You First: A Joe Goldberg Prequel (You, #0)(29)

“Angus, I gotta take a leak.”

Normally, he says to piss in the fireplace, and usually, I’m okay to hold it. I don’t want to catch a disease off the toilet, the hand towels, the air. But he’s in outer space, trying to bite his toenails. I rise out of the chair while he thrashes like a fish that just turned into a human, and I’m down the hall. I close the bathroom door and I call you and it rings.

Is it over? Are we dead?

Then…“Joe?”

There is noise in the background. Life. Men. “Vail, thank God. Are you okay?”

You laugh and you’ve had a drink, maybe two. “I’m great. I met up with Cynthia at Jake’s Dilemma and I ran into a friend….”

Is that friend a guy? Does he have a dick? You drop your phone and thank a guy for picking it up and my Portnoy didn’t like that, and you groan. “Fuck.”

“Vail, are you okay? I’m getting out of here any second….”

“Babe! I’m so dumb.”

“You are not.”

“No, I mean…I left my scarf. It’s red…I think. Or maybe I didn’t wear it? Omigod, I’m so fucked up…. I can’t do shots. Or cosmos…” A man calls out to you. Gundylocks! From the sound of it, you tell him to shhh. And then you come back to me. “Anyway, grab it if you see it!”

The end.

Hearing your voice did wonders for me, even though you were drunk. I see the positives now. I didn’t steal anything, and you’re not physically hurt. You’re self-medicating; that’s natural. And you didn’t send me to voicemail. You still want me. You got out. You used your feminine wiles. I don’t have those—I don’t think guys have wiles—but I have other stuff. I splash cold water on my face and slap my cheeks the way you slap a new baby’s ass.

I will get your scarf and there will be frozen hot chocolate. And sex.

I return to the living room, and there he is, fucking floating in our leather and our butter as he picks at a Band-Aid on his nipple.

I ditch my Heinie on the coffee table and scan the room for your scarf. “So, Angus, my man, I’m gonna head out.”

He laughs and picks at another Band-Aid on his belly. “She’s not even hot, Joe.”

Now he knows my name, and I grunt. “Angus, buddy, I’m sorry, but I really gotta split.”

“Aw, the boy said he’s sorry.”

I don’t want to die in here—the smoke, the farts—and Angus picks up his pipe. “You don’t get it,” he sneers. “You’re not the victim, Jamie. I’m the victim.”

Oh, for fuck’s sake, and I bob my ’70s head. “You’re right. And I’m sorry.”

He trades his gun for a lighter and poof. More smoke. I don’t know how he does it, how he stays the fuck alive. Worse still, the idea of you at Jake’s without me. Who was calling you Gundylocks?

Angus peels off the Band-Aid on his nipple. He chews on it. “I have cameras, Joe. All buildings like this…you might not know this, but they have cameras.”

That’s a threat, and could I do it? Could I pick up the gun and shoot him? Cut him up in pieces and toss him in the fireplace? If you could see me, if you knew what I was thinking, would you still want me to rescue your scarf?

“See,” he says. “I bet you’ve never been to therapy.”

It’s more expensive than Spain and Costa Rica. “Not yet.”

“Well, my mother made me go to sailing camp, Jerry. Can you imagine that? A kid like me…a certified genius learning to tie knots like some…” He shakes his fat head, and I can’t kill him. If I blew his brains out, his mother who hates him would come back to life like a zombie in pearls just to preserve the family image. She would find his killer and hire someone to write some ridiculous obituary about how much her precious, sensitive son loved to sail. “It’s the doves. Do you hear them, Jack?”

I hear them. I pray for them.

“I’m just like my mother,” he says. “And I’m just like my father too…. Did I ever tell you what he said about my first novel….”

It’s not a novel if you don’t finish writing it, and time is passing. You are out there, in the wild, and Angus moves in a circle, from his mother to Kelly Demon, back to his mother. The doves aren’t helping, the way they peter out and then return, unknowingly egging him on. He swats at them, at his mother, at his father, at all his Kelly Demons, but he won’t be alone. I can’t lose you because of him. I have to kill the doves. Distract him. He lights a Marlboro Red that he found in the butter and the leather, and he wants something from me, but I don’t have wiles or drugs or money and then it hits me…. Franzen. Sometimes you lie so much that you forget you’re lying. I always tell Angus what Mooney wants me to tell him, that we don’t have a galley of The Twenty-Seventh City. But we do. And it’s the white whale, the one he sees as the reason he never finished his own fucking opus.

I cut him off in the middle of some sob story about his dad’s Porsches. “Hey, did I tell you we got a galley of The Twenty-Seventh City?”

He drops his cigarette on the shag carpet and plants his bare foot on the butt. Sizzling skin. No pain, yet no gain, literally. “A galley? Are you sure, Jerry?”