Straight Man

for you tonight,” Tony informs me. “Your colleagues say you disappeared after the department meeting. They seem to think you might be hiding out at my place.”
    “You know the kind of company I keep. If it weren’t for erroneous conclusions, these people would never arrive at any at all.”
    He hasn’t made any move to join me on the deck. Instead he’s leaning against the grille of his car. The night has grown quiet, and I can hear the ticking of his engine as it cools. The temperature has fallen since Russell left. Occam circles himself twice, collapses onto the deck, sighs, and puts his head back down on his paws.
    “Come on up.”
    “I will,” Tony says, without showing any such inclination. “I’m trying to solve a mystery first.”
    “Okay, I’ll bite,” I tell him. “What mystery?”
    “There’s vomit on the hood of your car,” he points out.
    He’s parked right next to me, and now that I look, I see he’s right. This, it occurs to me, is my father’s fault. But for his books taking up space in the garage, my car would have been safely inside.
    Tony goes over to examine the mess. “Fresh, I’d say. A good forensic team would put the time within the hour.”
    I can’t help grinning.
    Tony trots up the deck stairs, goes in through the sliding door to the kitchen, and returns with two glasses, handing me one. “Alcohol,” he says conspiratorially, holding up the bottle for my inspection. It’s a fifth of very expensive Kentucky sour mash, about two-thirds full. Even in the poor light of the deck I can see that Tony’s eyes are bloodshot, that he’s started on this bottle without me. “When this bottle is gone, I know a place where we can score another.”
    He sets the bottle down, leans forward, hands on the railing, peers down at the hood of my car. “Whoever was sick,” he says, “was sitting in this chair.” He examines his hands for further evidence, brushes them off on his pants legs before pouring two heavy shots of whiskey. I take a sip, and it’s everything you could hope for. Billy Quigley, were he here, would weep religious tears.
    Tony is studying me, deadpan. “He was a small man. Left-handed. He walked with a limp. He served in India. So much is obvious, but beyond this I can tell you nothing except that he may have recently eaten asparagus.”
    While Tony has been investigating this mystery, I’ve solved one that’s been on the periphery of my thoughts all afternoon. Seeing Tony has somehow caused the penny to drop. The girl I saw in the back of the police car this afternoon is the same one I saw last Thursday night when I left Tony’s, the big girl who wasn’t afraid when I came out of the trees at three in the morning, who told me I wasn’t him. The “him” she referred to, I now realize, is Tony, and I also comprehend that it was to his house that she was heading. I remember the phone calls that kept getting Tony out of the hot tub, as well as the fact that after the last one he left the phone off the hook, which must have made her decide to come see him. And I remember Missy Blaylock’s insisting, this afternoon, that I ask Tony about what happened at his house after I left. My final intuition is that it must have been Tony’s class the girl crashed this afternoon, causing the police to remove her from campus, the ramifications of which caused Tony to cancel our scheduled racquetball match. William of Occam would be pleased with my deduction, which accounts for the major facts, is contradicted by none of them, and is not unnecessarily complex. All my theory lacks is reasons, human motives, the truth behind the known facts. The former novelist in me wonders this: How close could I get to the deeper truths, proceeding from the factual outline?
    Not very, probably. Tony’s mock investigation of the vomit on the hood of my car suggests how wide is the gap between known facts and a genuine understanding of their meaning. How could he be expected to intuit Russell and Julie, the breakup of their marriage, the failure of their love. What ails people is never simple, and William of Occam, who provided mankind with a beacon of rationality by which to viewthe world of physical circumstance, knew better than to apply his razor to the irrational, where entities multiply like strands of a virus under a microscope. Russell is not a small man, he’s not left-handed, he hasn’t served in India, he doesn’t walk with a limp, and he probably hasn’t eaten