Straight Man

entirely unlike her. I knew I was beat when I realized she wasn’t listening to me, which is not the same thing as reminding herself not to listen to me, which is what she’d always done before. For ten years I’d been able to get her to double-fault by warning her not to, but that afternoon she found a way to tune me out on the tennis court as efficiently as she used to at the dinner table when I recommended books. Only when the match was over and she’d done what she hadn’t quite dared to believe was possible did she finally break into the kind of radiant smile calculated to break a father’s heart. “That’s for what you did to Russell,” she grinned at me on the way home, and for a moment,until I remembered the basketball game in which he put a hook shot up on the roof behind the backboard, I thought she was talking about my running him out of town after I found him at Meg Quigley’s.
    Worse than defeat is concession. This summer, after jogging all spring so that I might retain my spot in left field, I have voluntarily made the move to first base, a position I mastered so effortlessly that I reinforced Phil Watson’s erroneous conclusion that I was born to play there. I was not. On first, the philosophical issues are competence, reliability, patience, and faith, but alas there is little poetry. There is satisfaction to be derived from digging an errant throw out of the dirt, but the heart doesn’t leap when the hitter turns on a pitch and lifts the ball high and far enough for a man like me to feel awe and wonder. Watson’s nephew has acquitted himself well enough in my left field. At the beginning of the season he had twice my speed and half my judgment, which meant the team was no better off, but as Watson correctly observed, his nephew’s judgment would improve with experience, whereas I was all done getting faster.
    Late one night on my deck, after Lily said good night, a bottle of good Irish whiskey between us, Tony Coniglia, who’d come over to say farewell before going to Pittsburgh for a year as a sabbatical leave replacement, tried to explain it all to me in what would have been another of his long, patented riffs, if I hadn’t been in a quarrelsome mood. “We have entered,” he explained, “the Season of Grace.
    “Consider Beowulf,” he went on. “There comes a time in every warrior’s life when he realizes he doesn’t have his best stuff anymore. He thinks he’s the same guy that whupped Grendel, but he’s not. If he were honest, he’d have to admit he could no longer take Grendel’s mother in a fair fight.”
    “Beowulf
did
defeat Grendel’s mother,” I couldn’t help reminding him. “And she was one tough broad, too.”
    “Huh,” Tony said. “Beowulf defeated Grendel’s mother?”
    “It was a clear victory, as I recall.”
    “Ah!” he said, remembering now, pointing his finger at me as if I were to blame for his faulty memory. “It was the
dragon
he lost to.”
    Unfortunately, my own recollection of Beowulf was not much better than his. “I think he kills the dragon too, though he himself is mortally wounded.”
    “Then
that’s
my point,” Tony said, narrowing his eyes at me. “It’s the dragon that’s my point. Beowulf was a fool to fight the dragon. By then he was an old warrior.”
    “No,” I assured him. “The point seems to have been that he was a hero for fighting the dragon.”
    He was glaring at me now. It actually seemed possible that we could have angry words over Beowulf. “But his skills were diminished. The time for deeds had passed. He had entered the Season of Grace but did not have the grace to admit it.”
    “He died a warrior’s death. That
was
his grace.”
    Tony took a long swig from the bottle, considered my pigheaded views. “Okay, fuck Beowulf. There are no more warriors anyhow.”
    With this I could agree. “There are no more Grendels,” I pointed out. “Men our age can’t even find a good Grendel’s mother. God knows what we’ll do when we’re the age to look for dragons.”
    “No dragons for me,” Tony said. “I’ve entered the Season of Grace.”
    “You and Jacob,” I nodded.
    “He’s merely entered Gracie. That’s not the same thing,” he said, before becoming philosophical again. “No, youth is the Season of Deeds. The question youth asks is: Who am I? In the Season of Grace we ask: What have I become?”
    “And what have we become?”
    “I have become very drunk.”
    “Then don’t drive