Straight Man

real regret.
    “Surely you don’t think he’s too squared away? Too emotionally stable?” Paul Rourke’s voice.
    “What are these pink spots that go all up your sleeve?” Jacob wants to know, apparently of Finny.
    “You can see them?” Finny says, clearly alarmed.
    “Not really. Only in a certain light,” Jacob assures him.
    “Isn’t Gracie still married?” Billy Quigley says, reassuring me, since this was my first question too. Their voices are growing distant.
    “Only in the legal sense,” Jacob assures him, and then the double doors at the end of the corridor open and close on their conversation.
    I cautiously unlock the women’s room door and peek out. The corridor is deserted, quiet. I study the double doors at the end of the corridor through which my colleagues have passed. Each of these doors contains a small rectangular window, but they’re too far away and the lighting is too dim for me to see whether these windows contain faces. I take a chance, slip out of the women’s room and quickly down the hall and into my office, where I gather my satchel and my workshop stories for tomorrow. Then down the back stairs.
    Outside, darkness is falling, for which I’m grateful. I sneak out of Modern Languages and cut across the lawn toward the back lot where my Lincoln awaits. This late in the evening there are only a half dozen cars in the two-acre lot, and maybe it’s odd that there should be another car parked right next to mine, but I don’t pay any attention. It’s been too long a day to confront minor riddles, slight statistical anomalies. There’s nobody in either car anyway. I can see that from fifty yards away. I unlock mine, get in, insert the key in the ignition. In my peripheral vision, I see the car next to me rock gently and a head pop up. I draw the conclusion that William of Occam would draw. Surely William was once a young man, subject to the impulses of spring, especially a late-arriving one. No doubt I’ve interrupted a young couple who thought they would be safe way out here in the back lot. They wish now they’d waited for it to be completely dark. I find reverse and start to back out. When a horn toots, I can’t help looking over at the car next to mine, and in it I see my son-in-law Russell’s bristly head framed in the window. I put the Lincoln in park, and Russell gets out, stretching and yawning. I lean over, unlock the passenger door. He gets in, still rubbing his eyes.
    It’s the smell that wakes him up. “Whoa!” he says, looking over at me, startled. He hasn’t closed the door yet, so the dome light is on and he can get a good look. “Jesus, Hank. What the hell happened to you? Don’t tell me another poet.”
    “Teaching English isn’t the clean work it used to be,” I explain. “Most people don’t realize.”
    He’s leaning out, gulping air. “Sorry,” he says, and he sounds genuinely sorry too. “I’ve got a hair-trigger gag reflex. I lose it if I smell cabbage cooking.”
    “How about oral sex?” It occurs to me to ask this.
    “Oh, God, Hank.” He’s still hanging out the door, this fastidious son-in-law of mine, who may or may not have given my daughter a shiner. “Have a heart.”
    “I mean in general. I’m not talking about you and me.”
    He gets out of the car again. He really does look sick.
    “What are you doing here, Russell?”
    “Waiting for you. I have been for over an hour. I thought we could go have a beer someplace. Talk.”
    “Okay. Let’s.”
    He peers in at me to see if I’m serious.
    “If you don’t mind, I’d like to shower and change my clothes first though.”
    “I insist.”
    “You want to follow me out to the house?”
    He hesitates. “Will Julie be there?”
    “Could be. I doubt it though. I think she’s back in hers. Yours. Now that the locks have been changed.”
    “I don’t think I’m ready to see her,” he says.
    “You’re married to her, Russell. You may have to see her again.” I doubt he even registered the information about the locks.
    He’s still peering in at me, grimacing. “You really got like that
teaching
?”
    Russell follows me out to Allegheny Wells. It’s fifteen minutes of solitude for each of us. He probably uses his fifteen minutes to consider the implications of the fact that he plans to seek marital advice from a fifty-year-old man who kills ducks and wets his pants. I use my own solitude to consider what may well be my worst character flaw, the fact that in the face