Straight Man

that I may have been unfair to him in other ways. I’ve just about decided that this must be the case when Bobo ambles over to the side of the porch, turns his baseball cap around backwards, yanks himself out of his fly, and arcs an impressive stream over the porch railing and onto the door of the car parked in the drive below, the one I’ve pulled in next to. I’m pleased to observe that when I get out of my car Bobo soils himself getting back into his jeans.
    “Dr. Devereaux,” he says nervously. “I didn’t see you sitting there.”
    He really is stunned by my sudden appearance, I can tell. He hugs his bare chest, as if somebody’s just this second whispered into his ear that it’s cold outside. What he’d like to know, and what he’s too hungover to figure out, is how much power I might wield over him in the present circumstance. He knows I have the authority to grade his compositions and make these grades stand despite his protests, and for all he knows I may have other powers too. I can see the wheels turning in Bobo’s slow brain. I’ve caught him with his dick in his hand in broad daylight peeing on somebody’s car. On the other hand we’re not on campus, which means I may be outside my legal jurisdiction. What the hell am I
doing
here? is what he’d love to know. He’s trying to think of a way to ask.
    “I’m curious,” I tell him, because I am. “Why is it necessary to turn your hat around backwards in order to pee forwards?”
    Bobo entertains this question with high seriousness, as if I’d just asked him to explain the disappearance of the Fool after Act Three of
King Lear
. “It isn’t,” he finally explains, without much confidence, it seems to me.
    “Kind of a precaution?” I suggest, confusing him further, though he agrees that this is what it must be. “You have a nice day, Bobo,” I tell him.
    “You too, Dr. Devereaux.”
    Meg’s flat is on the second floor, and I meet her on the stairs. Her hair is wet, and normally I would find this intimate detail attractive in Meg, but today she stirs little in me besides misgiving.
    “You the cowardly person who called and hung up fifteen minutes ago?” she wants to know, suggesting that I’m not the only person on this staircase suffering misgivings.
    “I wasn’t expecting to hear your voice,” I explain.
    “I can’t believe he gave you my number. He must have forgot you and I knew each other.”
    “Must have.”
    We both become aware at the same moment how awkward it is for us to be talking on the landing of a dark hallway. “Look,” she says, not meeting my eyes now. “I’ve got the feeling he’d like to stay. And I really need him to go, okay?”
    “He’ll be gone within the hour,” I assure her.
    “He’s a sweet man, but I’m friends with Julie too.”
    “Right.”
    “I mean, it’s not like the sex is a big thing,” she explains, “but I feel weird about the deception part.”
    “I can understand how you would.”
    “Well, the door’s unlocked,” she says, turning away and heading down the stairs. She stops suddenly, as if she’s just realized something. “You’re
really
pissed, aren’t you?”
    “Maybe sex is a bigger thing with me,” I say. What I don’t say is that right now I’m very glad I didn’t share that peach with her.
    She seems to understand this without my saying it. “You’re just like my old man,” she says, shaking her head on the way out, “only sober.”
    Meg’s flat, at least the living room, is typical graduate student chic, decorated as if to suggest that she still hasn’t made up her mind whether to drink or read. Everywhere there are candles, half burned, dripping colorful wax down the necks of wine and liquor bottles. There are about two tons of books stacked on boards spaced atop concrete blocks. A quick scan of the books’ spines reveals that many of her favorite authors are ones who also couldn’t decide whether to drink or write. Her copy of William Henry Devereaux, Jr. (funny the way itleaps off the shelf) is wedged in between a Frederick Exley and a Scott Fitzgerald.
    Finding Russell fast asleep in the tangle of Meg’s sheets, I jiggle the bed with my foot until he wakes up. He’s even more surprised to see me than Bobo was. He’s so surprised, in fact, that he looks around to make sure of his whereabouts. It would be strange enough to wake up in his own bed and see his father-in-law standing over him, but in Meg Quigley’s bedroom, with him in