Straight Man (20 page)

“Well, it is,” Missy insists.

“How come nobody cares about facts anymore?” Tony wonders. “Whatever happened to accuracy? That used to be considered a virtue. Along with fair play.”

Missy apparently concludes that Tony is making these observations to her, which is understandable, since he’s making eyes at her as he speaks. “I don’t know how to be fair to a goose,” she confesses.

“By not calling it a duck,” Tony explains, as if to a child.

Teddy must think it’s a good idea to change the subject, because he says, “Too bad Lily’s not here.”

We all look at him.

“What?” he insists, mostly to me, since I’m chuckling.

“I don’t get it,” Missy Blaylock says.

“Teddy’s got a crush on Hank’s wife, Lily,” Tony Coniglia explains happily. “He wishes she were here.”

In the time it takes to say these few words, all the blood in Teddy’s body locates in his face.

“Isn’t
she
his wife?” Missy says, indicating June with her thumb.

Tony shrugs, admits this is true. “For some reason, he prefers Hank’s.”

Missy leans forward to examine June, but without Lily for comparison, she can’t resolve the conundrum. She examines each one of us at the table. “Am I missing something?” she wants to know.

“Volumes,” June says.

Missy ignores this, turning back to Tony. “I mean, it’s really, like, weird that you’d just say that in front of her,” she explains, again using her thumb as a pronoun reference.

“It’s not true,” Teddy tries to explain. “It’s a joke. He just likes to cause trouble.”

Missy’s eyes first narrow as she considers this possibility, then widen with a recollection. “It’s true!” she says. “
You
’re the one who started everything back at the lake!”

When Tony looks over at me, I warn him, “If you say pond, I’m going to club you over the head with this pitcher.”

Seeing the margarita pitcher reminds Tony that his glass is empty. He fills it, then Missy’s, then tops off the rest of our glasses. The margaritas run out just before they get to June, though Tony seems not to notice.

My threat to brain Tony Coniglia stirs a memory in Teddy, who says enthusiastically, “You should have been with Hank and me yesterday afternoon,” unaware that June is switching glasses with him. Then he recounts, Teddy-style, how we were forced off the road by Paul Rourke’s Camaro, how there was almost a fistfight right there on the shoulder of the road. I can tell that in the twenty-four hours since the event, Teddy has come to think of this melodramatic account as true. I can also tell he’d like me to back him up.

“Were
you
there?” I ask innocently, just to see the look on his face. I mean, he’s known me for twenty years and knows better than to involve me in one of his stories. “Oh, right,” I say. “I remember now.”

“Thanks a lot,” Teddy says, wounded, bleeding. And he’s lost his margarita to boot, he notices. Now we need another pitcher, and if he acknowledges this need, he’ll have to pay for it, something he’d rather not do. Only when June offers him a thin smile, draining the last of his drink, do I feel regret.

“Can we get some more of those clams?” Missy wants to know.

“Ah!” Tony says. “The sea.” As if what he means by this phrase is something very different from what the words denote.

When Missy Blaylock gets up and heads for the women’s room, Tony watches her full, round hips. “I’m not easy,” he reminds us, “but I can be had.”

“No,” June says, unpleasantly. “You’re easy.”

“It’s true,” Tony sighs ruefully before catching a waitress and ordering more clams and another pitcher of margaritas.

It’s later than it should be, and I’m farther gone than I should be, and the moment when I might have exerted my free will, held up my hands, and shouted “No más!” to the cheering crowd is long past. I seem to recall trying to say “No más” at one point, only to discover that this turned the cheering crowd into a jeering crowd. And so, I’ve decided that it is the will of the people that I remain part of the festivities.

That was then. Now we’re heading to Tony’s house, and “we” are Tony and Missy Blaylock and William Henry Devereaux, Jr. We three are wedged into the front seat of Tony’s Nissan Stanza. Tony and Missy would not hear of my reclining quietly in the backseat. No, I must be Porthos to their Athos and Aramis. We must be all for one in the front seat as the Stanza climbs dutifully up the dark, deserted streets toward Tony’s house, which abuts the woods high in the Railton hills, beyond which the slope becomes too severe to clear and build on. Missy is stroking the inside of my thigh, but I attach no significance to this, because she’s stroking the inside of Tony’s more meaningfully, and
cooing at him too, nibbling his earlobe. I suspect that Missy is wired in parallel, so that her right hand does whatever her left is doing. Apparently she can’t rub the inside of Tony’s thigh with her left hand without doing the same to mine with her right. The front seat of the Nissan, designed for two, not three, makes it difficult to keep affection discreet.

“Green,” I announce, when the traffic light we’ve been stalled at changes.

“Envy,” Missy coos. She and Tony have been playing a word association game, and Missy must have concluded that I want to play too.

“Green light,” I explain.

“
The Great Gatsby
,” Tony answers confidently. “That’s an easy one.”

I see no way out of this, except to point at the traffic signal above us, which turns yellow as Tony looks up.

“Moon,” Missy says, locating the moon. “Green moon. The moon is made of green cheese.”

I shake my head.

“Sounds like moon?” Missy wants to know.

The light turns red. Tony puts the Stanza in gear. We proceed through the red light.

“I give up,” Missy says.

“Me too,” I tell her.

“You can’t give up,” she objects. “It’s your clue.”

“Here we are,” Tony says, pulling into his driveway.

“Jeez,” Missy says. “Do I have to pee.”

We all get out. Missy trips along the slate path and up the steps, stamping her feet impatiently until Tony locates the right key. There’s only one bathroom in Tony’s house, and since waiting is out of the question, I go around the corner and drip on his hydrangeas.

When I’m finished I follow them inside and find Tony in a small room off the kitchen toward the back of the house. I suspect he’s gone there so he’ll not have to listen to Missy tinkle in the preternatural quiet of the empty house. Against one wall is an expensive computer, monitor, laser printer, all set up on designer computer furniture. Tony purchased the whole rig from a remainder catalog at what he described enthusiastically as incredible savings. The problem is that the various components cannot be induced to work together, and all of the university’s
so-called computer experts have failed to bring his system on-line. Each has a different explanation of what’s wrong, what’s needed to fix the mess. When I see that Tony has wheeled his old Smith-Corona electric typewriter into the corner, a sad admission of defeat, I wonder if Russell, my son-in-law, might be able to help out.

“It’s like visiting the room of a dead child,” he admits so seriously that I am almost moved.

“You were fornicated,” I agree.

We hear a distant flush, and Tony arches an eyebrow. “Do you ever wish you were single and good-looking?” he wants to know.

He’s grinning at me in the dark, and I can’t help grinning back.

“I’m on-line and ready to interface,” he says proudly. “I bet it’s been a long time since you’ve even booted up.”

Since it’s close enough to touch, I hit the
ON
switch of Tony’s computer, which goes directly into high gear, whirring away with great urgency. What appears on the monitor is wonderful. Every symbol on the keyboard is represented, and they fill the screen from margin to margin, the entire nonsense text scrolling upward. Every line that disappears at the top is replaced by another at the bottom, all of it total gibberish. I’m grateful that William of Occam didn’t live to see this.

“You call this interfacing?” I say.

He sighs. “It casts into serious doubt the old theory that an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters would eventually write the Great American Novel, doesn’t it?”

We watch for a while until Tony turns the machine off, and in the silence we hear Missy, somewhere distant, squeal with delight. She has discovered, it turns out, the hot tub on Tony’s back deck. At the kitchen window we watch Missy undress, which she does with remarkable drunken efficiency. When she’s completely naked, she spies us at the window, two middle-aged men, and puts her hands on her ample hips and cocks her head as if to say, “Well?”

Tony waves at her. “Pay attention,” he nudges me. “You’re never too old to learn.”

When I say I’m going home, I’m persuaded to stay for one beer. This persuasion takes place at several levels. At the basest of these I’m persuaded because there’s a pretty, naked young woman in the Jacuzzi, even if the effect of her beauty is marred somewhat by the fact that the rich steam rising off the surface of the hot tub is uncaking and separating her television makeup. Her face now resembles a low-budget horror movie mask, the idea of which is to suggest skin peeling away from bone. I’m also persuaded to stay where I am in the hot tub by the fact that since we’ve all climbed in it’s begun to rain. Sleet, really. I hunker down. Below the water I’m feeling relief. The water temperature seems to have alleviated some of the pressure in my urinary tract.

Having agreed to keep them company for one beer only, I don’t seem to be making much headway on that one beer. It takes me far too long to realize that the reason for this is that it’s sleeting at about the same rate I’m drinking, so the glass is filling at the same rate I’m emptying it.

Twice since we’ve climbed into the tub, the phone has rung and Tony has left Missy and me alone in the burbling water. It’s a pretty noisy hot tub, and that, together with the drumming of the freezing rain on the deck, has discouraged conversation. Tony has been equal to the challenge and regaled us with all kinds of stories and the sorts of unrelated arcane bits of knowledge that enchant his students, but when the phone rings a third time, he leaves behind a silence that Missy and I don’t even attempt to fill. It’s only the third call that causes me to be curious about who’s calling Tony at two-thirty in the morning. I can see his head and thick shoulders through the kitchen window. He’s turned his back to us, as if he suspects that Missy or I possess lip-reading capabilities. If it’s Missy he’s worried about, there’s no need, for I note that she’s snoring peacefully, her head back on the tile, her lips parted slightly, her chest rising and falling to the beat of her respiration. Sleet is actually dancing off her forehead.

Inside, Tony hangs up the phone, stares at it for a second, then takes the receiver off the wall-mounted hook. I wait for him to punch in a number, but instead he opens a kitchen cabinet and places the receiver inside. “Problem?” I inquire when he returns, since, under the circumstances, not asking would seem more unusual than asking.

He waves away my suggestion that there’s a problem, though clearly there is something. Still, the sight of Missy Blaylock, naked and fast asleep in his hot tub, is enough to restore his good spirits. “What a picture,” he says, surveying Missy, her breasts buoyant on the surface of the water.

Actually, it occurs to me that there are two pictures. The other is Tony, who is himself no more self-conscious than he’d be stepping out of the shower in the men’s locker room. He appears to feel neither misgiving nor regret over his tenured paunch and dark, sagging genitals.

“Stay put,” he says, prancing impishly back into the house. When he returns he’s got a Polaroid camera. Missy, true to her profession, wakes up when she hears the shutter click. Tony takes several pictures, keeping the snapshots dry beneath a towel until they can develop. We huddle together in the tub then and wait for Missy to emerge from photographic darkness. She seems pleased with the result.

“Are these great boobs or what?” she says, handing me one of the Polaroids. “Jugs like these are just plain wasted in the Railton market.”

When the rain lets up, I tell Tony and Missy that it’s been great fun, but …

“It was just one …,” Tony sings.

“Of those things,” Missy finishes, surprising me that she knows a song lyric of that vintage. Maybe she’s older than she looks. In truth, I don’t care how old she is, and I feel no regret about leaving her with Tony. I locate my clothes, putting the Polaroid that Missy has pressed upon me as a memento of the occasion in my pocket, and dress in the warm kitchen, feeling full of my own virtue.

It’s only when I get outside that I remember my car is downtown, that for the second time in as many days I’ve been chauffeured somewhere against my will. It’s about a ten-block walk down the hill. When I’ve gone about halfway I realize that I’m full of something all right, but it’s not virtue. There’s a patch of woods on my left, so I duck into the shadow of these to pee. I drip at about the same rate as the branches above, a leisurely process that allows for contemplation. Now that I’m not rubbing haunches with Missy in Tony’s hot tub, I can’t help ruminating on her lament that breasts like hers are wasted in a small media market like Railton, a remark that struck me as funny when she said it but sad upon further reflection. It’s Jacob Rose’s and Gracie’s and Rourke’s and Teddy’s and June’s and perhaps my own position in a nutshell. We have believed, all of us, like Scuffy the Tugboat, that we were made for better things. If anyone had told us twenty years ago that we would spend our academic careers at West Central Pennsylvania University in Railton, we’d have laughed.

We aren’t laughing now though, and the thought of growing old together is not pleasant, though there’s nothing else for us to do. We might manage to be happy, even here, if the faces around us were new, but we have to look at each other every day, and this reminds us of ourselves and all the opportunities we found compelling reasons not to seize. Finny could have finished his dissertation and didn’t. June, on the strength of a good, well-placed article, had a job offer at a decent university over a dozen years ago, but Teddy had just gotten tenure and the other university couldn’t be talked into taking him as part of a package deal. Later, Teddy got an opportunity to move into administration, which would have been doing both himself and his students a
favor, but June, perhaps out of revenge, talked him out of it. Even Gracie’s poetry once showed promise.