It Feels So Good When I Stop Joe Pernice

Prev Next

I HAD A one-nighter in college that turned into a one-weekender. Another friend-of-a-friend thing. Her name was Julie. On Sunday afternoon I could tell Julie was getting too attached. She kept saying—in a blushing, pleasantly surprised way—that she never did things like this. She also thought it was cute the way I had to sleep with socks on. So I made sure my Friday-night disclaimer was still fresh in her mind. She had just bounded in from the kitchen, back to her futon with a tuna salad sandwich on toasted seven-grain bread. She took Court and Spark out of the tape player. She said she understood that I was unavailable for anything more, but that she couldn’t say she wasn’t disappointed. She thought maybe the weekend had changed my mind. I told her I didn’t think it had. I felt shitty about the whole thing. I didn’t want to sleep over her place that night, but I did anyway.

I woke up in Marie’s bed. She was getting dressed in the early-morning gray. She parted the curtains. The room went Technicolor. I faked the tail end of sleep and watched her. She was about the same height as Jocelyn, but thicker in almost every way. She picked up some clothes off the floor like she was cleaning up a careless mistake. A tattoo snake rose up the back of her neck and buried its head in her short black bob.

My head was spinning and I was thirsty. I thought about what I was going to say to her. I finally sat up and lit a smoke. Marie kept looking the other way.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey.”

“How you feeling? ”

“Like shit.”

“I’m not great, but I’ll live.”

She stayed as far away from me as she could without leaving the room. She lit a smoke from the pack on her dresser and finally faced me. Her eyes were saddled and dark. “How exactly did you get here? ”

I told her.

She nodded. “Did I suck you off? ”

“You tried to, but—”

“But you stopped me.”

I nodded.

“Did we fuck? ”

“No.” I peeled back the covers to show I was still wearing my pants. “We made out, but nothing really happened.”

“I’m sorry.”

She was sorry? I wasn’t expecting an apology. “Don’t be, please. Nothing happened.” I got up and started to gather the rest of my clothes.

“It’s not fucking you I’m sorry about.”

“But we didn’t.”

“I don’t care if we did. I’m sorry for showing up at your door in the middle of the night wasted.”

“You weren’t that wasted,” I lied.

“When you can’t remember if you let a perfect stranger come in your mouth . . .” She was leaning against a desk. She put her head down. “I’m just sorry, that’s all.”

“Okay.” If that had been Jocelyn there on the other side of the room, I don’t know what she would have done to me. She sure as fuck wouldn’t have apologized.

“ ROY ’S GETTING really big,” I said.

Pamela grunted as she extracted him from the car seat. “Tell me about it.” She looked tired but, on the whole, the best I’d seen since before she’d had Roy. Maybe it was the clothes. She wasn’t wearing one of her usual frumpy Sears pantsuits.

I touched her turtleneck sweater. “Is that cashmere? ”

“Silk,” she said proudly.

“Nice.”

“I figured, what the hell, right? ”

Roy’s feet hit the sidewalk, and he ran directly into my arms. “Hey, buddy, remember me? ”

Pamela lit up. “Wow. He only goes to people he really knows.”

“That is so amazing.”

“It’s only because you and I have the same nose.”

“No, it’s more than that.”

“You think? ”

“You’re a natural. I told you so.”

“Natural what?” Roy tried to reprise the glasses-swiping game.

“Gentle, baby,” Pamela said. “Gen-tull.”

“It’s okay.” I folded my glasses and put them in my pocket. Roy was pissed off. He hollered.

“It’s okay, baby.” Pamela distracted him with the small flashlight on her key chain. “He’s at that age where he wants everything. And if you don’t give it to him, watch out.”

No shit.

“He bit my neck the other day, look.” She rolled back the foreskin of her turtleneck. There was a purple bruise over her carotid artery.

“Holy shit. He got you pretty good. What did you do to get that? ”

“I wouldn’t let him have a lightbulb.”

“Oh, Christ.”

“I know, right? ”

“Sounds rough.”

“It is rough. Really rough. But it’s easier, too, in some ways, if you know what I’m talking about.” She didn’t want to say too much in front of Roy. “Has he been around much? ”

“Who? James? ”

“No,” she said with the kind of sarcasm that has sunk many a sitcom pilot. “Yes, James.”

“A couple times, quick. Him and Dogshit.” Pamela shook her head at the mention of his name. “They stopped by and fixed something. Fuck if I know what.”

“Easy with the language,” Pamela said. “He’s starting to repeat things.”

“Sorry.” I turned to Roy. “Sorry, kid. Don’t do what I do.”

“You sound just like Dad,” Pamela said. Countless times I’ve heard my father say those very words—don’t do what I do—seconds before doing something like stick a screwdriver into a dark recess of a running car engine. “Him and Ma been down yet?” She sounded like she was privy to something I wasn’t.

“You fucking told them I’m here?”

“No, I did not. And watch your mouth, please.” Roy recognized the annoyed and imperative qualities in his mother’s voice. He stopped jiggling the keys and gave us his undivided attention. Pamela softened. “But you know how they are. Empty house. Neighbors gone for the winter. I wouldn’t be surprised if they drive down once a week to make sure nobody stole the paint off the shutters.”

She was right. “Or the sconces,” I added.

“Or the sconces.”

Our parents were mildly insane that way. It should have been much funnier than it was. Roy was smiling.

“What about ‘Show me the couch’? ” I said. It was a famous story in our family.

“Oh, Christ almighty.” Now it was Pamela who sounded like our father.

When Pamela was sixteen, she volunteered to hang out at our aunt Christie’s apartment in East Boston and sign for the new couch that Jordan’s Furniture was delivering sometime between nine in the morning and four in the afternoon. My aunt Christie was an air-traffic controller at Logan Airport and couldn’t miss work. Her apartment was on the top floor of a four-story walk-up.

My old man was not into the idea of Pamela’s being alone with three or four furniture movers, as it’s well documented how fond furniture movers are of squeezing unscheduled gang rapes into their busy days.

My old man walked Pamela through the correct answers, then quizzed her:

Old Man: And what are you going to say when the movers buzz up from the lobby?

Pamela: Who is it?

OM: And when they knock on Aunt Christie’s door, then what are you going to say?

P: Who is it?

OM: And after they identify themselves as the movers, and you see them through the peephole, what are you going to say before letting them in?

P: Just a minute, I’m naked?

OM: Don’t be a smart-ass. I’m serious here.

P: Show me the couch. I say, “Show me the couch.”

OM: Exactly. Show me the couch.

I took a smoke from my pack, and Pamela motioned wordlessly, like a blackjack player who wants the dealer to keep ’em comin’.

“You don’t smoke,” I said.

“Oh, shut up.” She tickled Roy’s chin and said in a cartoon voice, “Show me the couch. Your grandparents are crazy, crazy, crazy.” He collapsed in a giggling heap on the driveway. Pamela turned to me. “But you are going to have to tell them you guys split up, you know?”

“Thanks,” I said sarcastically. “I had no fucking idea.”

“I’m just saying, you might want to do it sooner than later.”

“What for?”

“They’re reserving the function room at the Knights of Columbus for a party for you guys.”

“Are you fucking serious?”

She nodded. “Around Christmas.”

“Shit.”

“I told Ma you guys meant it, you didn’t want a party or anything.”

“What did she say?”

“That it wasn’t about what you wanted.”

“Fucking Ma. I swear to God, we should have kept getting married a secret.”

Pamela couldn’t resist. “What were you going to do, never tell anyone?”

“Not never. When we knew it was going to work out, then . . .”

“You’re kidding?”

“What, is that so wrong?”

“Whatever. It’s your business.” She didn’t want to get sucked deeper into the conversation she’d started. She took refuge in her pocketbook, feeling around in it like doing so was her sole purpose in life. “Tell me I did not forget my Visine, Roy.”

“Not telling anyone certainly would have made splitting up a lot easier,” I said.

Pamela responded by not responding.

I had at her. “And do me a favor. Spare me the ‘You can’t leave yourself a trapdoor and expect your relationship to work’ crap.”

“Fine. Do I look like I’m not sparing you?” She had the contents of the bag emptied onto the sidewalk.

“But you do think that, though, don’t you? That you can’t have a trapdoor?”

“Are you asking me or are you not asking me?”

“Yes, I’m asking you.”

“The answer is no. You can’t.”

“Oh, okay. So you honestly thought you were going to stay married to James? Forever?”

“I didn’t think it was going to be easy, but I thought I was signing on for good.”

“Yeah, well, it looks like I was right, and you were wrong.” That hurt her.

“Why are you being such a fucking asshole? Just because you’re screwed up and having a shit time doesn’t mean you get to be cruel.” She was right, and I was sorry I’d hit her that hard. “And to me of all people. You call me out of the blue—”

“I know. I know. I didn’t mean that.” I was trying to head her off before she could recap her generosity and my selfishness. But she wasn’t going to stop until she’d gone through at least one cycle of letting me know how she felt about the whole thing. I got out of her way.

“And you tell me all this crazy, über-dramatic shit—like my plate isn’t buried already. You need a place to stay, a few dollars, and I say, ‘No problem.’ ”

I felt like a shit for making her cry right in front of Roy. “You’re right. I’m sorry. Please, stop crying.” I touched her arm, partly so Roy would sense that affection still existed in the world. “Mommy doesn’t feel so good, Roy.”

Pamela regrouped.

I looked her right in the eyes. “I appreciate everything. I really do. If it wasn’t for you, I’d be screwed royally.”

“No you wouldn’t, you idiot. You’d be inconvenienced. Confused. Scared, God forbid. And then you’d have to figure it out like every other slob. Jesus Christ.”

I was going to say something smart-assed to Roy, like how Mommy was obviously feeling a lot better, but I didn’t. I watched as my sister threw the former contents, one item at a time, back into the bag. When I finally spoke, it was just above a whisper. “Well, I do mean it. Thanks for helping me.”

“Right.” She didn’t look at me as she snapped her bag closed.

“What, you want me to get out of the house?”

“No. Come on, Roy. Mommy’s got to make a detour to CVS.”

“Well, maybe I could watch him here and there. You know, to earn my keep.”

Pamela laughed.

I WOKE UP a few hours after Jocelyn split for work. Waking up alone was one of my favorite things about New York. I had a smoke in bed and listened to the wilderness. Sixth Avenue just below Ninth Street in Brooklyn was lined with old elm and oak trees. From late spring to early fall, Jocelyn’s bedroom looked out into the jiggling bosom of an enormous green sequined dress.

I was planning on going out to Shea Stadium for an afternoon guided tour. Jocelyn thought baseball was sexist, and on top of that, she wondered, why should baseball players make so much more money than teachers or social workers. I told her it was about supply and demand. She said two-thirds of the earth was covered with assholes.

Luckily for me, Redbook was “in ship” that week. Even Jocelyn’s lunches were working ones. She was bummed out because she wanted to squeeze every last drop of together time from my visit.

Jocelyn had one of those Bodum plunger coffeemakers. They make horrible-tasting coffee. Jocelyn disagreed, which is why she had one in the first place. I called it a Scrodum instead of a Bodum. She didn’t think that was too funny.

I poured the rest of the cold coffee into a three-pound mug Jocelyn received as a gift when she was a second-semester lesbian in college. The potter’s name was Sue, but she went by Brianna. She and Jocelyn had a brief thing. Jocelyn was stingy when it came to divulging the details of it. I asked her if Brianna was good looking. Jocelyn said it wasn’t about that. I asked her what they did in bed. She said they pretty much just made out, and, no, asshole, the first time wasn’t after a Sweet Honey in the Rock concert.

I couldn’t believe they didn’t go any further than making out. When I pressed her, she asked me why I wanted to know so much. I told her it was the responsible thing, what with AIDS and all. Jocelyn held up her pussy finger and wiggled it ever so slightly, then left it in the “Fuck you” position.

I brought up Sue/Brianna’s names once while Jocelyn and I were fucking. It was a big no-no. She was unpredictable like that. She’d ask me to slap her on the ass now and then, but if I initiated it, she acted like I’d asked to watch the gutter bum of my choice take a piss in her mouth.

I was craving some toast, but Jocelyn only had rye bread. I didn’t have any because it tastes like medicine to me. I lit another smoke and sat at the table with my coffee. My hands were shaky. The latest issue of The New Yorker topped a neat pile of back issues. I read a few cartoons, then got the show on the road. I took my smoke and coffee with me to the can. Jocelyn left a note for me on the back of the toilet because she knew I’d find it there: “Tried to wake you. Free for lunch, after all. Come by office. Noon sharp. xoxoj.”

Fuck me. I lifted the seat cover, and the note slipped out of sight behind the shitter. Problem solved. I sat on the hoop and pulled a random issue of Redbook from the wicker magazine box. Cybill Shepherd was on the cover wearing a Calvin Klein tan herringbone tweed skirt and blazer ($1,995; Saks Fifth Avenue); white pinpoint Oxford shirt by Pink ($295; Pink, NYC); green armadillo cowboy boots by Justin ($895; Barneys New York).

According to the blurb on the cover, Cybill was revealing to Redbook’s readers her secret to having it all: children, romance, and career. I found Jocelyn’s name under the junior editors’ section of the masthead. Then I went straight to the Cybill Shepherd article. I jerked off to a photo spread of her—in full equestrian gear—grooming a horse named Lemonade.

Around one o’clock I called Jocelyn from Shea Stadium. I knew she’d be too busy to pitch a proper fit. I got the short form.

“Where the fuck were you?”

I could hear telephones and fax machines exploding in the background. “What are you talking about?”

“Didn’t you see my note?”

“What note?”

“You know what? I can’t talk to you about this now.”

“What note?”

I TOSSED AND TURNED most of the night. My dog bite itched, and I was trying to calculate the size of the wrench I’d tossed into things by spending the night with Marie. It was plenty big enough to beat myself up with. I finally knocked myself unconscious. I couldn’t have been asleep too long when James barged in with Roy. They were an hour early. I had no intention of telling him about Marie or the dog attack. Roy couldn’t rat me out even if he wanted to.

“It’s Roto-Rooter,” James said. “We’re here about your clog.”

“Fuck, James. You said you’d be here at nine.” I was not my usual ray-of-golden-sunshine self.

“Definitely not.”

I pushed back at him from beneath the covers. “Definitely yes.”

“Definitely not the case, but we’re here now, aren’t we?” He underhanded Roy on top of me. “Teach ’em a lesson about punctuality, kid.”

Roy squirmed his way up like a slimy newborn kangaroo trying to make it to his mother’s pouch. When he got to my head, he licked my chin. It tickled. Roy laughed after I did. Why he was so happy to see me, I had no idea. It felt pretty good, but I was suspicious.

“Pamela told me she stopped by with the kid,” James said. “I assume since she didn’t chew my dick down to the nub that you didn’t tell her anything. But then I got to thinking, What if you did, and she was just playing dumb and collecting evidence?”

“That seems kind of elaborate.”

“Maybe yes. Maybe no.”

“I got to tell you, I don’t feel so hot about lying to her. She’s down on me as it is.”

“That’s crazy,” James said. I was letting Roy bounce on my chest. “You and Roy can’t do no wrong in her eyes.”

“I still don’t like lying to her.”

“But you did lie, right?”

“Yeah, I lied to her.”

James wasn’t satisfied. “What did you say, exactly?”

“I don’t know. I just pretended like I hadn’t seen you in a while.”

“Good. Just so long as we’re on the same page.” He went to the bathroom to see how his hinge repair was still holding up. “It’s not really lying,” he yelled. “And I’m the one who’s lying anyway.”

I heard him open and close the door a few times.

When he came back he said, “God, this room really stinks. Did you queef?”

“Yes. Right out of my vagina.”

“I’m not kidding. It smells like a sore throat in here.” He took a more forensic, sour-faced whiff. “A sore throat and old butter.”

For once, he was exactly right.

JOCELYN AND I had maybe five or six “officially broken-up” periods. I initiated all of them. During the first one, I promptly slept with an older waitress at Esposito’s who was into kayaking and talking about being “on her moons.” Her name was Leyla. I heard every third word she said. Her face was perpetually sunburned and her hair was a blown-out yellow. She was in an open marriage with a carpenter named Dylan. She called him Dill when she referred to him—which she did a lot; it was a testament to their open-marital strength. Dill was off somewhere building houses in the Pacific Northwest. We lubed ourselves up by drinking the beer he brewed. Each brown bottle had a label with a roofer’s hammer and Dill’s Own Lager printed on it. As I sunk into his wife, I half expected him to pop home and sink a roofing hammer into me before driving straight back to fucking Spokane.

“It’s obvious you’re still in love with her,” Leyla said as she wrestled herself out of her Wranglers. “Look at me and Dill. We’re in love with each other. Sometimes though, you need a freebie.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” I said as I stuffed my socks into my shoes to expedite my exit. “But isn’t a freebie when a hooker gives you a turn on the house?”

“No. It means you do it because you’re free to.”

Two days later I called Jocelyn and asked her if she wanted to talk. She wanted to know why. I told her I didn’t want her to move to New York, that we should get married. She said she didn’t think she could count on me, but to come over anyway if I was serious about talking. We sat on her bed. The first thing she asked me was if I’d been with anyone else. I lied to her because I was ashamed and I knew she’d never let me forget it. She kept asking. She said, no, really, it would be okay, honest—especially since we were split up—as long as I told her the truth about it. Amherst is a small town. She didn’t want to be the only idiot who didn’t know. I resisted further. She said if I was honest with her, we could start over—right then and there—swear to God—with a clean slate. She was all smiles and understanding. I thought about Keith Richards having all of his poisoned blood replaced with a supply that was fresh, promising, and bright. I came clean—sort of. I told Jocelyn that Leyla and I had protected sex—missionary position only—one time. And by “one time” I meant I’d had a single, unsatisfying—depressing, if you really must know—semi-orgasm.

Jocelyn went totally fucking ballistic. She didn’t know what was worse—that I lied to her or that I “stuck my dick into that smoky old purse.” She was so upset she skinned a pillow alive, rolled the case into a ball, and threw it at a glass on her dresser.

She wanted to know how I could be so fucking cruel and vulgar? I told her I was still in love with her, and that we weren’t even going out at the time. That made it worse. She started crying and said she was crushed that I could turn off my feelings for her so quickly. I told her I hadn’t turned off anything. She asked me why I did it if I was still so in love with her? I think Leyla might have been right, that I just needed a freebie. But I told Jocelyn I didn’t know why I did it. Jocelyn wasn’t happy about that answer. I told her I’d make something up if she wanted me to. She said she’d take me back if I was absolutely explicit about what Leyla and I did to each other, where we did it, who else knew about it, et cetera. It was like she’d prepared a list long beforehand because she knew I’d be unfaithful at some point, which, technically I had not been. She made me feel like I’d been cheating on her since day one with her best friend, when all I’d done was bend the truth.

She pressed me for the details. Fool me once. I gave her the answers that I’d want to hear if I was in her position. I’d never believe them, but I’d still want to hear them.

I WAS WORRIED about getting attacked by Tinker again, but more than that, I didn’t want to run into Marie. I had a growing feeling that once she sobered up and thought about it, she’d come around to blaming me for the hookup. When we took our walk, Roy and I kept away from her end of Opal Cove Road. It didn’t make any difference. Marie’s Subaru rolled to a stop in front of us.

“I knew it, Roy.”

Marie got out but stood behind the open door. She was wearing a long, dark paisley scarf tight against her head. She looked a lot better than the last time I’d seen her.

“How is he?” she asked.

I palmed Roy’s head. “Pretty good.”

“Hey there, Roy,” she said.

He was a loyal kid. He gave her the cold shoulder. She wasn’t expecting that.

“Don’t take it personally. It takes him a while to warm up to people, right, kid?” I rubbed his head. He bristled. “See what I mean?” Marie smiled weakly. I watched her watching Roy like she was waiting for him to do something remarkable. She started fidgeting with the door’s foam rubber seal.

“Do you think we could get together sometime and talk?” she asked.

“Is something wrong?”

“Don’t worry. It’s nothing bad. Honestly.”

RICHIE’S STEREO SPEAKERS were enormous. He pointed them out into the living room from his bedroom doorway. We were listening to the album All Rise by Naked Raygun, watching a Nuremberg trials documentary on TV with the sound off. We were stripped down to our boxers, lying on ratty, his-and-his loveseats that were too short for our bodies. The loveseats smelled like old Band-Aids. A full-on August heat wave made it seem like the living room of a forgotten elderly shut-in. At least when you’re broke and it’s cold, you can put on more clothes. But you can only get so naked when it’s hot.

“Why in the fuck does Hitler get to own that ’stache?” Richie asked. We weren’t even high, so I took it as rhetorical. He lifted his chin while pinching his upper lip. “I think I’d look good in one. But if I wore one around this town, every lefty hippie peacenik fuck would want to tear a strip off me.” He was right. Amherst was one of those places that was liberal to a fault. It made you feel uncomfortable, like the person who found the unrecy cled mouthwash bottle in your trash might be waiting for you in the dark.

“Melanie’s beard is thicker than the one Gregory Peck grew for Moby Dick,” Richie said, “and everyone cuts her a free pass because she’s a dyke expressing herself.” Melanie was a busboy at Esposito’s. She was also a friend of Richie’s. I brought that up. “Not the fucking point,” he said. “What is the point is, why can’t I, a decent, semi-law-abiding citizen, wear a Hitler? It’s bullshit.”

“Because it would bum a lot of people out.”

“Why?”

“Why?” The perspiration oozing down the lovely brown hips of a Michelob bottle collected in the dent of my sternum. The ceiling was unevenly stained by secondhand smoke and seepage.

“Yeah, why? Think about it. Stalin was just as big a douche as Hitler. And he had a mustache.” No arguments from me there. “Well, then why the fuck aren’t mobs of people out gang-shaving Burt Reynolds or Tom Selleck?”

I egged him on. “Or what’s-his-face, that dude from the Toronto Maple Leafs?”

“Wendel Fucking Clark. There’s another one. Why’s he still walking the streets, and I can’t grow a Hitler?”

“Nobody’s stopping you. Grow one.”

Richie got a look on his face like it just occurred to him that buying some relatively expensive thing—a used, beater motorcycle or two work-free weeks of fucking off—were doable if he was smart about it. “Look at these fucking psychopaths,” he said. A chain gang of Nazi defendants donned their translation headphones in unison. “One of the really fucked-up things is that these guys had, like, wives and shit who loved them. I mean truly loved them.”

“Hard to imagine.” But it wasn’t really.

“This fucking guy.” Richie presented a particularly horrible and homely Nazi as his case in point. “This guy’s wife worshipped the ground he walked on.”

“He probably persuaded her.” I said it like Major Hoch stetter from Hogan’s Heroes.

“Fuck that. She always had a hot strudel waiting for him when he got home from a hard day at the Zyklon B plant.”

Richie scratched at the large shamrock tattoo high on his biceps. It was a money-green reminder of a night he’d never remember. He wasn’t even Irish. When I asked him why he didn’t have it removed, he told me there was no point, like it was a mole his doctor told him not to worry about. I told Jocelyn the whole tattoo story, and she said Richie was a schnauxer. It was a Yiddish word she invented. A schnauxer is a guy who realizes he bought a case of the wrong shade of house paint and ends up using it anyway.

“You ever see Eichmann’s old lady?” I asked.

“Nice?”

“Hell yeah. Feeders like this.” I supported two enormous air tits, my beer jammed tight in their cleavage.

“You laugh. I bet you money you’re not far off. And name me a bigger animal than Eichmann.”

It was my turn to go to the fridge for beers. Richie did some soul-searching in the forty seconds I was gone.

“Yeah,” he said, like he hated to admit it, “it’s about time I got a serious girlfriend.”

“Why would you do that?”

“Well, why the fuck do you have one?”

“No, I mean you hook up with more women than anyone I know. Why get tied down?”

“So, if you could trap as much pelt as me, you wouldn’t be in an exclusive thing?”

“No, I would, but—”

“Damn right, you would. Your old lady’s awesome. You know how fast some other dog would be sniffing her ass? They already are.”

I knew Richie had a small crush on Jocelyn. I wasn’t concerned. He was a good friend. In fact, I actually enjoyed knowing he liked her, because there was no way she’d ever have anything to do with him.

We stopped talking and listened to the end of the song “Peacemaker.” The lead Nuremberg prosecutor was pounding sand up the ass of some kraut who had it coming.

“That guy is no bullshit,” Richie said. “He never even went to college.”

“No shit? How’d he get this gig?”

“You don’t have to go to law school or college to take the bar exam.” Richie said it like it was something he’d considered doing.

“You should take it. But wait till your Hitler’s nice and full.”

“That would be fucking hilarious. Distract all those Amherst College lawyer wannabes. They’d shit themselves.”

“You could single-handedly change the face of the Massachusetts legal system.” Richie liked that idea.

The faces of the condemned Nazis were as sullen as their victims’. One by one, black hoods turned them into footnotes before the gallows floor vanished from beneath their feet.

“Fuck it,” Richie said. “I am officially growing a Hitler.” He lifted the window shade to gauge if the sun was any closer to cutting us some slack. A wide blade of white sunlight momentarily obliterated the Nuremberg trials.

“I got the beers,” I said. “You flip the record.”

“Christ,” Richie said. “It’s like a fucking oven in here.”

MARIE WAS PICKING me up at seven. I didn’t want her to see how I was living, so I waited on the front porch. I was already at the sidewalk when she drove up.

“You have to get in this door,” she said.

“I know.”

“Right.” She put the Subaru in park and got out. I squeezed past her. Her hair looked damp. It smelled like a banana daiquiri. I cleared the stick shifter and got myself seated. The Hefty-bag passenger window sagged in against my face.

“Sorry about the window.”

“It’s dark out anyway.” I checked out her ass as she got back in. It looked pretty good, even in navy blue Dickies. She left the door open to keep the dome light on. She let out a sigh, like the first of many hurdles had been negotiated. Then she just sat there for what seemed like an extraordinarily long time, staring at the windshield. I pretended to think nothing of it. I looked around the car’s interior like I was taking in the great room at Mon ticello. Marie snapped herself to attention. “Okay, let’s go eat,” she said, like she was psyching herself up for a Brazilian wax.

“We can do this another time if you don’t feel good. I’m not even hungry.”

“Please.” She took my hand, and I flinched. “It’s important for me to do this.”

“Okay.” My door had no handle. I was Ted Bundy’d in.

WE WENT TO the Crow’s Nest. From across the room, the waiter and cook nodded at me when we walked in.

“Come here a lot?” Marie asked.

I didn’t answer.

“Two for dinner, Captain?” the waiter asked with menus in hand.

MARIE PICKED THE chunks of meat from her lobster roll and scraped off most of the mayo before eating it. She scrubbed her front teeth with her tongue after each swallow. She looked like she was working a football mouthpiece into proper position. It was a little disgusting to watch. I deducted a few beauty points.

“So, what did you want to talk to me about?”

She took a sip of her cocktail. “Have you ever made a film?”

“No.” I didn’t think she was talking about porn, but I wasn’t sure. Jocelyn and I had snapped a few Polaroids of each other that were bluish in tint. Garden-variety back-of-the-top-drawer stuff. But that was all. We pillow-talked about doing more, and that was arousing enough. Plus it would be a drag if my parents saw it. Or if I had a kid someday—which was never going to happen, but if I did—it would blow having sex movies of me out there.

“I’m a filmmaker.” She swallowed, then pushed the sides of her hair behind her ears. “I thought maybe you’d work for me for a couple weeks.” I pictured a false-walled torture chamber retrofitted to 97 Opal Cove Road. “I can’t pay you a lot.”

“Why me?”

“Honestly? The way you take care of that baby gave me a feeling about you.”

“Really? I almost got him eaten.”

“But you didn’t.” She took a drink. “And you didn’t fuck me when I was wasted.”

“If I was more shitfaced I would have.”

“Thanks a lot. Am I that attractive?”

“No. Yes. I meant if I’d have had more to drink-”

She smiled. “I know what you mean. If, if, if. If I was the queen of England, I’d pee Moët.”

We laughed. I felt the earliest pinch of a crush.

“Seriously,” she said, “why are you trying to make me think you’re repulsive for not being repulsive?”

“Is that what I’m doing?”

I WAS WAITING as the bus pulled into Amherst Station. It was near midnight. I’d been staring at a small cluster of fireflies flickering above a patch of unruly garbage grass, trying not to think about the family I’d financially destroy if my health-insuranceless body was taken over by cancer. Thankfully, I spotted Jocelyn seated—like an angel—near the back of the bus. She stayed there well after the initial crush of passengers moved forward. Jockeying for position was not her thing. I moved closer to the door as passengers filed off. They all looked beat.

“People are fucked,” she said before her second foot touched the pavement. She was wearing the white linen pants. That meant a thong could be in my immediate future. We kissed.

“What happened?”

“Oh, boy, you’re going to love this.” She scanned the small crowd. “See dumpy-ass over there? With the Princess Leia haircut?”

The young woman in question was standing in a puddle of urine-colored light. Her billowing Sinbad pants and leotard top were chicken-broth green. She poked the pay phone dial pad like it was the chest of someone who had wronged her.

“Of all the fucking people, who do you think sat down next to me?”

“Nut job?”

“And, oh, my God, does she ever smell.” Jocelyn gagged. A fake, but a nice touch.

“Onion pizza?”

“Worse. Halibut.”

“Oh, man.”

“I’m not kidding. I had to put Blistex on my nostrils. Feel.”

I touched her mustache patch. It was still slippery. I felt a twinge in my dick.

“And that’s not the best part.”

“Lucky you.”

“I make a special trip to the Strand to buy a book for the trip, right?” She drew a copy of Maxine Hong-Kingston’s Woman Warrior from her pocketbook. “So as I’m smearing Blistex all over my face so I can read without puking, she sees the book on my lap and asks me if she can take a look at it because she likes the title.”

“And you let her?”

“I didn’t think she was going to read the whole thing.”

“No shit.”

“Can you believe that?”

“Did you tell her you wanted it back?”

“I couldn’t.”

“Why?”

“Because at first I thought she was just reading a few lines, you know? Then when she turned the page, I was thinking, There’s no fucking way. And then, I’m not kidding, I was fascinated. What kind of person does that? I mean, to smell like that’s one thing. Maybe she can’t help it, you know? Some people smell. What can you do? But reading a stranger’s book is just . . .” She shook her head, trying to jar the right word loose.

“Fucked up.”

“Isn’t it? And you know what she said when she gave it back? She said she was disappointed. She expected it to be different.” Jocelyn’s mouth was open wide with reen acted shock. “Can you fucking believe that?”

I took the book from her. “It’s pretty thick. She’s a fast reader.” I spread the book open, raised it to my face, and took deep a whiff.

“I wouldn’t.”

“It smells like sea monkeys.”

Jocelyn was entertained, but she acted like she didn’t want to be. “You’re sick.”

“You’re the one laughing, so what’s that make you?”

“Sicker, probably.”

The driver was pulling the last of the suitcases from the bus’s lower compartment. Jocelyn took the opportunity to distance herself from the oddball sniffing the crotch of The Woman Warrior. I watched her walk. A thong it would be. She slipped the driver a couple bucks’ tip.

“Why did you do that?” I said out of the corner of my mouth.

“Because that’s what you do.” Jocelyn’s family was loaded and domestically disinterested enough to have their standing weekly grocery order delivered by a young man her mother described as a “nice colored fellow.”

I took her bag, and we walked arm in arm in a line tangent to the rancid pool of light. “Go slow,” I said. “I want to see if I can smell her.”

“Stop.”

I pulled Jocelyn closer to me. Princess Leia was giving the gears to whoever the poor fuck was that she’d called: “Do not fucking stand there and tell me you didn’t tell me that.”

Jocelyn squeezed my arm. “My God,” she whispered, “look at the receiver.” The cord leading to it was frayed and completely severed from the rest of the telephone.

“Do not humiliate me here,” Leia said to her imaginary friend.

“Humiliate her somewhere else,” I whispered.

Jocelyn nibbled my ear and told me I was a terrible person.

We walked toward my house along Pleasant Street. It was late June. Trustafarians with names like Zephyr, Flake, and Winnebago were reenacting scenes from Billy Jack, Burning Man, and Bread and Puppet on Amherst Common. They had established a tiny Hoover ville of high-end pop tents, a small circular trampoline, and some anti-whatever signs. Someone was blowing a spastic tune on a flute. Two dudes were squeezing those long African drums Paul Simon had a total hard-on for around the time of the Graceland album. Birds from deep within the majestic, centuries-old elm trees were screaming like their throats were being cut.

“Fucking hippies,” Jocelyn said, tapping into her mean streak. “Free Leonard Peltier, my fucking ass. These are the same assholes with No Blood for Oil bumper stickers.”

“So?” I didn’t particularly like hippies, but I didn’t particularly hate them, either. Mostly they were invisible to me.

“So? So doesn’t the bumper of a fucking Volvo seem like an odd place for that sentiment?”

“It’s not like they’re actually hurting anybody.”

“What do you mean? That’s exactly what they’re doing. It makes me sick.” She was getting heated up. I knew how little it would take for her to turn that heat directly on me.

“Hey,” I said. “Guess who bought new sheets?”

“WHAT KIND OF film are we talking about?” I asked Marie.

“A documentary.”

“Oh.”

She laughed. “You seem disappointed. What did you think I meant, porn?”

“No.”

Marie was loosening up. How loose remained to be seen. The waiter took his time placing two fresh drinks near the hub of the table. He was eavesdropping. I waited until he was gone before I spoke.

“I don’t know if I have the head for any kind of work right now,” I said. “I’m in the middle of some heavy personal stuff.”

“Who isn’t? ”

“I don’t know. Lots of people?”

“I’ve never met any of them.” Marie got to work on the new drink. “I’m not going to try too hard to convince you of what you’re up for. You know better than anyone.”

“What’s the movie about? Cape Cod surf culture and tattoos? Shit like that?”

Marie’s eyes were the color of a drunk-friendly Jack and Coke. Two lovely crow’s-feet appeared at their corners when she smiled. “It’s about my son. He drowned four years ago.”

JOCELYN WAS IN the bathroom, caulking the edges around her diaphragm with spermicidal jelly. We had an understanding that her inserting it in front of me would have had the opposite effect of a good Degas painting of a peasant woman washing herself. Nothing like a lot of real-life bending, reaching, and determined lower-lip biting to empty the sails of all wind.

“What a pain in the fucking balls,” she said, climbing into bed. “I should go back on the pill.”

“Why don’t you? Seems like it would be a lot easier.”

She got annoyed with me, like going back on the pill was my callous and uninformed idea. “Because the pill fucks up your body. That’s why. They don’t even know what it does to you long-term. I might never be able to get pregnant.”

“So?”

She gave me a dirty look.

“Fine,” I said. “Let’s keep doing what we’re doing.”

Jocelyn rolled onto her back in a huff and slapped the comforter with both hands. “Because I don’t want to get pregnant now.”

I went cold. “Did something go wrong in there?”

“No. Not any more than usual. It’s not like I can stick my head up my twat to check the fit.”

“I can go back to wearing a rubber, too, if that makes you feel any better.”

She pooh-poohed that idea like I was, for the umpteenth time, overlooking the obvious. “I can’t feel anything with a condom. I have to be able to feel you. You, not an inner tube—or it doesn’t work for me.”

I could have put on three rubbers after a dip in hot paraffin and still would have been able to bust a quality nut. I moved into the fetal position and faced her side. “I know,” I said. “It’s a drag for me, too, if I can’t feel you.”

“GOD, THAT’S really horrible,” I said.

“The worst,” Marie said.

“How old was he?”

“Almost three.”

“What was his name?” I instantly felt bad for referring to her son in the past tense.

“Sidney. After my father.”

“Man, that sucks.”

Marie took a drag off her smoke and blew extra hard at the ceiling. She ground the butt to death in an ashtray fashioned after a ship’s steering wheel.

I searched the compost of my past. No one really close to me had died. “My ex had a miscarriage.”

Marie winced. “That’s so sad.”

“It was a lot harder on her than it was on me, to be honest.”

“It’s hard on everyone. Was she far along?”

“Not at all.” I said it a little too easy-come-easy-go.

Marie thought I was trying to appear strong. “You shouldn’t downplay your feelings. It’s still devastating.”

“It’s nowhere near as bad as what you went through.”

She couldn’t bring herself to disagree with that. She treaded lightly. “Is that why it didn’t work out with you and—”

“Jocelyn.”

“Is that why?”

“Not exactly, but it didn’t help, you know?”

Marie shook her head. She knew. But what she knew and what I knew were like apples and orangutans. “Were you guys married?” she asked.

“Mm.”

“How long?”

“We were together for about three years.”

“After Sidney died, Jason and I tried to hang on.” She stared into her drink as she stirred.

“That sucks. How long’s it been since you guys split up?”

“Two years ago July.”

“What happened?”

“What do you mean, what happened?” I think she was having second thoughts about me.

“I mean, did it just—” I was going to say “die.” “Did you stop loving each other?”

“No, but if we had a hundred years we wouldn’t have been able to work back to zero.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to dig stuff up.”

“You didn’t. And anyway, I’d better be able to dig stuff up, right? Or this film is going to suck.” She laughed like she’d just cracked a joke from her hospice bed. “Hey, at least I don’t feel like killing myself anymore.”

“That’s good.”

She scared me.

I HAD A terrifying flash of Roy falling off the back of a boat and flailing in the ocean during his last minute of life. I shook my head like it was an Etch A Sketch I was trying to erase. In reality, Roy was kicking up a storm in the car seat because he didn’t want to leave me.

“More, more, more,” he cried. It sounded like “Moe, moe, moe.”

“It’s okay, pal,” I said through the driver’s-side window. I’d walked James and Roy to the car without first putting on a coat. “You’ll be back on Friday.”

James corrected me. “Tomorrow. Tomorrow and Friday.”

Two pinecones flammed against the hood of the Suburban like sparrows in a suicide pact.

“What time tomorrow?”

“Regular time, why?”

“I kind of have to be somewhere at eleven.”

“Where?”

“I might have a job.”

“You’re shitting me? ”

“No I’m not.”

“Sonovabitch.” James said. “Doing fucking what? ”

“I don’t want to say yet because I’m not sure if I have it, or if I even want it.”

“Fucking fuck.” He glanced in the rearview mirror to confirm that, yes, Roy existed. James was like a billion-dollar enterprise jeopardized by the failure of the three-dollar part. “Well, I hope you don’t get the job.”

“Thanks.”

“Hey, I’m sorry, but if you can’t watch the kid, I’m screwed. For real.”

“I’ll still watch Roy for you. It’s only for a couple weeks, part-time.”

“Is it close by? Can you tell me that much or is that some big fucking secret, too?”

“Yes, very close by.”

“Hmm,” he said, trying to reconcile numbers in his head.

“I swear, James, if the job starts to get in the way—”

“You’re watching someone else’s kid for money, aren’t you?”

“Are you out of your mind? Look at me. I can barely keep myself clean.”

He wasn’t completely convinced.

“Dude,” I said. “Me having a job is not going to be a problem. I give you my word.”

“Well, I still hope you don’t get it. These kind of things never go smooth.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Well, they don’t.”

“I’ll see you later. I’m freezing.” I gave Roy two thumbs up, and started for the house.

“But what about tomorrow?”

I took a few more steps. I felt like sticking it to him a little bit. “What about it?”

“We on or what?”

“What do you think?”

“I thought we were on.”

“We’re still on.”

“And don’t forget, tonight’s trash night.”

THAT NIGHT I collected my garbage. It all fit easily into a white plastic convenience-store bag that said Thank You three times in red.

“No, thank you. Really, I appreciate it.” I tied a knot in the package. It looked like Johnny Appleseed’s do-rag luggage. I should have been wearing a fucking pot on my head as I ran across the front lawn in my bare feet. The grass felt wet, but it was only cold. I put the bag at the curb. It looked like a widower’s trash.

I went back inside and smoked in my bedroll. Marie had told me she was making the film of Sidney because every day she forgot more and more about him. I didn’t know how making a movie was going to stop her from forgetting.

The next morning I looked out the window to see if my trash had been taken away.

Fuck me. I was becoming part of the order of things.

I BIKED OVER to Spunt’s because I’d just wiped my ass with a coffee filter James had been using as a makeshift container for trim nails. It was a pleasant ride. Either I was creeping toward improved physical fitness or the bike was.

“Hey, Pay Phone,” the kid with the pomegranate head said.

“Hey, Spunt.”

He laughed like a three-year-old who thinks you think his name really is Tiger or Kiddo. “I’m no Spunt,” he said.

“You sure look like one.” I was in a good mood. I made myself a Coke Slurpee, then started tossing shit into a basket.

“Pay Phone, know what rhymes with Spunt? ”

“I think so,” I said over the Frito-Lay rack.

“Runt.” He laughed. “Guess what else?”

“Well,” I looked around. I couldn’t resist. “There’s cunt.”

“That’s what I was going to say.” He cracked up. “Cunt rhymes with Spunt.”

I heard a toilet flush. Tommy the cop walked out of the bathroom wearing street clothes, holding an Auto Trader magazine. He was a good cop. He made me instantly.

“Hey, hey, hey. It’s the bike nut.”

“Only on the side roads,” I added.

“That’s what we like to hear.” Spunt had the hiccups from laughing. “What I miss?” Tommy asked as he put the magazine back on the rack. “Must have been a good one.”

“Nothing,” I said.

“This guy”—Spunt pointed to me—“this is a funny guy.”

“Funny’s good. Everybody likes a funny guy.” Tommy grabbed two rival microwave burritos—one in each hand—and compared their weights. He flipped the loser back in the refrigerated case.

“Hey, Tommy?” Spunt broke into a football fight song: “Let’s go Titans. Right? ”

“I hear that, Ricky.” Tommy opened the microwave door. It looked like a cat puked in it. “Big game Saturday.” He pressed the start button and turned to me. “You going?”

“Where?”

“East Falmouth-Barnstable game.”

“Hockey?”

“No,” he whinnied. “Football.”

“Yeah, I’m not much of a sports fan.” I liked baseball and hockey, but only at the pro level. I’d rather watch two rutting bucks fight over a salt lick than a high school sport.

“Celts, Sox, Bs, Pats,” Ricky raised a finger for each of Boston’s major sports teams. “They are all awesome.”

“Preview of the Cape Cod Conference Finals, you know,” Tommy said, trying to sweeten the deal for me.

“Tommy, you see Bourque’s goal last night?”

“Eff yeah, I did.” Tommy turned back to me. “You’ll be missing a primo game.”

“Where’s it at?” I asked.

“East Falmouth High. Less than a click from here.” Tommy pointed out the window, as if East Falmouth High School were right there on the other side of his yellow Datsun B210 pickup.

“I don’t know,” I said, and took a pull off my Slurpee. “Maybe I’ll check it out.”

“We got this kid,” Tommy said, “Whitman, a running back. Can move the football. Runs like, whew.” He slapped his hands together and sent the top one off like a shot. “Full boat to Notre Dame.”

“Full boat,” I said. “Good for him.” I pictured this Whitman kid ten years down the road, divorced, two kids, installing urinating cherubs in the backyards of tacky Cape Cod Guinzos.

Tommy checked on his burrito, then keyed in some more time. “Deserves it, too. He’s a good kid.” He lowered his voice. “Black kid. Couple of them on the team. He’s by far the best one. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t care if he’s green.”

“Tommy, Bird would have been the best ever—better than Dr. J and Magic—if it wasn’t for his back, wouldn’t he?”

“Not would have been.”

“What do you mean?”

Tommy spelled it out for him. “Larry is the best of all time.”

“I knew it,” Ricky said. He could now scuttle off and settle a dispute. “What about the parade after they beat the Sixers?” Ricky asked. “Moses eats Bird shit,” he chanted. “Moses eats Bird shit.”

The microwave sounded. Tommy checked his burrito. “You got to do something about this oven.” He went to straighten his cop utility belt, but he was wearing fleece sweats. They were maroon with gold piping. They looked so comfortable.

MARIE’S LIVING ROOM was almost as spartan as my sister’s, but elegant. The floor was blond, satin-finished hardwood. The walls were yellow. There were two chrome-framed lounge chairs with painted pony-hide seats, backs, and sides. They were worth more than me. They faced each other, separated by a brass floor lamp with a green glass shade and a coffee table that had been an oxblood touring wardrobe in a previous life. That was it for furniture.

“Mind taking your shoes off? ” Marie was wearing a white long-sleeve T-shirt. The frayed ends of her Levi’s brushed the tops of her bare feet. Her toenails were purple. I set my shoes down next to her purple Doc Martens boots on a woven palm-frond doormat. I was embarrassed because my feet smelled.

“I used to have a pair of mustard-yellow Hush Puppies loafers that made my feet reek,” Marie said.

“Sorry about that.”

“Don’t be. I wasn’t. They were my favorite shoes. I wore them all the time anyway until my husband threw them out.”

I changed the subject. “This is a beautiful room,” I said, like I’d never seen it before.

“It’s not bad.” She looked around. “I think I’m going to be ready to sell soon.”

“Is this your house?”

“Mm.”

“I’ll never own a house. I just know it. I’ve never even owned a used car.”

“You’d be surprised how fast things can fall into place. Out of place, too.”

“Out of place I can relate to.”

“One week I’m renting a slummy apartment in Central Square, next week I inherit a house on the Cape.”

“That’s pretty cool.”

“I’d rather have my mother back.”

I COULDN’T STOP singing the line “What’s so bad about dying?” from the Plush tune “Found a Little Baby.” It was driving Jocelyn crazy.

“Thanks,” she said, without looking up from her Harper’s. “I used to like that song.”

“Sorry.” I clammed up for about thirty seconds and resumed speed-reading Emerson’s complete works from a cinder-block-sized Norton Anthology of American Literature open on my kitchen table.

I skipped right over Emerson and many like him when I was in college. I didn’t want to go to grad school, but it was still a more appealing option than getting a job selling IRAs over the phone for Fidelity or hawking cases of fluoride treatment kits to dentists.

“What’s so bad about dying?”

“Okay, I mean it now,” she said sternly. “You really have to stop that.”

“I can’t help it.”

“Try and help it.”

I gave Emerson another go. He was making me sleepy. The GRE was the next morning at eight. I’d decided at the last minute to take it. I was cramming. It felt like not-so-old times.

I was applying to UMass and UMass only because I had some suck there with an English professor named Sanbourne. He was a middle-aged, brooding dude made of knotty pine and crooked teeth. He was the kind of guy you could easily picture cursing into John Berryman’s The Dream Songs, getting shitfaced alone in a cabin after digging a new sump.

“What kind of suck?” Jocelyn asked, like I was full of shit.

“He told me I should apply.”

“Just like that? ‘You should apply’?”

“Pretty much.”

“Hmm.”

This was the extent of my suck: One morning before class a couple of us were smoking outside Bartlett Hall. Sanbourne didn’t just bum a smoke. He bummed a brand. I gave him a Winston. Before flicking my Bic, he pointed it at me and said I should think about grad school.

“You’ll see,” Jocelyn said. “You will loathe grad school.” She was trying to sound like she’d given up long ago on trying to talk me out of it.

“We’ll see.” I began to sing the melody—sans lyrics—to the Plush tune.

Jocelyn slammed her magazine shut. “I cannot fucking fathom why you’d go through with this. Just go get a job. People do it all the time.”

“You mean like you?” She rolled her eyes. “What, you think I’m wrong?” She didn’t answer, so I gave her the other barrel. “I’m not the one who has the luxury of holding out for the coolest unpaid internship of my choice.”

“Just because I have access to a little money doesn’t—”

“Oh, right, a little money.”

“It doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”

“Well, you know what? I have no money.”

“Then, please, I’m begging you, let me give it to you. It kills me to watch you waste your life.”

“I don’t want your money.” I did want it. But taking ten or twelve grand was a lot different from letting her pay for our dates and the odd weekend away. “I’d feel like a fucking loser.”

“Okay, then, borrow it from me.”

“We both know I’d never be able to pay you back.”

“Then don’t pay me back. I don’t care about the money.”

“I do. I’m not taking your money.”

She led me onto thin ice. “If we were married, you’d take it, right?”

“Probably, but I’m not ready to get married.” I was hoping she’d forgotten about the hundreds of times I’d proposed to her. That was before the infatuation started losing some of its sheen.

“Oh, I see.”

I challenged her. “You see what?”

“Just read your fucking Self-fucking-Reliance.”

WHEN I WOKE the next morning it was raining like a motherfucker. Jocelyn was hugging me like I was a body pillow. Each time I tried to slip away, she tightened her grip.

“Come on. Let me go.” I was this close to blowing off the exam, but I’d already paid the fee.

“You’re making a big mistake. Grad students are the worst kind of people.”

I ended up regally shitting the bed on the literature subject exam. I did pretty good on the math and verbal. All told, I thought my scores were high enough to get me back into UMass.

I sent Sanbourne a letter at his sabbatical address in Caribou, Maine, letting him know my application package was in the system. The letter went unanswered. Even if he did flag my application, it didn’t do me a fuck of a lot of good. That morning in front of Bartlett Hall, he must have been talking to the fucker who smoked Newports.

MOST OF THE FILMING WAS to take place in Sidney’s old room. Marie led me into the small, dark hallway that ended at his closed bedroom door. She was telling me about some performance artist who had kept the packaging to every scrap of food he’d eaten over the course of a year. Fuck, I’d had roommates who did better than that without even trying.

“His whole thing is measuring intangibles against the refuse of what fuels it.”

“Interesting,” I said. “Was he German?” It was my way of indirectly asking if the performance artist had saved his shit and piss for the year.

“No, Japanese. Why? Have you heard of a German artist who has done something similar?” She seemed genuinely interested to know.

“I might have, but my memory’s crap.”

Marie had her hand on the doorknob. She went into deeper analysis of the Japanese dude’s art. I started picturing mountains of plastic wrap and plastic foam trays soaked with blood from red meat, and crusty-mouthed chocolate milk cartons, and knotted condoms as stiff as potato chips.

She opened the door. “I wanted to do something in the spirit of that.”

“Wow. That’s a lot of stuff.”

Sidney’s room was an overflowing ten-by-ten purple box. It looked like someone had dumped the contents of a cargo net full of secondhand Save the Children relief.

“I trashed or gave away more than that.” She sounded sorry that she hadn’t kept every item—food, diapers, or otherwise—that Sidney had consumed during his short life.

Piles of entangled toys and clothes overran the floor like kudzu. There was hardly a place to stand. A white-barred crib was overpopulated with stuffed animals, like a pen used to turn calves into veal. More clothes and fleece baby blankets buried a toddler bed, like heavy snow on a car. Sunlight poured into the room through two sliding glass doors. A larger-than-life poster of a serious-looking Kermit the Frog watched over everything.

“I called a few of my girlfriends and got some of it back.”

“You tell them what it was for?”

“The ones I thought would understand.” She held up a tiny orange shirt with a purple dinosaur on it. “Some of the stuff, I’m not sure was ever ours.” She refolded the shirt and put it back on the heap. “It’s all here, though, because I can’t be sure.”

I looked out through the sliding glass doors. The small backyard sloped down and butted against the pond-calm water of Opal Cove. Somehow I was sure Sidney had drowned right there.

“So,” Marie sighed, “there is a method to this madness.” I was picturing Sidney running down the small hill to the water, unable to counter the deadly momentum that launched him out too deep. “I want to remove a little at a time until—by the end of the film—it will be just me sitting in this empty room.”

I FELT PRETTY good when I woke up because it was exactly the kind of Saturday morning I loved as a kid: cold and gray. The first snow was still weeks away, but there was a sense that anything could happen. I turned on the TV and caught the tail end of a commercial for some acne scrub. Two pristine teenage couples were blasting around a California beach in a jeep, laughing at the fun niest fucking joke ever told. The backing musical track was a note-for-note rip-off of the guitar lead in R.E.M.’s “Flowers of Guatemala.” It started to piss me off, but then I watched some Looney Tunes. The new episodes—the ones without Mel Blanc doing the voices—were depressing, but they tossed in a vintage Bugs Bunny, the one set in ancient Rome. It lifted my spirits back up. I quoted Bugs Bunny while I showered.

When James and Dogshit showed up out of the blue, I was sitting on the porch, reading some film notes Marie had put together for me. I folded up the pages and hid them in my back pocket before they’d crossed the lawn.

“What’s that?” James asked. “Employee handbook?”

“What’s what?”

“I’m fucking with you.” He laughed. Dogshit laughed, too. “I don’t care if it is. I thought about it. I’m cool with you working.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

Dogshit laughed at that, too.

James reached for the upper hand. “Even if you are going to pussy out and not tell anybody what exactly it is you’re doing.”

“Yeah, why’s that?” Dogshit asked. “A job’s a job, no?”

James gave wordless confirmation.

Dogshit continued. “I mean, I emptied Porta-Johns. I worked at the dump. I drove around for the MDC picking up roadkill and shit. I cleaned the wading pool at—”

James nudged me. “He found Sinn Fein dead on Twenty-eight,” like I was supposed to know who or what the fuck Sinn Fein was.

“That was a harsh toke,” Dogshit said. He swallowed uncomfortably. “One side of his head was caved in, and his tongue was really long and green. I had to wash the blood off his collar before I gave it back to Finneran.”

“Harsh,” James said. Harsh was the adjective of the moment for James and Dogshit. They used it without discretion. In a week or two, it would be fierce, insane, or deadly.

“I never told Finneran that part about his dog’s head being mushed to a pulp.”

“Why the fuck would you?”

“I wouldn’t.” There was a pause. “So what the fuck?” Dogshit asked me. “Who you working for?”

I told them.

“Well, that settles one thing,” James said. “He’s definitely not babysitting.”

“Oh, man, that’s harsh,” Dogshit said. They both laughed.

“Seriously,” James said, “what are you doing for her?”

“I’m helping her make a movie.”

“What the fuck kind of movie?”

“You going to bone her?” Dogshit asked.

“It’s a documentary. No, I don’t think so.”

“A documentary about what?”

“It’s about her kid.”

James shook his head. “Man, you really do have a dark streak running through you.” He said it like he’d had more than one conversation behind my back on the subject.

“It’s just a job,” I said.

“No. What I have is just a job. Fixing boats is just a job.”

“I don’t know,” Dogshit said. “Sounds kind of cool.” James looked at him. “In a fucked-up way.”

JAMES AND DOG SHIT convinced me to go with them to the East Falmouth-Barnstable game. If Minnesota is “the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes,” then Cape Cod is “the Land of Ten Thousand Dunkin’ Donuts.” We hit one of them on our way to the game.

“Wouldn’t it be cheaper if we all pitched in and bought a dozen instead? ” Dogshit asked.

“Now you’re thinking.” James canceled his order.

The doughnut girl sighed. She tried to locate the void register key in a mug stuffed with pens, highlighters, and rubber bands. “Goddamnit.” She emptied the mug onto the counter. A pen rolled onto the floor. I picked it up and placed it near the mug.

“How long till kickoff?” James asked.

“T minus five minutes,” Dogshit said.

“Christ almighty. You want to just skip this shit and get something there?”

“Lines will be insane.”

The girl hollered in the direction of the back room. “Who isn’t putting the friggin’ register key back where it goes?”

James looked at his watch. “This is pointless.”

“Look,” the girl snapped, “would you give me half a fucking second, please?”

James said something under his breath.

“What was that?” she asked. I looked at Dogshit, and he raised his eyebrows.

“I said, ‘Take your time.’ ”

THE LOT at East Falmouth High School was full, and cars were backed up along Plymouth Street and its tributaries. We parked in Dogshit’s cousin’s driveway.

“What’s his name?” I asked. “Apeshit?”

James laughed.

“Okay,” Dogshit said, “I see how things are here. I was going easy on you because you’re all fucked up, but no more.” He challenged me to a slap boxing match. I wouldn’t put up my dukes. He danced around me, then tapped me, unchallenged, on the cheek. “Down goes Frazier!” he said like Howard Cosell. “Down goes Frazier!” He put his arms up in victory and made crowd noises.

A real cheer erupted from inside Colonel James J. Sweeney Memorial Field.

“Come on, you homos. We just missed something.”

The bleachers on both sides of the field were full, and fans stood three people-deep along the sidelines and behind the end zones. I assumed East Falmouth was the team in green and gold, since James and Dogshit instinctively moved to that side.

A man with an elfin voice yelled, “Hey, Jimbo!”

James was literally head and shoulders above most people standing. He scanned the crowd until he located the person attached to the voice. “Swainer! ” James yelled. “You haven’t been up this early since you were in high school.”

People laughed.

“What do you mean ‘up’?” Swainer said. “I ain’t been to frickin’ bed yet.”

More laughs.

“Outstanding!” James said.

Another disembodied voice cheered for Swainer.

“Beers at the Nail after we KICK BARNSTABLE’S ASS!” Swainer yelled.

A cheer rose.

“We’ll see, buddy,” James said. “Now get a job.” He gave Swainer a wide-handed wave. We worked our way close to the bleachers. Two kids standing on a scaffolding flipped the numbers on the scoreboard. We had missed most of the first quarter. East Falmouth was up, eight-zip. I couldn’t give a fuck.

“How’d we score? ” James asked a guy in front of us.

“Whitman, who else? Took it in from the eighteen. Then he got the conversion.”

“Outstanding. Kid’s on his way.”

“If he can stay healthy,” the guy said.

“And out of jail,” someone else said.

“Harsh.”

“Very harsh.”

NEAR THE END of the second quarter I had to take a leak.

“I told you you should have used the can at Dunkin’s. The Porta-Johns are horrible.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Dogshit said. “They’re fine.”

“If I’m not back in a week . . .”

“Shit,” James said. “I might as well go now and avoid the rush.”

We walked under the bleachers. Kids were having a three-on-three touch football game.

“Someone’s going to get mangled on all this glass,” I said.

“That shit never happens.”

As we passed the kids, James hijacked the play in motion by blocking the pass intended for a kid who was wide open.

“Down over!” the offended kid yelled. The two pip-squeak teams started arguing over whether or not the play counted.

“Fair’s fair,” James told them. “The play stands.”

The kids screamed. People in the bleachers looked down to see what was up. Women closed their legs.

“Hey, it’s Pay Phone.” Ricky’s upside-down head was looking at me from between his legs. So was Tommy the cop’s.

“Couldn’t stay away, could you? ” Tommy asked.

“Guess not,” I said.

“Where you sitting? ”

I threw a thumb back over my shoulder.

“There’s room up here,” Ricky said.

“Squeeze down,” Tommy told the people on the other side of Ricky.

“No, that’s cool,” I said. “I’m with some people.”

“How many? ” Tommy asked.

“Two.”

“Gotcha,” he said, like me giving my companions the slip and joining him was what I really wanted to do. “Next time we’ll plan it out better.” He saluted me and got back into the game. Ricky waved. James and I found the end of the shortest Porta-John line.

“How do you know that fuckwad? ”

I knew he meant Tommy because James wouldn’t make jokes about retarded people—mildly or otherwise. The story was sketchy, but someone in his family—a first or second cousin—had Down’s syndrome. “Why’s he a fuckwad? ”

“Because I went to high school with his older brother. And that guy was a complete fuckwad.”

“ I CAN’T UNDERSTAND why you’re friends with him,” Jocelyn said. “Never mind live with him. That brings it to a whole other level of perplexing.” She removed a cookie pan from the oven. On it were two small brown bowls of onion soup. A scab of mozzarella covered each.

“I could give you shit about some of your friends, but I don’t because I don’t let them bother me.”

“You do give me shit about my friends.”

“Like who? ”

“Like Stephanie.”

“Because she’s a pain in the ass.”

“Stephanie’s nice.”

“I can’t fucking stand being around her.”

“Because she’s too New Agey for you. But she’s a good person.”

“I hate nurturers.”

“She’s helped me through a lot of stuff.” Jocelyn made a face like it should be understood by both of us that I was to blame for a good deal of that “a lot of stuff ” Stephanie had helped her through.

I mocked the look. “And Richie’s helped me through a lot.”

“You don’t like Stephanie because she thinks crystals are magical. I don’t like Richie because he’s a dick.” Jocelyn popped the tab on her can of diet Sprite. “Stephanie’s a little out there. I’ll give you that. She’s not hurting anyone, though.”

“Richie can be a very good guy.”

“I’m sure. Even Hitler loved his dog.”

“You’re putting Richie and Hitler in the same group? ”

She didn’t answer.

“Give me a fucking break,” I said. “You’ll never like him because of Josie.”

She swallowed her soda. “This is true. But I wouldn’t have liked him anyway.”

“You might if you got to know him.” I peeled the cheese off the top of my soup. “If you saw his good side.”

“You know what I can’t fucking stand? That whole ‘Such-and-such treats people like shit, but he’s always been a good guy to me’ mentality. It’s fucking bullshit.”

“God, you’re really hard on people.”

“I have to be. I’m sick of letting crap drift into my life.”

“He likes you.”

“Richie? ”

“Yes.”

“That’s because I’m a good person.”

“I mean he likes you.”

“God help us.”

MARIE FIXED A Fisher-Price pixel movie camera to a tripod in the middle of the bedroom. “I bought four of these right as they stopped making them.”

“Is that a toy? ”

“It was meant to be, but filmmakers discovered them.”

“That’s what you’re going to film with? ”

“Record with, technically.” She opened the camera’s cartridge bay, and slipped in a new Maxell audiocassette. “Pretty cool, huh? ”

“How’s it look? ”

“Scrappy and beautiful.”

“Color? ”

“Better. Infinite analog shades of gray.”

I did some quick math in my head: a case of cassette tapes, a toy camera, maybe some batteries. “So this is a big-budget picture.”

She laughed. “Colossal. Actually, you’re by far my biggest expense.”

MY JOB WAS to interview Marie, asking her questions from a script she’d written. She wanted me to be positioned right behind the camera the whole time. She said she hated it when she watched a documentary and the person on screen wasn’t looking her in the eyes. She said that happened all the time. I’d never really noticed.

“How great would it be to have one of those contraptions Ross McElwee used in his films? ” she asked.

“That would be amazing.” I had no fucking idea what she was talking about.

Marie was sorting through a large manila envelope of colored, translucent lens filters, trying to determine which was appropriate. “Did I say Ross McElwee? I meant Errol Morris.”

“Right.”

“It’s a pretty ingenious solution to the whole eye-to-eye thing. I can’t believe it took so long for someone to come up with it.”

I didn’t say anything.

Marie stopped what she was doing and looked at me. “You have no idea who Errol Morris and Ross McElwee are, do you? ”

“Not really.”

“Why didn’t you just say so? ”

“I don’t know. It’s a bad habit.”

She could have made me feel like a shit heel, but she didn’t. “Isn’t it weird how people do that? ” she asked. “I’ve never read The Great Gatsby. Or The Old Man and the Sea. Whooptie-doo-shit.”

I laughed. “Even I’ve read those.”

“Yeah, but you don’t know who Errol Morris is.”

“Or Ross McEwen.”

“McElwee. Ross McElwee.”

“Fine. Ross McElwee.”

Marie looked at her watch. “Okay. You’re coming with me.” She took my hand and led me out of Sidney’s bedroom and into her own. She pushed me into a worn armchair next to her bed. “You stay there,” she ordered. She went into her closet and emerged with a videocassette. She fired up the large television on top of her dresser and slid the tape into the VCR. She got prostrate, with her chin resting on a two-pillow stack at the foot of the bed. “If you don’t like this, you’re fired.”

We watched Gates of Heaven and Vernon, Florida. Between films, Marie put two frozen pizzas in the oven. We drank a few beers. It was getting dark outside by the time we finished. I told Marie I thought both films were amazing. I could tell she was glad I got it.

“But if I had to choose I’d pick Vernon, Florida.”

“Who is asking you to choose? ”

LOU BARLOW FROM Sebadoh was headlining, playing solo acoustic, so I was okay with suffering through the four opening acts. One of them was Jocelyn’s friend Stephen’s band. They were called the Coughins. They all smoked onstage and went to great lengths to look like they couldn’t give a shit how they looked. They embraced the crappy-playing-equals-pure-art-and-unmolested-genius myth. Stephen graduated from Pratt, but was doing production at Redbook because it was easy money. Jocelyn said that he’d designed some nice Vera Wang bridal knockoffs, and too bad they were counterfeits. I wasn’t too impressed, since Stephen had merely copied Vera’s design. Jocelyn said it still wasn’t easy to do. She suggested I try banging out a Cézanne.

Stephen put us on the Coughins’ guest list. The whole band probably only got two guests, so I was grateful. I liked Lou Barlow’s songs a lot. I wasn’t alone. When dangerously full, Brownies held about two hundred and fifty people. All three nights sold out in about twelve seconds.

After the Coughins’ set of Game Theory B-sides, Jocelyn and I went outside to have a smoke and wait for Stephen. It was one of the first nice nights in April, when you think you might actually live to see the summer. A crowd of people kept us from venturing too far beyond the entrance. Two bouncers stood like enormous African urns on either side of the doorway

One of them got up on a milk crate and made an announcement. “People, the show is sold out. If you don’t have tickets, go somewhere else. I repeat. The show is sold out. Sorry.”

People moaned, though very few left.

“You’re not sorry,” the other bouncer joked.

“You’re right. I don’t give a flying fuck who they do or don’t let in. Let ’em all in. Let none of ’em in. I don’t care.” They laughed.

“I like these guys.” Jocelyn said about the bouncers, loud enough for them to hear.

“You catching that? ” one of the bouncers asked.

“Oh, yeah.” He called in to the guy taking tickets. “Zippy? Zip, you make sure this pretty lady and her friend get treated nice.”

“What’s that? ” Zippy was flustered, taking tickets like a madman and trying to make sense of a messy guest list. Brownies was not accustomed to crowds this size.

“Forget it, Zip. Go back to work.” The bouncer winked at Jocelyn.

“Zipper-headed Zippy,” said the other.

Two sonic youths wormed up to the front of the line. “You sure there aren’t any more tickets? ” one of them asked.

“One moment, please.” The bouncer got back up on his milk crate. “Oh, I forgot to mention,” he screamed down at the sonic youths. “The show is sold out! Go home! ”

People with tickets laughed. The bouncer stepped off the crate. The sonic youths evaporated.

Stephen finally came outside. He’d changed into a ratty white T-shirt that said “Be All You Can Be.” His hair was wet, and his face was red. He was hyper and effeminate.

“Hey, you!” He hugged Jocelyn. Then he hugged me. I wasn’t into it. I don’t like people who I’m not fucking touching me. “How were we? Be honest.”

“You looked like you were having a good time up there.” It was the most positive thing I could come up with.

“Really? Thanks.” He was still breathing heavy from the gig.

“I agree,” Jocelyn said. “You guys were amazing.”

“Thanks, you guys.” He group-hugged us.

“Nice set,” someone leaving the club said.

“Thank you soooo much.”

“Was it good for you? ” Jocelyn asked.

Stephen turned into Willona, the lusty neighbor on the TV show Good Times. “Sister, it’s always good for me.” Jocelyn slapped him on the arm. “No, there were some bumps, you know? But on the whole, I think it was—no, I know it was our best show yet. Each one gets better.” Stephen moved his hand in small increments from the left side of his body to his right, mimicking the Coughins’ evolution as a band. “And as long as that keeps happening, you know? ”

“Something good’s got to happen,” Jocelyn said.

“Improvement’s what you want,” I said.

“That’s what I keep telling Jeremy, but he’s so”—Stephen clenched his fists—“he wants everything to happen yesterday. He’s like a child. But you know what? I’m not going to think about his issues tonight. This is me not thinking about it. It was our best show yet, and I’m going to enjoy it.”

“You go, girl,” Jocelyn said.

The Coughins were never going anywhere, and at least two of the three of us knew it.

The crowd in front of Brownies parted. Lou Barlow waited while the rest of his party got out of the cab. He looked like a Lovin’ Spoonful-era John Sebastian. There was a scrawny dude wearing an unfashionably full beard and an olive drab army fatigues jacket. He had a camera in his hands, and two more around his neck. He immediately swapped out lenses. A green-haired woman wearing a co-opted auto mechanics jacket with LADY SUB POP embroidered in pink on a breast pocket was reading the number off her pager.

“Lou’s here! ” people murmured. “That’s him.”

Lou walked the length of the concrete-gray carpet. He saw Stephen standing near the door.

“Hey, man. Sorry I missed your set. Fucking ridiculous photo shoot.”

The photographer was unfazed. He got the camera right up in Lou’s face.

“Oh, please,” Stephen said. “Thanks for just letting us play.”

“Was anyone there? ”

“By the end it was pretty full. More people than we’ve ever played to.”

“Cool.”

Stephen introduced us. He told Lou I lived in Amherst.

“Yeah, you look kind of familiar,” Lou said.

“I wait tables at that restaurant, Esposito’s.” I had also seen Dinosaur Jr. play about twenty times when he was still in the band. I left out that part because I didn’t think it was a good idea stirring up the bad blood.

“He’s got a cool band, too,” Stephen said. “The Young Accuser.”

“Cool.”

I was embarrassed. “It’s not really a band. Just me and another guy on acoustics. I think you know him. Richie Leonides? ”

“No way! The Richie Leonides? He’s a musician? ”

“Sort of.”

“I worked with him in the kitchen at the Soldiers Home in Holyoke.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Fuck! That was like ’eighty-two, ’eighty-three. He’s the guy that got me way into Sabbath.”

“No way! ” Stephen said. “He’s the one? ”

“Totally. I owe that guy a lot.” And with that, Jocelyn added Lou Barlow to her shit list. “He also showed me how to suck the nitrous out of these big industrial canisters. I definitely owe him a lot.”

Lady Sub Pop finished sorting out arrangements with Zippy the doorman.

“Okay,” she said, “they’ll let us use the upstairs office for the interviews, but we have to do them, like, right now.”

“Fuck,” Lou sighed. “All of these fuckers think they own you.”

Lady Sub Pop took Lou’s disdain for her and her industry as a healthy and highly marketable display of indie cred. She nudged the photographer back to work.

I sheepishly took a three-song cassette from my pocket. “You don’t have to listen to it, but maybe you could pass it on to your guy at the label.”

“That would be me.” Lady Sub Pop accepted the tape like a mother into whose hand a child spits his spent chewing gum. The scrawny dude photographed the whole thing. I pictured my demo suspended in a pillar of wet paper towels, lipstick-kissed Kleenex, and feminine-hygiene packaging in the ladies’ room trash can.

LOU’S SET WAS very good. He tried out some new songs and a bunch of my favorites off The Freed Weed. Jocelyn and I got moderately shitfaced. Except for two guys who chose a Lou Barlow acoustic set as background music for their five-year high school reunion, the room was dead quiet when he played. People shushed them with little lasting effect. Lou finally stopped a few bars into “Soul and Fire” and told them to get the fuck out. The audience cheered. Lou shaded his eyes from the stage lights and scanned the crowd.

“I’m serious,” he said. “Get the fuck out! Get your ten bucks back—or however the fuck much it is—and get the fuck out! ”

The audience went crazy. We all started chanting, “Get the fuck out!” The two guys got the fuck out. One of them held the bird high like he was carrying the Olympic torch.

“Fucking maggots,” Lou said, then started the tune from the top.

AFTER THE GIG, we hung around and had a few drinks at the bar with Lou. Only musicians and their satellites remained in the club. We were talking about Robin Williams, trying to estimate how much cocaine—both in weight and in money—he’d done behind the scenes of Mork and Mindy. The amounts varied greatly, but even the lowball figure was a lot. We agreed that however much it was, it was more than any of us had done. We toasted to that.

It came up that Fifi had recently opened some Sebadoh shows in Holland and Germany. Stephen told Lou that Jocelyn and Roger Lyon III had a past—a very brief past.

Lou didn’t hold back. He said Roger Lyon III was a dick for a number of reasons. “He’d sing a line and then spit all over the place.”

I loved it. I had to know more. “What do you mean, by accident? ”

“Fuck, no.” Lou imitated Lyon III flapping his phlegmy epiglottis.

“Gross,” Stephen said.

“And he kept spitting through their entire set.”

“Did he spit on the audience? ” I asked.

“On the audience, on the stage, on the monitors, on the amps. It was fucking weird.”

“What’s the point? ”

“Exactly.” Lou scraped the soles of his shoes on a bar-stool rung. “I had to wade through his fucking throat eggs every night.”

“Eww. That’s so gross,” Stephen said.

“I was like, ‘Dude, someone’s going to get sick from all that saliva and phlegm.’ And he says, ‘What are you talking about? ’ ”

“What a fucking dick,” I said.

Lou turned to Jocelyn. “How long were you his girlfriend? ”

Jocelyn was not completely immune to being star-struck, or she never would have gone out with Lyon III in the first place. If Lou Barlow had been Joe Public, she would have told him it was none of his fucking business. “We went on three dates.”

I added color. “And the first one was when he picked her up after one of his shitty band’s shitty shows.”

“He’s got that down to a science these days,” Lou said. He put his hand on my shoulder. “I don’t know jack shit about this guy right here, but I’m sure he’s a huge upgrade from Roger Lyon the Fucking Third. A huge upgrade.”

“And what kind of pretentious fuckwit puts ‘the Third’ at the end of his name? ” I asked.

“An enormous one.”

Lady Sub Pop was sitting alone near the low stage, patiently bored stiff, drinking a can of Diet Coke. She was ready to go back to her chrome room at the Paramount an hour before.

Lou called to her, “Jenna, from now on I want to be called Lou Barlow the Third.”

Jenna smiled, using the last of her A&R man’s daily allotment of phony amusement.

“No, even better, Lou Barlow Junior.” He stood on the rungs of his bar stool and proposed a toast to his new name.

JOCELYN TOLD OUR cabbie we were going to Brooklyn. He groaned like he’d just been told by his boss that he was going to have to take a small pay cut.

“Sorry”—Jocelyn looked at the cabbie’s nameplate display—“Ahmed, but that’s where I live.”

I gave her a look.

“Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “They have to take you.”

I was not so drunk that I couldn’t sense the eighth day of the Seven Days’ War dawning. I distracted Jocelyn by pulling her closer to me on the slippery vinyl seat. I kissed her neck. Ahmed hauled ass toward Houston Street.

“And take the Manhattan Bridge, not Brooklyn,” Jocelyn added for good measure.

Ahmed’s eyes tightened in the rearview mirror.

The cab crossed the bridge the way a hovercraft does gentle sea swells. Jocelyn had her head tilted back far enough to look straight up through the rear windshield. Her tongue and teeth glistened. A sparse constellation made up almost entirely of aircraft shone through the blurry rhythm of ironwork. She started imitating the in-cab recording of Elmo telling tourists to buckle up and not to forget their shit when they left. I kissed her exposed throat.

She giggled.

The sound of the steel-belted radials on the road changed from a sizzle to a wash as the Manhattan Bridge became Flatbush Avenue.

“I like that Lou Barlow,” I said.

Jocelyn had no comment. She lifted her ass off the seat and guided my hand under it before sitting back down. Traffic started backing up right around Junior’s cheese-cake restaurant.

“Elmo says, ‘Keep doing that.’ ”

“LOOK, ROY,” James said, “it’s Ron Jeremy, the king of hardcore! ”

“James, if you only knew.”

“As if.”

“Listen. What do you think about me dropping you off at work so Roy and I can go somewhere in the truck? ”

“Like where? ”

“I don’t fucking know. Isn’t there a mall or a playground near the boatyard? It’s just getting old going up and down this street all the time. I think Roy needs more stimulation.”

James was suspicious. “Can you even drive? ”

“Of course I can drive.”

“I mean legally? ”

As we pulled into the boatyard, Dogshit and two other scruffy-looking guys were drinking coffee and smoking alongside a long elevated red hull.

James let go of the steering wheel and rubbed his hands together like a miser. “That big red bitch is going to cover my nut till Christmas.”

I had one hundred fifty dollars in my pocket Marie had paid me for my first three days of work. I was feeling pretty good about it. I was going to treat Roy to a grilled cheese or something. “How much you make on a repair like that? ”

“Oh, you know,” James said, “a gentleman never fucks and talks.” He reached back over the front seat and grabbed a cooler from the floor. “Does he, sonny boy? ”

Roy giggled.

James reluctantly dropped the keys into my hand. He checked to make sure Dogshit was still way out of earshot. “You and I both know I don’t even have to say it.” He said it anyway. “I depend on this truck, so don’t drive like a Chink.”

The steering wheel was miles away. So were the pedals. I reached down and found the seat-adjusting lever. I couldn’t release it. James was watching me. He came back to the Suburban and opened the driver’s door.

“What the fuck’s the problem? ” Dogshit and the other guys looked on.

“I can’t get it to—”

“Look out.” James released the lever with one hand and moved the massive bench all the way forward with the other. “Close enough for you? ”

It was too close, but I told him it was fine.

“And make sure you’re back here by three sharp.”

I unintentionally did a mini peel-out in a patch of sand. Roy loved it. I looked in the rearview mirror, and James was shaking his head.

I turned on the heater. The sweet smell of rotting tree waste blowing from the vent was nauseating. Roy was making a face like he’d just eaten a bad blueberry. I shut the heater down and opened a window. I was colder than I’d been three minutes earlier.

“What do you say we put some food in the furnace, Roy old kid? ”

It was still too early for lunch, so I swung through the McDonald’s drive-through and bought a couple number-three breakfast combos. I got one with a coffee, and the other with the orange juice. I was planning on drinking both, but Roy spotted the orange juice from way the fuck back there in his car seat. He went completely batshit when I told him the sippy cup of lukewarm two-percent milk was all his. There was no reasoning with him. My options were to endure the tantrum or give in.

“Fine. Fine.” I knew he couldn’t help himself, but it still sucked getting yelled at. “Hang on.” I held the orange juice between my knees while I drove and used a coffee stirrer to poke a small hole in the foil. He sucked on it and was instantly relieved, like the Levy character in Marathon Man when Zell, the Nazi sadist, rubs a numbing tincture of clove on the tooth he’d just drilled. “Is it safe, Roy? Is it safe? ”

He glared at me while sucking away.

James had assured me there was no way it was going to rain. I pulled into the parking lot of the John Glenn Middle School and let Roy loose. The playground was a lot closer to the building than it looked from the road. A window of the classroom nearest the swing set had two crude gender representatives painted on it: a football and a horse with a pink mane. I could see the faces of kids dying at their desks. The teacher was a middle-aged woman. She was startled when she turned and saw me standing so close to the other side of the glass. I waved to her, one caretaker to another. She started to wave back, but stopped herself.

“We’re not hurting anybody, right, Roy? ” I pulled my knit hat from my pocket and concealed my homeless-guy hairdo. I showed off some fatherly affection by kissing Roy’s cheek, then looked back into the classroom. I felt so sorry for Roy. He had his whole life ahead of him.

The playground was built for kids much older than Roy, so I had to sit on the swing and hold him in my lap. He didn’t like it at first, but as soon as we started moving, everything was fine. It was kind of nice holding on to him. His fat fingers were white from squeezing the iron chains. He laughed more and more the higher we went.

I glanced into the classroom. The teacher was now talking to a man who resembled the father on the show Family Ties. I could see yellow in his beard. They exuded the same kind of distrust. They had me made for a pedophile fishing for a keeper, using little Roy as bait. I swung him less high. He wanted to get down and run around, so I let him.

“Careful, Roy. Careful.”

He was standing in a depression worn into the ground, fucking around with the swing. I tried to pick him up and move him somewhere safer, but he screamed. Both teachers looked at me, so I left him where he was. He pushed hard on the swing. It came back and smashed him in the mouth. I knew he was going to cry like a motherfucker because for the first few seconds he made no sound at all. He just looked like he was screaming.

I picked him up and hugged him while he wailed. He was touching his mouth. His top lip was already swelling. I lifted it. One of his front teeth was outlined in a fine bead of blood. I touched the tooth, and he screamed. It was loose. I rocked him back and forth. His arms were so tight around my neck, I could have let go of him, and he would have stayed attached to me. I kissed his face and told him it would be okay. I gave him a drink of milk from his sippy cup. That calmed him. He left some bloody, milky drool around the mouthpiece. Seeing that almost broke my heart.

I sat back on a swing and tried to seat him on my lap, but he wanted me to hold him. He rested his head on my shoulder. I put my hand under the back of his coat. My fingers played over his ribs. It scared me to think of how easily they could be broken. I gently rocked us without taking my feet off the ground.

I wondered if Marie’s son, Sidney, had been more or less afraid while dying than Roy was just then. Or are dying and a shocking whack in the mouth one and the terrible same when you don’t know any better? I protected Roy with my body, but no one can protect someone forever.

Both teachers were watching from right up against the window.

“He’s okay, for fuck’s sake.”

WHEN WE PICKED James up at the boatyard, I told him right away about Roy’s accident. James almost seemed excited to see the wound.

“Let’s see that wobbly Chiclet.” Roy resisted, but not enough. “Oh, you’re okay. You’ll live to get married.”

“You think it’s still in there good enough? ”

“That thing’s not going anywhere.” It was one of the few times I was glad James was a know-it-all. “I’ll tell Pamela I walked into him, just in case.”

James asked for his car keys by sticking out his hand, palm up. “I tell you what, though. I don’t know what the fuck we’re going to do when Roy starts talking for real.”

We stopped at Spunt’s on the way home.

“Awesome football game,” Ricky said, like I’d played a key role in East Falmouth’s victory. He was wearing an enormous Boston Bruins home jersey. He looked like he’d been born without hands. “I’ve been waiting for you to come in. I got you something.”

“For me? ” I asked.

James was drinking from a quart of milk, watching us. Ricky reached into his hip pocket and removed a twenty-dollar prepaid telephone card, still in the cellophane wrapper. It had pictures of flags on it.

“So you won’t need to change dollar bills into change to use the pay phone.”

I was touched. “Oh, man, you got to let me pay for that.”

“Why? It’s prepaid.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

James did, I’m sure. I could see him composing a string of homophobic cut-downs he would have delivered with relish if Ricky had been merely stupid.

Ricky showed me the price breakdown on the back of the card. “See? Six cents a minute. Now look.” He raced over to the phone card display and came back with both a five-dollar and a ten-dollar card. He turned them over on the forest green Formica counter. “Seven cents a minute. And eight cents a minute.” He raised the twenty-dollar card and exclaimed to the room, “This one’s got the value.”

James nodded in agreement, then polished off the quart of milk.

Roy was trying to lift a gallon jug of blue windshield-washer fluid.

WHILE JAMES GASSED UP the Suburban, I slipped out to the phone booth and test-drove my new phone card. I used a nickel to scrape off the scratch-ticket coating that concealed my access number. I jumped through the dialing hoops, then punched in the main number for Redbook. I had 325 minutes available for the call. I dialed Jocelyn’s extension, and again I was rerouted to the receptionist.

“I’m sorry, she’s no longer employed by Redbook.”

“What do you mean? ”

“She doesn’t work here anymore.”

“You’re kidding? Since when? ”

The receptionist went into protection mode. “I’m sorry. I can’t say.”

“Did she ever come back from her honeymoon? ”

“Sir, I really can’t—”

“You can’t or you won’t? ”

“Is there someone else you’d like to speak to? ”

“Joff.”

“Who? ”

“Joff Something-or-other.”

She humored me and searched the directory. “I’m afraid there’s no one named Joff working here, either.”

I hung up and dialed Jocelyn’s apartment. Still no answer. Still no answering machine. I bludgeoned the telephone with the receiver, then started walking back to the Suburban.

Jocelyn could have been anywhere: languidly drifting past a Grecian island with a Moroccan financier named Sergio or buying a box of fucking Spic and Span at the C-Town on Ninth Street. Maybe Roger Lyon III flew her over to meet up with the Australian leg of the Fifi tour, or some fucking shit like that. Lyon III seemed like just the type of strategically neglectful, dashing egomaniac who could bring a high-strung girl like Jocelyn around.

James stopped tapping his watch when he saw my face. I opened the passenger door.

He spoke over the top of the truck. “What happened to you? ”

“What a fucking mess.”

James smiled. He enjoyed that he understood all too well. “What she say? ”

“Nothing. I can’t reach her. It’s like she disappeared.”

“Good. Talking to her’s the worst fucking thing you could do.” He slapped the roof. “No. Seeing her is the worst thing.” He started imitating the “weaker” sex, whichever sex that was. “ ‘Maybe we should meet for a coffee and just talk.’ Next thing you know, you’re caught—balls deep—back in the penis flytrap. Fuck that.”

“I know, but it’s fucking hard,” I said.

“Damn straight, it’s hard. But you have to be tough. What did Ronnie say, ‘We don’t negotiate with terrorists.’ ”

“I thought Reagan did negotiate with terrorists.”

“Depends on who you ask. All I’m saying is, you talk to her, and just like that, you’re set back months.”

“I know, but—”

“Like in AA, when they give you a badge for every week you’re dry. That’s all fucking good and well, but you fall off the wagon, and those badges don’t mean shit.”

“What if you’re meant to be a drunk? ”

“I don’t know. I guess, be a good one.”

A pristine navy blue Chevy Impala from the early seventies pulled up on the other side of the pumps.

“Here comes Mr. Fucking Magoo,” James said. “This is all I need.” An elderly man got out and squinted at the gas prices. “How are you today, Mr. Mahoney? ” James called over.

“Fine.” It took Mr. Mahoney a few seconds to process just who James was. “Jimmy. I didn’t recognize you.”

“It’s the gray hair.” James took off his hat and slicked back his temples.

“I don’t see any gray.”

“Oh, it’s there.”

“Least you still got some.” Mr. Mahoney ran his hand over his bald head. It was as shiny as a priest’s.

They chuckled, each pretending to know the mythical inner peace that’s supposed to come to aging men.

Mr. Mahoney grabbed a small, triangular wooden block from his dashboard. He slid the nozzle into his gas tank, then wedged the block into the nozzle’s handle so he could fuel up hands free. “How are your mom and dad? ”

“They’re doing great,” James said. “Thanks.”

“That’s fantastic. Give them my best.”

“I certainly will. And give mine to Mrs. Mahoney.”

“It’s a deal.” The old man walked toward the store, leaving the rigged pump unattended and racing toward a potential overflow.

When the coast was clear, James removed the block of wood and tossed it in the trash. “That man should not be allowed to drive.” He finished filling Mahoney’s tank the old-fashioned way. “No shit, they should retest all of them at sixty-five.”

JAMES’S MOTHER DIED of bone cancer a few weeks after Roy was born. I went to her wake. It was open-casket. She looked like that nineteenth-century sailor they found preserved in a block of Arctic ice. I never met his father. He died not long after James and Pamela started dating. He was out fishing alone in his boat, and he had a stroke. They said he wouldn’t have lived even if he’d had the stroke in the emergency room of Mass General. That made everyone feel better.

“ PRETTY COOL, HUH?” I said. “A twelve-inch, stainless-steel skillet with an aluminum sandwich bottom.”

“What do you know about aluminum sandwich bottoms? ” Jocelyn said snidely. “You read that off the box.”

I knew when I saw my mother’s return address on the package that Jocelyn was going to have an issue with what was inside—whatever it was. I didn’t feel like getting into it with her. We stood in my kitchen looking at the new skillet gleaming on my dulled, shit brown electric stove.

Jocelyn shook her head like something was a crying shame. “And she sent that to you out of the blue? ” She knew damn well where it came from.

“Yup.”

“That’s weird.”

“It’s a fucking gift from my mother.”

“It’s more complex than that.”

“Oh, it is? ”

“Yes. I see it clear as day. Obviously you don’t.”

“Give me a break. Can’t my mother buy me a pan? ”

“It’s the only pan you own.”

“It’s not my only pan.”

“Correction: It’s the only usable pan you own. I wouldn’t wash my feet in your cookware.”

“They’re not that bad.”

Jocelyn skipped right over the sorry state of the rest of my pots and pans. “She’s still taking care of you. And you let her.”

“That pan is taking care of me? ”

“If you can’t see that, then I don’t know what to tell you.”

Jocelyn’s mother was a sclerotic-livered concern-sponge, the Bizarro World opposite of my own. Right then I felt like rubbing her nose in it, but that would have been cruel. So I rubbed her nose close to it. “You sure you’re not just a tiny bit jealous? ”

MARIE WA S SITTING in a folding chair. A threadbare, stuffed Hamburglar character with a broken neck was slumped over in a high chair next to her. It was so grim I wondered whether she had put him that way on purpose. The camera was rolling. I read from the script.

“Do you think you were ever going to tell Sidney he was an accident? ”

“When he got old enough to understand, I would have. And I would have told him that sometimes an accident can be the best thing that ever happens to a person. It was for me.” She took a drag off her smoke. “I thought about this a lot when he was alive. The only other thing that might possibly have changed me as profoundly as having him would have been surviving a life-threatening illness. New job, new city, marriage, divorce—even the death of my mother—didn’t change me as much.” She took another drag. “Before I had Sidney, I was a lot of things: selfish, vain, careless with other people’s feelings. If it wasn’t for him, I know I’d still be that old person. Maybe worse.” She told me to stop shooting. “Fuck.”

“What is it? ”

“I don’t like how I said that. Sounds so fucking fake.”

I agreed, but didn’t say so.

“I don’t want to talk about it. Can we please just do another take, quickly, please? ” She asked like I’d been trying to dissuade her.

“Sure. We can do as many as you’d like.”

“What I’d like is to do one fucking good one. Again, please.”

I rolled tape and we started over. I tried to sound more casual.

Marie left a pregnant pause between the question and her answer. “Sidney’s father and I weren’t married until after Sidney was born. I messed around on him before that. I loved him. It was shitty of me. I was young, stupid . . . Fuck, fuck, fuck, stop the fucking tape, please.”

I stood up. Marie smashed her two fists together. “This sounds so retarded. Jesus fucking Christ.” She mocked herself. “ ‘I was young, stupid.’ Give me a fucking break. What is this? How Green Was My Valley? ”

“I don’t know that movie, but I’m sure you weren’t that bad.”

“Goddamnit, I wrote it exactly the way I wanted it, but it sounds like crap. I’d puke if I had to watch a film like that.”

“Maybe you should just wing it.” I knew what I was talking about. I had a lot of experience at going into something unprepared.

“How so? ”

“I don’t know. Why don’t we just let the camera roll and shoot the shit.”

A soft lightbulb went on inside her head. “Instead of act.”

“Might feel better.”

“I don’t know. I spent a long time preparing. I had it all planned out. The look, the script, everything.”

“You’re the one who said sometimes an accident is the best thing. Did you mean that? ”

“Yes.”

“So? ”

She positioned Hamburglar so that his head would remain upright. “That means I’m going to need something to sip.” She got up and headed out of the room.

I called after her. “What are you having? ”

“Bourbon.”

“Set me up, too, would you? ” I lit a cigarette and stood between the camera and the sliding glass doors. There was a spade sticking out of a weedy pile of loam off to one side of the backyard. I breathed on the glass, drew a triangle, then wiped it clean. “What in the fuck am I doing here.”

“What was that? ”

“Just thinking out loud.” I turned. Marie was now in the doorway holding two coffee mugs of bourbon on ice. She gave me my drink, then checked to see if the camera was still in focus.

“Hey, you never turned off the camera,” she said.

“I thought I did.” I started for it. “I can just rewind it to where—”

“No, no, no. Don’t bother. It’s all part of the process.” She sat back down in her chair. “As embarrassing as it may be.” She raised her glass to me.

I got behind the camera. “You, as my mother would say, like to take drink, don’t you? ”

Marie laughed. “Now and then.”

“Did you drink while you were pregnant? ”

“Jesus, no. I quit everything—drinking, weed, cigarettes, coffee—all the things I’d tricked myself into believing weren’t that bad for me. That’s how I knew I was pregnant. Just imagining myself taking a sip of booze or coffee would make me retch. It’s pretty remarkable when you think about it. There I was, a grown woman being watched out for by an embryo.”

“Like all kinds of choices were being made for you.”

“More like, all of a sudden, a lot of the things weren’t even on my radar anymore. It was a relief. All the guilt, all the excuse making—gone. Replaced by the purpose of growing and delivering this person. It was very peaceful.”

“Sounds pretty good.”

“It wasn’t pretty good. It was fucking amazing. And it kept getting better, especially after he was born. Who knows if it ever would have plateaued.”

“Growing up, did you ever imagine having a kid could make you feel that good? ”

“God, no. I never wanted kids. I remember when I was about twenty, my friend Tina taking my hand and placing it on her stomach when the baby was kicking. I didn’t like it all. It just seemed creepy and wrong. She was way overdue, and her skin was pulled so tight, I thought her stomach was going to split open right there on the subway. It was disgusting. She got mad at me for saying so.

“But when I got pregnant, I loved it when Sidney woke me up kicking. I’d just lie there in the dark with my hands on my stomach. I wouldn’t even wake up Jason because I was worried that if I did, all the commotion would make the baby stop.” Marie stared silently into the camera for a few seconds.

“Do you ever worry, like, okay, here was this great person who changed you and your whole world and everything, and now that they’re gone, everything will go back to the shitty way it was before? ”

“Obviously.” She raised her mug of bourbon in one hand, and her smoke in the other. “But in other ways, it changes you for good. It stains you. I mean, look at me.”

“Did you get all of those tattoos after he was born? ”

“The better ones.”

“Can I see? ”

“Oh, God, really? ”

“If you don’t want to . . .”

“No. I do.” She took off her shirt. It didn’t seem like she was wearing just a bra because she was covered in ink. She tapped the place above her left breast. “This one . . .”

I couldn’t make it out. “What is it? ”

“Two dates. The day he was born and the day he died.” She tapped the corresponding spot above her other breast.

“And that one? ”

“Two more dates. My birthday and the day I was planning on killing myself.”

BY THE END of the day’s shoot, we were both frazzled. Marie thought we were onto something. I had a head ache and I was starving. I asked her if she wanted to get something to eat, but she said she was too torched. She paid me another fifty bucks in cash and handpicked a few articles of clothing from a pile on the toddler bed.

“Here,” she said. “These look like they’d be about Roy’s size.”

ROY WAS A crabby loose cannon because he had a bad cold and hadn’t slept much the night before. James dropped him off with me just the same. After his lunch, he could barely keep his eyes open. I brushed the sand and crumbs from my bedroll and folded it in half so that it would be twice as comfortable for him. I covered him with my jacket and put my knit hat on his head. He liked that. I started to tell him a bedtime-story version of Dog Day Afternoon. He fell asleep in about two seconds. I didn’t want to get sick, so I sat out on the front porch. I cracked open the copy of Glengarry Glen Ross Marie let me borrow. I got pretty deep into it when I heard Roy crying inside.

“Jesus Christ, Roy. What happened? ” He was sitting upright, covered in diarrhea. It looked like he’d been sprayed with A1 sauce. The smell had a toxic chemical component to it not found in your everyday shit. He was freaked out because his hands were messy. He held them up for me. It was a damn good thing he couldn’t see the rest of him. He was probably thinking, How the fuck did this shit get all over my hands while I was sleeping? Please clean them at once.

“Sorry, kid, but that’s horrible.” I couldn’t hide my expression. Roy stopped crying on a dime and smiled, proud of himself. He clapped his hands, liberating a poisonous mist into the room. Then he raised one hand toward his runny nose.

“No, no, no. Don’t do that.” I grabbed his slippery wrist just in time. I scooped him up, then carried him—at arm’s length—into the bathroom. “Dear God in heaven.” He loved it.

I set him down on the floor and turned on the shower. There was no graceful way to free him from his soiled clothes so I just went for it. His head was further beshit ted as it passed laboriously through the opening of his shirt. I started taking off all of my own clothes. Roy was curious. He reached up for my crotch. It shocked me.

“Get out of there,” I laughed. “Jesus, kid. Didn’t your old man teach you anything? ”

He giggled, naked except for the shit.

I sat him in the middle of the tub. The water going down the drain turned Psycho brown. I sat like a bobsled der behind him and soaped us both up.

“Breathe in that good steam. It’ll fix you right up.” I demonstrated. He followed. He exploded with a series of yellow, ropy sneezes. I plucked the phlegm from his nose after each one and flung it at the drain. “Huh, kid? What I tell you? Better, right? ”

I looked through the mommy bag for a change of clothes. There was a pair of green socks. That was it. “What the fuck, James? ” Even though it hadn’t happened yet on my watch, one had to think the possibility of a toddler shitting not just his pants but his entire outfit was not altogether far-fetched.

I’d been a little weirded out when Marie gave me that stack of Sidney’s old clothes. But it was a good thing she did. I dressed Roy in a pair of black sweatpants, a black long-sleeved shirt, and a Velvet Underground and Nico T-shirt over that. He looked pale and exhausted, like a roadie for Soundgarden. I threw our dirty clothes and my makeshift bed into the washing machine. There was no detergent, so I ran it all through twice.

“Where’d he get those clothes? ” James asked.

I told him everything.

“You just called Roy Sidney, you know.”

“I did? ”

“Yes. You said, ‘Sidney had an accident.’ ”

“That’s strange.”

“Yes, it is. Do me a favor. Don’t do that again. I’m superstitious. It’s bad enough you got him in a dead kid’s clothes.”

THE NEXT TIME I worked for Marie I told her the whole story. I laid it on thick, making it sound like Roy’s diarrhea was more explosive than it actually was. She liked the story, especially the parts about Sidney’s clothes and me getting shat on.

“Babies and men and poop,” she said. “Guys who don’t have kids fear diaper changing almost as much as anything. That’s the easy part.”

“Really? Because it was not exactly a good time.”

“That’s because he was sick. He probably had the flu.”

“Great. That means I’m going to get it. I’m fucked.”

“Oh, don’t be such a pussy.”

I liked that Marie didn’t have a problem using pussy as a playful put-down. She’d also drop a C-bomb in conversation now and then. “Well, anyway,” I said, “it’s a good thing you gave him those clothes.”

Marie thought about it. “I think I’d like to see them on Roy. I don’t know how it would make me feel, but I’m curious.”

“Hang on,” I said. “Don’t you think the camera should be rolling when you say stuff like that? ”

“Hmm.”

“Would it be too fake if we let it roll and had that whole talk over? ”

“I don’t know. We can try.”

“ THAT’S A horrible expression,” Jocelyn said. “I find it upsetting.” She had her hands cupped around a full rocks glass. She was waiting for the ice in her Wild Turkey to melt to just the right size before drinking. It was after eight o’clock, but the front room at Nursing Holmes was orange with natural light. Some guys in a band were hauling their gear through the bar and into the bigger room.

“Can you just let the expression slide for the sake of the story? ” Richie asked.

“It’s not just the expression,” Jocelyn said. “It’s the whole story.”

The other person at the table with us was a pretty Mexican kitchen worker named Milagro. The other Mex icans at Esposito’s called her Flaca because they thought she was skinny. Flaca’s English was broken. She backed Richie up. “What’s wrong with saying ‘piece of ass’? ”

“You know what? ” Jocelyn said. “There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s a fine expression. Succinct, and not wholly without texture. Use it liberally.” She didn’t feel like teaching Flaca both the English language and Feminism 101. She gave me a dirty look, which I shrugged off. Someone at a pool table in the next room executed an explosive break. Jocelyn flinched.

Richie continued where he left off. “For me it’s a toss-up. I’ve had a few amazing ‘wedding pieces.’ ”

I had drunk two beers and a shot. I was feeling all of them. “Hang on,” I said. “For it to qualify as a wedding piece, do you have to fuck during the actual reception, or is it just someone you hook up with at a wedding and end up fucking? ” I was a stickler for details.

Jocelyn blew smoke in all our faces.

“Either one,” Richie said. “But let me go on record: It’s way better if you screw during the festivities. It heightens it.”

Flaca laughed, then said something in Spanish.

Richie continued. “I screwed a bridesmaid at my cousin Eleni’s wedding. We were in a supply closet in the basement of the reception hall. I swear to God, Eleni and my uncle Nick were doing their father-daughter dance to ‘All the Way’ right above our heads. It was pretty priceless.”

“Sounds classy,” Jocelyn said.

“Hey, it wasn’t my idea.”

“Oh, in that case, sounds classy.”

“What was her name? ” I asked.

“Honestly? I could not tell you.”

Jocelyn stood up. She frisbeed a Sam Adams beer coaster at the tabletop, and it skipped onto the battered red wool carpet. “In case you’re all wondering,” she said, “I’m going to the bathroom now to take a dump.”

“Thanks for sharing,” Richie said. We watched Jocelyn vanish, then Richie drew Flaca and me closer toward him. He smelled of Murray’s pomade and Salems. He lowered his voice. “You ever get a wake piece? ”

“Get the fuck out of here.”

“What’s a wake piece? ” Flaca asked.

“You’re telling me you got laid at a fucking wake? ”

“Not at the wake. Right after. And it was someone I sort of knew back in high school.”

“That’s insane.”

“Amy Dellorto,” he reminisced. “You have to love a girl with the same last name as a carburetor.”

“When the fuck was this? ”

“I don’t know. Couple years ago.”

“Who died? Don’t tell me it was her mother.”

“No, our American history teacher, Mr. Savage. The only good teacher anyone in East Longmeadow ever had.” Richie raised his glass, and we toasted this Mr. Savage.

“How in the fuck do you engineer something like that? What did you do, whisper in her ear while you were kneeling at the corpse? ”

“A bunch of us met up for drinks afterward. She and I were catching up, and she says out of nowhere that she always liked me back then, but was too shy. We start making out in the bar. One thing led to another, blah, blah, blah, and you know that Budgetel on Route Five in Holyoke? ”

“Wow.”

“First floor. Third window from the right. I still look at it whenever I drive by.”

“That’s hilarious.”

“The best part is, I was sitting on the edge of the bed with my Filene’s Basement el cheapo suit pants pulled down to my ankles, and she’s kneeling there, glazing my vase—”

“You just make that up, ‘glazing my vase’? ”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Anyway, so she’s glazing my vase, and the TV’s on, and the Happy Days theme song starts playing. Not ‘Rock Around the Clock,’ the other one. I can’t stop reading the names going by: Ron Howard, Henry Winkler, Donny Most, Anson Williams, blah, blah, blah. It was distracting, so I look down at my feet, and I’m wearing one brown sock and one blue sock.”

“That is rich.”

“A good time was had by all.” He turned to Flaca. “Tu comprendo? ”

Flaca nodded. Jocelyn was lingering at the jukebox. The Dream Syndicate’s “Tell Me When It’s Over” started playing. Richie leaned closer to Flacca and stroked her cheek with the back of his hand.

MARIE THOUGHT THE raw source material we’d taped so far seemed really good. And what wasn’t could probably be fixed in editing. She said that’s where the magic happened anyway. She mentioned something about the film Burden of Dreams. I was proud of myself for telling her I’d never seen it.

“You have to. It’s a classic.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll sniff it out when I have time.”

“No you won’t. I can tell.” She popped the lens cap back onto the camera. “We’re watching it now.” She went to her room.

“What about work? ” I called after her.

“This is work.”

I followed her. “Okay, but you don’t have to pay me for sitting around watching movies. I feel like I should be paying you.”

She was getting the VCR ready. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

I sat in the armchair. Marie raced back to her bed and was lying down before the film’s opening sequence. She patted the place next to her.

“You’ll be able to see better from right here,” she said.

“Okay.” I was nervous. It didn’t seem like she was coming on to me, but I could have counted on half a hand the number of times a girl inviting me to sit on her bed wasn’t a come-on. I lay down next to her. I made sure there was a good foot of space between us.

“Are you okay with this? ” she asked.

“Fine, why? ”

“Just making sure.”

Marie said Burden of Dreams was one of her favorite films. She’d seen it at least fifty times. She wasn’t kidding. She deconstructed and reassembled it as it went by. Usually that kind of running commentary would have driven me fucking crazy. But hers was insightful without making me feel like a fucking dope.

She grabbed my arm. “This part coming up is horrible.”

“What happens? ”

“Just watch.” Ten seconds later some native day labor ers hired to work on the film set were feared to have been crushed beneath an enormous portaged boat.

I groaned. “Do they die? ”

“Watch.”

I heard Marie start to sniffle as the scene played out on the screen. I looked at her out of the corner of my eye. “Are you okay? ”

“I will be. It’s still really hard for me to watch anything where people die.”

“We don’t have to watch it.” I started to get up to turn off the VCR.

She stopped me. “No. I want to watch it.”

“Why, if it makes you feel like shit? ”

“Because a lot of things make me feel that way.” She hit Pause on the remote. We faced each other. “If I want to keep living, I can’t avoid feeling the pain.”

“Jesus, that’s pretty heavy.”

“Well, what do you want me to say? ”

“No. It’s just—honest to God—the only time I’ve ever heard someone say something like that and mean it was in the movies.” Like Debra Winger in Terms of Endearment or the guy in Brian’s Song.

“I don’t know what to tell you.”

“I’ve never been through anything as heavy as you have.”

“No one close to you has ever died? ”

“No.”

“Well, they will.”

“Unless I die first.”

“That’s your plan for dealing with grief? ”

“No, but sometimes I think about certain people dying—like my parents or my sister—I can’t imagine it. I’d definitely rather die first.”

“You don’t strike me as a selfish person, but that’s pretty selfish.”

“I know.”

“You wouldn’t want to die first. Trust me. You wouldn’t want to put your mother through that. If the grief didn’t kill her, the guilt might.”

“Guilt? I’m not saying I’d want her to feel responsible for me dying.”

“It’s the guilt she’d feel for wanting to go on living after you.”

“I never thought of that.”

“I mean, I’m not distraught every fraction of every second of every minute, right? ”

“And that makes you feel guilty? ”

“Yes.” She shifted on her elbow. “I’m not an idiot. I know that’s why I drink as much as I do.”

“Guilt? ”

She nodded.

“That fucking sucks.”

“Things aren’t the way I planned, but what can you do, right? ”

“How do you do it? ”

“I just do.”

“Man.”

“You know that Eleanor Roosevelt quote?” Marie asked.

“No.”

“The end of it is, ‘You must do the thing you think you cannot do.’ I say it to myself a lot.” She repeated the quote.

“I mean—and I swear, I’m not trying to be an asshole—what’s the payoff? ”

“I don’t think you’re an asshole. Payoff for what, doing the things I think I can’t? ”

“Mmm.”

“I get to live with some hope.”

“That what, you’ll be happy again? ”

“No. I don’t think that’s an option. More like there’ll be some kind of tolerable balance between the glimpses of happy moments and the rest of them.”

“Right.” I nodded. “And you’ll get back to zero.”

She nodded and smiled weakly. “That’s the idea.”

“It’s kind of like that joke,” I said. “The one with the guy who keeps whacking himself over the head with a hammer.”

“And? ”

“And his friend asks him why he’s doing that, and he says, ‘Because it feels so good when I stop.’ ”

She liked the joke. “It’s sort of like that. I’m not the only one doing the hitting, but I’d take the relief just the same.”

“Sometimes I think I’m the guy in the joke.”

“Which? The inquisitive friend? ”

“I wish.”

“You ask me some pretty okay questions.”

“Thanks, but I wasn’t trying to.”

She liked that. “You weren’t trying to. That’s really good. Thanks.”

“Thanks for what, saying something funny? ”

“Yes.”

I WALKED HOME with another bag of Sidney’s clothes. If Marie was thanking me for inadvertently saying something funny and cheering her up, I wondered how she’d react if I actually tried to do something nice for her. I got an idea. When I got home, I went through the bag of clothes and laid out Roy’s outfit for the next day: a pair of cherry-red jeans and a mostly green hand-knit Icelandic sweater.

I hoped Marie liked it.

I got into bed. I started to jerk off, imagining what the rest of the night with Marie could have been like if Burden of Dreams hadn’t brought her down so hard. I couldn’t pull it off. It felt wrong. It had nothing to do with Jocelyn or exhaustion. I just couldn’t get beyond the real image of Marie bummed out when those people in the movie got crushed by the boat.

I WAS WAITING on the front porch for them when James drove up with Roy.

“You’re up early,” James said.

“I have a big day ahead of me.”

“You and me both.” He thought about it. “What the fuck do you have to do? ”

“Just the usual. Hang out with my best-buddy pal, Roy.” He ran right at me.

“Jesus Christ,” James said. “Did you shave? ”

“Kind of. The razor was like a butter knife.”

“Interesting.” James was looking down his nose at my work.

I self-consciously stroked my cheeks. “You like it? ”

“Yes,” he said. “Very much. Now come on over here and suck my dick.” He threw a playful backhand that I avoided.

“As much as I’d like to, I really can’t.” I tossed Roy up into the air and caught him. He started coughing.

“Hey, go easy on him. He’s still not a hundred percent.”

“You still feeling crummy, kid? ” I held him with one arm, like he was a full grocery bag. “You’re looking pretty pink.”

James watched us. “I guess it would be okay if you dropped me off and took the rig for the day.”

“Nah, I figured we’d just poke around the neighborhood and entertain ourselves with the local flora and fauna.”

“Flora and fauna? What the fuck’s got into you? ”

“How do you mean? ”

“You’re up early. You shaved. I swear to God, if your hair was combed, I’d shit blood right here on the lawn.”

“Nothing has got into me. This is me feeling reasonably okay.”

“I don’t think I like it.”

I STRIPPED ROY out of his outfit and dressed him in Sidney’s clothes. “Honestly, kid, it’s not the look for you, but it’s a special occasion.” Standing there in the pants and sweater, he looked like a psychedelic-era Clancy Brother. “I dig the red slacks, but the sweater’s a bit much.” Roy was scratching at his neck and wrists. “Want me to take that off you?” I tried to remove it, and he protested. “Okay. The sweater stays.” I got him in his coat and Wel lingtons, and we strolled toward the dead-end side of Opal Cove Road.

As we approached Marie’s, I could hear a dog barking somewhere out of sight. It was too thin and yappy to be Tinker. Roy let out a small, fearful moan.

“Don’t sweat it, kid. This time I’m prepared. Check this out.” From beneath the stroller, I produced a sufficient length of copper pipe with an ugly, unfriendly T junction soldered to one end. “Like your old man says, you got to have the right tools to do the job.” Roy wanted me to give him the pipe. “I can’t, kid.” He insisted, so I let him hold it. I felt less safe. “But if I spot Cujo”—I pointed at my chest—“the pipe goes to you know who.”

We tried Marie’s front door, but there was no answer. We went around to the back, and I banged on the storm door. I wanted to surprise her, so I kept Roy out of sight, off to the side. A light went on in the kitchen. Marie answered the door wearing a pink terry-cloth bathrobe. She didn’t look too good. She was either hungover or had just gotten out of bed, or both.

“Hey,” I said through the screen.

“I thought you couldn’t work today.”

“I can’t.”

She was confused. “Well, then . . .” She rubbed her eyes and scratched her head. “What are you doing here? ”

“Did you just wake up? ”

“Mmyeah, about three seconds ago.”

“Sorry.”

“I couldn’t get to sleep, so I took a sleeping pill at around four.”

“Oh, man. Should we leave? ”

“Who’s we? ”

“Roy and me.” I pulled Roy into view.

Marie perked right up. “No, you shouldn’t go. You should come in.” I carried Roy into the kitchen. “Hey there, Roy. It’s good to see you again.” Marie extended her hand for him to shake. He was cautious.

“It’s okay, kid. Marie’s our friend. Look.” I shook her hand.

“Yeah, Roy, friends.” She kissed me on the cheek.

“See,” I said. “Marie is a friend.”

“Can I give Roy a kiss? ” Marie asked Roy. She leaned in and kissed him. He smiled. “Look at that smile. What beautiful teeth you have. Would you like a drink of milk? ” Roy reached for the refrigerator. “You want something in the fridge? ” Marie held out her arms for Roy to come to her. “Can I hold him? ”

“If he’ll let you, be my guest.” I passed Roy to Marie, and he went without a fight. She wore him on her hip and went to the fridge.

“Let’s see what we have in here for you, Roy.” They disappeared behind the open door. Light poured out onto the beige linoleum. Roy made a noise like he was struggling to reach something. “What is it? ” Marie asked. “You want ketchup? No? An egg? ” That was it. “Oh, Roy wants an egg.” Marie’s head appeared over the door. “Can Roy have an egg? ”

“I don’t see why not.”

“That’s great news, Roy. Let’s get you out of your coat and boots, and Marie will make you an egg, okay? ” She set Roy on the floor and unbuttoned his coat. She gasped when she saw Sidney’s sweater on him. She put her hand on her mouth, then stood up so that she could take all of him in.

“Oh, my God. And the pants, too.” She started to cry.

I felt like a heel. “I thought you wanted to see them on him,” I said. I tried to close Roy’s coat. Marie stopped me.

“No, don’t,” she said. “I do want to see them. It’s just a shock.” She picked Roy up and squeezed him. She ran her hands over the sweater and pants.

“You sure? ”

“Yes.” She smiled at me, then kissed Roy’s face. She pressed his head against her chest and rested her chin on the top of his head. “Thank you,” she said. “Both of you.”

Roy ate his scrambled egg with ketchup and toast off a green plastic plate decorated with an action scene from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics. Marie and I split an omelet with blue cheese and tomato. We sat at her small kitchen table.

“It’s nice not to be eating in a restaurant,” I said.

Marie gave my coffee a warmer. “Not much of a cook? ”

“I’d like to be, but I never found the time.” Never found time? I didn’t really know the reason why I’d never learned to cook, but it sure as fuck wasn’t because of a lack of time.

“I was a pretty okay cook,” Marie said. “I just haven’t felt like it.”

I impaled a chunk of omelet with my fork and raised it. “I’d say you’re still a pretty okay cook.”

“It’s just an omelet.”

“Well, it’s a good one.”

“Thanks. Watching someone enjoy is half the fun of cooking.”

“FYI, I’m enjoying this.” I chewed and watched her watch me. “Is it still fun? ”

She smiled. “It’s not bad.”

I turned to Roy. “What about you? You having fun, Roy? His Roy-al Highness? Little Lord Fauntle-Roy? ” I messed up his hair.

“You should never disturb a man when he’s eating,” Marie said.

“So true.” We watched him eat.

“Have you ever had an aged sirloin? ” Marie asked. “I mean, a really good, really well prepared aged sirloin? ”

“I might have.”

“No, no, if you had one, you’d know.” She closed her eyes and bit her lower lip.

“Then I guess I haven’t.”

“It’s been a while for me. What if I cooked one? ”

“Now? ”

“Not now. For dinner.”

I could feel my face get hotter. “Well . . . sure. That would be awesome.”

“There’s a great butcher in Yarmouth.” She used her napkin to wipe the ketchup from around Roy’s mouth.

“That seems like a lot of trouble.”

“We could all go? ”

“What do you think, Roy? You have any plans for the day? ”

Marie tried to wipe his face again, but he wasn’t into it. “I think the ketchup’s giving him a little contact rash.” She touched the corresponding area around her own mouth. “See? Right here? ”

MARIE SAID ROY and I should play in Sidney’s room while she got dressed.

“This is where I work when I’m not taking care of you. Pretty cool, huh? ” Roy was momentarily paralyzed by the sheer number of things before him. When he got his bearings, he went straight for the movie camera. I intercepted him. “Sorry, kid. This is the one thing you can’t touch. This is Marie’s movie camera.” He looked at me like a puzzled dog. “Cam-er-a,” I repeated loud and clear. “Can you say cam-er-a? ”

Marie called from her bedroom. “Why don’t you shoot a little of him? ”

“For what? ”

“I don’t know. He might find it interesting.”

“Would you like that, Roy? You want me to take your picture? ” It was the first time since I’d started taking care of him that I thought he knew exactly what the fuck I was talking about. He started giggling and shaking like a crazy motherfucker. It was pretty great to see. “Okay. Okay.” I was laughing. “Just give me two seconds.”

I fired up the camera and looked through the viewfinder. Marie’s empty chair came into sharp focus. I collected Roy and sat him in it. I got back behind the camera. Roy looked like a tiny black-and-white photocopy of himself. I started recording.

“Okay, Roy, here’s your big break. What would you like to say to the people? ” I stuck an invisible microphone in front of his face. Roy kicked his legs and shrieked with delight. It was hilarious.

Marie appeared in the doorway. “What are you two clowns up to in here? ”

“I HONESTLY DIDN’T THINK I’d ever be doing this again,” Marie said as we installed Sidney’s old car seat in her Subaru.

I pulled on one of the fastening straps until it was taut. “You think this is tight enough? ” She jerked on it and nodded. I hoisted Roy and we strapped him in.

“You feel like driving? ” Marie asked, wearing the key ring on her index finger.

“Really? ” My voice cracked.

“Are you old enough? ” She handed off the keys to me as we passed each other around the back of the car. I got in. Marie settled into the passenger seat. “Feel free to adjust anything if you’re cramped.” I fixed my grip at ten and two. The worn leather cover around the steering wheel was sticky.

“Actually, it all feels pretty good.”

The last time Marie had driven, she killed the engine without first turning off the tape player. When I started the car, the song “Rolling Moon” by the Chills played mid-song. “Oh, fantastic choice,” I said. “I love the Chills.”

Marie turned the music off, then said, “Me, too, but do you mind if we don’t listen to this right now? They can be a little depressing.”

“No problem. Quiet’s good. So where are we going exactly.”

“Well, it’s basically a straight shot once you get back onto Twenty-eight. When we get into Yarmouth—right around the center of town—I’ll tell you which way to go.” I was a slightly less nervous driver than I was a passenger. I needed to hear the simplest of directions—even to places I’d been before—four or five times. I knew it didn’t make any sense, but I couldn’t help myself.

“Back up a second,” I said. “Which direction do I go on Twenty-eight? ”

Marie had some fun with me. “Is this your first trip to Cape Cod? ”

“I’m not even going to dignify that with an answer.”

“Okay. Let me rephrase the question. Is Yarmouth anywhere between East Falmouth and Boston? ”

I smiled without looking at her. “No, I do not believe it is.”

“So, Professor, seeing as Boston is east of where we are right now, which direction do we go on Twenty-eight to get to Yarmouth? ”

I looked back at Roy. “Are you catching what she’s doing up here, kid? I mean, do I deserve this kind of abuse? ”

“Seems to me you’d be better off asking him which direction we go on Twenty-eight.”

“That’s it. I’ve taken all I’m going to take.” I opened the door and pretended to be getting out of the car. “I’m outta here and I’m never coming back.”

Roy started to cry. Marie turned in her seat. “It’s okay, Roy. He was just playing.” She grabbed my arm. “Tell him you’re not going anywhere.”

“I’m not going anywhere. Look. I’m still here. We’re all going to the store—together. Me. You. Marie.” I closed the door and buckled my seat belt for effect. Roy stopped crying, but his lip was still quivering.

“He was just pretending, Roy.” Marie and I looked at each other. She reached back and took hold of one of Roy’s feet. She gave it a playful wiggle, and he smiled.

“What can I say? ” I asked her quietly. “I guess the kid really likes me.”

“I think it’s more like love.”

“Crazy, huh? ”

“Not so much.” We had to turn away from each other to keep from cracking up. We didn’t want Roy to think we were laughing at him.

AFTER JAMES picked up Roy, I biked down to Spunt’s for some laundry detergent. Ricky was glad to see me. While I comparison-shopped, he told me about how Bob Lobel, the legendary Boston sportscaster, had gassed up there yesterday on his way out to Truro.

“No shit.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Was he a nice guy? ”

“He was awesome.”

“That’s cool. I always liked Bob Lobel. It would be a drag if he turned out to be a dick in real life.”

“No, not Bob Lobel. Look.” He held up a disposable camera. “There’s four pictures of me and him. I took them myself.” It was nice to see how proud Ricky was of the whole thing.

“That’s really cool.”

“Only twenty more pictures to go.”

“I hope you get some good ones.”

“Me too. Can I take one of you? ”

I was surprised. “You want a photo of me? ”

“I won’t use the flash if it bothers your eyes. Some people get those little things when they look at a flash.” He wiggled his fingers in the air.

“Jesus, Ricky. It’s not the flash.”

“Awesome, ’cause I think it’ll come out better with it.” He raised the camera to his face. “Stay right there.” I froze. “Smile.”

“I am smiling.”

He snapped the photo. “One more, just in case.” He snapped another. “How about one with me and you in it? ”

“Sure, why not? ”

“But stand right here so it’s like the ones with me and Bob Lobel.” Ricky leaned his head in over the middle of the counter. I did the same. We were almost cheek to cheek. He snapped two photos.

“Awesome. Only sixteen more pictures to go.”

I joked with him. “You could take a hundred pictures. None of them are going to come out as good as the ones of me.”

He giggled. “That’s a good one.” He started to ring up the detergent. “Doing laundry, Pay Phone? ”

I felt like joking some more with him. “What, this? No. I use it instead of shampoo.”

“For serious? ”

“Hell yeah.”

“Whoa.” He ran his fingers through his hair, trying to imagine what it would feel like shampooed with Tide. “I never heard of anybody doing that before.”

“Sure you have. Everybody knows All-Tempa-Cheer is gentlest on your scalp.”

“It is? ”

“Yeah, but you guys are out. This will do me fine.” I started peeling dollar bills from a roll.

“You sure? ” He craned his neck to see into the right aisle. “I thought we had that kind.”

“Forget it. It’s no biggie.”

“If you watch the register, I’ll go out back and see if we have some.”

“No, don’t bother.”

“It’s no bother. I want to.”

“Don’t.” I started to feel like an asshole. I didn’t think he was going to swallow the hook so completely and feel bad about disappointing me.

He came around the counter. “It’s no bother, honest. It’s my job.”

“Really, Ricky,” I grabbed him by the arm. “Don’t.” I think I scared him.

“Why? ”

I loosened my grip. “Just don’t, okay? ”

EVEN AFTER WORKING in a restaurant for nearly three years, I knew just enough about wine to fuck up an eighty-dollar piece of meat. So I brought a fifth of Jack Daniel’s to Marie’s. Bourbon and beef. That’s how they did it on The Big Valley and The High Chaparral.

Marie answered the back door wearing a white apron over her clothes. It was a cartoonish map of Italy with, Sì, sono della Calabria! splashed across it. Marie had eye shadow on. She kissed me on the cheek. Roy wasn’t with me this time.

“Huh, Jack Daniel’s.” She examined the label. “I approve.”

“It’s downright upright,” I said, quoting Frank Gifford from the Harveys Bristol Cream ad.

She was impressed. “You remember that commercial? ”

“Please.”

“What about this one? ” She started singing, “ ‘Martini and Rossi on the rocks. Say yeh-eh-ess.’ ”

I finished the jingle in a sultry voice: “Yeeehhhsss.”

LALO SCHIFRIN’S made-for-TV music jiggled from a boom box on her kitchen counter.

“I love Lalo Schifrin,” I said.

“Same here.” She poured us both a glass of dark red wine. “Him and Ennio Morricone.”

“Do not even get me started on how good Morricone is. We could be here all night.”

I felt pretty comfortable, sitting at the table and watching the back of her as she prepped the steak at the stove. I always thought those gaucho pants made grown women look silly, but the jury was still out on whether Marie was pulling them off. As she shifted her weight, I could see the musculature of her peasant calves at work beneath her animated skin. More inky pinks and greens popped in contrast to her white, plunging-back angora sweater.

The grill pan objected with a prolonged hiss when the meat came into contact with it.

“What about the scene in Raging Bull,” I asked. “Where whosie-whatsie there—La Motta’s wife—is cooking him the steak? ”

She turned a cheek to me. “You know, I actually started to hate De Niro in that scene—not as an actor, as a person.”

“Really? ”

“It’s like, he was such a phenomenally good abusive asshole of a husband, there’s no way he could have been acting.”

“Then you must love it when he asks Joe Pesci if he fucked his wife? ”

Marie came at me. I was startled. She raised a long, two-tined fork to my throat. “Did you fuck my wife? Why did you fuck my wife? ”

THE STEAK WAS divided into two slabs, and Marie put the slightly more imposing one my plate. The blood rushed around my scalloped potatoes and stained their edges pink. Both of us were starving. We ate like marooned sailors.

“You were right,” I said, talking around a tobacco plug of meat tucked into my cheek.

“Mmm.” Marie was consumed by the pleasure of consuming.

“If I ever had an aged sirloin before, I would have known it.”

“Mmm,” she agreed.

“How do they get it so tender? ”

She took a cleansing gulp of wine. “Decomposition.”

“Oh, man, that’s sick.” I set my utensils down loudly.

Marie was amused, like the tribal elder who tells the Western traveler he’s eating jellied goat testicles. “Don’t think about it.”

“Oh, okay,” I sulked. “I’ll try.” I poached a piece of meat from her plate.

“Hey,” she protested. “You purloined my loin.”

“I did no such thing, Your Honor.”

She looked at my plate. I hadn’t touched my asparagus. “What, my vegetables aren’t good enough for you? ”

I selectively ate asparagus after Jocelyn said it made more than just my piss smell funny. “I just didn’t want to fill up on it. Look.” I took a bite.

“Well, I love it.” Marie held a lemon-zested stalk in her fingers and powered through it like a gopher. The theme to The Streets of San Francisco came on. Marie pointed to the boom box. “Mmm,” she said as she chewed. “Karl Malden. Criminally overlooked actor.”

I SAT WAY BACK in my chair and put my hands on my stomach. “Good thing I didn’t wear a belt.”

“You and me both.” She stood up so I could see. “I popped my top button as a precaution.” I caught a small shimmering triangle of electric blue before she sealed her pants up and sat back down. I pretended not to notice by raising a hand to my heart like I felt a massive coronary coming on. I was going to be funny and ask Marie if she knew CPR, but luckily I didn’t. I had a flash of her screaming while paramedics tried to save her son. “But,” she said, “I’m not too stuffed to sip some bourbon.”

“You read my mind.”

I watched as she reached up into the cabinet for two glasses.

“You a fan of car racing? ” I asked.

“No,” she said, intrigued by the question. “Why? ”

“The checkered flag on your shoulder blade.” I could just make out a leading corner of it poking out from under her sweater.

“That’s not a flag. It’s a kerchief.” She got in front of my chair with her back to me. “Look.” Like a wife whose dress is about to be zipped by her husband, she bent her neck forward and lifted her hair out of the way. I drew back the fuzzy neckline of her sweater.

“Whoa. That’s definitely not a checkered flag.”

“No,” she laughed. “It isn’t. You like it? ”

“Is it wrong if I say I do? ”

“I think it would be wrong if you said you didn’t.”

“Then I like it.”

It was a full-body profile of a kneeling, naked pinup girl. Something slightly more X-rated than what you might see painted on a World War II fighter plane. The checkerboard kerchief in her blond hair gave the impression that she was a good all-American girl who enjoyed a good all-American screwing after a secluded picnic lunch.

“I have her twin on the other side.” Marie reached over her opposite shoulder and guided me to the spot. She left her hand on mine. My heart started pounding. She pulled my hand around her and parked it on her right breast. “Is this okay? ” she asked. We were both stone-cold sober.

“I think so.” My left hand found her other breast. I automatically handled her the way Jocelyn liked to be handled. I kissed her exposed back. She started to laugh. “Should I stop? ” I asked.

“No, please don’t. Just do everything a bit harder.”

I did. She started grinding her ass against me. I grabbed her by the hip bones and pulled.

“Tell me one thing,” she said between breaths.

“Mmm,” I said with my mouth against her back.

“And I want the truth.”

“Mmm.”

“Did you really not fuck me last time? ”

“No,” I said.

“I think this time you should.”

AFTERWARD WE LAY on our backs in the dark without talking. I felt surprisingly okay about the whole thing, except for not knowing what Marie was thinking. I cleared my throat just to let her know I was still there. I tapped a galloping, four-fingered beat on the mattress that would have driven Jocelyn nuts. Marie didn’t make a peep. Her silence grew too uncomfortably big to ignore.

“Are you freaked out?” I finally asked. She didn’t answer. “You are, aren’t you? ”

“Hmm? ”

I sat up. “Are you asleep?” I asked at louder-than-bedroom volume.

“Was.”

“Jesus.”

“Sorry.”

I laughed. “Don’t be sorry.”

“So tired.”

“Do you always zonk out after sex . . . like a guy? ”

She let out a short, closemouthed laugh. “You offended? ” She would rather have been sleeping. I knew that feeling.

“God, no.” My tone was unmistakably revelatory.

She stroked my shin once with her foot, then shifted into the fetal position. Her knees were touching my thigh.

“You weren’t talking,” I said. “I figured . . .”

“You, either.”

I thought about that for a bit. “I wasn’t, was I? ”

She didn’t answer. I let her go. Within seconds, her breathing was even and automatic.

I WOKE UP in the middle of the night without the terrifying sensation of not knowing where I was. Woke without lying perfectly still for fear of falling from the Empire State Building; without the anxiety of having strolled into a classroom after months of truancy, only to learn the final exam was that day; without thinking all of my teeth had just mysteriously fallen out.

I did wake with the very real sensation of having to take a massive shit. I could tell it was going to be an embarrassing, conspicuous, and hostile parting. Marie was still curled up, but facing the other way. I decided to get dressed and split back to my sister’s. Then I thought that would be a ridiculous thing to do. Marie’s Eleanor Roosevelt quote went through my head.

Fuck it. I tiptoed naked to the kitchen, found my cigarettes, then—as quietly as I could—destroyed her bathroom.

On my way back to the bedroom, I stopped at Sidney’s open door. My eyes skipped over the dark, kaleidoscopic clutter of his room, and rested on two moons beyond the sliding glass doors: One glowed still. The other was indiscriminately pulled apart and put back together by the undulating surface of Opal Cove.

I took a few steps into the room, but stopped abruptly when I kicked a small toy that lit up in flashing red and played that tune about the kids on the bus going up and down all through the town. I managed to shut the fucking thing off by the third or fourth refrain. I carefully put the toy down and got out of Sidney’s room.

I sneaked back into Marie’s bed. She’d slept through it all, including the multiple flushes. She only partially woke when I started laughing softly.

“’t’s so funny? ”

“Shhh.” I patted her ass. “Keep sleeping.”

I WAS DREAMING about James and Roy and me at Spunt’s. James had just finished filling Roy’s sippy cup—which was about five times as big as it is in real life—with hot coffee.

“Everybody knows coffee’s good for kids,” James said.

“I’ve never heard of that.”

“Sure you have,” James said. “Plus, he loves it.”

“You’re out of your mind.”

“No I’m not. Watch.”

“Dude, he’s going to fucking scald himself.” I tried to swat the cup away, but James grabbed my arm and stopped me. I woke up before Roy took a sip.

Marie wasn’t in bed. Sunlight broke into the room between the partially drawn curtains. An otherwise welcoming aroma of coffee was burned around the edges, like the Mr. Coffee had been on for some time. The kitchen faucet went on, then off. I got up and put my clothes on. If Marie heard me, she didn’t say anything.

Her elbows were on the kitchen table. She was enveloped by the pink terry-cloth bathrobe. Her face was in her hands. I wishful-thought that maybe she was just tired, but I knew nobody that tired gets out of bed unless they absolutely have to. I put my hand on her shoulder. She wasn’t startled. She dropped her hands to her lap.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey.” She didn’t try to hide the fact that she’d been crying.

“What is it? ”

She just shook her head and said, “I can’t.”

“Can’t what? ”

“I can’t do this. I’m sorry. I just can’t.”

I fell into one of the chairs. Her dirty utensils and napkin from the night before were in front of me. “You can’t? ”

“No.”

I lit a cigarette and listened to the elliptical hum of the refrigerator’s compressor motor. “What about—”

“Don’t,” she said.

I threw a nod in the direction of her bedroom. “And all that was just—”

“Please, don’t. I’m asking you, please.” She looked like she was begging me to spare her life. Maybe she was.

I pretended to shrug the whole thing off. “It’s no big deal.”

She could tell I was stung pretty bad, but she also knew how to accept a gift. “Thank you.”

I just sat there for a little while, staring at a framed needlepoint primer hanging on the wall. It said, I Am the Queen of the Kitchen. All Those Who Do Not Bow Down to Me Can STARVE.

“It’s because I plugged your toilet, isn’t it? ”

She came right back at me, weepy and laughing at the same time. “I thought I was the one who plugged it.”

I smiled, but couldn’t go on with the flirty repartee. “And what about the movie? ” I asked.

“I was hoping you’d still want to.”

“Sure.”

She reached across the table for my hand. I let her have it, but I thought I was going to come apart. I stood up abruptly. “I’m going to go now.”

Marie tightened her grip on my hand. I turned my head away. She gave my arm an attention-getting tug. “Let me see you first.” I didn’t want to, but I faced her. She let me go only after I faked a smile.

I pulled Sweet Thunder out from under her back porch. Through the walls of the house, I could hear her crying for a number of things—the least of which was me.

JAMES AND DOGSHIT were sitting on the hood of the Suburban. James stood when he saw me. He semaphored me in like I would have otherwise biked right by him—which is exactly what I felt like doing. “What do you want first,” he asked me. “The good news or the bad news? ”

“I don’t fucking care.”

“What crawled up your ass? ”

“Nothing.”

“Fine. The good news is, you don’t have to watch Roy anymore.”

“That’s the good news? ”

“The bad news is, she knows.”

“Who knows what? ”

“Pamela. She knows about you watching Roy.”

“Come again? ”

“She knows you’ve been—”

I came uncorked. “What the fuck do you mean she knows? ”

James got defensive. “Hey, listen, pal. You’re the one who dressed him in that crazy fucking outfit.”

“Yeah, I did. But you were supposed to change him out of it before you brought him home.”

“Well, I didn’t. And now she knows. So sue me.”

“Fuck me,” I said. “Motherfuck me.”

Dogshit chimed in. “How’d she figure out just from seeing Roy in the clothes that he’d been watching him? ”

“Shut the fuck up.”

“Yes, James,” I said sarcastically. “How did she put two and two together? What, did Roy learn how to fucking talk overnight, you moron? ”

“Hey, back off, Jack.”

I couldn’t back off. “You know, when Pamela’s your ex-wife, she’ll still be my sister, you fucking idiot.”

“Whoa, dude.” Dogshit put his hand on my shoulder. “Chill out.”

I swatted his hand off me. “I’m not going to chill out.”

“Oooh-kay,” Dogshit said. “I think I’ll take a little walk and let you guys—”

“Don’t fucking bother,” James said. “We’re not going to be here that long.”

“What are you going to do, level me with one punch? ”

“Is that what you want? ” James yelled. He took a step toward me. “Is that what you fucking want? ”

Dogshit got in front of him. “No. It’s definitely not what he wants.”

“Then somebody should stuff a fucking sock in it,” James said.

“That sounds like a great idea,” Dogshit said. “Dude,” he appealed to me.

“You know, James, you’re a real pisser. I lie to her fucking face. My sister. For you. Fuck knows what shit things you did to make her want to divorce you, but no matter. I lied to her anyway. I could have fucked you over a few times but I didn’t. I just lied to her like a genuine fucking asshole. For you. Not me. You.”

“You think I don’t know that? You think I don’t fucking know that? ”

I was exasperated and worn down. “Well, if you knew it, why’d you tell her? I mean, couldn’t you have lied to her just one more time? You had to know she was going to be completely bullshit with me. What were you thinking? Jesus.”

“What do you want me to say? I’m sorry? Is that what you want me to say? ”

“Dude,” Dogshit said to me. “Is that all you want? ”

“I don’t fucking know what I want. I swear to God, I don’t.”

Dogshit turned to James. “I think that’s all he wants.”

“Fine,” James said. “I’m sorry. I am.”

I knew what was at risk when I agreed to be party to James’s plan, but I needed to be mad at somebody. He held out his hand for me to shake, but I wouldn’t take it. “Whatever,” I said. I pointed Sweet Thunder toward Plymouth Street and started pedaling. I added my sister Pamela to the short list of women I’d forced out of my life.

“Oh, that’s right. Whatever,” James called after me. “I apologized. I’m not going to fucking beg you to accept.”

I BIKED STRAIGHT to the phone booth at Spunt’s and dialed Jocelyn’s number. No answer, no machine, nothing.

“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! ”

I whacked a glass panel with the receiver, but not hard enough to break anything. I tried to slam the phone-booth door, but it was designed so that no matter how much force you put into it, it always closes nice and easy. I had to go back to New York and look for Jocelyn. Ricky was watching me from inside the store. He gave me a small, concerned wave. I left the Spunt’s parking lot and pedaled away from East Falmouth. Fuck Tommy the cop. If he—or any other cop—picked me up, all the better. I’d give him my word never to return so long as he got me off Cape Cod ASAP. I took the feeder ramp onto Route 28 and knowingly became a criminal.

AS I ASCENDED the back stairs, I could hear Richie on the porch, talking to someone on the phone. “I’m going to have to call you back,” he said excitedly when he saw me. He was wearing nothing but a raunchy lime-green towel around his waist. The towel was so small that if the temperature outside had been five to ten degrees higher, his nut sack would have swung visibly—like a produce bag containing two kiwis. “Dude,” he said, “you are not going to fucking believe this.”

“What? ”

“This.” He handed me an envelope.

“What’s this, a summons? ”

“Kind of.”

I checked out the return address. “From Sub Pop? ”

“No shit, it is. Read it.” I peeked into the envelope like it could have been from the Unabomber. “Out loud,” Richie added. “I want to hear someone else say the words. And make sure you enunciate.”

“ ‘Dear Losers: This letter concerns your crummy demo tape. While it leaves much to be desired, miraculously, it isn’t as ear-piercingly horrible as the other thousand we received that day. One song in particular, “Black Smoke, No Pope,” does not completely suck. Though we can’t—for legal reasons—encourage you to continue making music, this letter is intended to come infinitely close to that point. Sincerely, Sub Pop Records.’

“What the fuck is this? ”

Richie was smiling. “Dude, it’s positive reinforcement.”

“Get the fuck out of here.”

“It is. I’m serious. They like our tape.” He tried to high-five me.

“Where in this letter does it say that? ”

“Right here. We’re not as ear-piercingly horrible as everyone else. We don’t completely suck.”

“That’s them liking it? ”

“Hello, come-guzzler, it’s Sub Pop we’re talking about here. Maybe you’ve heard of them? Nirvana? Sebadoh? Mudhoney? Beat Happening—”

“Yes, I’m well aware of who is on the label, thank you. But this doesn’t sound like they’re into it.”

“Dude, that’s their way. Trust me. Think about the Clash. Think about the Pistols. What did the audience do when they liked them? They covered them with loogies.”

“That’s different.”

“It isn’t.”

“I don’t know.”

“I do. Sub Pop is going to fucking sign the Young Accuser.” He started dancing around, and his towel fell to the porch floor. He made no move to cover himself.

“Dude, wrap that shit up.” He boosted himself up onto the railing and yelled, “Sub Pop is going to sign the Young Accuser. Mark my words.”

“You’re fucking insane.”

“And you are afraid of success.”

“Oh, I am? ”

“That’s okay, though, because I’m not. You can be the shy, moody one in the band. Just grab on to this little old belt loop and hang on tight. We’re going places.”

“I’m not grabbing on to anything. Would you put some fucking clothes on.”

Richie wasn’t listening. “Okay, what we do is we start four-tracking our asses off. Eight days a week. Morning, noon, and night. None of this ‘I don’t really feel like it right now’ bullshit. And we get salty. We get tight. But not too tight. We don’t want to turn into fucking Tim buk Three.” He had a revelation. “I got it. Maybe we ask Melanie to play with us. Nothing too over-the-top. Just a kick and snare. Dyke drummers go over huge in Seattle. I’m serious. They eat that shit up.”

“At least put your towel back on.”

Richie went on with rattling off his plans. They were like cracks in the ice spoking out from a single point of impact.

I read the letter a few more times to myself. I wished it had been even more discouraging. I didn’t know how to tell him I was moving to Brooklyn as soon as I could find someone to take my room.

DONNELLY’S PARKING LOT was empty. My hands were shaking as I fed change into the Coke machine right outside the front door. I shielded my bad molar with my tongue and drained most of the icy soda in the first go. I inhaled my cigarette like a POW upon liberation. Goddamnit, it felt good as the caffeine and nicotine exerted their influence.

I heard someone riding a go-kart out back. The driver knew the track like the back of his hand. He stepped on and off the gas pedal in a regular, predictable sequence. I closed my eyes and imagined it was me—younger and unspoiled—tooling around and around the track. I moved Sweet Thunder’s handlebars like I was steering the kart. I might even have been making audible, muffled motor sounds. In my mind I know I was.

“Do you need help, son? ”

I opened my eyes, startled. Mr. Donnelly Jr. was standing close enough to touch me. “No.”

“You sure about that? ”

“You scared me.” I could still hear the sole kart going at it out back.

“You looked like you were going to have a seizure.”

I laughed it off. “No.”

“That’s good.” He waited a couple beats. “Well, what were you doing? ”

I didn’t feel like lying. “I was listening.”

“To the engine? ”

“Yes.” That didn’t seem so strange to him. “And imagining myself behind the wheel.”

He chuckled. “Why pretend? ”

“I wasn’t exactly pretending.”

He patted me on the back. “Why not come and try it for real.”

“That’s okay.”

“Come on. I won’t even charge you.”

“Thanks, but I think I’d rather just think about it.”

“You would? ”

“I think so.”

“Okay. Suit yourself.” He was shaking his head. Once again, he did not know what the fuck to make of me. “Suit yourself.” He opened the door to his known quantity and disappeared into it.

I LOOKED OUT Jocelyn’s front window. A maroon Lincoln Town Car was parked on the opposite side of Sixth Avenue. The driver was leaning against the outside of the door, reading a paper.

“Our car’s here,” I said. Jocelyn was buzzing around the apartment in her underwear, stuffing clothes and toiletries into a backpack. “You go down. I just need a couple minutes.” She gave me a peck, then took my face in her hands, looked it over, and planted a longer kiss, into which I fell. She pulled herself away from me. “Do you have everything? ”

“Yes,” I said, mildly annoyed.

“Passport? License? Birth certificate? ”

“Yes. Yes. Yes.”

“Just checking. I don’t want this to fall apart at the eleventh hour.”

“It won’t.”

She straightened my tie beneath my denim jacket. “I like the Sam Shepard thing you have going on. You look handsome.”

“You too.” I touched the front clasp of her white bra and ran my finger down her stomach. She sucked it in out of reach before I could go too far.

“Later,” she protested playfully.

“Now.”

“Don’t be greedy. We’re going to have each other for the rest of our lives.” She bounded off to the bathroom. She looked like she was crossing a river by stepping on the heads of crocodiles. “Now go, or we’ll lose the car.” I looked out the window. The Lincoln was still there. I was closing the apartment door behind me when I heard Jocelyn call out like a Hollywood cowgirl, “Oh, yoo-hoo? Yoooo-hoooo? ” I poked my head around the door to see Jocelyn poking her head around the bathroom door. We were two heads.

“What? ” I asked.

“Are you still here? ”

“No. I am not.”

“Good.” She was all smiles. I might have been, too.

I MADE IT about a mile, a mile and a half, back toward East Falmouth, when a cop car coming in the opposite direction flashed me. I stopped on the sandy shoulder and watched him pull a U-turn. He parked in front of me and got out of the cruiser. He stared at me. I stared right back at him. Neither one of us wanted to be the first to laugh.

Prev Next