Straight Man

felt was pretty much devoid of theological dimension.
    “But is it love? Are you in love with other women?”
    “Maybe half in love.”
    Tony squints at this, but there’s no stopping him. “You’re half in love with other women who are not your wife,” he sums up, nodding, as if this is a perfectly reasonable position. “Half is okay. Half is legitimate. There’s nothing wrong with the fiftieth percentile. No
more
than half is the rule. You’re sure it’s not fifty-one percent?”
    I take another sip of whiskey and track its warm glow all the way down into my belly. “Teddy thinks I only half-love my wife though. If true, that would mean I love these women equally, those who are my wife and those who are not.”
    “
If
true,” Tony says, noting the utmost importance of the subjunctive. “More than half is the rule for a wife,” he concedes. “I loved Judy right up there in the high ninetieth percentile.”
    Tony was one of the first of our generation of Railton professors to be divorced—what?—twenty-some years ago now. Either the year of or the year after our arrival in Railton. He’s been chasing young women so long that many people remember him as a philanderer in his marriage, which was not the case. His wife’s leaving him was the cause, not the result, of his having so much to offer other women.
    “Comfortably in the exceptional range,” he continues, clearly pleased to have found a metaphor to apply to his topic.
    “A tiny sliver on your pie chart. Right up there at the top on your graph. And for most of our marriage her affection for me was considerable. Not in the exceptional range, but well within acceptable boundaries. Seventieth percentile or thereabouts. Not bad. Satisfactory. ‘Fond’ would be a good way to describe her feelings for me. Back then, I was always trying to push her into the low eighties, which I thought was a realistic goal for her. Out of the satisfactory and into the good range. I mean, when you yourself are exceptional, you aren’t all that keen on ‘satisfactory.’
    But the more I urged her into the low eighties, affection-wise, the more she slipped in the other direction. Before long she was mired in the midsixties. Barely a passing grade. Marginal effort. I was still exceptional, mind you. Day in, day out. Ninety-five, ninety-six, ninety-seven was routine for me. In the end she finally slipped below the fifty percent you speak of, where she was less than half in love, at least with me.”
    As I suspected, Tony is just the man for me tonight. Listening to him talk, I can’t help but smile. At least I think I’m smiling. My face is doing something in the dark, I can feel it.
    “In the end her leaving was a good thing. Long term, it’s not healthy to love up there in the exceptional range when your beloved is struggling to achieve a modest showing in the seventies. You keep that up too long, and somebody goes out and buys a gun.”
    He leans over and pours more whiskey in my glass, not much, though, because I haven’t made much headway with what he gave me before.
    “How come I can drink twice as much as you even when I’m doing all the talking?”
    In truth, I’m afraid to start really drinking. Afraid I won’t be able to stop with this wonderful stuff Tony has brought. If I could be sure we’d stop when we got to the end of this one bottle, I’d race him to the bottom, but Tony has warned me that he knows a place where we can score another, and I know about twenty such places, the nearest being the kitchen cabinet, where I’ve stashed, unopened, a bottle of Irish whiskey even more expensive than the stuff we’re drinking.
    “For a long time after she left, I stayed right up there. Very little slippage, affection-wise, but I have to tell you it’s true what they say. It’s lonely at the top. And after a while, you feel a little foolish, too. You begin to consider that you have a lot to offer women, if you could just be a little less exceptional.”
    “You forget I know how this story ends,” I remind him. “I know how much you’ve offered other women. You brag about it in the locker room twice a week.”
    “And
you
forget Joe Namath,” he says. “It ain’t bragging if you can do it.”
    The whiskey that was in my glass has mysteriously disappeared. I hold it out for some more.
    “But here’s the thing,” Tony adds thoughtfully. “Most of the time, since I have so much to offer women, I’m comfortably down in the lower sixties