Joey
David's friend in Brooklyn, present only in memory. The night the two of them spent together is where David first learned to treat tenderness as a threat.
For David to stay. He never says so. David's own account is that Joey did not know how to protest or insist, "he did not know that this was all he needed to have done."
The book
At a glance
- David's boyhood friend in Brooklyn — present only in memory, in one chapter
- About David's own, give or take a year; both were still in their teens
- "A very nice boy, too, very quick and dark, and always laughing"
- Near Coney Island, in a poorer part of Brooklyn than David's family
- By accident, near the end of that summer. His family later moved away
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeJoey is a boy David knew in Brooklyn as a teenager, and for a while his best friend. He appears in one long passage near the start of the novel and never again. Everything about him is remembered rather than witnessed, from an evening about ten years before the rest of the story.
He matters far more than his few pages suggest. The night the two of them spent together is where David first decided that wanting someone was a threat, and every choice David makes afterwards — including the one that destroys Giovanni — repeats what he did to Joey the following morning.
David says he forgot him deliberately, because the idea that such a person could have been his best friend became "proof of some horrifying taint in me." On the last night of the book, waiting for Giovanni to be executed, he sees him clearly again.
How the book draws them
- The summerHis parents were away for the weekend and David was staying at his house near Coney Island. They spent the day at the beach, swimming and whistling at girls who ignored them, then walked back through hot Brooklyn streets in the evening with David's arm around his shoulder. David remembers being proud that Joey's head came just below his ear, and remembers, with some surprise, "how good I felt that night, how fond of Joey."
- The bedbugIt begins with a joke. Joey wakes David up, examining the pillow, convinced something has bitten him. David teases him about it and grabs his head the way he had a hundred times before, and this time Joey does not resist. What David compares the moment to is holding "some rare, exhausted, nearly doomed bird which I had miraculously happened to find."
- How David sees him in the morningAsleep, curled on his side, mouth half open, his curly hair dark against the pillow. David calls his body "the most beautiful creation I have ever seen till then" and then, in the same paragraph, becomes frightened of it — of the power in his arms and thighs, and of what it would mean to want that. He never touches him again.
- How it endedDavid made coffee, invented a reason to go home, and did not wait for breakfast. He knew the excuse fooled nobody. He simply stopped visiting a friend he had seen nearly every day that summer, and Joey did not come to him either. When they met by chance weeks later, David told him a long invented story about a girl.
Nothing further happens to him in the novel; he is gone by page thirty.