The Book of Joe

is infused in some way with his essence. And those pages, I am pleased to see, are starting to add up to something substantial. I’ve been working on it for less than three weeks, and I already have over two hundred pages. What’s more, I think a lot of them are keepers.
    Carly has set up a temporary office in the living room and spends most of every morning on her cell phone, checking in with her staff and reviewing layouts and e-mails on her frighteningly large laptop. Whenever Wayne wakes up, she comes in and the three of us have long, streaming conversations about nothing and everything, reminiscing and telling stories about the lives we’ve led up until this point, as if our entire adult lives have been nothing more than filler until we could be reunited. We laugh a lot, sometimes strenuously, our combined laughter always tapering off into identical wistful sighs and averted gazes. It’s just too hard to know how to feel. No one wants to dampen the mood, but the upbeat sounds of our conversations, reverberating conspicuously against our silences, can sometimes seem callous and disrespectful of the situation at hand. Is it better to laugh in the face of death, or cry? In the absence of any evidence pointing in either direction, we vacillate randomly between the two, hoping that the compromise we arrive at is serving Wayne well.
    Later in the afternoon, Jared stops by to say hello. He’s developed a liking for Wayne that borders on fascination, and has been coming every day to sit on the edge of his bed and listen to our conversation. Wayne, for his part, seems to relish Jared’s company, often interrupting us in the middle of anecdotes to include Jared. “Wait till you hear this one,” he’ll say sardonically to my nephew as one of us starts to tell a story from our shared past. “I think you’ll agree your uncle was quite the wanker.”
    I tell the story of the night Wayne and I, with nothing else to do, drove his car up and down a nearby stretch of I-95 that was home to a slew of gas stations, stopping at each one to ask for the bathroom key and then driving off with it. By the end of the night, we’d collected seven keys, which Wayne kept in his glove compartment so that we’d always have access to bathrooms when we were out driving. Wayne tells about the time the three of us went into Manhattan to see Elton John playing at Madison Square Garden. We paid eighty dollars each to a scalper on the corner of Thirty-third and Eighth, only to find, when we tried to enter the arena, that we’d been sold years-old soccer tickets. Wayne and I were thoroughly disgusted with ourselves, but Carly managed to somehow sweet-talk the ticket taker into letting us in anyway.
    Carly surprises me by relating how she and I, desperate for a place to have sex, climbed the fence and infiltrated the Porter’s campus one cool spring night and got naked on a picnic blanket. We were well into the act when the automatic sprinklers suddenly came on, soaking us and drenching our discarded clothing in a spray of freezing water. She cracks up Wayne and Jared by describing how we tried in vain to soldier on in spite of the continuous onslaught of the sprinklers. The fact that I’d forgotten about it shocks me into a thoughtful silence, and while the three of them laugh it up, I flash back to that night, the feel of the grass, and the smooth, slippery surface of Carly’s soaked skin as we slithered hungrily over each other, reveling in our slickness and the sudden lack of friction.
    “Joe?”
    I snap out of it to find everyone looking at me, Wayne and Jared with amused grins and Carly with a funny, questioning look. “Should I not have told that story?” Carly says.
    “What? No, no. It’s fine,” I answer too quickly, looking to put everyone at ease. “I was still finding blades of grass in my crotch two days later.”
    “Didn’t all that cold water make it hard to maintain your ... concentration?” Jared says.
    “I was eighteen,” I say. “I shouldn’t have to tell you of all people that when you’re eighteen and in love, there’s just about nothing that can ruin your concentration.”
    Jared and Wayne snicker, while Carly holds my gaze for another few seconds before shrugging lightly and letting me off the hook.
    While many of our group reminisces are from the time we shared back in high school, Wayne seems equally intent on sharing experiences from the years he lived in Los Angeles.
    He tells us in carefree