Straight Man

After a moment she says, “Hi, it’s me. He’s still here at school if you want to see him … I don’t know … suit yourself.”
    When she hangs up, I lean forward, sneak a peek below at Meg, who’s begun to pace. Next to finding me in my hiding place, the thing I fear worst is that she’ll decide to see what it feels like to sit in the chair’s chair. Perhaps she suspects what it will feel like, because she doesn’t. She stays on her side of my desk, and I’ve just decided that Meg is a good, respectful Catholic girl when she pauses and turns her head at an odd angle so she can read what’s sitting in the middle of my desk, which happen to be the Xeroxes of the department operating paper that Rachel gave me this morning. Meg reads part of the text upside down, then sensibly turns the papers around, rotating the neck of my desk lamp and bending over the small print in earnest. She’s wearing a shirt with a scoop neckline, no bra on underneath.
    My behavior at this moment, it occurs to me, is undignified. I lean back into my self-imposed darkness to contemplate the position I find myself in, though the privileged view I have just been afforded is of precisely the sort that muscles out abstract thought. It’s not entirely dark up here among the rafters, I realize, now that my eyes have adjusted. By the light coming from the office below I’m able to examine the close, low space I’ve folded myself into so unnaturally. Directly above me, inches above both my head and knees, is the slanted ceiling. I have difficulty turning around, but when I do I see, off in the distance, other shafts of light shooting up from below like lasers, and I hear, though just barely, Billy Quigley greeting our colleagues as he enters the meeting. Also, now that I’m paying attention, other distant voices.
    There’s an urgency to these murmurs that reminds me of the distant arguments I listened to as a boy. The old university houses we lived in transmitted sounds through heat registers in the walls and floors, and some nights, when I wasn’t sleepy, I’d crawl out of bed and put an ear to the cold register and learn what I could before the heat clicked on about what was on the minds of my parents. Once I heard them discussing what they were going to get me for Christmas, which was good to know, since it was something I didn’t want. Knowing their plan so far in advance meant I’d have many natural opportunities to subvert it. On another occasion, I heard a man’s raised voice say the words, “You bet your ass,” which caused me to conclude we had a visitor downstairs. The only other time I’d heard the same expression wasoutside a restaurant where my mother had taken me. There, propped up against a parking meter, a man dressed in dark, shabby clothing seemed to be waiting for us when we came out. He looked right at us from beneath hooded eyes and said, “You bet your ass.” My mother whispered that I was to pay no attention, the man was drunk, but it was hard for me to understand that his words were not meant specifically for us. What in the world, I now wondered, my ear to the cold register, was this same man doing as a visitor in our house? The heat clicked on before I could discover.
    The next morning the question was still fresh in my mind when I came down to the breakfast table, and I was about to inquire when I saw something in my father’s expression that stopped me. My mother and father hadn’t said a word to each other since I came in, and suddenly I knew it was my father who had uttered those strange words, that he spoke them in anger to my mother, and I believe this may have been the first time I intuited that adults had secret lives, that there were things about my parents I didn’t know, things they didn’t want me to know, maybe ever. Moreover, there was apparently some common emotional denominator between my elegant father and the shabby, leering drunk outside the restaurant. I felt strange all that day when I thought about it, and I remember it was scary at first. But by the end of the day I felt the thrill of knowledge, and when I arrived home and my mother asked if I’d had a good day at school, I very nearly said the words that I’d been practicing in my head all afternoon. You bet your ass.
    I’m thinking these words when the light goes out below, plunging me into near total darkness. Meg has apparently grown tired of waiting for me to return and switched off the desk lamp. I hear my