Straight Man

not a young man’s face looking back at me from my kitchen window, but the nose is its only gruesome feature.
    I’m still engrossed in its purple swelling when Lily’s reflection appears behind mine and she observes sadly, “You can be
such
a jerk.”

CHAPTER
2
    As a rule I jog before dinner, but Teddy has thrown everything off by coming home with me and drinking coffee and flirting with Lily. By the time my wife and I finish a quiet supper, it’s almost dark, but there’s a full moon and very little traffic on our country road. I get into my sweats and go out onto the deck to loosen up. From there I can survey the thing we’ve for so long called our lives.
    The house—this house we’ve lived in since moving out of Railton—is situated at the top of a long, winding, tree-lined incline. Nestled down among the trees are a half dozen other houses, all more expensive than ours, all owned by university people—senior professors, administrators, a coach. In summer, when everything is green, no house on our hill is visible from the others, which creates the impression of solitude, dispelled only by the occasional glint of painted metal as our cars glide among the trees, the yellow window at night winking through the stirring foliage, the distant argument conducted at an open kitchen window and borne along on the breeze. Starting in lateautumn, though, and continuing through the long Pennsylvania winter, we are more aware of our neighbors’ existence, as we become partially visible to each other among the naked trees. And so during half the year, at least, we wave to one another apologetically, getting into and out of our cars, taking the trash out to the road, shoveling snow off our decks. Now, in April, we are anxiously awaiting our solitude—the reason we all moved to Allegheny Wells to begin with.
    Lily and I purchased the first lot in the development nearly twenty years ago, using the advance on my novel to make the necessary down payment to buy the land and begin construction. Unlike those who followed, we cut down the majority of trees on the lot and put in grass. Lily, who grew up in a grim, dark neighborhood in Philly, wanted light and plenty of it, and long, sloping lawns for me to mow. She also wanted decks, front and back, and lots of patio furniture, as if the presence of summery chaise longues possessed the power to ward off Pennsylvania winters. Needless to say, we store the patio furniture in the garage below the front deck seven full months of the year. But our deck is the best one around for sitting. Cutting down so many trees seems to have reduced the insect population, and we are seldom bothered by bugs. Our neighbors farther down the hill and across the road complain that they are driven indoors as soon as the sun gets below the trees. From our deck we listen to the syncopation of their bug zappers.
    Summer deck sitting is one of the ways Lily and I are compatible. Once we’re done with classes in a few short weeks, the summer evenings will stretch before us, long and languid. We’ll bring bottles of chilled white wine out with us and either read or talk until the quiet and the dark and the wine make us sleepy. Years ago, when the house was new, we occasionally made love outdoors on the deck, but it’s been a long time since we’ve done that. There’s something to be said for outdoor sex, with its vague danger and attending excitement, but sensible middle-aged people are apt to feel foolish screwing on plastic outdoor furniture. Your skin sticks to it, and the sound it makes when you peel yourself free is the sound of folly. And soon the special excitement associated with the possibility that you will be discovered in the act of passion begins to fade because, of course, you are not discovered. On dark, quiet summer nights in the country you can hear a visitor’s car approaching on the county road below from half a mile off, and youknow when it turns off onto your access road, and you can track its progress as it labors up the hill toward the house. By the time whoever it is parks and climbs the creaky deck stairs, you could be showered and freshly dressed, a pot of coffee brewing, cookies arranged on a dish. Surprise, at our age?
    And is it the secret desire for surprise, I wonder as I do my obligatory deep knee bends on the deck, that has caused me to imagine my wife and friend as lovers tonight? It’s not the first such vision I’ve been visited by lately. Once, several months