Straight Man

to finish, but he doesn’t. “Right,” I say, because I hate to see him struggling for something I understand already. Hell, I could finish this story for him.
    “So I went over to where she was standing in front of the door and told her to get out of the way. I remember it didn’t even sound like myvoice. I kept wondering, who are these people? And I was still thinking, I can stop all this right now.”
    “But you didn’t.”
    “No,” he says. “When she wouldn’t get out of the way, I set the bag down and took her by the shoulders.”
    He held his hands out before him in the dark, seeing her there.
    “Then … I don’t know. She must have tripped over the bag. I heard a crash, and when I turned she was on the floor. She’d fallen into …”
    He stops, unable to continue.
    “The chair,” I say.
    He stares over at me through moist, confused eyes. “No, the stereo cabinet.”
    “Oh, sorry,” I say. In my writing workshop I’d have explained to my students why, for symmetry, it had to be the chair.
    Russell isn’t interested in symmetry. “I kept thinking, this isn’t right. She can’t have fallen. All I’d done was move her aside. Maybe I was a little rough, but I didn’t push or shove her. What was she doing down there on the floor?”
    Again, I wait for him to continue, until I realize that this is the end of his story. He hasn’t reached any conclusions about these events because he hasn’t moved past the moment when he turned and saw Julie on the floor and imagined himself responsible, even though he didn’t quite see how he could be. As I’ve listened to him relate what happened, the thing that’s puzzled me is that he hasn’t asked how Julie is, and the deeper he’s plunged into his story, the more I’ve feared the reason for this was that he didn’t care. Now I suspect it’s something else. The image of Julie on the floor has burned onto the retina of his mind’s eye. It hasn’t occurred to him that she might be okay, because every time he thinks of her, he sees her there, on the floor, one hand clutching the already damaged eye. There simply is no
after
. If I asked him where he thought Julie was right now, the question would confuse him. Intellectually, he knows that days have passed, but where Julie
is
for Russell is right where he left her. Probably he went to her, tried to see how bad she was hurt, tried to take the hand away from her eye, but by then the dramatic focus of the scene would have shifted. A few minutes earlier it was
his
scene, and he could havealtered its course had he chosen. Now it was
her
scene to play out as she chose. Her decision, to exclude him, was the same as his own decision to punish her.
    And now his life has turned mysterious. Because it can’t go forward, he can only keep going over and over how he got where he is. “Anyway,” he says. “I wanted you to hear my side. I know you have to believe Julie, but …”
    “Listen, Russell,” I begin, without the vaguest idea how I’ll continue.
    “I want you and Lily to know that I’m going to pay you back every nickel of the money you loaned us. I mean, even if Julie and I don’t make it.”
    “Russell.”
    “It may be a while,” he admits ruefully, this son-in-law of mine who’s been out of work since last fall. “I mean, maybe this has gotten me jump-started, finally. I’ve got to do something, even if it’s wrong.”
    “People often say that before they do the wrong thing, Russell.”
    “I called this guy in Atlanta today,” he says. “Last summer he offered me this great job there, terrific money. But we were building the house, so I said no.”
    “This is a story I’ve heard before.”
    “I don’t think so, Hank,” he says. “I never even told Julie.”
    I just grin at him in the dark.
    “Oh, I get it,” he says. “It’s a familiar story, you mean. How does it turn out?”
    “I forget,” I tell him. I and the majority of my colleagues in the English department are how it ends. There’s no need to depress him further.
    “The job he wanted me to take before is gone, of course,” he continues. “But he says he thinks he can scare something up.”
    “In Atlanta.”
    “That’s where the company is, Hank. Atlanta. If the company were in Railton, this whole story would be different.” Now that he’s got Julie out of his mind’s eye, Russell is his mischievous, slightly mocking self again.
    “I understand that, Russell.”
    “Good. I thought maybe