Straight Man

  “So, how did you come by that nose?” Russell finally asks.

  Aware that the truth will probably sound more absurd than my previous lie about the wasp, I tell him, “A poet did it to me.” And I can’t help grinning at the fact that I’ve acknowledged that Gracie is a poet.

  “Mean one,” Russell says.

  “About average, actually,” I say. “They run to meanness.”

  “Unlike novelists,” Julie says, really surprising me this time. After all, my one novel came out the year she was born, and though we’ve never told her, there’s a pretty good chance she was conceived in celebration of its acceptance for publication. Is my daughter stretching a point, as I just did by conceding poet status to Gracie, or does she really think of me, despite my twenty-year silence, as a writer? Maybe to her my newspaper op-ed pieces count. Maybe she can’t see much difference between them and novel writing. Truth be told, I seldom think of myself as a writer anymore, though I write all the time—churning out film and book reviews for the Railton Mirror, along with my “The Soul of the University” pieces. But I haven’t published, or even written, so much as a short story in the long years since the novel was published, given a foolishly positive review in the Times (a review instigated, I later learned, by my father, who knew the editor), and then dove precipitously into that unmarked grave of books that cause no significant ripple in the literary pond. Apparently I’m not the only one who no longer considers me a writer. Last Christmas was the first since Off the Road’s publication that I did not get a holiday greeting from Wendy, my agent, though my fall from her good graces may have been the result of a note I sent her the previous year. She’d informed all her clients that due to increased costs of doing business in New York she was going to have to go from a 10 to a 15 percent commission. She may not have seen the humor in my sarcastic refusal to pay her an additional 5 percent of nothing. Have I brought this on myself, I wonder, that people who know me refuse to take me seriously, while to virtual strangers my ironic sallies are received with staunch, serious outrage?

  Regardless, the fact that my daughter still thinks of me as a novelist cheers me, its further evidence of her unworldliness notwithstanding.

  “I noticed the tennis courts are nearly dry,” Julie remarks. She and I play hard, competitive tennis throughout the summer and as far into the fall as weather permits. She’s got age and talent on her side, along with a sweet, hard, two-handed backstroke, and she would beat me easily if she could keep her concentration. I am the reason she can’t keep her concentration. Part of my game—the only good part, according to Julie—is gamesmanship. She hates to be talked to during a match, so I find all sorts of things to discuss with her. I keep this up until she screams, “Shut up, damn it!” a sign that her concentration is shot and that it’s okay for me to just play. Our games mystify Russell, who’s too nice a fellow in general to understand either sport or competition, and far too uncoordinated to benefit from instruction. When he and Julie started dating seriously and he wanted to make a good impression on me, he suggested we play some one-on-one basketball. The contest was so lopsided, with Lily and Julie looking on, that both my wife and daughter were furious with me afterward. “You didn’t have to humiliate him,” Lily said.

  “I never meant to,” I assured her. “I tried to keep him in the game.”

  “You could have let him score one basket.” Julie frowned. “One basket. Would that have been so terrible?”

  “He kept throwing the ball over the backboard,” I reminded her. “Four times I had to go up on the roof.”

  “You did everything but slam-dunk over him,” Lily said.

  “And not for lack of opportunity.”

  Russell joined the conversation then, taking my side. “Hank’s right,” he admitted sadly. “I suck. I suck bad. I suck the big one. I never should have asked you to play.”

  “We’ll find another game where we’re a better match,” I suggested.

  “I don’t know,” he grinned sheepishly. “Basketball’s always been my best sport.”

  No, that was our first and last contest.

  “Watch out for the old man this year,” I warn my daughter. “My hamstring’s healed. I’m already up to two miles a day.”

  “How come you and Mom never jog together?” my daughter asks so seriously that I’m momentarily puzzled. I’ve heard the words, but the tone of my daughter’s voice suggests a different sort of question entirely, something more on the order of “How come you and Mom have separate bedrooms?” Some damn thing seems to have caused a blip on my daughter’s psychic radar screen. Unlike her sister, Julie has never excelled in ordered thinking, but from the time she was a child, she’s always been capable of chilling intuitive leaps.

  Or possibly she’s just curious about why Lily and I never jog together. This explanation would satisfy William of Occam, and it ought to satisfy me.

  “She hates my pace,” I explain, finishing my coffee and sliding the china cup and saucer toward the middle of the table.

  Russell is grinning again. “You go too fast or too slow?”

  “She won’t say,” I grin back at him.

  “You’re supposed to know,” Julie explains. “You’re supposed to pay attention.”

  I could be wrong, but I get the feeling that this remark is addressed to Russell more than me, and from the look on his face, I’d say he’s come to the same conclusion. There’s another long silence, and when the phone rings and Julie gets up to answer it, I’m glad, until I hear her say, “Yeah, he’s over here. You want to talk to him?” A moment passes. Apparently not. Julie listens, her face clouding over. “I’ll tell him,” she says, and hangs up. Russell raises a sympathetic eyebrow at me. He’s young, but he’s been married long enough to recognize unpleasantness.

  “You’re to go home,” Julie says. “Mom says Mr. Quigley’s been trying to reach you. She says you’ll understand.”

  Unfortunately, I do, though if Billy Quigley’s trying to reach me, that’s a pretty good reason to stay where I am.

  “Mom says he refuses to believe you aren’t home.”

  I stand up, slide my chair back. “When Billy’s home, he expects other people to be home too,” I explain, approximating my drunken colleague’s logic. Billy’s problem is he’s smart enough to know I don’t want to talk to him, but he’s too drunk to remember that I always talk to him whether I want to or not.

  “I’ll give you a lift,” Russell offers.

  “No,” Julie says, showing him the keys dangling from her pinkie. “You’ve had a rough day. Relax.”

  Russell takes this parting shot like a man, without flinching. I flinch for him. “Hank,” he says without getting up, “take care.” There’s danger everywhere, he seems to imply.

  We take Julie’s Escort.

  I’m about to break one of the few simple rules I live by and ask Julie if everything is okay between her and Russell, when she says, “So what’s with this job interview Mom’s got in Philadelphia?”

  “It’s not something she’s seriously considering,” I explain. “The principal at Railton High is supposed to retire after next year though. The school board could clarify the line of succession if they felt sufficiently motivated.”

  “What if they won’t? Would she take this other job?”

  “Aren’t you asking the wrong person?”

  We’ve stopped at the Presbyterian church intersection. Its spire is a beacon, and with the surrounding trees so bare, the scene lacks only snow to be straight out of Currier and Ives. Julie’s looking at it, without really seeing. We’re idling roughly at this literal crossroads, as if we’ve both lost our sense of direction. Anyone coming up behind us would probably conclude that we’ve taken a wrong turn and are lost, that we’re either hunched over a map or consulting the stars, the full firmament of which are winking above us, suggesting an infinite number of possible directions, when in fact there are only three, two of which are wrong, and we know which two.

  “What
would you do? Leave your job at the campus?” When I don’t have an immediate answer, she adds, “Are you the right person to ask that?”

  “No, that would be your mother again.”

  What happens next surprises me. Without warning my daughter, her small hand balled into a fist, pivots in her seat and punches me as hard as she can on my left biceps. No, as it turns out it wasn’t as hard as she could. The second punch is harder, and it’s hard enough to cause me to catch her by the wrist before she can deliver a third.

  “You bastards,” she cries. “You are getting a divorce.”

  “What are you talking about, Julie?”

  She’s glaring at me, like I’m someone she’s concluded, over a lifetime, is not to be trusted. I let go of her wrist to show that I trust her, and she punches me again, though not so hard this time. “I want you to tell me what’s going on.”

  “I don’t know,” I confess. “Have you been talking to your sister?” I no sooner ask this than I can tell I’ve intuited the truth of the matter. Karen, an otherwise sensible girl, has always been certain that her mother and I were on the verge of divorce. When she was in high school, several of her best friends’ parents went through rancorous divorces, leaving her friends shattered and Karen herself shaken and alive to the possibility the same thing could happen to her parents. She was always looking for signs, and most everything she witnessed, from petty bickering to benign conversations she didn’t understand or had joined in progress, she construed as omens of the impending dissolution of her parents’ union. And of course, being older than Julie, she was able to convince her younger sister to share her anxieties.

  “Mom’s always telling her things she won’t tell me,” Julie explains. “It really pisses me off.”

  “What did she tell Karen?” I ask, genuinely curious.

  “Karen won’t say. Which also pisses me off. It’s like they’re a club, and I can’t get in.”

  “You’re imagining things. So is your sister. There’s nothing wrong between your mother and me.”

  Julie shoots me a look. “How would you know? You never know when Mom’s unhappy.”

  “When is she unhappy?”

  “See?”

  A car has come up behind us and is waiting for us to do something.

  “I just … I don’t think I could take it if you guys divorced right now, okay?” Julie says.

  I don’t know. Is it wrong of me to regret this nearly complete lack of irony in my offspring? Either this is a changeling sitting next to me, or my genes are breaking down at some submolecular level. How is it that a daughter of William Henry Devereaux, Jr., can deliver a line like this straight? If Lily were here she’d say it’s sweet that our daughter would take her parents’ marriage so personally and want to save it, but I’m not certain.

  When the car behind us toots, Julie rolls down her window, sticks her pretty head out, and yells, “Fuck off!” To my amazement, the car does a three-point turn and heads back up the road the way it came.

  “Listen,” I suggest, “if you and Russell need money …”

  My daughter looks at me in disbelief. “Was someone talking about money?” she wants to know.

  “I don’t know what we’re talking about,” I confess. “Your mother’s got a job interview in Philadelphia. While she’s there she’s going to look in on your grandfather and see how he’s doing. She’ll be back next Monday, okay? That’s all there is to know. You’re up to speed.”

  She studies me hard. We’re still sitting at the intersection. Finally, she puts the car in gear. “I doubt that,” she says, surrendering to her old man a grudging half grin. “I’m just up to your speed.”

  CHAPTER

  4

  The phone is ringing when I return, so I pick it up. “Hello, peckerhead,” says a voice I immediately recognize as Billy Quigley’s. “I knew you were there.”

  “I just walked in.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “How drunk are you, Billy?”

  “Plenty,” he admits. “Not that it’s any of your business.”

  Billy Quigley calls me periodically, reads me the riot act, insults me, then begs my forgiveness, which I always grant, because I like Billy and don’t blame him for drinking himself into merciful oblivion. He’s fifty-seven and all worn out, and the eight years that remain before he can retire must look to him like an eternity. Irish and Catholic, he’s put ten kids through private parochial schools and expensive Catholic colleges by teaching summer sessions and taking course overloads during the regular semesters. He and his wife, a local girl he married young, live in the same shabby little house he bought some thirty years ago, before the neighborhood went bad. Their mortgage payments are all of a hundred and fifty dollars a month, and the rest of his salary goes to paying off mountainous loans. Their youngest daughter, Colleen, a senior at Railton’s Mount Olive Catholic High School, has just been accepted at Notre Dame on a music scholarship that will pay part of her expenses. Billy will do the rest.

  “I hear Gracie cleaned your clock this afternoon,” Billy says, clearly hoping that this is true, that what he’s heard is not exaggeration.

  “She sure did, Billy,” I tell him. “Who told you?”

  “None of your business, you goddamn sellout, son of a bitch. You’d sell us all out for a nickel, you goddamn Judas peckerwood.”

  This, I realize, is what the phone call is about. The persistent rumors of an impending purge have spooked Billy. He’s called for my reassurance, which he wouldn’t believe even if I offered it, and anyway I decide against it. “Not for a nickel, Billy,” I tell him. “Ours is a two-bit department. I always get full price.” My strategy with Billy is to play along, wait for him to come around. Lily claims my turning Billy’s accusations into a running gag is further evidence that to me everything is a joke. But the fact is, jokes often work on Billy. They work on most people. The exception is Paul Rourke, who’s proud of never having cracked a smile at anything I’ve ever said or done, and who vows he never will. Like everyone else, Billy has only a finite amount of meanness in him, and most times he exhausts it quickly.

  “I bet you got my name right at the top of that list. Don’t tell me you didn’t make one, either, because I don’t believe it.”

  “The merit pay list? Of course I made it. I put you in for a bonus this year.”

  “Good. I’m going to need it. I tell you my kid got accepted at Notre Dame?”

  I tell him he sure did and congratulate him again, wondering if he’s already shifted gears.

  “Fucking Notre Dame,” he says proudly. “Your youngest never even went to college, did she? What the hell was her name?”

  “Julie,” I tell him. I don’t bother to correct him, though in fact Julie did go to several colleges. She enrolled. We paid tuition. She moved into the dorm. But in the most important sense, Billy is right. Julie never went to college.

  “And you a college professor,” he says. “Is that any way to raise a kid, you peckerhead?”

  I’m getting a little tired of this. “We all do the best we can, Billy,” I say. “You know that.”

  “You could send her to school at least,” he insists. “Even I could do that, and I’m just a drunk.”

  We’re winding down now, I can tell. These conversations with Billy have a rhythm to them. “You aren’t just a drunk,” I tell him. “You’re a drunk all right, but you aren’t just a drunk.”

  The line is quiet for a moment except for some muffled sounds on Billy’s end, and I realize he’s cupped his hand over the receiver. When he finally speaks again, I can tell he’s been crying. “How come you always let me talk to you like that?” he wants to know. “How come you don’t just hang up?”

  “I don’t know,” I tell him. Which is true. “In fact, you’re beginning to gripe me. I’d really prefer you didn’t bring up my kids.”

  “I know it,” he admits. “I shouldn’t do that. That’s going too goddamn far. I don’t know what comes over me. Sometimes I just
feel like I’m going to explode. You ever feel like that?”

  I tell him no, and in truth anger—if it’s anger he’s describing—is an emotion that’s foreign to me. Which infuriates Lily, who comes from a family of brawlers. She has dreams where, when she tries to pick a fight with me, I laugh at her, and she holds me accountable for this behavior, though I never laugh at her when she’s awake.

  “That’s because you’re a peckerwood,” Billy says, though there’s humor in his voice now. “Anyhow, I gotta go. More papers to grade.”

  “Right,” I say.

  “I want that extra section of comp next fall. And a summer session. And make damn sure Meg gets her two sections, too.” Another of Billy’s daughters. My favorite. This one teaches for the English department in an adjunct capacity.

  I tell him what I’ve been telling him—that I’ll do my best, that I don’t have a budget yet, that nobody has a budget yet, absurd though that is. “You should just do a regular load,” I advise, at the risk of getting him angry again. “What good are you going to be if you crack up?”

  “Best thing that could happen,” he says. “The loans are all insured. Something happens to me, they’re all paid off.”

  “Good strategy,” I tell him. “Get some sleep.”

  “Okay,” he agrees. “The bitch didn’t hurt you, did she?”