Straight Man

and she hasn’t yet discovered how to “be” in the world. Unsure what to desire, she simply wants. Or this is the conclusion I’ve come to. A father’s too generous theory, perhaps. Applied evenly, it might be a rationale for acquisitiveness in general, not just in my daughter. Who
is
truly at home in the world? Who
is
sure what to desire? Well, lots of people, I answer my own question. Lots of people know exactly what they want. I just can’t believe Julie is one of them. I can’t believe my daughter’s soul is so easily purchased.
    “You want to tell me how she got that shiner, Russell?” I ask, before our discussion becomes too abstract.
    “She didn’t tell you?”
    “Last Friday she said you shoved her,” I tell him. “This morning she suggested maybe that wasn’t the full story.” These are approximate statements I’m making to him actually. Julie neither told nor suggested anything to me this morning. She told my machine, while I stood by, paralyzed, and listened.
    Russell nods, gets to his feet, and leans over the railing of the deck, peering down in the dark, at I can’t imagine what. When the breeze shifts, I catch a distinct whiff of lupine presence. I’m expecting Russell to speak when I see his body heave violently, and he begins to retch off the side of the deck. Occam awakens, gets quickly to his feet, goes over to survey the situation, then turns and looks at me expectantly. Humans have a more complex response to regurgitation than animals do, and I’d like Occam to understand this. I’d like for him to understand that we people do feel natural sympathy for someone in this sort of distress, even as we choose to limit our personal involvement. I try to convey all this to my dog in a look, but he’s having none of it, I can tell. He’d like to
do
something. If he could think what, he wouldn’t mind getting his paws wet. He can always lick them dry later. Wet paws are a small thing when weighed against suffering. What’s wrong with me? is what he’d like to know. Well, I’ve just showered, for one thing. Still, he’s right. I
should
do something. So I go inside and get a swatch of paper towels and return with them when it feels safe. Russell is still standing at the rail, but his body has stopped heaving. I hand him the paper towels, which he accepts gratefully. “I warned you about my gag reflex,” he says. “I’ve felt like doing that all day. I wonder if I’m coming down with something.”
    He collapses back into his deck chair. Occam sniffs the paper towels. There’s no aspect of this entire proceeding he doesn’t want to understand.
    “What’s down there anyway?” Russell wants to know, indicating whatever is below the spot where he lost the contents of his stomach. I haven’t turned on the exterior lights, so beyond the deck, which is illuminated by the kitchen light, it’s pitch black.
    “Don’t worry about it,” I tell him.
    He uses a clean paper towel to wipe his forehead. “I feel better,” he confesses.
    “I bet.”
    He looks over at me and offers up a weak grin. “Do you realize that during the last hour we’ve managed to entirely gross each other out?”
    “Male bonding, they call it.”
    “It works,” he shrugs.
    This is a funny, touching thing for Russell to say, and I
am
touched, though the emotion is complicated by the fact that I too have a hair-trigger gag reflex.
    “I appreciate the fact that you haven’t gone ballistic over all this, Hank. All weekend I’ve been thinking you probably wanted to kill me. I guess that’s why I had to see you. To find out.”
    “I harbored a violent thought or two,” I assure him. Now that we’ve bonded, I wouldn’t want him to get the idea that I’m incapable of righteous fury, that my daughter can be knocked about with impunity, just because her father’s an English professor and in theory a pacifist. Not that I ever really believed that Russell knocked Julie around. Some damn thing has happened though, and apparently he’s going to tell me what. Whether what he’ll tell me is true, whether I’d recognize the truth if I heard it, these are other questions. I can tell one thing. Whatever Russell means to tell me is either a difficult truth or a difficult lie. He doesn’t launch right in. He’s scratching behind Occam’s ears, and the animal’s limbs are palsied with pleasure.
    “She came home with this chair,” Russell finally says, his words small in the dark, and again I imagine