Straight Man

way of thinking we’ve worked long and hard to achieve this silence, Lily’s and mine, so fraught with mutual understanding.
    “When you get back, let’s talk,” she says ominously, as if she’s been eavesdropping on my thoughts again.
    “Okay,” I say, trying to sound eager or, failing that, agreeable.
    “I’m thinking maybe I should cancel this trip,” she says.
    “No,” I tell her. “You should go.”
    “You’ll be okay?”
    “Sure. Why not?”
    But now it’s my wife who’s located the perfect rhetorical place for silence.
    “Left field,” I explain, “is my spiritual position. Not first base.”
    “I know, Hank,” she says, as if she’d like me to understand that this isn’t all she knows.

CHAPTER
3
    At the bottom of our hill, I turn left, as I do most evenings, and head out away from town. Lily turns right and jogs toward Railton, explaining that the run is prettier, also flatter. But it’s just like Lily to run toward town and, she would say, just like me to run away from it. My logic is simple. You don’t spend a lot of money building a house out in the country and then run back toward the town you just fled. If running in the opposite direction means that you’re running away, then so be it.
    Lily’s logic must be more complex, but then she’s no great believer in Occam’s Razor. A teacher in the beleaguered public schools’ secondary system, she has more reason than I to flee the town but, as the daughter of a Philadelphia cop, also more inclination to turn and fight. Instead of using her tenure, her seniority, her obvious gifts as a teacher to better her position at the high school by teaching the honors students or, like so many of my colleagues’ spouses, by wheedling her way into the college and a somewhat lighter teaching load, Lily has plunged into the community’s educational nether regions, teaching the low-track kids, “therocks,” as they are referred to by the other teachers. No, our light, airy home in Allegheny Wells is not an escape from town for Lily, just a temporary refuge into which she can retreat and recharge her batteries for the next day’s wars. Though she goes slower, she jogs farther than I do, and from the crest of the last hill, before she heads back to Allegheny Wells, she can see Railton, sooty and sprawling and self-satisfied in the valley below, see, as it were, her task. Actually, I don’t know this to be true. I don’t know how far she runs. It’s what I imagine.
    My running in the opposite direction acknowledges, I suppose, an even sadder truth—that we should have left Railton altogether, instead of making this coward’s march a slender four miles out of town. When the wind is right, wisps of dark, ashy film are borne on the breeze like polluted snow all the way from town. And so I run deeper into the green hills and woods, vaguely aware that these extend, more or less unbroken, all the way to Canada, where, beer commercials tell us, everything is pure and clean.
    About a mile up the blacktop is the tiny village of Allegheny Wells proper, a community of some twenty houses, roughly the same size as the two Allegheny Estates developments. Here, the houses are smaller, two-bedroom raised ranches mostly, and they are clustered around, at the village’s only intersection, the steepled Presbyterian church, the lights in the belfry of which are coming on just as I lumber into town. Except during services, the church’s front door is always padlocked, probably to guard against the temporary conversions of cold, winded joggers like me. I consider doing a victory lap around the building and heading back. After all, that would be a two-mile run, and I only began jogging again a couple of weeks ago. But for some reason I’m energized by my throbbing nose and my visible breath escaping in white, reassuring bursts, so I decide to turn right at the intersection and jog up the half-mile grade to where my daughter Julie and her husband, Russell, have just this autumn built their house. My wife may believe that I run away from unpleasantness, but in my view there’s unpleasantness on all points of the compass, including this one.
    This house of Julie’s is a proscribed topic. When I bring it up, Lily shoots me one of her warning glances and reminds me that we’ve agreed to butt out of our children’s lives. Basically, I agree. I dislike meddling in their affairs, even when it’s obvious as hell that somebodyought to. Still, there wouldn’t