Straight Man (8 page)

A car that I’m aware has been following me up the long hill catches me here at its crest. I trot into my daughter’s drive to let the car pass. But whoever it is has slowed down in what appears to me comic concern for my safety. When whoever stops, blinker blinking, I realize it’s Julie, who toots me out of the way and then waves for me to follow her up the drive. The last thing I want is to visit her and Russell, but I’m stuck, so I do as I’m told. Actually, I’ve run farther than I planned, so maybe resting up before I head back isn’t such a bad idea.

“You didn’t look like you were going to make that hill,” my daughter says when I trot up. She hands me a small sack of groceries from the trunk and slams it.

“I’m going to be fifty this summer,” I remind her, panting. “One of these days you’re going to find me alongside the road.”

Julie usually chides my morbid humor, but she’s caught sight of my nose. “Good lord, Daddy!”

I know this girl, so when she raises a delicate index finger with its carefully sculpted and brightly lacquered nail to touch the purple nostril that my run seems to have further expanded in my lower peripheral vision, I’m quick enough to catch her slender wrist. The rapid circulation of my blood has the nose pounding in time with my pulse, and even the gentlest of touches is, at this moment, a pretty terrifying prospect. “Please,” I warn her.

She promises not to, but she can’t help leaning in close and making me turn so she can inspect the injury more closely under the porch light. “Yuck” is her final word on the subject, and I can tell how much
she’d like to probe the wound with her long-nailed pinkie. “What is there about something revolting that makes you want to touch it?” she wonders out loud.

What indeed? What would William of Occam say? There’s a simple explanation, surely.

“Where’s Russell?” I say, eager for a change of topic, hoping he will not be home, though I like Russell.

Julie takes the bag of groceries from me and puts it on the kitchen table. “He’s around somewhere.” She bellows his name. We hear a faint reply.

“Upstairs,” Julie says.

“Outside,” I say. “Back deck.” Their house carries sound the same way ours does, even though ours is fucked up. I can tell Russell is out back. What I can’t guess is why. It’s far too cold to be deck sitting.

“Come on out,” Russell’s voice, barely audible, finds us.

What I really need, suddenly, urgently, is to pee, for about the tenth time today, I think, and at the thought of what this probably means, my sweat goes cold. No, I tell myself. Don’t even think about it.

We go out on the back deck, where Russell is standing on the bottom rung of a stepladder under the eaves a few feet away. He’s got a flashlight in one hand, and he’s shining it up into a pretty amazing wasps’ nest that’s attached to the overhang. There’ve been several warm days this week, and apparently that’s been enough. In Russell’s other hand is an enormous can of Raid. He looks like he’s been standing in just this attitude for a long time.

“You think they’re asleep?” he says.

What I think is that this man should not be a homeowner. My daughter, now that she’s seen the nest, has backed up near the sliding deck door, through which she clearly plans to duck.

“I’m not sure wasps
do
sleep, Russell,” I tell him.

The flashlight locates me. Apparently Russell had not noticed, until I spoke, that his wife was not alone. “Hank,” he says, altogether too glad to see me, as if, now that I’m here, he’s got a friend.

“Hi, Russell.”

“God. What happened to your nose?”

“Stung by a wasp,” I tell him.

“No shit?”

“Would I shit you, Russell?” The answer to this rhetorical question is obviously yes, but Russell has been standing too long beneath a wasps’ nest, trying to work up the courage to Raid it. There’s nothing more real to him at this moment than a wasp sting, and some damn thing has happened to my nose that a wasp sting just might account for. “They always build their nest right in that same spot in our house too,” I tell him. “I came over to warn you. I think we may have identical wasps.”

When he finally lowers the flashlight, I can see he’s caught on. “I’d sure hate for us to have identical noses,” he says. “Yours is the ugliest one I ever saw.”

The flashlight returns to my face for another look. I hold up my hand this time, tired of the light in my eyes, and of Russell’s curiosity. “I bet if I had that flashlight I could find something ugly on you too,” I tell him.

“Jules. Come hold the flashlight while I spray,” he suggests.

“Be real,” Julie tells him.

I go over, take the flashlight, locate the nest.

“Ready?” Russell wants to know, his voice grim, determined, scared.

“You’ve never been to war, have you,” I say.

“Neither have you,” he correctly points out. “You were a typist in Vietnam.”

This is not precisely true. I was a typist
during
Vietnam. “I teach
The Red Badge of Courage
every year, though,” I tell him. “Spray the bastards so we can go inside.”

Russell sprays the gray, paperlike cone until it glistens and begins to drip. There’s no activity. I begin to suspect it’s last year’s cone we’re dousing. “That’s the way I want to go,” Russell says, satisfied with the job once he’s finished.

“You want someone to asphyxiate you with insecticide?” I say.

“Nope,” he says. “I want to die in my sleep.”

“Much as you sleep,” Julie says, “there’s a good chance you will.”

We go inside, to the kitchen, their only fully furnished room. Russell and I sit down. Blessedly, my daughter and son-in-law have not tried to copy our interior furnishings. Perhaps our stuff is fucked up.
Perhaps Julie’s imagination is functional regarding tables and chairs and sofas. In place of our island, they have an inexpensive kitchen table, half wood, half glass, in a complex geometric design that makes it hard to see whether you got the oatmeal spill with the rag or missed it.

Russell sits down at the table while Julie starts a pot of coffee and I visit their bathroom, where I stand before their commode like a medieval man of faith. The sensation I had a few minutes earlier, of being powerfully backed up, of risking an explosion, is now belied by what might best be described as a slow faucet drip. What I have, I fear, is a stone. My father has been visited by them all his adult life, though he started earlier, in his thirties. His father before him had also been tormented with them, and my great-grandfather actually died of blood poisoning, the result of a bladder stone the size of a mango that blocked his urethra, backing urine all the way to his eyeballs. I’ve been putting off the appropriate diagnostic measures in the hope that they would not be necessary. Now, I will have to go to the hospital and be X-rayed, the stone identified, surgery recommended.

I’m less afraid of the knife than of the comic dimension of the malady. My colleagues will consider it just like me to have a joke affliction. “This too will pass,” they’ll assure me. Given today’s mutilation, I’m even more adamant about keeping the stone a secret, somehow getting through the rest of the semester. Then having it taken care of when people are away. Maybe I can even get the procedure done in New Haven, where our daughter Karen lives. Surgery may not even be necessary in a big, metropolitan hospital. I’ve read somewhere that there’s a whole new technology for the treatment of stones that involves busting them up with concentrated blasts of ultrasound.

When my undignified dripping finally ceases, some of the pressure seems to have been released. I give myself a final shake and return to the kitchen and the polite society of my daughter and her husband.

As soon as I sit down at the table I’m aware of electricity in the air. Julie and Russell have had quiet words. The scar at the edge of my daughter’s eye, where she flew over the handlebars of her first bike and then into the road, is aflame, and seeing this always makes me feel both sad and responsible, a failed parent. It’s not a big scar, just a tuck at the corner of her eye, a small reminder that life is capable of far worse
things. When my daughter is happy, the scar disappears completely. But anger and frustration and weariness drag at the corner of her eye, causing her at times to look almost sinister, as she does now. If Lily were here, and I wish she were, she’d find a way to touch the scar gently, her signal to Julie, across the long years, to smile, to make herself beautiful, an act of will.

If unkind things have been said in my absence, Julie has said them, not Russell. I can tell this by looking at him. Now that I have the opportunity to examine Russell, he looks a little heavier to me. He’s always been trim and athletic-looking, though he’s never played sports, but in the month or two since he’s been out of work, he appears to have put on about ten pounds. He’s looking slightly unkempt too. He wears his hair fashionably short, usually moussed up in bristles. When you catch him just before he and Julie go out somewhere, he always looks wet. By the end of the evening his hair takes on a more human, Tom Sawyer–ish quality. At the moment his hair looks long and limp, and it occurs to me that though we live close by, I’ve seen neither Russell nor Julie in about a month. I’ve been kept up to date on their lives by Lily in much the same fashion that I’m informed about what’s happening in the life of our other daughter, Karen, who lives sensibly in a second-floor New Haven flat that bears no resemblance to her parents’ house. “So,” I say to Russell. “What’s up? Long time no hear.”

“Well, Hank,” Russell admits, “we owe you too much money to enjoy casual conversation.”

I don’t know quite what to say to this, partly because I’m not sure how much money we’ve loaned them. The right thing to say is probably “don’t worry about it,” but I’d hate for them to take me literally, especially if Lily has been more generous than I know.

“What’s up is mortgage payments,” Julie says. “What’s down is personal income and savings accounts.”

“And the spirits of a certain privileged young woman,” Russell says, looking past me to where Julie is gathering cups and saucers. Then he adds, “Sorry, Hank. That sounded like I was criticizing your child rearing, didn’t it?”

“Not at all,” I assure him. “Lily raised her. I was teaching
The Red Badge of Courage
.”

“While Mom was earning it,” Julie says. She’s serving the coffee in fancy cups I’ve never seen before. “Menstruation always was the real red badge of courage.”

Russell and I exchange a look. Julie has always been the least thoughtful but the most outspoken of the three Devereaux feminists. “I guess I should have taken more of an interest,” I acknowledge. I don’t consider myself a chauvinist, but I can play that role.

Julie joins us at the table, spoons three sugars into her own coffee. “Too late now, Pop,” she says, patting my hand. What I’d like is for her to pat Russell’s hand, the same sort of I’m-just-kidding pat she gives mine. When Russell sees the gesture, he looks away.

We drink our coffee in silence for a minute. I’ve stopped sweating from my run, and the drumming in my nose is quieter too. Emotional atmospherics notwithstanding, I’m comfortable in their kitchen, perhaps because of its resemblance to our own, Lily’s and mine. Lily is precisely what we’re missing, it occurs to me. If she were here, the electricity resulting from Russell and Julie’s financial problems would disappear. A natural humidifier is Lily, somehow conveying that things cannot seriously go wrong, at least not in her presence. Even as kids Karen and Julie never fought in front of her, as if they considered their mother’s emotional equilibrium essential to the general welfare. Lily has, I’m told, the same effect upon her low-track students, her “rocks.” They’re a tough bunch, many of them, and a fair number end up in jail, whence they write Lily apologetic letters, explaining, “When I knifed Stanley, I never meant no disrespect to you or what you tried to teach us about living good. I know your pretty disappointed because I’m the same.” Lily’s the kind of woman who loses sleep over ambiguities like the one in that last statement, and her kids seem to understand that, even the ones who couldn’t locate the word
ambiguity
in a dictionary for a free trip to the Bahamas.

“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?