The Book of Joe by Jonathan Tropper Page B

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 camaraderie, in the running jokes and understandings that developed among the three of us as the summer progressed. Me and the guys. I developed a spring in my step, a quicker grin, a wider eye. I was suddenly, unaccountably happy.
    And for as long as I could, I ignored the larger, unspoken thing that was happening ominously on the periphery, the stray secret looks and the nonverbal signals that I was inadvertently intercepting with increasing frequency. I was determinedly unwilling to rock the boat. We listened to Springsteen and watched MTV, drank too much beer and went swimming, raced golf carts across the Porter’s campus in the dark of night, talked back to the screen at the Megaplex, ate burgers and pizzas at the Duchess Diner, and very occasionally scored some weed from Niko, who ran the Sunoco station downtown. And somewhere, in the middle of it all, Wayne and Sammy became something far more than friends.
    How long can you remain oblivious to a love affair going on right in front of you? It’ s all a question of determina tion, actually. On some level, I must have registered the furtive glances and knowing smiles, the disappearing hands in the movie theater, the quick, jerky redistribution of bodily masses when I entered the room suddenly, and the slow general thickening of the atmosphere surrounding my two best friends. But I clung steadfastly to my oblivion, determined to ride out this new insanity like a powerful virus. I naïvely believed it was nothing more than a bizarre behavioral phase, a rebellious experimentation they would outgrow.
    This was 1986, after all, and we hadn’t yet been trained to deal with this sort of thing. We knew about homosexuality the same way we knew about god; we’d heard it existed, but didn’t necessarily accept the reality of