Hi Dominick,
Thad & I are off to mixology class, we’re learning cream drinks tonite! Guess who called? CONNIE CHUNG!!
She wants to interview your brother. (Details later!)
If you have one of my Lean Cuisines for supper, could you not eat the vegetable lasagna. Thanks!
Love, Joy
P.S. Call Henry Rood!!! (That guy’s a pain!)
I read the note without really reading it. My brain wouldn’t stop flashing sights and sounds from Hatch: Thomas’s leg chains, his shabby Bible going through that X-ray machine. I walked around the condo, yanking down blinds, putting on lights. Passing the TV, I turned it on for the relief of the squawking.
In the bedroom, I eased myself out of my jeans and into a pair of sweats. If I felt sore now, I was probably going to feel a hell of a lot worse tomorrow. The first thing I was going to do was get my brother out of that snake pit. Then I was going to get a lawyer and sue their asses off: the state of Connecticut, the hospital, that fucking guard who’d kneed me. I’d have that son of a bitch hanging by his balls before I was through. So what if I’d gotten a little out of control? So fucking what?
I went back in the kitchen for a beer. Did we still have those Tylenol with codeine left over from her root canal? Where had I seen those things? Not in the medicine cabinet, of course. Not with Joy’s “system.” Keeps aspirin in the phone book drawer, peanut butter in the fridge. “Where’s the vacuum cleaner bags?” I asked her the other day when I was cleaning out her car for her.
“Under the couch,” she says, like that was the most logical place in the world.
The answering machine had . . . six, seven, eight blinks. Fuck. I hit the button.
Beep. “This is Henry Rood, 67 Gillette Street, and this is my fourth call in three days.” I clamped my eyes shut and saw that peeling three-story Victorian headache of his. Saw Rood and his wife with their little his-and-hers potbellies, their rosy alcoholic faces. “I’d like to know when in hell you’re going to get back to work over here, if that’s not too much to ask. If at all possible, I would like to be able to look out my office window by the time the snow flies and not see your scaffolding!”
Before the snow flies: that was cute. Well, not tomorrow, Henry. There was no way in hell I was going to be climbing up and down ladders for the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours. I was going to be down at Hatch, figuring out how to spring my brother. Shit, I’d hire a fucking helicopter if I had to. Get him out of there like they did in that Charles Bronson movie the other night on HBO. . . .
Beep. A hang-up. A freebie.
Beep. Somebody at the something-something Examiner wanting to interview Thomas. When hell freezes over, pal. Order yourself a cream drink. Get in line behind Connie Chung.
Beep. Did I have this one right? Some guy from New York wanted to be my brother’s booking agent? I closed my eyes, leaned my forehead against the kitchen cabinet. Reached out and hit the stop button without looking. Shit, man, when was this whole thing going to end?
There were four cans of Lite in the refrigerator. Sixteen-ouncers. After I’d specifically told her not to get Lite beer. She was going to make a great bartender, the way she listened. I grabbed the beers by the plastic ring anyway. Yanked one, popped the top, chugged a third of the can nonstop.
I looked through the cupboard, the freezer. Fished through Joy’s Lean Cuisines. Considered the turkey tetrazzini. With the portions they gave you, eating those things was like foreplay. Plus you had to wait around for twenty minutes. There were a couple of hot dogs in there—left over from the Ice Age from the looks of them. A can of Chunky clam chowder in the cabinet—New England chowder, naturally, because I’d told her I liked Manhattan.
I hit the message button again. Beep. “Ray Birdsey. 3:30 P.M. 867-0359.”
Real considerate, Ray. You never can tell when I’m going to go prematurely senile and forget the family phone number. I told myself I should call him back. Let him know about the mix-up—about having to leave Thomas at Hatch. He was his stepfather, wasn’t he?
Beep. “This call is for Joy? From Jackie at A New You?” I picked up my beer again and drank. “Just wanted to let you know that the cocktail dress you were interested in is here now. We’re open every day till five-thirty. Thanks!”
If she was running up her charges again, she could forget about me bailing her out. What had we been invited to that she needed a new cocktail dress, anyway? I stopped the tape, took another swig.
I closed my eyes and saw Robocop again: ice-blue eyes, acne scars. What had he said? “This one’s crazier than the brother.” I opened up the soup and poured it into a pan. Threw in the dogs. Canned soup and hot dogs for supper. And where’s the woman of the house? Over at the community college learning how to mix cream drinks. Poor Ma was probably rolling over in her grave.
God, my testicles were killing me. Where were those codeine pills, anyway? I’d seen them someplace. . . . Okay, I admitted it: I’d acted like a jerk down there. Saw now that I should have played it calm and cool. Story of my life: acting like a hothead, especially when it came to Thomas. But did that give the bastard the right to knee me in the nuts? What I should probably do was get back in the truck and drive over to the emergency room at Shanley. Have them examine me. Get it documented in case I decided to sue. I should sue, too—go after that guy personally with some shark of a lawyer. Knee him back, in the bank account. I had witnesses, up to and including that social worker who’d poked her head out the door. Only there was no way in hell I was going back to any hospital tonight. I popped another beer. Went looking for those pills of Joy’s.
They were in the medicine cabinet after all, behind her Oil of Olay. She gets logical every once in a while. Has a temporary bout of organization. I washed down a couple of pills with the beer. “Caution: may cause drowsiness.” Shit, man, let it happen. Let this day end. . . . Ever since Thomas cut off his hand, I hadn’t slept for shit. Had woken up like clockwork every night at two-thirty. Gotten out of bed and sat there on the couch in my skivvies, channel-flipping past Sy Sperling and Hawaii Five-O and that muscle guy who claims a flat stomach’s the way to happily-ever-after. . . . When I closed the medicine cabinet, I saw Thomas’s face in the mirror.
Had they at least given him something to zonk him out down there? Was he at least sleeping through this nightmare? If anyone hurt him, they were going to have to answer to me. They were going to have to cry for mercy.
Back in the kitchen, I reread Joy’s note: cream drinks, Connie Chung. Good God. I balled up the note, shot it toward the garbage. Bricked it.
It figured, didn’t it? The one night I could have really used a little moral support and she’s out at bartender school with her little gay boyfriend. Thad the massage therapist. The Duchess. I’d started calling him that when we went over to him and his boyfriend’s house for dinner and he made those duchess potato things. Joy hates it when I call him that: the Duchess. “You’re homophobic,” she said the other night. Which I don’t really consider myself. My opinion is, they can do anything they want with each other as long as they don’t invite me to the party. . . . Homophobic. Where’d she get her psychology degree from? Geraldo Rivera Community College?
This was Joy’s big plan: she was going to learn bartending and then moonlight until she paid off the rest of her MasterCard. Back in ’87, after her second marriage busted up, she’d gone on a nine-month charging spree. Shopped till she dropped. She still owed $8,000, down from $12,500 since I loaned her a thousand and the collection agency started attaching her pay down at the health club.
That’s where I met Joy—down at Hardbodies. It was after Ma died. After Nedra Frank hijacked my grandfather’s life story and disappeared. Dessa and I had been history for about a year and a half by then, and it still hurt like hell. Leo was the one who kept bugging me to join up at Hardbodies with him; they were running one of those two-for-one “buddy membership” specials. I kept telling him I didn’t have the time or the interest to join a gym, but he wore me down. Talked me into it. Fucking Leo, man: Mr. Car Salesman. Mr. Bullshitter. He could talk a Tahitian into buying snow tires.
We go way back, Leo and me—all the way back to 1966: summer school remedial algebra. He’s my ex-brother-in-law, too—married to Dessa’s sister, Angie. I was best man at Leo and Angie’s wedding, and he was best man at Dessa’s and mine. They got married three months after we did. It was your basic shotgun situation: Angie was three months pregnant. She lost it, though. Miscarried while they were on their honeymoon in Aruba. God, if that kid had lived, it’d be what? Seventeen by now? Eighteen? Everyone thought it was an accident—Angie’s pregnancy—but come to find out, she did it on purpose. Leo told me a while back, after they ended up in marriage counseling. She just came out with it one session: that she’d wanted to get married because her big sister was getting married. When she dropped that little bombshell, Leo was pissed !
She’s good people, Angie, but she’s always been jealous of Dessa. Always looking over her shoulder to see what Dessa has, who loves Dessa better than they love her. When the four of us were newlyweds—Leo and Angie, Dessa and me—we used to hang out together all the time. Go to the beach together, go to each other’s apartments and play cards. It got a little intense, though. All that unspoken competition. If Dessa hung baskets on our kitchen wall, Angie had to go home and hang some on hers. If we got a sleep-sofa, Angie and Leo would suddenly need a sleep-sofa. Angie finally got the upper hand when she had Shannon. Dessa and I had been trying for years to have a kid. Had been to two fertility specialists—put up with one humiliation after another. It’s funny, when you think about it, though: of the two couples, Dessa and I were the ones everyone predicted would last. Us included. “They’re never going to make it,” we used to say about Leo and Angie. They’d fight all the time, right in front of you. In front of Dessa and Angie’s parents, even. One time, we were all over there for dinner and Angie started chucking dinner rolls across the table at Leo. He’d said she was fat or something, I can’t remember. Easter, it was. Greek Easter.
The reason Leo wanted me to join the health club with him was because he’d auditioned for this new sports drink commercial down in New York, made the first cut, and then gotten stiffed. (Twenty years out of acting school, nine years selling cars, and he’s still waiting for his big break in show biz. You want to say to him, “Wake up, Leo! It didn’t happen!”) When he pressed the casting director about why he didn’t get the part, she told him that he was the right age—they were targeting baby boomers—but that they were looking for somebody with a “better bod.” Leo had begun to put on a few pounds around the middle; even I’d noticed it, and I don’t usually notice shit like that. It practically killed him when he heard that, though. She might as well have stuck a dagger in his heart. “Look at this, Birdseed,” he’d say, pinching a little of his spare tire. “A knit shirt, man. That’s the acid test.” He wouldn’t drop it. It was like he was facing his immortality or something. Leo’s more vain about his appearance than any woman I know. Always has been. Which is kind of funny, because Angie never bothers with makeup or dresses or any of that stuff. Lives in jeans and sweatshirts: what you see is what you get.
I actually started liking it down at Hardbodies, though. Not the weight machines or the exercise bikes or any of that shit. There aren’t enough hours in the day as it is and I’m going to waste time riding a bike to nowhere? What I liked was the racquetball. Smashing those little blue balls against four walls felt good to me in a way nothing else had for a long time. Felt therapeutic, I guess. Racquetball spends you, you know? Sweats the piss and vinegar right out of you. Those little rubber balls can be anybody.
I met Joy the first day, right when Leo and I walked in the front door. Joy’s the membership coordinator—the one who gives you the tour, then signs you up and takes the photos for your ID card. “Okay, there, good-looking,” she said, from behind the camera. “Smile!” Said it to me, not Leo, who’s never passed by a mirror he hasn’t fallen in love with. “I’ll laminate you guys and you can pick these up at the desk after your game,” Joy told us after she took our ID pictures.
“Or,” Leo said, leaning over the desk, “we can skip the game and you can just laminate us.”
She shut him down cold just by the way she looked at him. Iced the guy.
“You know, Leo,” I told him as we headed toward the locker room that day, “you’re like in a time warp or something. Women these days hate that kind of talk.”
“Bullshit,” Leo said. “You mark my words, Birdseed. That one would screw anything.” He held up the handle of his racquetball racquet. “She’d screw this. She’d screw you, for Christ’s sake!”
That first day, she was wearing one of those ass-hugging pink Lycra things and a pink sweatshirt knotted around her shoulders. Okay, good-looking. Smile! That one little comment was like a life raft tossed to a drowning man.
I asked her out two or three visits later; I’d just beaten Leo and some other guy three games in a row in this round robin thing we were playing. I was feeling a little cocky, I guess. Leo dared me to and I just did it. It wasn’t until after she’d said yes that the cold sweat crept over me. For one thing, Joy’s a very good-looking woman—short, blond, in great shape from all those machines at the club. For another thing, she’s fifteen years younger than I am. Joy was born in 1965. The year Sandy Koufax pitched his perfect game against the Cubs. The year after the Mustang came out. Joy’s mother’s only five years older than I am. Nancy. Now there’s a trip. On her fifth husband: Mr. and Mrs. Homeopathy. They’re always sending us yeast and extracts in the mail, which we keep for a while to be polite and then flush down the toilet. Joy’s last “stepfather” was a junkie.
It turned out better than I expected, though—Joy’s and my first date. It went great. I picked her up at work and we drove down to Ocean Beach. There was a full moon out; the sky was clear. We played Skee-ball, ate soft ice cream. Danced on the boardwalk to the music of these goofy father-and-son Elvis impersonators. The son was dressed all in black—young Elvis. The father was fat, white-jumpsuit Elvis. End-of-the-road Elvis, which, at Joy’s age, is the only Elvis she remembers. They took turns: first the son would do “Heartbreak Hotel,” and then the father would do “Hunka Hunka Burning Love.” It went back and forth. Everyone was dancing and singing along, and every guy there was checking out Joy. I don’t know, it just felt like I was back from the dead or something. Felt like: okay, Life After Dessa. This is doable after all.
I cut up the hot dogs and poured the soup in a bowl. Invented a new recipe: Clam & Hot Dog Chowder. I found some saltines that were so stale they were almost bendable. You say to her, “Joy, just twist the wrapper on the end so they’ll stay good,” and she stands there, looks at you like she’s from some other planet. Which, in some ways, it almost seems like. It’s the age difference. We both try and tell ourselves it doesn’t matter, but it does. How couldn’t it?
Here’s what Ray said when I told him we were living together: “Jesus God Almighty, she’s only twenty-three years old and she’s gone through two husbands already?” I hadn’t made any big announcement or anything—hadn’t sent him a notice that she’d moved her leotards into my dresser, her futon and wicker furniture into the living room. Ray just called one morning and wanted to know who the “chippy” was who was answering the phone at 8:00 A.M., so I told him. And that was his response. Not “Gee, I’d like to meet her.” Or, “Well, it’s time you moved on.” Just, “Twenty-three years old and she’s already gone through two husbands?” See, Ray was always crazy about Dessa. Used to call her his “little sweetie” and stuff like that. He could even get, I don’t know, playful with Dessa. He treated her a lot nicer than he ever treated Ma. It would never bother me much when we went over there, but then later on it would. Dessa used to always say how “needy” Ray was, how “on the surface” his insecurities were. She was always declawing him for me—analyzing him to the point where my stepfather seemed almost sympathetic, which I hated. “Hey, you didn’t have to grow up with the guy,” I used to remind her. “He’s a lot more mellow now than he used to be.” Ray’s always assumed that Dessa’s and my divorce was 100 percent my fault. My failure. That his “little sweetie” was blameless. Even though she left me. Even though I was the one who wanted to try and work things out. The only one of the two of us who’d meant “for better or worse.”
It was great for a while, though—Joy and me. She’s from Anaheim, California. She’d been out here almost three years but hadn’t really seen that much. We used to travel on weekends—up to the Cape, over to Newport, down to New York. For a while, the only sex we had was in motels. Joy had a studio apartment and a roommate, so that didn’t work. And, I guess this was stupid, but I just didn’t want to do her on Dessa’s and my old bed. I finally drove that thing over to Goodwill and bought a brand-new mattress and box spring. It was pretty wild, though—all that motel sex with Joy. It was like a drug or something. Here she was fifteen years younger and she was teaching me things.
Leo says it’s a trend: that younger women are much sluttier than women our age. He and I were driving home from Fenway when we had that particular conversation, I remember. New York had just humiliated the Sox. “I didn’t say she was slutty,” I corrected him. “I said she was uninhibited.”
He laughed out loud. “Slutty. Uninhibited. Same difference, Birdseed.” We’d just stopped at the drive-thru at Burger King and were cruising along the Mass Pike, me driving, naturally. Leo’s stuffing his face and talking about blow jobs: women who like it versus women who are doing you a big favor; women who swallow versus women who won’t. He wanted to know which category Joy was in.
“What do you mean, what ‘category’?”
“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 her. 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 Openness. 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.”
She let go of my hand and put herself against me—reached up under my balls and stroked me there. Smiled. Watched me blink. Watched me swallow. Good sex with Dessa was something we’d taught each other, but Joy came into the thing we had already knowing what would drive me crazy. Same things that had driven her two husbands crazy, I guess. And her uncle.
“What about what I expect?” she said. “Doesn’t that count for anything?” Her finger kept stroking. In another ten seconds, she’d get whatever she wanted.
I took her hand by the wrist and held it away from me. Stared at her. Waited.
“It’s not . . . ,” she said.
“It’s not what?”
“It’s not that I don’t like him. I do like him, Dominick. He’s a nice guy, in his own weird way. But he scares me. The way he acts sometimes. The way he looks at me.”
It was crap, what she was implying: that Thomas was eyeballing her. Lusting after her. I mean, most guys do. Joy’s a very good-looking woman. She gets her share of ogling. But with all the medication he’s taken over the years, my brother has about as much sex drive as a mannequin. “How does he look at you?” I said. “Give me the specifics.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It isn’t even really that. He just kind of gives me the creeps.”
“He gives everybody the creeps,” I said. I was still squeezing her wrist. Squeezing it a little harder, even.
“Yeah, but . . . well, part of it—I’m just trying to be honest, okay, Dominick? Don’t get mad, but . . . part of it is that you and he look so much alike. That’s what’s a little scary. Sometimes he seems like some weird version of you.”
I kept looking at her until she looked away. Then I let go of her hand and stepped into the shower.
“Hey, just forget it, okay?” she called in, over the hiss of the water. “Go ahead. Bring him over. I’ll deal with it. It’s my problem, not yours. I’m sorry, Dominick. Okay?”
Her hand reached past the plastic curtain and inside for my hand. I stood there and watched it move, searching, like the grope of a blind person. I refused to grab it, to take her small, perfect hand in some soggy gesture that gave her permission to feel that way—to say what she’d just said about him.
I wouldn’t give her that. I couldn’t. Which is probably, right there, why it’s never going to work with her and me.
I picked up Thomas same as usual that day. Drove him all the way up to the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., which he didn’t give a crap about seeing. Took him out to eat at a Red Lobster on the way home, where he spilled melted butter all over himself. Got back purposely late. I gave Joy the silent treatment for the next couple of days—treated her so shabbily that I ended up rooting for her instead of me. She doesn’t have it easy living with me. I know that. You try being the brother of a paranoid schizophrenic. See if it doesn’t royally fuck up your life. Your relationships.
I stood there staring at the blinking message machine. Remembered the other phone messages—the ones I hadn’t listened to yet. Hit the button.
Beep. “Good afternoon, Mr. Birdsey. This is Henry Rood again. It’s five o’clock, sir—the end of the workday.” (He was slurring his words, had jumped the gun on cocktail hour again.) “Not that your workday ever began, Mr. Birdsey. At least not here it didn’t. I’m still waiting for you to return one of the five calls I’ve made to you now. I’m marking them down—all my attempts to communicate with you. I have a little pad here. Maybe I should just call the Better Business Bureau instead.”
“Maybe you should just blow it out your ass,” I told the machine. I’d get to his freakin’ house when I got to it.
Beep. “Uh, yeah, hello. My name is Lisa Sheffer. I’m trying to reach Dominick Birdsey? In regard to Thomas Birdsey? Your brother?”
Here we go again, I thought. What illustrious organization are you with, honey? Hard Copy? Geraldo?
“I’m a social worker at Hatch Forensic Institute and I’ve been assigned to him, or he’s been assigned to me, or whatever. . . . I know you were pretty upset tonight when you came in with him, and I just thought you might want to talk to me? Have me walk you through the procedures down here or whatever? You can give me a call if you want to. I’m going to be in my office until about ten o’clock tonight.” I looked up at the clock. Fuck! It was twenty after ten. “Or, you can call me tomorrow. Relax, now. Okay? Okay.”
End of message. Shit! If I had just listened to the whole goddamned tape as soon as I got home. . . .
But the voice spoke again.
“I, um, I just talked to him. We just had a nice talk. He’s okay. He’s fine, under the circumstances. Really. I know you had a bad . . . sometimes some of the guards here can get a little . . . well, he’s okay. Your brother. Inside the unit, it’s not like, you know, a torture chamber or anything. It’s really a pretty humane place, for the most part. I just thought it might help if you knew that after what happened tonight. Okay? . . . They’ve got him on one-to-one observation in a room right across from the nurses’ station. Which is good, right? And the nurse who’s on tonight is super. I know her. . . . So, anyway, just relax. And like I said, call me if you want to. So, uh . . . well, no. That’s it, I guess. Bye.”
I tried calling her back. Maybe she’d stayed later than she’d planned. But there was no answer.
I went into the living room and stood there, channel-flipping. Lisa Sheffer: at least she sounded somewhat human. I paced. Went into the bathroom and popped another of Joy’s pills. The codeine was either working or it wasn’t working—I wasn’t sure. I was still sore down there below the belt, but it was like, who gives a shit? Which I guess meant that it was working. . . .
I woke up from a dream where I was apologizing to Connie Chung for something. Begging her to forgive me. To give me the key so that I could unlock my brother. “La chiave,” she said. “Say it. La chiave.”
When I opened my eyes, Joy was sitting on the couch next to me. “Hi,” she said.
She ran her fingers through my hair. “He looks like a little boy when he first wakes up, doesn’t he?” she said. At first, I didn’t know who she was talking to, or if I was still dreaming or what. Then I saw him. The Duchess. He was sitting across the room on her overstuffed futon, smiling at me. They both had drinks in their hands. Cream drinks.
“How are you?” Joy said.
“I’m all right,” I said. “I’m good.”
“Good,” she said. She put her hand to my face. Stroked my cheek with her shoplifter’s fingers. They were damp from her drink. Damp and cold.