The Book of Joe

in their prime, clutching and groping at each other with what then must have been simple young lust but what now seems like something infinitely more desperate. “I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”
    “Did you really forget that night in the field, when the sprinklers went on?” she asks me, her expression frank and unyielding.
    “I don’t know. I’m not sure if I’d forgotten it, or just hadn’t thought about it in so long that it felt that way.”
    She nods. “Either way, I guess it amounts to the same thing. We all try to hold on to the good things from our past.
    Especially when the here and now doesn’t measure up. These jocks ... ” She holds up her hands again. “It’s almost like they knew it would never get any better for them than it was right there. And for me, it was the time I spent with you. And for the last seventeen years, that time was the ball in my trophy case that I could look at every day and find some measure of comfort, of happiness remembered.”
    “For me too.”
    “I know,” she says. “But memory is imperfect at best. And if that’s all you’ve got, then what do you have when it’s gone?”
    I walk over and sit down beside her on the bed, holding up my own hands demonstratively. “Just some dirty hands.”
    She presses her palms against mine and we slowly fold our fingers into each other’s. Small, charged things fly back and forth between us at harrowing speeds. “I was just on my way to take a shower,” I say.
    Carly nods. “You want company?”
    In the shower, we scrub each other softly with washcloths, the water coming off us dark with the ink of the 1958 Championship Cougars team. We watch the stained water swirl around the drain at our feet until the color gradually fades and the water regains its normal clarity. Satisfied that we’ve washed off the last traces of the past, we drop the washcloths ceremoniously to the floor, our hands and mouths being more suitable instruments to the business of becoming reacquainted in the here and now.
    My fingers encounter a small, knob-shaped dent in Carly’s chest, just above her left breast, and they stay there, rubbing it questioningly, until she looks up at me, water dripping down her face and over her lips in thin rivulets from the overhead spray of the shower. “He hit me with a toaster oven,” she says neutrally. A tiny puddle of water is collecting in this unplanned crevice, and I lean forward and suck it out, my tongue exploring the smoothness of the small site where her bone has been permanently compromised. Then I pull her tightly against me and we cling to each other directly beneath the showerhead, its unrelenting spray enveloping us in a soft hissing curtain. “When I hold you like this, I can’t feel it,” I say into her wet ear.
    “Me neither,” she says, opening her mouth against my shoulder and biting down.
    I carry her, wrapped in a towel, back to my room, where I spread her out on the bed and unwrap her carefully, like packaged pottery. I lie on top of her and we spend a long while stroking and kissing each other, but Carly holds off on taking me inside her. She wants it to last like this for a while, like it did when we were kids, when heavy petting was an end unto itself and not simply the means by which the sexual wheel was greased. Then, sex had been a far-off and mythical prize, but now it’s just the last part of the whole act, and she doesn’t want to get there so fast. Eventually, though, the mounting heat from our friction will not be denied, and we’re faced with the pragmatic choice of acting our age or making an unseemly mess. Afterward, I turn on my old stereo, and we listen to Peter Gabriel sing about getting so lost sometimes, the sound of the phonograph needle on dusty vinyl hissing like rain through the speakers. Carly lies with her head on my stomach and we listen to the music until we fall asleep. We’re still lying in that position at around three in the morning when Fabia raps loudly on our door and tells us that we had better come downstairs right away.
    Wayne lies propped up in his bed, eyes closed, thin beads of perspiration coating his forehead and upper lip. “What’s up, Wayne?” I say, sitting down on the edge of the bed. Carly moves around the bed to sit on his other side. Fabia stands at the foot of the bed, looking highly agitated. Wayne’s eyelids flutter open, but he can’t quite get them to stay that way, and they flicker erratically, as if some