Straight Man

the proceedings that I hadn’t told him about, though he wasn’t sure enough of himself just then to be critical. During the whole weekend Russell seemed more determined to get back into my good graces than Julie’s, which was another reason I’d taken him along with me, to show him there were no hard feelings. He and Julie both seemed tremendously relieved to be back together again.
    When Tony spotted us, he came over and I introduced him to Russell, explaining that my son-in-law was a computer guy and suggesting that Russell take a look at Tony’s system while I got us a drink. Fifteen minutes later I poked my head into the spare bedroom, where I found Russell under the table, fiddling with the back of the computer, his bristly cranium just visible above the machine, the top of which he had removed. Tony himself I found outside on the back deck, sitting on the edge of the quiet hot tub, alone.
    “I’ve been thinking about going back to Brooklyn,” he said, raising his glass so we could clink. “The problem is, the Brooklyn I’d like to return to doesn’t exist anymore.”
    “Should you be drinking?” I wondered.
    “This is iced tea,” he admitted. “Do you ever yearn to return to that horrible place in the Midwest where you were born?”
    “Never,” I told him, the simple, honest truth. Of course I had no recollection of it either. We’d moved by the time I was two, and by the time I was three we’d moved again.
    “Most people are one way or the other,” Tony explained. “They either want to confront the past or escape it.”
    I could feel one of Tony’s long, scientific disquisitions, full of clinical observations and invented statistics, coming on, so I took a good, long pull of bourbon and settled in.
    “I’d like to meet that woman again,” he told me. “Did I tell you about her?”
    “You came before she could get out of her brassiere.”
    He nodded sadly. “She must have touched me, though,” he said. “I don’t remember her touching me, but I think minimal physical contact would have been necessary.”
    “If you don’t remember—” I began, though he wasn’t really listening.
    “I think I must have flirted with Yolanda Ackles,” he said, staring out at the dark woods beyond his house. “I don’t remember doing it, but you may have noticed I’m a flirtatious man. I have even flirted with your wife upon occasion.”
    “And you remember doing it,” I pointed out, adding, “so do I.”
    “Well,” he conceded. “Perhaps. But I can’t help thinking that what happened to that young woman may be my fault.”
    “I know you,” I told him with as much conviction as I could summon. “If you flirted with Yolanda Ackles, you did it to make her feel good about herself.”
    “You think so?” he said. “You think I did it to make her feel good? Not to make me feel good?”
    “I’m sure of it,” I told him. I know you, Al. You’re not the kind of man who.
    We looked each other in the eye then, both shrugging at the same instant. “I think that woman must have taken me in her hand,” Tony says. “It stands to reason.”
    One of the things you never know for sure in life is whether a joke is the right thing. Sometimes even after you’ve offered one. I can onlysay that I was too delighted to have caught Tony in an ambiguous pronoun reference to refrain. “I’m sure it was standing,” I told my friend. “But not to reason.”
    Back inside, the living room had been abandoned. We found everyone crammed into the spare room, where Russell was watching Tony’s computer scroll, jammed to the margins of the screen with keyboard symbols that materialized below, inched upward line by line, and disappeared into the top of the screen. You almost expected to see the same lines appear, intact, in the air above the monitor, scrolling up the wall and along the ceiling.
    The small room was very crowded with men watching this bizarre sight as if it were a feat of magic. Several more friends of Tony’s had arrived, and from out in the hall we could hear the doorbell. I saw that Billy Quigley was there and had cornered his new dean and was reading him the drunken riot act. I overheard the word
peckerwood
, a term I had always assumed Billy reserved for me.
    To William Henry Devereaux, Jr., the whole scene took on a surreal quality. Dreams, it is said, are all meaning, and I couldn’t help thinking that that’s what this scene must be, some form of concentrated significance. I