The Book of Joe by Jonathan Tropper Page B

you're here, Gramps must really be in bad shape, huh?”
    â€œIt seems that way.” His eyes widen with what looks to me like fear, and I realize that he and my father share a special relationship. I experience the same stab of jealousy that I felt at the hospital, watching Brad adjust Dad's blankets.
    â€œDamn,” Jared says softly.
    There follows a brief moment of silence in honor of the things we're thinking but won't say, about death and its proximity to my father. We're interrupted by the electronic chime of my cell phone, which I snatch off my belt with the apologetic smile of an addict. “Hello,” I say.
    â€œYou're a lying, egotistical son of a bitch,” comes Nat's voice. I put my hand over the mouthpiece and look at Jared and Sheri. “I have to take this. Be a minute.”
    â€œJared,” Sheri says, chewing her lip. “I've got to go.”
    â€œI'll walk you,” he says. “Later, Uncle Joe.”
    â€œI'll be here,” I say, putting the phone back to my ear to catch the rest of Nat's remarks. “. . . used me, you asshole. And when you were done . . .” I watch Jared and Sheri from the living room picture window as they shuffle down the walk, his arm around her, their hips gently bumping. It makes me suddenly feel old and used up. Nat finishes and hangs up, and I close the phone and slide it back into the plastic holster on my belt. With a heavy sigh, I grab my duffel bag and head upstairs to my old room to get that part over with. Coming home, I think. It's never quite how you pictured it would be.

ten
    1986
    At night, Lucy swam naked.
    Not actually, although for all I know she really did, but in my mind, where every night she habitually doffed all constraints and plunged naked into the pool, swimming languidly then floating on her back in the hazy glow of the submerged pool lights. The fantasy was born, and no matter where I was or what I was doing, it played continuously in my mind.
She stands there on the diving board, luminous in her nakedness, and just before she dives, she sees me standing across the pool from her. Instead of being surprised, she flashes a warm, knowing smile full of seductive promise and then plunges into the water. I step in from the shallow end and am waiting for her when she surfaces. We stand there, the water just above our waists, and she says, “I've been wondering when you'd come.” “I know,” I say, and then she envelops me in her arms, and I feel those magnificent, bulbous breasts, hot and damp, pressed against my chest, and her warm lips open up over mine as she probes me with her tongue. Below the waterline, our groins brush lightly and then with greater force, and she pulls me deeper into the water to make love to me while in the background there's a radio playing Peter Gabriel's “In Your Eyes.”
Cheesy as hell, but at the time it seemed as magical as the alluring concept of pool sex.
    Pool sex, for Christ's sake. A tenuous, complicated coupling, more strenuous than pleasurable, where every move and thrust must be compensated for in order to maintain a precarious semblance of balance, and for all of that extra work, sensitivity in the vital areas is actually diminished rather than enhanced. This was not the popular view embraced by late-night cable television, but that very fact proves the point that pool sex is a primarily visual phenomenon. It looks much better than it feels. But for a seventeen-year-old virgin, pool sex felt just as good as all of the other kinds of sex I wasn't getting, just another entry in my expanding journal of the unattainable.
    Aside from my immense sexual frustration, which threatened to cross the line into obsession on a daily basis, I was having a pretty good summer. To have two friends is to have something greater than the sum of its parts. Sammy's introduction into the mix meant that I now had a group. A crew. “The guys.” I reveled in our easy