Joyland

months later. When he called and told me he was sick, his usual ratchetjaw delivery flowed by the wrecking ball swinging back and forth in his head, I was stunned and depressed, the way almost anyone would be, I suppose, when he hears that a guy who should be in the very prime of life is instead approaching the finish line. You want to ask how a thing like that can be fair. Weren’t there supposed to be a few more good things for Tom, like a couple of grandchildren and maybe that long-dreamed-of vacation in Maui?
    During my time at Joyland, I once heard Pops Allen talk about burning the lot. In the Talk, that means to blatantly cheat the rubes at what’s supposed to be a straight game. I thought of that for the first time in years when Tom called with his bad news.
    But the mind defends itself as long as it can. After the first shock of such news dissipates, maybe you think, Okay, it’s bad, I get that, but it’s not the final word; there still might be a chance. Even if ninety-five percent of the people who draw this particular card go down, there’s still that lucky five percent. Also, doctors misdiagnose shit all the time. Barring those things, there’s the occasional miracle.
    You think that, and then you get the follow-up call. The woman who makes the follow-up call was once a beautiful young girl who ran around Joyland in a flippy green dress and a silly Sherwood Forest hat, toting a big old Speed Graphic camera, and the conies she braced hardly ever said no. How could they say no to that blazing red hair and eager smile? How could anyone say no to Erin Cook?
    Well, God said no. God burned Tom Kennedy’s lot, and He burned hers in the process. When I picked up the phone at five-thirty on a gorgeous October afternoon in Westchester, that girl had become a woman whose voice, blurry with the tears, sounded old and tired to death. “Tom died at two this afternoon. It was very peaceful. He couldn’t talk, but he was aware. He . . . Dev, he squeezed my hand when I said goodbye.”
    I said, “I wish I could have been there.”
    “Yes.” Her voice wavered, then firmed. “Yes, that would have been good.”
    You think Okay, I get it, I’m prepared for the worst, but you hold out that small hope, see, and that’s what fucks you up. That’s what kills you.
    I talked to her, I told her how much I loved her and how much I had loved Tom, I told her yes, I’d be at the funeral, and if there was anything I could do before then, she should call. Day or night. Then I hung up the phone and lowered my head and bawled my goddam eyes out.
    The end of my first love doesn’t measure up to the death of one old friend and the bereavement of the other, but it followed the same pattern. Exactly the same. And if it seemed like the end of the world to me—first causing those suicidal ideations (silly and halfhearted though they may have been) and then a seismic shift in the previously unquestioned course of my life—you have to understand I had no scale by which to judge it. That’s called being young.

    As June wore on, I started to understand that my relationship with Wendy was as sick as William Blake’s rose, but I refused to believe it was mortally sick, even when the signs became increasingly clear.
    Letters, for instance. During my first week at Mrs. Shoplaw’s, I wrote Wendy four long ones, even though I was run off my feet at Joyland and came drag-assing into my second-floor room each night with my head full of new information and new experiences, feeling like a kid dropped into a challenging college course (call it The Advanced Physics of Fun) halfway through the semester. What I got in return was a single postcard with Boston Common on the front and a very peculiar collaborative message on the back. At the top, written in a hand I didn’t recognize, was this: Wenny writes the card while Rennie drives the bus! Below in a hand I did recognize, Wendy—or Wenny, if you like; I hated it, myself—had written breezily: Whee! We is salesgirls off on a venture to Cape Cod! It’s a party! Hoopsie muzik! Don’t worry I held the wheel while Ren wrote her part. Hope your good. W.
    Hoopsie muzik? Hope your good? No love, no do you miss me, just hope your good ? And although, judging by the bumps and jags and inkblots, the card had been written while on the move in Renee’s car (Wendy didn’t have one), they both sounded either stoned or drunk on their asses. The following week I sent four more letters, plus an