John Brandon - Further Joy

The utilities in Joyce’s daughter’s home had been shut down for months, but Joyce still paid the phone bill.

Joyce opened the blinds and saw a barge plowing tranquilly out to sea. A bunch of gulls tussled over something and then decided they didn’t want it. Out in the surf, a dog chased a tall bird. Whenever the dog got close, the bird, with gawky effort, would beat itself into the air and glide farther down the beach, where it would resettle, regain its dignity, and put the chase out of its mind. And here came the dog again.

Joyce neatened her house, dusted, wiped down the mirrors without looking at herself, lined up the tumblers and flutes and shot glasses and highball glasses and martini glasses just so. She folded laundry, dumped the rest of the coffee down the sink.

She put on a long sweater with big, square pockets and stepped out onto the back porch with her cigarettes. There was enough breeze to carry the barking of a single sea lion. Joyce heard them all the time now, always sounding like they were protesting a loss, like they were calling helplessly toward the sky, refusing to be reasonable.

You may remember that summer, the way it ground to a halt. The sun would get straight overhead where you could barely find it, and just stay lost up there. I kept leaving sunglasses all over town so I started buying the cheapest pairs I could find, six dollars and oversize and with lenses that turned the world gray. The baseball team down in Tampa was still in last place. There’d been repeated threats of shipping them to a bigger market where they could get a fresh start, but finally everyone understood it was a bluff. Tampa was stuck with them, as they were stuck with Tampa. Freaks roamed the beach, my favorite an old man who ate entire watermelons on demand. Children would approach him, lugging the outsize fruits in their frail arms, and the old man would whip out a machete and get to work and every trace of the pink flesh would disappear down his gullet in under a minute. And of course there were all the minor shark attacks, which were even more frequent that year. Everyone kept saying something was in the water, that some pollutant was turning the sharks even more ornery. The town I was living in was built on a shallow cove with two or three thin rivers pouring into it, and the sharks out there were mostly youngsters. The waters were a training ground — the school fish drowsy, the currents mild, the swimmers pale and off-guard and accustomed to chilly lakes.

It wasn’t like I had nothing to do. I’d agreed to fix a restaurant space up for an old high school classmate and her girlfriend. The place was small but it was on the corner of a block right down by the beach and had windows you could sell out of hand-to-hand. It wasn’t going to be a sit-down restaurant. Cammie, the brains of the operation, and the money, didn’t want to deal with a wait staff. She was going to serve cold soups and pressed Cubans, one appetizer of salsa and plantain chips, key lime pie and coffee. I’d known Cammie since the old days. She’d used her real name then, Rachel. She looked exactly the same now, but with simpler hair. And she still had those same legs. She wore unmemorable white shorts and unmemorable white sneakers, but you remembered her legs. I’d never met her girlfriend, but I imagined she was on the brawny side because she worked security on a rundown casino boat.

Cammie’s job, on the other hand, was orchestrating the dessert room at a pricy steakhouse down in Tampa. She was paying me $350 a week right out of her salary, and the deal was that when the restaurant opened I’d be in for a percentage and get a job with them — assistant manager in charge of sweeping or something. Chopping up the salsa. Didn’t matter to me. When I pictured Cammie and her girlfriend I pictured them peaceful and whispering at the end of a day. Maybe they’d have a lamp on, and they’d each be reading a book, their legs tangled up on the couch. One of them would pass the other a cookie from a plate. They didn’t need the restaurant. It was a venture that might make their nice life even nicer.

I had no deadline for getting the place ready and I always felt like I was working too fast. I wasn’t used to getting paid by the day, wasn’t used to being an employee, and I wondered if I was meant to be stretching the tasks instead of burning them up. After a couple weeks, I had the storeroom stripped and the ceiling repainted and the toilets installed and new screens in and the windows gliding up and down with a finger. Lighting fixtures and ceiling fans. Hot water heater. There were a couple steps just inside the door, and I bolted a handrail onto the wall alongside. I had most of the floor ripped up. I knew I needed to pace myself, so I began a slow morning habit of clearing all the breeze-fallen palm fronds off the front walk. I dragged them to the fence at the rear of the strip mall, where they rested in a brittle rising drift, dry as paper. I had the feeling, doing any of this, of going through motions, a dull, drained feeling, like if anything were going to work out for me it would’ve already happened.

A couple nights a week, tired from working and from trying not to work, I’d sit in my truck down on the stretch of beach where you could drive cars and I’d wait for people to get stuck. In the dark you could easily veer from the hard-packed strip into the loose sand. One night the dusk brought me this stand-up comedian and this woman twice his age. He was set to perform at a club I’d never heard of, opening for a sitcom actress I’d never heard of. He didn’t come up with any funny remarks about being stuck in the sand and, in fact, acted kind of solemn while I hooked him up behind the 4x4. He and his middle-aged woman were in a rental, a late-model muscle car made to look like its classic predecessor. After I hauled the car loose, the comedian said he was eternally grateful, in those words. He’d never been late to a show in his life. The woman was drunk, or maybe she wasn’t. Beads and feathers were dangling in her hair. She said this was the last summer she was going to be sexy. She was glad it was lasting forever.

The little city I was living in was a few towns north of Tampa and a few towns south of where I’d grown up. People wound up here because no one else would have them, because there were already too many lawyers in better towns or too many pharmacists in better towns, because they couldn’t afford to retire in Naples, because, in rare instances, they were born here. In my case, a bunch of projects had fallen through at the same time. Normally my projects collapsed in a staggered fashion, which always left me with one or two irons in the fire, one or two reasons to be optimistic. Marketing was my area of schooling and I was also handy enough to help out on a construction site, but I’d tried to push into the foreclosures boom, had sought a patent for a lawn-care tool, founded a maid service, bought a slice of an on-demand storage company that went belly up. I’d taken a couple stabs at the forty-hour-a-week cubicle thing too — once I got laid off and once I hated it so much I wound up walking out in the middle of the morning.

My girlfriend finally had enough, and that’s what left me fleeing south for shelter. We’d been together nine years, so “girlfriend” doesn’t seem weighty enough a term. We’d always been happy, at least fairly so, until the last year or two. We were the couple who wouldn’t split up — everyone else believed that and for a while we did too. It got to where I was rooting for her to leave me, wishing for it every afternoon once the profitless, drummed-up tasks of my day ran out. I had no idea if I was still in love with her or not. Once enough time passes, there’s no way to tell. What I did know was that we’d stopped taking meals together, we’d stopped asking how the other’s day went, and when we slept together it was like we were actors, like we were trying to convince each other how much passion was still between us. I honestly wanted better for her than what she was getting from me. I honestly wished her well.