Straight Man

daisies. He hasn’t told you about it?”
    “Nope,” I tell her. “He’s working up to it though.” It’s when I say this that I realize it’s true. This is precisely where we’ve been heading all night. “If he doesn’t pass out first. If
I
don’t pass out first.”
    “You aren’t driving, are you?”
    “Hell no.”
    She shakes her head. “That damn Jesuit is right. You
never
tell the truth, do you?”
    “Well …”
    “Call me if you need a lift,” she says. “Here he comes again.”
    Tony is indeed weaving his way toward us, hangdog now, no longer dangerous, though the other diners are not sure of this, and the dining room is full of the sound of people scraping in their chairs to give him plenty of room. I see he’s picked up Teddy and June’s check, which is a good way of saying you’re sorry to Teddy. There may be no good way of saying you’re sorry to June.
    “Professor Coniglia,” Bodie says. “How lovely to see you this evening.”
    “Professor Pie,” Tony says, taking her hand gallantly, kissing it. “May I call you Sweetie?”
    In the few minutes he’s been gone, he’s located his old self. Mock-charming, outrageous, impossible to take seriously.
    “It’s my night to offend everyone,” he explains.
    “Between us,” Bodie says, taking her hand back as soon as she’s decently able, “you’re right about Juney. She’s a bitch on wheels. And she won’t forget.”
    “Well, then,” Tony says, raising my water glass in a toast to good fellowship, “she’ll just have to remember.”
    Our dinners arrive then, all the waiters having returned to the dining room at once, and Bodie takes her leave. “I have to admit,” Tony says. “That’s one classy lesbian.”
    I’m astonished to discover that I have an excellent appetite for my prime rib, which has arrived sweet and bloody. Tony picks at his trout, then finally asks if he can have a taste of my dinner. When I start to carve off a portion, he stops me. “Just the fat,” he explains, leaning over to take the piece he wants from the tail. He chews it with something akin to religious ecstasy.
    We do not want what’s good for us.

CHAPTER
31
    Her name was Yolanda Ackles, and she’d been a longtime resident at the nearby Hereford Clinic until it was decided that she should be main-streamed. One of the first things Yolanda did after she settled into her new apartment at the Railton Towers was sign up for classes on campus. She was encouraged to do this by her counselor, who assured her that the state would pay. The counselor’s only other advice was for her to stay on her medication: “Don’t forget what happens to you when you start skipping.”
    The problem with the medication was that it made everything fuzzy and abstract and gray. Still, Yolanda appreciated the fact that her meds allowed her to go among other people, who would treat her, when she was medicated, much like they would treat any other big-boned, over-weight girl with straight, mouse-brown hair, who lumbered across floors so heavily that objects rattled and the surfaces of liquid in glasses boiled. It was a relief not to be viewed as someone with special problems. She sat in the rear or off to the side in her classes, and she took lots of notes, though these often did not make sense to her later. She studied her professorsmeticulously for signs of kindness, and she was often more interested in these signs than in what her teachers had to say about cell division. She did not sign up for any classes with women professors
.
    Despite her difficulty in processing information, her inability to differentiate between important and less important facts, her tendency to mishear, to get sidetracked, to mistake irony for its opposite, she managed to do comparatively well, earning mostly C’s and the occasional B in her course work. As long as she stayed on her medication, she could compete with the hungover, the lazy, the drug-addled, the terminally bored
.
    There was no need for her counselor to remind Yolanda about what happened when she started skipping her meds. She had not forgotten. In fact, she remembered fondly. It was like there was suddenly wind for her sails after months of breathless calm. Properly medicated, Yolanda felt becalmed on a flat lake where others nearby were sailing about merrily, wind snapping in their sails, and she could hear the sound of their laughter and catch, every now and then, a scrap of joyous conversation. Was it fair that