The Book of Joe

feigning sleep. Finally, she leans forward and presses her lips softly to my temple. They are dry now, as if I’ve sucked all the life out of them. She rests them there for a minute before standing up and tiptoeing out of the room. I don’t open my eyes until I hear her car engine fading in the distance.

Twenty-Seven
    A brief lesson in poetic justice: The first time I had sex with Carly, I thought of Lucy, and now, seventeen years later, I’ve finally slept with Lucy, and can’t stop thinking of Carly, even with Lucy’s fragrance still firmly ensconced in my nostrils, the taste of her still lingering on my swollen, chapped lips, her nakedness still tattooed across my eyelids, flashing in neon whenever I blink. I am the star in my own Shakespearean farce, never managing to sleep with one woman without wanting the other. The gods of sex and irony are playing hockey, and I am their unwitting puck.
    I leave the house for the first time in almost three days, the sunlight harassing my constricted pupils as I drive the Mercedes into town. I try to think myself out of the perplexing cloud of distress that seems to have enveloped me in the aftermath of sex with Lucy, but the whole magically sordid evening defies perspective. I pull up to Wayne’s house, but his mother tells me that he’s still sleeping. Something in her manner, in the too quick pronouncement of this fact, makes me think she’s lying, but she seems more on edge than usual and girded for battle, so rather than set her off, I tell her I’ll come back later.
    Once back in my car, I grab my cell phone and dial Owen.
    “Congratulations on sleeping with your mother,” he practically shouts with glee, prompting me to reconsider the wisdom of calling him at home so early in the morning.
    “What?”
    “Oh, come on, Joe. Your attraction to Lucy is a direct manifestation of your longing for the love of your own mother.”
    “Why can’t it just be healthy lust?”
    “It’s just not that simple, given the complexities of your circumstances.”
    “I don’t think you’d be saying that if you ever saw Lucy,”
    I say.
    “Well, you keep telling yourself that if you want,” he replies smugly.
    “What happened to not giving shotgun diagnoses?”
    “Oh, come on, Joe. This one’s a gimme.”
    I sigh. “Honestly, I’m starting to rethink this whole agent-as-therapist arrangement.”
    “There is a larger issue here,” Owen says.
    “Larger than mother fucking?”
    He laughs. “Has it occurred to you that, oedipal issues aside, you’re trying to fuck your past, as it were?”
    “Come again?”
    “It seems to me that you’re subconsciously trying to correct past mistakes. Both your ridiculous ongoing phone relationship with Natalie and your sleeping with Lucy are part of a compulsive need you have to right past wrongs. You feel responsible for Sammy’s death, and therefore that you wronged Lucy.”
    “Maybe I do feel somewhat responsible for what happened to Sammy,” I say. “But how does sleeping with his mother erase that?”
    “It doesn’t, of course. But you would hardly be the first man in history to think the answer to all his woes lies in his dick. All of your self-destructive behavior stems from this misguided need to fix your past. And the one person who it seems to me might represent real potential for the future - Carly - you’ve kept at arm’s length.”
    “She hasn’t exactly been giving me that come-hither stare.”
    “That may or may not be,” he says as if he might have some inside information. “Carly represents something more than sexual to you, and you feel unworthy, of her and of the potential future she might offer, until you’ve somehow fixed your past, which I can tell you will remain unfixable, no matter how many people you fuck. Not that I’m discouraging it.
    Far from it. Fuck away, by all means.”
    “It’s funny,” I say. “All this crap happens to you and you think you’re handling it okay, and then years later you realize that you weren’t handling it all, and you hurt people and hurt yourself, and you’ve got so many things to make up for, you don’t know where to begin.”
    Owen grunts, unimpressed with my latest epiphany. “Just go slow,” he advises, turning serious. “Rushing into things isn’t going to work, as evidenced by your decision to sleep with Lucy.” As if any decision at all were even possible, once she’d walked, warm and willing, through that door. “You need to establish