Good Trouble by Joseph O'Neill

Author:Joseph O'Neill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2018-06-11T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

—

The next morning, a Monday morning, Tom is on Fifth Avenue, walking to work, when he hears, piping out of the loudspeakers of a department store, none other than Billy Joel—which, given his death, makes perfect sense. He extracts his phone from his breast pocket and calls Suzanne.

“I forgot to tell you,” he says. “Did you hear about Billy Joel dying?”

“No. He died?”

“Yeah. On Friday.”

“Well, I haven’t seen anything about it. Wait a minute.” Suzanne, who is already at work, consults people in the office. “No,” she says, “nobody’s heard anything about it. Are you sure?”

“I saw something on the CNN ticker about Billy Joel, aged fifty-five. I’m assuming there’s no other reason for him to be on the news.”

Suzanne passes on what Tom has said. He hears indistinct talk followed by his wife’s clear peal of laughter. “He didn’t die, honey,” she says. “He got engaged. To a twenty-two-year-old or a twenty-six-year-old, we’re not sure which.”

“Oh, right,” Tom says. “Jesus, I went through the whole weekend thinking he was dead.”

“Well, he isn’t,” Suzanne says. “Quite the opposite.”

Tom continues walking down Fifth Avenue. It’s cold. Ice is piled up everywhere. He has twelve days left before he’s forty. Tom perceives—as, apprehending the anniversary as a deadline, he begins to walk faster—that he must in the meantime understand, somehow or other, to soap himself with the shriveling world.

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