The Book of Joe

to be a hospital. I deliberately take up two spots to prevent anyone from parking too close, an embarrassing habit I developed after buying the Mercedes. Parking lots are a breeding ground for door dings, the bane of the luxury car owner’s existence. It occurs to me once again that I hate my car. It’s like a high-priced whore. The minute you’re finished with it, you want it to vanish without a trace.
    A cool October breeze touches down on me like a benediction as I step out of the air-conditioned confines of the Mercedes. The sky is crammed with thick, dust-colored clouds, and the baby elm trees planted at exact intervals throughout the lot have their leaves turned upward in sup-plication. A small group of young doctors are taking a smoking break on the front stairs, which strikes me as somewhat blasphemous, like rabbis eating pork. I brave the gauntlet of their fumes, holding my breath until I’m through the revolving door, and follow the signs to the intensive care unit.
    Cindy is looking bored, sitting with her twins on a bench in the hall outside of the ICU. All twins are cute. I’ve never seen an ugly set. It’s as if there’s some stopgap measure in place, biological or divine, expressly there to prevent the du-plication of ugliness. And Brad’s girls are way beyond cute.
    Between him and Cindy, these girls have hit the genetic mother lode. They’re twelve years old, with their mother’s dark flowing hair and creamy complexion, wearing identical plaid skirts and white polo shirts. Just from looking at them it’s clear that as they mature, they will never worry about pimples or how fat their thighs and asses are. Like their mother, they will be perfect, until that very perfection becomes their ultimate flaw. They swing their legs back and forth together, linked at the foot, creating an almost perfect mirror-image effect.
    “Hello, Cindy,” I say formally. It’s been twenty years since the fellatio incident, but it’s still the first thing to pop into my head. Men tend never to forget things like blow jobs, even those that happened to someone else.
    Cindy looks up. “Hey, Joe,” she says evenly. She stands up and gives me a dry kiss on the cheek, and I find myself unwittingly appreciating her body, which, even after three children, is still lithe and toned. There is nothing you could point to that’s changed in her face, other than perhaps the slight weathering of the skin immediately beneath her eyes, and yet somewhere a light has gone out. The structure is still in place, exquisite as ever, but the engine that propels it has been compromised, its powerful throb reduced to a dull, vacillating hum. Men will still notice her walking down the street, will hungrily catalogue her toned stomach and buoyant breasts, her lean, lightly muscled legs and the soft, heart-shaped curves of her ass, will get reprimanded by their wives or girlfriends for staring a bit longer than the legal time limit, and will mollify them by declaring that they prefer more meat on their women and other masculine lies, but it will end there. They won’t take her home in their minds as they once might have, to superimpose over reality as they thrust their way to mundane, household orgasm. Cindy’s beauty, while still intact, has become of the forgettable variety.
    She steps back and points to the girls, who are eyeing me with wide-eyed curiosity. “You remember Emily and Jenny.”
    She doesn’t bother to indicate which is which, as if it really doesn’t matter for my purposes - which is true enough, I guess. In their entire lives, I’ve actually seen them only a handful of times, on those rare occasions when Cindy and Brad visited New York. “Girls, this is your uncle Joe.”
    “Hi, Uncle Joe,” they say in perfect unison, and then look at each other and giggle. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard myself referred to as an uncle, and I shiver, feeling conspicuously empty-handed. Uncles are supposed to have magic tricks or silver dollars or candy, aren’t they? The only uncle I ever had - my mother’s brother, Peter - used to squeeze my shoulder, slip me five dollars, wink, and say, “Don’t shit a shitter,” even though I hadn’t said anything at all. I routinely withstood the abuse, because it seemed like a small price to pay for five bucks. I consider giving each twin a twenty, but decide against it - wisely, I think.
    “Hello,” I say weakly. “Do you two always dress alike?”
    “We aren’t dressed