Straight Man

thought maybe if
I
concentrated I could figure it out. I knew these men. I’d known most of them for twenty years. When we met we were all married. A few of us still were. A few more were divorced. A few more were remarried and trying again. Some of us had betrayed fine women. Some of us had been ourselves betrayed. But here we were, tonight at least, drawn together by some need, as if we were waiting for a sign. And I was one of their number.
    Russell pushed back his chair, confessing, “I don’t understand this.”
    And then suddenly we were all chuckling, probably at the sight gag that accompanied his words, the computer’s packed screen still scrolling upwards.
    “No, I mean, this should work,” Russell explained, having concluded perhaps that the laughter was directed at him.
    “Maybe it
is
working,” Jacob Rose suggested. “I think you’ve hacked your way into God’s mainframe. This is a list of our options. All we need to do is break the code.”
    And maybe it was so much laughter, so many of us bewildered, middle-aged men using up the oxygen in such a tiny room, but all atonce we seemed to realize how close it was in there, and just as suddenly we all wanted out. Only when we turned toward the exit did we realize our predicament. The bedroom door opened inward, toward us, but we’d moved too close to it. There wasn’t room.
    “Trapped,” I heard a droll voice say. “Like rats.”
    “Everybody back up,” another voice suggested, but those in the back of the room either didn’t hear the request or didn’t understand its necessity. Everyone knew where the door was and continued to press toward it and imagined freedom. Suddenly, everyone was talking, laughing, shouting panicky, desperate, half-joking obscenities. “Help!” yelled someone near the center of the room, perhaps in jest.
    Normally I’m subject to the kind of blind claustrophobic panic that then filled the room, but I happened at that moment to catch the eye of Paul Rourke across the room, and when I grinned, he tried valiantly to smother a grin of his own. For twenty years he’d steadfastly maintained that anything I thought was funny most assuredly was not, and I could tell he felt his twenty-year resolve crumbling. I could see him let it go, and his big, mean-spirited face broke into the widest imaginable grin, and his shoulders began to bounce up and down.
    Clearly, the only solution was for all of us to take one step backward so that the door could be pulled open. By this point a group of plumbers, a group of bricklayers, a group of hookers, a group of chimpanzees would have figured this out. But the room contained, unfortunately, a group of academics, and we couldn’t quite believe what had happened to us.

ALSO BY R ICHARD R USSO

    “Russo is a master craftsman.… The blue-collar heartache at the center of [his] fiction has the sheen of Dickens but the epic levity of John Irving.” —
Boston Globe
    MOHAWK
    Mohawk, New York, is one of those small towns that lie almost entirely on the wrong side of the tracks. Its citizens, too, have fallen on hard times. Dallas Younger, a star athlete in high school, now drifts from tavern to poker game, losing money, and, inevitably, another set of false teeth. His ex-wife, Anne, is stuck in a losing battle with her mother over the care of her sick father. Out of derailed ambitions and old loves, secret hatreds and communal myths, Russo creates a novel that captures every nuance of America’s backyard.
    Fiction/Literature/0-679-75382-6
    NOBODY’S FOOL
    This slyly funny and moving novel follows the unexpected operation of grace in a deadbeat town in upstate New York—and in the life of one of its unluckiest citizens, Sully, who has been doing the wrong thing triumphantly for fifty years. Divorced from his own wife and carrying on halfheartedly with another man’s, saddled with a bum knee and friends who make enemies redundant, Sully now has one new problem to cope with: a long-estranged son who is in imminent danger of following in his father’s footsteps.
    Fiction/0-679-75333-8
    THE RISK POOL
    Set again in Mohawk, New York, Ned Hall is doing his best to grow up, even though neither of his estranged parents can properly be called adult. His father, Sam, cultivates bad habits, and his mother, Jenny, is slowly going crazy from resentment at a husband who refuses to either stay or go away. As Ned veers between allegiances to these grossly inadequate role models, Russo gives us a