Straight Man

wolves gathering in the woods behind the house. “For the guest room. As if we could afford to have guests. She’s telling me she got this great deal because the store is going into bankruptcy. Sixty percent off. Only three hundred dollars.”
    He stops scratching Occam to rub his own temples with the thumb and index finger of his left hand. His right hand contains the wadded up paper towels. I can tell he’d like to toss them over the railing, but he doesn’t.
    “The idea of buying something at a bankruptcy sale …,” he begins, then stops and laughs bitterly. “I mean, you’ve got no idea how strapped we are, Hank.”
    He shakes his head, a lost man. “Actually, that’s a dumb thing to say, after all the money you guys have loaned us.”
    I nod, agreeing about something, I’m not sure what. “How much money have we loaned you?” I ask, genuinely curious.
    “Too much,” he says, leaving me in the dark, where, if Lily were here, she would say I belong. “Anyhow, I felt something in me snap,” he explains, staring out over the tops of the trees. The darkness is so complete that the trees and the sky blend into each other.
    “I looked at her and that chair and I
did
hate her, Hank. I’m ashamed to admit it, but right that second, I did. Lately, I’ve mostly hated myself for being out of work when she was working, but right then I hated her worse, and God it felt good to hate her more, that look on her face when she brought in the chair.”
    He’ll allude to her face, but not her eye, I think, and for this I am grateful. I know the expression he’s referring to, and I know the way that old injury drags the one side of Julie’s face down, making her look like a stroke victim. It’s a thing she can’t help, so Russell won’t mention it. He’s too decent to enter that detail in evidence before her father, even though it’s the thing that contains and represents what he most wants me to understand. What he wants me to understand is how, under the right circumstances, a person you love can be ugly, repulsive.
    “Anyhow,” he continues. “I knew I couldn’t stay in any house that contained that chair. That sounds ridiculous, I know, but it was the one thing I was most sure of.” He chuckles, like a man who knows that what he’s chuckling at isn’t funny. “You’ll appreciate this, Hank. A man and his wife. Faced off. Ultimatum time. It’s either me or the chair, he says with a straight face. Not, it’s either me or him. Your husband or this other man you’re in love with. That would be a tough one,right? No, I tell her to choose between me and a chair she bought on sale, sixty percent off.”
    “Well, it may have been on sale, but it wasn’t cheap,” I tell Russell. “Three hundred bucks is not a cheap chair.”
    “I’m not sure you’re grasping my point,” Russell admits. “My point is that, when she had a choice between her husband and an inanimate object, she chose the chair.”
    “I understand that, Russell, I do. And I can see where it would hurt your feelings.”
    “She didn’t even hesitate, Hank.”
    “Except it doesn’t prove that she doesn’t love you,” I tell him.
    “She just loves the chair more? Is that what you’re telling me?”
    “Actually, I was going to say it proves she knows where to plant the knife. She doesn’t really prefer the chair. She just knows how much it will hurt you if she acts like she does.”
    He hangs his head. “I know,” he admits. “By the time I packed my bag and came back downstairs, I could see everything had changed. She’d put the chair off to the side. She had tears in her eyes, and she was standing in front of the door. We could have made it all up right there. It was my inch to give, and I couldn’t give it. I didn’t hate her anymore. In fact, I wanted to take her and make love to her right then.”
    “Careful, Russell,” I warn him. I know he’d like me to understand, to chart his emotional trajectory, but this is my daughter we’re talking about.
    “I wanted my marriage and I wanted my wife. Hell, I even liked the damn chair. It’s not a bad-looking chair or anything.”
    “She’s got her mother’s good taste,” I admit.
    “But like you said, she’d hurt my feelings, and I wanted to hurt her back. And I felt this strange … rush. She’d tried to run this bluff, see, and I’d called it. She’d lost, and now it was time for her to learn her lesson. So instead of …”
    I wait awhile for him