Straight Man

ignores this friendly, heartfelt advice. “Still, it’s pretty amazing you think you can just run me out of town like this. I mean, a man in your condition.”
    “What condition is that?”
    He studies me. “You look awful,” he confesses reluctantly. “I could easily overpower you. I could wrest the wheel from your control. I could toss you out and leave you by the side of the road and take your car. You know I could.”
    “Overpower?” I say. “Wrest the wheel?” What kind of language is this?
    “I could,” he says. “You want to know the reason I don’t?”
    “Because you feel guilty and humiliated, a failure in marriage and life?”
    “Ah,” he says, staring straight ahead now. “You
do
understand why.”
    What I understand is that a bad thing is beginning to happen, one I might have predicted. Now that he’s not in Meg Quigley’s bed anymore, all my affection for Russell is returning at a gallop. I haven’t liked him this much since the day I thrashed him at basketball, since he made that wild, awkward, desperate hook shot and the ball landed on the roof, wedged in behind the backboard so that I had to climb up and get it, his new wife, my daughter, looking on.
    “I hope you don’t think my running you out of town means that I don’t like you, Russell,” I tell him. “This isn’t forever. I just think everything will be better if you leave town for a while. I know
I’m
going to feel a lot better.”
    “I just hope you don’t imagine I have plane fare to Atlanta.”
    I glance over at him and raise an eyebrow, as if to ask just how dumb he thinks I am.
    “Or money to live on when I get there,” he adds, sheepishly.
    “Don’t try to talk me out of this, Russell,” I warn him.
    We make the airport in record time. Russell puts up exactly no fuss. His only visible resentment of his father-in-law is manifested by his refusal to let me carry either of his bags.
    “I hate commuter flights,” he tells me after I’ve booked him on one to Pittsburgh, where he will connect with a direct flight to Atlanta. We’ve left the return open-ended. I write him a check for expenses. He studies it dubiously. “Stay someplace cheap,” I advise. “Call Julie when you get in.”
    “Really?”
    “Take my advice,” I say. “Tell her this was your idea. She’ll like you better.”
    “What are
you
going to tell her?”
    “I haven’t decided,” I say, though I have.
    Russell notices his flight is boarding, and he takes a deep breath. “I’m really scared of these little planes,” he confides, and I can see he’s not kidding.
    “You’re not going to die on this flight, Russell. You came closer to dying in bed this morning before you even woke up.”
    “Knowing how scared I am, you’re still going to make me do this?”
    “That’s right.”
    He shrugs, as if to say he’s not surprised. “Well, good-bye then.”
    We shake hands like two men who may never see each other again.
    “Meg told me she’d been flirting with you for a long time.”
    “She did, huh.”
    “She said you wanted to fuck her. She could tell.”
    “Really.”
    “She said you wanted to, bad.”
    “Not bad enough.”
    He nods. “That kind of hurt her feelings. I told her about your father, so she’d understand.”
    “So she wouldn’t misunderstand my stubbornness for virtue?”
    “Hey,” he says. “I never thought of it that way.”
    “Good luck in Atlanta,” I tell him, and I wish it for him, too. I wish for it with a hard, determined, childlike intensity. A prayer, almost.
    When he’s on the plane and the stewardess pulls up the stairs and locks the aircraft’s door, I immediately regret having done this. Russell is always good company, and I wish I had some for the trip home.

CHAPTER
33
    By noon, when I pull up to the curb in front of my mother’s place, she and Mr. Purty are just backing out of the driveway in his truck. Which means I’ve narrowly missed witnessing her climbing into it, something I feel sure would have cheered me up.
    “Hi, Mr. Purty,” I say, addressing the person who is nearest, who is also, I judge, the person gladdest to see me and most likely to be civil regardless. My mother’s stony expression conveys eloquently and with great economy several things: that she is put out with me, that she is frustrated, that she has been trying to call me, both at home and at the office, getting only my machine, which she hates.
    “Henry,” Mr. Purty says flatly. I understand his