Straight Man

me. Even in the dark gym I could see her eyes were full of tears, and it made me a little misty-eyed myself to think how much she loved me after all. The next day I heard the truth from her girlfriend—that Eliza had broken up with me so she could be available for another boy who, she heard, was about to break up with his girlfriend of many months. When this did not happen, she’d come back to me. Even as I’d listened to Eliza’s tearful epiphany, part of me suspected something like the friend’s version, but it must be said that I preferred the tale told by the little minx who nuzzled herself so sweetly against me. What is truth, anyway?
    The truth is I am dreaming. I realize this without completely waking up. The truth is I don’t want to wake up. In my dream I’m in bed with my wife, and the bed is in the middle of an empty high school gymnasium. The Everly Brothers are crooning dreamily in the background about all I have to do, and it ain’t much. My wife is contrite. In fact, Lily is offering an act of contrition, her eyes full of tears. I’ve been reluctant to believe she has anything to feel guilty about, and so she’s explaining just how wrong I am. She’s spent the weekend in Philadelphia with a man she met on our honeymoon in Puerto Vallarta over twenty-five years ago. She’s not sure I’d remember him. He sat all alone at the table next to ours, and she fell in love with him then and there, and he with her. They’ve kept in touch over the years, and now after loving each other from afar they’ve spent the weekend together, consummating their faith and devotion. What my wife wants to know is if there is any way I can forgive her.
    I would like to believe my wife because this is one beautiful love story she’s telling me, and I’ve got a meaty dramatic role in it myself. I mean, this is truly heroic forgiveness that’s being asked of me. I’m a hell of a guy in this story. And so I forgive my wife despite the fact that there are parts of her story that simply can’t be true. We didn’t honeymoon in Puerto Vallarta, for instance, and she may be lying about otherthings as well. Still, my dream logic goes, if I could forgive the lying little Eliza, whose memory seems to have furnished the props for my dream, can I do less for my own wife?
    Well, it’s true there are other inducements to Christian forgiveness. My dream-Lily is naked beneath the covers, and apparently she has not lost all fondness for her husband. When she moves on top of me, I feel a terrible, wonderful release. We make love with almost unbelievable gentleness. In fact, there seems to be precious little friction, which may be why my dream orgasm is curiously devoid of, well, sensation. Even so, I don’t want it to end, and it doesn’t. I’m amazed. It’s the longest orgasm of my life, and wouldn’t you know, I can’t feel a thing. Still, if this is what I’m offered, I’ll take it. I’m that delighted to see Lily, that moved she’d confide in me about this other guy she’s been in love with all these years.
    There may be no harder admission for a man of my years to make than that he has wet his pants, but this, to my horror, is what I have done. By the time I jolt fully awake, my chinos have gone from tan to dark brown in the crotch and all down one leg. I also have a wet sock and shoe. My whole office smells like the doorway to a lower Manhattan bank at eight in the morning in mid-August. I call Phil Watson, make his receptionist put him on the phone.
    “Watson,” I tell him. “I fell asleep and wet my pants.”
    “Significantly?”
    I notice a shadow go by outside the frosted glass, so I lower my voice. “I’m going to need a new office chair.”
    “Huh.”
    “I must have passed the stone.”
    “There’s no stone, Hank.”
    The certainty in his voice is more annoying than I let on. I remember falling asleep with one foot up on my desk, and my logic is that this gravity-shifting posture has caused the stone to move, unlocking my urine. This explanation makes such immediate sense that I can give it up only reluctantly, a necessary concession to my physician’s expertise. This is the way my students feel, I realize, when I suggest stylistic revision. They
like
the sentence the way they wrote it. They defer to my greater knowledge and experience because they must, but they still like the way the original sentence sounded when it had a dangling modifier,and they secretly suspect that my judgment, while