Straight Man

list of things a man like me might be thankful for if he were so inclined, and here they are:
    1. I have my health. My dick (or rather my prostate gland and my entire urinary tract) has been put through the metaphorical wringer of what Phil Watson referred to as a full battery of tests. In fact, I think he would have hooked me
up
to a battery if I’d let him. There is nothing wrong, I am reassured to know, with either me or it. Certainly, there is no tumor. Subsequent rectal searches by several educated and lubricated index fingers have found neither asymmetry nor enlargement of my prostate gland. More important, to me at least, I am again peeing freely, regularly, and without discomfort. I am, in all respects penile, as other men. Which leaves only the mystery of my temporary affliction. According to Phil I most likely suffered from a condition known as hysterical prostate, a phrase itself calculated to induce hysteria, at least in a man like me. According to Watson, who I suspect may have invented this condition to entertain me and explain my otherwise inexplicable symptoms, it’s a rare circumstance that is in part physical and in part psychological, induced by stress, aided and abetted by antihistamines, which I’d been overusing all spring to combat allergies and colds.
    Anyway, this explanation accounted for all the known facts of my case. What the diagnosis lacked, I decided when Phil Watson shared it with me, was poetry, and for that reason I told him why it was that Jacob Rose found me laughing like a madman before the commode when he followed me into the men’s room. For with the first blast of urine against porcelain I’d heard a distinct plink, as of a small pebble on china, evidence, it seemed to me, that I had been right all along. I had just passed a stone. Watson, a man not easily taken in by poetry, merely smiled and reminded me that this simply could not be, that it would be impossible to pass through a human ureter a stone large enough to make an audible plink. Further, a stone that large would have caused considerable bleeding before, during, and after the event, and I had experienced none. He did have enough poetry in him to concede that my decision to turn down the position of dean and relinquish my tenure at the university may have been the symbolic equivalent of passing a stone, but he maintained that the worlds of symbol and matter, of meaning and substance, remain discrete. This from a Roman Catholic who extends his tongue every Sunday morning to receive the Body and Blood of Christ.
    2. I am still married. Here I must be circumspect. Forgive me. You may believe that a man willing to share candidly the intimacies of his urinary tract has waived his right to circumspection, but I claim it, nevertheless. I will report little more than the facts. The first is that I’m no longer pestered by fantasies of my wife making love to my friends. Affection-wise, I find myself hovering in the high nineties regarding Lily, and though Angelo’s presence may be a factor, I believe she has been fonder of me this summer than in some time, though she resists representing her affection for me in percentiles. I get the distinct impression that despite managing to fulfill all of my wife’s dire prophecies about how I would fare in her absence last April, I passed some sort of test, though I have no idea how, nor is she telling. Perhaps no man should possess the key to his wife’s affections, what makes and keeps him worthy in her eyes. That would be like gaining unauthorized access to God’s grace. We would not use such knowledge wisely.
    What is it that we want from women? To be understood? I’ve heard men say this—I may even have said it myself—but I have my doubts. Not long after Lily returned with Angelo, she took somethings to the dry cleaner’s, including my tweed jacket. In one of its pockets she found the Polaroid Tony had taken of Missy Blaylock and me in his hot tub, which I’d forgotten. This she presented to me for explanation, and who could blame her? Except that she seemed less troubled than puzzled by the fact that her husband had been photographed in a hot tub with a naked woman. “Isn’t that the girl from ‘The People Beat’?” she wanted to know.
    3. I have friends and loved ones. In fact, our house has been full to overflowing most of the summer. Angelo spent over two months, returning to Philadelphia in early August for his trial, which ended, as expected, with his