Straight Man

there should be wind on one part of the lake and not on the other?
    Skipping her medication caused the sails of her own small craft to billow like the others, allowed her to join in the merriment, tacking in and out among the other revelers, the wind in her hair and her clothing. The low gray sky went high and blue, the air so clear that Yolanda could almost see in the high cirrus clouds the face of a benevolent God. She was still alone, of course, but it was exhilarating to move, and the laughing people from nearby boats waved to her in a manner that made her feel welcome, even though it was impossible in such a wind to do much more than wave and smile
.
    This was what it felt like to Yolanda on days when she skipped her medication, and this was why there was no danger of her forgetting her counselor’s warning. And she knew he was right. If she stayed off her meds too long, the warming winds grew too strong, ripping her fragile sails to shreds and driving her onto the rocks of the Hereford Clinic, a thing Yolanda did not want. Still, even that was not so much worse than the return of the dreaded calm of the medication, of seeing the other boats sail merrily off, of realizing that the other revelers had been waving not to her but to each other
.
    This much I compose in my head as Tony talks. We now have coffee and the whole restaurant to ourselves. The sailing metaphor is myown invention, the omniscient telling merely an exercise. These last few years, having limited my creative endeavors to the op-ed page of
The Rear View
, I’ve had little opportunity to indulge omniscience, though I continue to teach it, out of duty, to my fiction writers, even as I warn them against it. Omniscience requires a combination of worldly experience and chutzpah, in more or less equal measures, a technique I’m drawn to now in advancing middle age, perhaps because, as my wife and daughter never tire of reminding me, I tumble to the truth of things late and would prefer to give the impression that I’ve known all along. By making use of omniscience I may be able to explain to myself life’s mysteries, which I’m not even close to grasping in the first person, a more modest form, even when you’re William Henry Devereaux, Jr.
    “So this girl’s in love with you?” I say.
    “Obsessed,” Tony corrects me. “She claims to hear my voice coming out of the walls at night. She thinks I’m God. She says she’s carrying God’s child.”
    “Jesus,” I say. It slips out before I can think. “So she’s claiming you’ve had sex?”
    “Great sex,” he says sadly, with only the most distant hint of his usual braggadocio. “Sex like nobody’s ever had before. Sex on a whole ’nuther plane.”
    “I should think that the fact that she’s hearing your voice come out of the walls would make her testimony in these matters suspect.”
    “Some people are apparently anxious to believe the worst. Juney’s harassment and sexual misconduct committee is going into full-blown investigative mode. I suspect the whole thing will be on the front page of the newspaper tomorrow unless you kill another duck.”
    “Speaking of people anxious to believe,” I say. “Can’t the girl be placed under observation?”
    “We’re hoping. Today’s was the third incident this term. Twice she’s had to be forcibly removed from campus. Usually, though, they just call her therapist, get her back on her meds, and let her go. And there has to be an opening back at Hereford before she can be readmitted.”
    “Thank heaven we’re almost to the end of the term.”
    “That’ll keep her off campus,” Tony concedes, “but she shows up at the house now too. If you’d stayed twenty minutes longer the other night, you’d have met her. One minute the local press and I were alone,and the next there she was, taking off her clothes, about to get in the tub with us. Naturally, the press freaked.”
    “Take a long vacation,” I suggest. “Rent the house to a graduate student for the summer and go somewhere.”
    “I’d probably be better off to sell it and just go. This is going to put me right at the top of Dickie’s list. Everybody in bio has tenure, and what I’m hearing is that one of us is going to have to go anyway.”
    “You really think they can just start sacking people with tenure?”
    “I think
they
think they can.”
    “I’m not so sure.”
    “Well, here’s an interesting item,” he says. “Remember how all of us who were coming up