Straight Man

avoid the right turn at the Presbyterian church that would lead us past the house that used to be Julie and Russell’s. A new family moved in last week, renting with an option to buy, a flexible arrangement for all concerned. Last month Julie joined Russell in Atlanta, where, I have it on excellent authority, they are doing well. Julie has found work, and Russell has been promoted already, and I’m told they are thinking about buying a house. What they are planning to use for money I don’t know. From little things Lily says I gather that she and Julie speak almost every day. I’m not allowed to see the phone bills.
    But the leaves. Yesterday, returning from our morning run, we encountered Paul Rourke pulling out from between the tilting stonepillars of Allegheny Estates II, on his way in to campus, which is gearing up for fall semester. Since being made dean, Rourke is working longer hours, which, according to him, is fine under the circumstances. He and his wife have separated, and the second Mrs. R. disappeared clean, like her predecessor, taking with her little more than the clothes on her back. A large contingent of divorced academic men in Railton would love to know how Rourke always manages this. Some have joked that somebody should sneak into his house some night when he’s away and dig in the basement. Personally, I don’t find the disappearance of the second Mrs. R. all that mysterious. The wife of a dean of liberal arts has few responsibilities, but there are occasions upon which she cannot be stoned and barefoot. My own best guess was the second Mrs. R. liked being stoned and barefoot. She liked wearing jeans and being braless beneath her thick sweatshirts. She liked to smoke a joint and hold her breath and wiggle her toes and stare at them, none of which you can do when you’re entertaining the chancellor.
    In any event their house is for sale along with half the others in the two Allegheny Estates, though I heard Rourke has rented it for the upcoming school year and himself plans to move over Labor Day into Jacob Rose’s town house in West Railton, which has also been on the market since his wedding. Jacob and Gracie have begun building on the lot I sold them in May. The house is going up fast, and sometimes when Lily and I are deck sitting, I catch a whiff of Gracie’s cloying perfume born upwards on a breeze. Lily, of course, insists that I’m imagining this.
    I feared that selling to Jacob what I refused to sell to Paul Rourke might enrage my old enemy further, but, strange as it seems, I’m apparently no longer on his shit list. Jacob says that this is because the job always makes the man, a line I’ve often used on Jacob himself when he’s done what struck me as a cowardly thing. According to Jacob, Rourke has simply realized that as dean he cannot afford to have personal animosities, and so he’s had to give me up. My own feeling is—and I’ve always maintained this—that most people have a finite amount of meanness in them, and Rourke used his up with me back in June when a group of us (Jacob, Teddy, Rourke, a couple guys from biology, and me) started playing basketball again on Sunday afternoons. I may have suggested it. Basketball is a beautiful game for a tall,graceful man like me. At times I’m so overwhelmed by its beauty that I lose touch with reality. When my shot is falling, when I’m moving across the lane and back out to the perimeter for my jumper, I forget my age and position in life. I feel like my dream self in the donkey basketball game, and in the throes of such emotion I’m prone to acts of foolishness. One Sunday afternoon in late June I made the mistake after a missed shot of crashing the boards, where I caught one of Paul Rourke’s big, churning elbows. The fractured cheekbone and black eye that resulted seem to have satisfied my old enemy. Also he seems cheered to be driving the Camaro again, his fainting spells having ceased now that he no longer has to breathe the second Mrs. R.’s secondhand smoke. At any rate, yesterday, when Lily and I encountered him at the end of our run and I pointed up at the sickly yellowing leaves on his side of the road, he merely rolled down the window, nodded at me knowingly, and said, almost affectionately, “Lucky Hank.”
    He’s right, of course, I am lucky. As a result of the series of events that landed me first in jail and then in the hospital, I’ve followed my mother’s somber advice, taken stock, and made a