You First: A Joe Goldberg Prequel (You, #0)(60)

“Have you really gone that soft, Joseph? Do you think I have nothing better to do than repeat myself?”

“No.”

“Go home.”

“I need the hours.”

“Oh, you do?”

“I’ve been spending a little too much lately….”

He kicks back in his chair. It swivels. I used to sit in that chair when I first started coming in here. I loved that thing. We didn’t have anything that swiveled at home or in school. Once, I asked him to spin me around. He said no. I never asked again.

“Joseph,” he says. “In Israel, all teenagers go to war before they go to college.”

“Okay.”

“Meaning you’re eighteen years old, boy.”

Seventeen, but who cares. “Okay.”

“When I was your age, I had my own apartment. I was a father. I was a man.”

True, but his kid died in childbirth, so does that even count? Fuck him. This is my life. Our life. “Bet you also knew what to do with a devil’s doorbell.”

He looks through me. “Did you ever read the Neil Postman as I suggested?”

No. “Of course.”

“Then you know that childhood and adolescence are invented concepts.”

I nod the way I do with Dick, and I wonder if this is it for me. Maybe I’ll never become my own Big and will live out my days turning to others for advice, to guys who don’t even know each other, guys who would fucking hate each other if they met. Something is missing inside of me, and there’s almost no family on Sex and the City. Carrie never calls her mother. She almost never talks about her dad. Is that why I’m like this, like her?

“I’ve had it up to here with your fluctuations of late, Joseph. The haircut, that shirt.”

“I know.”

“No, you don’t know.”

“Sorry.”

He pounds the desk, and I’m an idiot. Can’t even delete the s-word from my fucking vocabulary. “Don’t be sorry, goddamn it. Be a man. Call it a fucking clitoris.”



* * *



—

Three minutes and two hours later, I’m in the basement with Our Bodies, Ourselves.

I’m doing a skim read and a deep clean and did I ring your devil’s doorbell? Did I touch your…Still not used to that c-word and I want to cry but I don’t cry. Boys don’t cry and when Carrie asks Big if he cried while they were apart, he says no. But I sure did listen to a lot of Sinatra. I stab the floor with my broom. This is what I am. I don’t have my own thoughts. I used to live in books, and now I live in Sex. It’s all the same. Mooney is right. I’m not a man. I’m a mug. Empty. Real men pour their knowledge into my empty head but I trip on my own two feet and burn myself, then I’m empty again. Thirsty.

Footsteps above and the door opens. I wipe the tears away. Fucking crying. Didn’t I just say I wasn’t gonna do that?

The lights switch off and on, and that’s Mooney code for get the hell up here. I trudge up the stairs like a child. I remember when I had that Beck song in my head. I thought I was a loser. Little did I know that I was about to become a Sex fiend who can’t even make a woman come. I button up my shirt. It doesn’t hide the hickey. And it’s not a love bite if you don’t love me, which you don’t because how could you love me? There is no me to love. I make promises in my head.

No more quoting Carrie and the girls. Or their men.

No more coffee at Dick’s.

No more letting Mr. Mooney treat me like shit.

I’m gonna get another job. A real job.

I’m gonna get my own place. Somewhere on the East Side. Or the West Side.

I’m gonna take a break from people.

I’m gonna read until my eyes bleed out and the right novel tells me where to go, who to be, what to do with all these white fucking shirts. I reach for the doorknob, and it’s the worst thing about love, about you. The second I feel charged up about becoming my own fucking person and figuring out who I am, all I see for myself at the end of the road is, well, you. It’s like Mikey in Swingers. You are the pot at the end of the rainbow. But I won’t get near the pot until I forget about you, you and your naked dress and your six-toed left foot. Carrie never got this dark or morbid, and here it comes again, the words that feel like truth.

There is no me to love. Never was.

On I go, dragging my feet into the deserted floor of the shop. Too bright, too dusty. A mother reads Strawberry Shortcake and the Winter That Would Not End to her mini-me little girl. I feel a sneeze coming on, and it’s a relief, to lose myself for a second, to sneeze and come a little close to death.

“God bless you, babe.”

I turn around and YES! “Vail!”

You’re laughing at me—I am loud—and fuck yes, I am loud. I don’t need Our Bodies, Ourselves or Dick the Damaged or Mr. Fucking Mooney to know that this is it. You’re here. And you wouldn’t have come if you hadn’t come. I did it. I rang your devil’s doorbell, and you’re holding two hot Greek cups of coffee and one of them is for me. You came. You’re here. I take the cups and put them down and I pick you up and I do not put you down. I will never let go, never again. You hold me tight as eyelids on eyeballs. It is you. You. We stay like that, wrapped up as one, and I take it all back, Vail. Every last word. Especially the worst part, the part where I said that you can’t love me because there is no me.