Straight Man

wrong with you?”
    In truth, I don’t know. I had not intended to belittle Gracie. At least not until I got started, after which it felt like the natural thing to do, though I no longer remember why. I don’t dislike Gracie. At least I don’t dislike her when I think about her. When I’m in one place and she’s in another. It’s when she’s near enough to backhand that back-handing her always seems like a good idea. This is true of several of my colleagues, actually, though they don’t bother me in the abstract.
    “Anyway,” Teddy is saying. “I thought I better bring him home. So far he hasn’t even said thank you.” Part of Teddy’s camaraderie with Lily has always been based on their shared belief that I am an ingrate.
    In my view, I am not an ingrate, but I can play that role. “Thank you for what?” I ask him. “Thanks to you my car is still in the faculty lot. Lily will have to take me to campus before she leaves for Philadelphia. All so you can come out here and flirt with her.”
    Teddy goes so scarlet at this that Lily leans over and gives him a kiss on the cheek, which makes him redder still. “It’s nice to be flirted with occasionally,” she tells him, though if I’m not mistaken this remark is aimed at me.
    “Philadelphia?” it occurs to Teddy to inquire.
    “A job interview,” she explains.
    And now he blanches, all the blood of embarrassment draining out of his face. He looks first at Lily, then at me. “You guys might leave?”
    “No.” She pats him on the hand. “But keep that to yourself. The principal at the high school is retiring next year. I’m trying to force the school board to name his successor.”
    You can actually see the relief on Teddy’s face.
    “Have June give me a call if she wants me to pick anything up.”
    “She’ll want some of that good olive oil,” Teddy says sadly, as if he knows his wife’s desires and would rather not think about them.
    When Teddy slides off his barstool, Lily offers to walk him out to the car, and when they’re gone I take the empty coffee cups over to the sink. From the kitchen window I can see the tops of their heads as they stand in the driveway below the deck and hear their muffled voices through the glass. Something about the way they’re standing there, some hint of heretofore unthinkable intimacy, causes me to imagine Teddy and Lily as lovers. I place them in our bed, Lily’s and mine, and for some reason Lily is on top. Probably because I can’t imagine Teddy on top. With Lily, with his own wife, with any woman over the age of eighteen. He’s just too apologetic. Even more bizarre, I imagine myself in the room with them, a witness on the brink of several possible but not necessarily compatible, or even valid, emotions—surprise, anger, jealousy, curiosity, excitement. I tell myself that if I’m a little detached from this imaginary betrayal, it’s because I know that Teddy and Lily are not lovers. In real life if Teddy’s fantasy ever came true, he’d confess it. He’d come to my office, haggard and happy and damned, and tell me what he’d done, then go out and buy a gun and shoot himself in the foot by way of comic penance, and then apologize all over again for lacking the courage to make a stronger statement. He’s an academic, after all, like the rest of us.
    When they share a quick hug and separate chastely, I’m almost disappointed. I think I hear Lily tell him to give her best to June, whom she hasn’t seen since when. Then Teddy asks her something that I can’t make out at first. What he wants to know, what I decide it sounds like, is whether Lily thinks I’m going to be okay. It occurs to me rather forcefully that he is not inquiring after my nose. I wish I could make out Lily’s response, but I can’t.
    Across the way, on top of the opposite hill, I can see Paul Rourke’s satellite dish partially obscured by tree branches, and it chooses this moment to search out a different satellite. Rourke’s dish is constantlyin motion. A compulsive pro basketball watcher, he’s always looking for feeds. I know it’s an optical illusion, but this time when the dish stops, it appears aimed directly at me. In a sci-fi movie, a beam of light would emit from its dark center and I would be reduced to cinders. Between the dish and me is my own pale reflection in the glass. I try to take Teddy’s question seriously, but for a man like me it’s not easy. Of course I’m going to be okay. True, this is