, as if I've sucked all the life out of them. She rests them there for a minute before standing up and tiptoeing out of the room. I don't open my eyes until I hear her car engine fading in the distance.

twenty-seven

A brief lesson in poetic justice: The first time I had sex with Carly, I thought of Lucy, and now, seventeen years later, I've finally slept with Lucy, and can't stop thinking of Carly, even with Lucy's fragrance still firmly ensconced in my nostrils, the taste of her still lingering on my swollen, chapped lips, her nakedness still tattooed across my eyelids, flashing in neon whenever I blink. I am the star in my own Shakespearean farce, never managing to sleep with one woman without wanting the other. The gods of sex and irony are playing hockey, and I am their unwitting puck.

I leave the house for the first time in almost three days, the sunlight harassing my constricted pupils as I drive the Mercedes into town. I try to think myself out of the perplexing cloud of distress that seems to have enveloped me in the aftermath of sex with Lucy, but the whole magically sordid evening defies perspective. I pull up to Wayne's house, but his mother tells me that he's still sleeping. Something in her manner, in the too quick pronouncement of this fact, makes me think she's lying, but she seems more on edge than usual and girded for battle, so rather than set her off, I tell her I'll come back later.

Once back in my car, I grab my cell phone and dial Owen.

“Congratulations on sleeping with your mother,” he practically shouts with glee, prompting me to reconsider the wisdom of calling him at home so early in the morning.

“What?”

“Oh, come on, Joe. Your attraction to Lucy is a direct manifestation of your longing for the love of your own mother.”

“Why can't it just be healthy lust?”

“It's just not that simple, given the complexities of your circumstances.”

“I don't think you'd be saying that if you ever saw Lucy,” I say.

“Well, you keep telling yourself that if you want,” he replies smugly.

“What happened to not giving shotgun diagnoses?”

“Oh, come on, Joe. This one's a gimme.”

I sigh. “Honestly, I'm starting to rethink this whole agent-as-therapist arrangement.”

“There is a larger issue here,” Owen says.

“Larger than mother fucking?”

He laughs. “Has it occurred to you that, oedipal issues aside, you're trying to fuck your past, as it were?”

“Come again?”

“It seems to me that you're subconsciously trying to correct past mistakes. Both your ridiculous ongoing phone relationship with Natalie and your sleeping with Lucy are part of a compulsive need you have to right past wrongs. You feel responsible for Sammy's death, and therefore that you wronged Lucy.”

“Maybe I do feel somewhat responsible for what happened to Sammy,” I say. “But how does sleeping with his mother erase that?”

“It doesn't, of course. But you would hardly be the first man in history to think the answer to all his woes lies in his dick. All of your self-destructive behavior stems from this misguided need to fix your past. And the one person who it seems to me might represent real potential for the future—Carly—you've kept at arm's length.”

“She hasn't exactly been giving me that come-hither stare.”

“That may or may not be,” he says as if he might have some inside information. “Carly represents something more than sexual to you, and you feel unworthy, of her and of the potential future she might offer, until you've somehow fixed your past, which I can tell you will remain unfixable, no matter how many people you fuck. Not that I'm discouraging it. Far from it. Fuck away, by all means.”

“It's funny,” I say. “All this crap happens to you and you think you're handling it okay, and then years later you realize that you weren't handling it all, and you hurt people and hurt yourself, and you've got so many things to make up for, you don't know where to begin.”

Owen grunts, unimpressed with my latest epiphany. “Just go slow,” he advises, turning serious. “Rushing into things isn't going to work, as evidenced by your decision to sleep with Lucy.” As if any decision at all were even possible, once she'd walked, warm and willing, through that door. “You need to establish some distance.”

“I've had seventeen years of distance,” I say, impulsively flipping my phone shut, suddenly sick to death of talking about it. If I'm going to make a genuine effort to roll up my sleeves and get dirty here, it won't do to have our constant clinical analysis lifting me out of the fray. I pull over, wait for a break in the traffic, and then execute a quick U-turn, pointing the Mercedes in the direction of the editorial offices of
The Minuteman.
It's high time I got a little reckless, I think. Every once in a while you experience what alcoholics and addicts refer to as a moment of clarity, where the opaque veil of chaos falls away and the unarticulated cosmic rhythm of the universe seems suddenly within your grasp. I don't doubt that it will all turn out to be a load of crap as usual, but I nevertheless feel an overwhelming surge of optimism so powerful that it remains undiminished even as Mouse pulls me over, his siren wailing obnoxiously, to write me a summons for the illegal U-turn and, get this, driving with a broken taillight.

twenty-eight

The offices of
The Minuteman
are located in a strip mall that's been converted into a small corporate park on Oxnard Avenue, just north of the center of town. I step through the glass doors and into a large open office area filled with the controlled din of enterprise—the plastic clatter of keyboards, the atonal electronic chimes of telephones, and, faintly in the background, some Lite FM refugee station for displaced artists like Phil Collins, Billy Joel, and Hall and Oates. In the center of the room, bathed in the fluorescent glow from light tubes in the drop ceiling, four reporters sit in oddly configured cubicles, typing urgently on battered gray computers. Two college-aged kids sit at aluminum desks on the periphery, looking cool and bored as they answer the phones and sort through mountains of papers and photos. In the far corner, two geeky-looking guys sit in front of oversized Macs, configuring digital layouts for the paper. The back wall contains three doors, all open, and through the one on the left, I catch a glimpse of Carly. As I make my way through the cubicles, a hush falls over the staff as they become aware of my presence, tracking my progress toward Carly's office with obvious interest.

“It's not going to work,” Carly says when I enter the room. She's sitting Indian-style on the center of a worn oak desk, poring over a layout proof, her hair hanging over her face like a curtain.

“You haven't even heard my pitch yet,” I say, and her head jerks up, her eyes wide with surprise behind the gold-framed spectacles that I had no idea she wore.

“Joe,” she says, letting the proof slip out of her hands and onto the desk. “What are you doing here?”

“What's not going to work?” says a disembodied voice from behind Carly.

“The layout on page six.” Carly addresses the speakerphone, still staring at me. “I don't want to cut up the article for two lousy sentences.”

“Then get editorial to trim fifteen words,” comes the reply.

“Did you speak to them?”

“They told me to piss off.”

Carly looks at me and grins apologetically. “I'll call you back in a minute,” she says.

“Who's Joe?” the voice wants to know.

“Good-bye, Calvin,” Carly says, hitting a button on the phone. “I'm sorry,” she says to me, self-consciously removing her glasses. “What are you doing here?”

She's wearing a rust-colored stretch blouse tucked into dark pleated slacks, and she looks cute and compact on the massive desk. Her face, devoid of any makeup, looks more chiseled than I remember, bordering on gaunt, and I'm still getting used to the surprise of her long chestnut hair: straight, thick, and defiantly unstyled. “I thought I'd buy you lunch,” I say, affecting a casual tone.

“It's ten
A.M.
”

“We'll beat the rush.”

She considers me thoughtfully for a minute. “What will we talk about?”

Carly's disarming directness, powered by the undercurrent of her incisive wit, was one of the qualities I always admired about her back when we were teenagers. But getting into the conversational flow with her now is like playing in a jazz combo, and I'm out of practice and my timing is off. “I don't know,” I say. “We really haven't had the opportunity to catch up.”

“It's sort of pointless, isn't it?” she says, rolling gracefully off her desk and landing in the worn leather chair behind it. The light from her desk lamp picks up the soft blond down on the side of her neck that disappears behind her ears into her scalp.

“Why would you say that?”

Carly rolls her eyes. “I mean, what will we really say? You'll tell me about being a big-time author, and I'll tell you about running a small-town paper and then we'll have a few awkward silences, which neither of us will be able to stand, so we'll say anything to fill them until one of us inevitably brings up the past, probably you, and you'll apologize for being such an asshole to me in New York and I'll say forget about it, it's ancient history, even though that's not how I really feel, and then I'll be mad at myself for not telling you, so I will, and then I'll cry and you'll think you made a meaningful connection when all you really did is make me cry. Again. And then you'll be off, back to your big life and terribly interesting friends in the big city, and I'll be here and everything will be just how it was before you came back, except now it will have this irritating little epilogue. And so I say again that it's pointless.” She raises her eyebrows at me. “Don't you think?”

“That's one way of looking at it,” I say slowly. “A neurotic and depressing way, but a way, I guess. May I rebut?”

“It's a free country.”

I take a deep breath. “First of all, I'm sure it's interesting running the paper and all, but frankly I couldn't care less, and I'm not remotely interested in talking about being an author. I have no exciting friends or big life in the big city to get back to. As a matter of fact, I don't even have a little life there. You're probably right that the past will come up—how could it not—but I'm only interested in it as it pertains to the here and now. I was under the impression that I was avoiding the past for the last few years, but it turns out what I was really avoiding was the present and I'm firmly committed to not doing that anymore. There are good reasons for us to talk, to know each other as we are now, but I'm trying not to analyze them for the time being. I'm going on instinct here, which is something entirely new for me, and I promise, the last thing in the world I want to do is make you cry.” I pause dramatically to catch my breath. “It's just lunch, for god's sake. It doesn't mean we're engaged or anything.”

A small grin pulls at the corners of Carly's mouth, but she remains resolute. “I don't know if I'm up to dealing with this right now.”

“I said that once, when I was about nineteen,” I say. “Now I'm thirty-four.”

“Jesus, we're old,” Carly says wistfully, and I can tell I have her on the fence, her good judgment wavering in the face of my resolve.

“I can see you're conflicted. Let me make it easier,” I say, sitting down in one of the chairs facing her desk. “I'm not leaving here without you.”

She stares at me and I stare right back and something in the air where our eyes meet clicks. “Come on,” I say. “How much damage could I possibly do over lunch?”

After a moment, Carly closes her eyes. “Oh, well,” she says softly, more to herself than to me, and then stands up. She grabs her leather jacket off a coat tree and I follow her out of her office, back into the newsroom. If the
Minuteman
staff were interested in me before, they are now shamelessly gawking as we make our way back through the work space to the exit. “It doesn't take much to excite this crowd, does it?” I mutter to Carly.

“We reap what we sow,” she says, opening the door and stepping out ahead of me into the parking lot. “You gave my employees the opportunity to read the vivid details of how you deflowered me in the backseat of your car. I would say you've earned your share of stares.” I smile stupidly and try to ignore the traces of anger in her voice, like microscopic shards of shattered glass after a car wreck.

The sky is overcast; fat, dirty clouds hang low and thick like pollution over us, the air heavy with the probability of rain. “Your car looks like it was in a bar fight,” Carly says, taking in the Mercedes' busted taillight and jagged scratches.

“We've both seen better days.”

She looks across the roof of the car at me, wondering if my comment is inclusive of the car or herself. “Joe,” she says softly, “I'm not sure about this.”

“Come on,” I say, trying to keep it light. “I plan on being especially witty today.”

“Stop that.”

“Stop what?”

“Stop trying to be charming.”

“I'm not trying; I just am.” Between us, a single pear-shaped droplet of rain lands on the soft roof of the Mercedes like a plump teardrop, and we both look at it, considering its potential for symbolism.

“Go easy on me,” she says, opening the car door. “I don't exactly have my shit together these days.”

“Who does?”

She climbs into the car, leaving me there to contemplate the lone raindrop on my own. I sigh deeply as it begins to drizzle, get into the car, and hope like hell that I know what I'm doing.

         

The staccato percussion of the rain on the roof of the Mercedes fills the awkward silence in the car, and the daylight has dimmed to a gloomy gray by the time we pull into the Duchess's parking lot. We run from the car to the restaurant, heads bent and shoulders hunched, our feet splashing through the mini rivers that flow down the flooded sidewalk. Once inside, I shake my wet hair and wipe my face with my hands, while Carly fusses with her blouse, which now clings provocatively to her chest in small, transparent sections that I will devoutly pretend not to notice. Sheila, the waitress who served Brad that strangely personal look a few days earlier, says a familiar hello to Carly and tells us to sit anywhere. Carly selects a window booth, and Sheila takes our orders immediately and disappears into the kitchen. We're the only diners there, which is fine with me, since it greatly reduces the odds of another unfortunate milk shake incident.

Carly moves her salad around with her fork, flipping, sorting, and rearranging the assorted vegetables into recondite patterns only she can discern. Every so often, when the leaves of her lettuce are properly aligned, she stabs at a particular section with her fork and brings it to her mouth. Eaten this way, a Caesar salad can last over an hour. It doesn't take nearly that long for us to run out of small talk. So for a while we sit in silence, watching through the window as the rain comes down in angry torrents. Finally, I look across the table at her and say, “So, ask me a question.”

She raises her eyebrows, unsure of how to react. It was a game we played back in high school, usually after sex as we lay together basking in the afterglow. We wanted to know each other so thoroughly, and sometimes things didn't come up in general conversation, so Carly developed the habit of challenging me to ask her revealing questions designed to open up secret compartments in each other. She stares at me for a few more seconds before flashing a forced grin and putting her fork back down. “Okay,” she says. “When are you leaving?”

“I don't know, but way to make me feel welcome.”

“Come on, Joe. Why are you still here?”

“It's complicated.”

“Why don't you give me the
Reader's Digest
version?”

I think about it for a minute. “My father's death has unexpectedly fucked me up. It only recently occurred to me that all those years I was hating him for not being there for me, he was grieving for my mother, and really, I should have been there for him. I let him down. I should have been there for Wayne and Sammy too—”

“You were,” Carly interrupts me. “You were the only one who was.”

“Physically, maybe,” I said. “But what good did I do either one of them? I just kept hoping that the whole thing would go away on its own, that Wayne would wake up liking girls again, and most of the time I was too hot for you to care very much one way or the other.”

“So it's my fault?”

“Of course not.” I shake my head. “You were, by far, the greatest thing that ever happened to me, and now, seventeen years later, you still are, and that's either pathetic or wonderful, depending on how you look at it.” I look away and clear my throat. “Um, how do you look at it?”

“As sad,” Carly says neutrally, looking out the window. Not quite the reaction I'd been hoping for.

“Whatever,” I say, feeling somewhat deflated. “I guess it's that too. But the point is, I feel like I've been angry for so long, and maybe I was because there was nothing I could do about it. But now it's like I've been given this chance, to be there for Wayne when he needs me, to help him see this through to the end. To become part of my family again, if they'll have me. And then there's you. . . .”

“There's me,” Carly says, nodding her head bitterly. “The cherry on top of your psychotic little sundae.”

“Excuse me?”

“You're unbelievable,” she says, the volume of her voice sliding up a few notches. “Everything back here, me and Wayne and this town, it has nothing to do with you anymore. You went off and hit the big time, and now you want to come back and shower your beneficence on all the little people who fell apart when you left.”

“That's not it at all,” I protested. “I'm the one who fell apart.”

“Well, cry me a river,” she says angrily. “News flash, Joe. Everything isn't about you. We all managed to get fucked up on our own. There was nothing you could have done about it then, and there's nothing you can do about it now. You think you have the market cornered on regret?”

“That's not it,” I say, wondering how the conversation went haywire so quickly.

“Why don't we just cut to the chase here,” she says, waving away my protestations. “What do you want from me, Joe?”

“Nothing.”

“Bullshit. Try again. What do you want from me?”

Her eyes are cold and humorless, and looking into them, I experience the sensation of drowning, a careless swimmer who failed to heed the undertow warnings. “I just want the chance to get to know you again,” I say. “I know we're not the same people we were, but underneath everything, you're still the only person I've ever really loved.”

“So, what are you saying? You want to go out with me? You want to go on a date?”

“Why would that get you so mad?”

Carly nods slowly, her cheeks flushed with anger. “I look like such an easy bet to you, don't I? Your lonely, battered ex-girlfriend. You must have thought, after all I've been through, that I would just jump gratefully into your arms.”

“That's not fair,” I say, trying to manufacture some indignation of my own to neutralize hers.