ixteen years with Dessa. He is living with a younger beautiful woman named Joy. After falling two stories while housepainting,Joy visits Dominick in the hospital with the wonderful news concerning her pregnancy. Dominick knows that Joy was unfaithful as the baby could not possibly be his as he underwent a vasectomy. Dominick tells Joy of his operation and she admits to cheating on him with another man. Dominick was cruelly lied to about an issue that was already delicate to him and as he lays in his hospital bed, he sinks into a depression and beings to question his reason for living. "Just let me lie here and think - play with the idea of dying."(493) At the height of Dominicks depression, after learning that Joy allowed her other lover watch Dominick and her consummate, and after his mothers death, after learning his step father Ray had gangrene and had to have part of his leg removed, after realizing that he was still in love with Dessa and after recalling his childhood - which was supossed to be a time of happy memories, Dominick visualizes his suicide. "They'd send me home with painkillers, right? I could take them all at once with a bottle of what did I have in the house anyway scotch Booze and pills, that would do it." (524)With Dominicks past and present combined, his life makes for an unhappy one. Since he was a child he had no sense of control. "When you're the sane brother of a schitzophrenic identical twin, and you're into survival of the fittest and being your brothers keeper say goodbye to sleep and hello to the middle of the night." (347) He has endured failed relationships, the death of his child, having to cope with the knowing that his brother crisis with schizophrenia was out of his control and for the first time he was unable to protect him; protecting Thomas was an idea which he had grown comfortable with as inconvenient as it was. Dominick also had no control over his mother's death as she died from bre...
