The Book of Joe

question,”
    he says, and then looks at me meaningfully. “Why are you still here?”
    “I have some things I still need to work out.”
    “What things?”
    “I’m not sure. I guess that would be the first thing on the list.”
    Owen nods and stands up, brushing an assortment of crumbs off his undershirt. “Well, to answer your earlier question, I stuck around to tell you something.”
    “What’s that?”
    “I’d like to tell you why your manuscript isn’t any good.”
    “So now it’s no good?”
    “No. It was always no good.”
    “I can’t stress enough how not up for this I am right now.”
    “Actually, you are,” Owen says. “Your business is writing, but my business is writers, and of the two of us, I’m the one who’s on top of his game right now, so it would behoove you to pay attention.” He stares at me intently, daring me to contradict him. “Bush Falls came from inside you, from that place where good writers store the great narrative events of their lives. The problem is that since you left the Falls, nothing of any significance has happened to you. If I had to write the jacket copy for the book of your life, I’d be hard-pressed to come up with anything. Joe lives in Manhattan. Joe has maybe a little more than his share of what is doubtless highly conventional sex. Joe gets older. Joe gets depressed. That pretty much does it. You’ve had no great loves and no significant experiences. It’s like you’ve been sleepwalking through the last seventeen years.”
    “Somewhere in there, I did write a critically acclaimed best-selling novel.”
    “So you did,” Owen concedes. “The single remarkable event in your post–Bush Falls life was writing a book about the Falls. Do you see what I’m getting at here?”
    “That I’m a big fucking loser?”
    “Besides that. Listen. You’ve been gone from here for seventeen years, but really you never left. The things that happened here - with your friends, and Carly, and your father - they damaged you, and from that damage came your book, but you’re not going to get another one out of it.”
    “Well, if you’re right, what the hell am I supposed to do about it?”
    “You’re already doing it. You’ve been doing it since you got here.”
    “What exactly is it that you think I’ve been doing?”
    Owen smiles. “Gathering new material.”
    “You’re insane,” I say. “This has been a nightmare for me.”
    “I know.” He sits down next to me on the stairs. “You’re in pain, and frankly I’m relieved to see it.”
    “And why is that?”
    “Because, to paraphrase the late Bruce Lee, pain is good. It means that you’re alive. And dead people, for the most part, don’t write books.”
    “Fuck writing,” I say angrily. “I have nothing. There’s no one in my life.” My voice trembles tellingly, and I take it down a notch for maintenance. “No one cares about me.”
    “That’s not true.”
    “But it is,” I say sadly. “And I never even realized it until now. What kind of colossal asshole must that make me, to have gone this far through life without having made a positive difference to one fucking soul?”
    “I care.”
    “You get paid.”
    “That just makes me care more.”
    I sigh. “Whatever.”
    “Wayne cares about you.”
    “Wayne’s dying,” I say, and immediately feel like a schmuck.
    Owen looks at me severely. “We’re all dying. Just at different rates.”
    “Is this the first time you’ve tried to cheer someone up?
    Because, I have to tell you, you really suck at it.”
    “It’s not in my job description.” Owen slaps my knee as he gets up from the stairs. “Cheer yourself up. I’m going home.”
    I watch him gather up his laptop and a leather overnight bag, and then follow him to the front door. Unbelievably, the white stretch is still parked outside. “You kept the limo all this time?” I say. “That’s going to cost you a fortune.”
    “Actually, it’s going to cost you a fortune,” he says with a smirk, heading out the door and down the steps before I can thank him for sticking around. I watch from behind the storm door as the absurd limo pulls away from the curb and meanders down the block. The sunroof opens and Owen’s hand pops up, comically brandishing a half-filled wineglass.
    He’ll be good and wasted by the time he gets home. For the first time I smile, feeling vaguely cinematic as I watch until the white of the limo is absorbed into the dusky Connecticut twilight. In