Straight Man

Russell says, satisfied with the job once he’s finished.
    “You want someone to asphyxiate you with insecticide?” I say.
    “Nope,” he says. “I want to die in my sleep.”
    “Much as you sleep,” Julie says, “there’s a good chance you will.”
    We go inside, to the kitchen, their only fully furnished room. Russell and I sit down. Blessedly, my daughter and son-in-law have not tried to copy our interior furnishings. Perhaps our stuff is fucked up.Perhaps Julie’s imagination is functional regarding tables and chairs and sofas. In place of our island, they have an inexpensive kitchen table, half wood, half glass, in a complex geometric design that makes it hard to see whether you got the oatmeal spill with the rag or missed it.
    Russell sits down at the table while Julie starts a pot of coffee and I visit their bathroom, where I stand before their commode like a medieval man of faith. The sensation I had a few minutes earlier, of being powerfully backed up, of risking an explosion, is now belied by what might best be described as a slow faucet drip. What I have, I fear, is a stone. My father has been visited by them all his adult life, though he started earlier, in his thirties. His father before him had also been tormented with them, and my great-grandfather actually died of blood poisoning, the result of a bladder stone the size of a mango that blocked his urethra, backing urine all the way to his eyeballs. I’ve been putting off the appropriate diagnostic measures in the hope that they would not be necessary. Now, I will have to go to the hospital and be X-rayed, the stone identified, surgery recommended.
    I’m less afraid of the knife than of the comic dimension of the malady. My colleagues will consider it just like me to have a joke affliction. “This too will pass,” they’ll assure me. Given today’s mutilation, I’m even more adamant about keeping the stone a secret, somehow getting through the rest of the semester. Then having it taken care of when people are away. Maybe I can even get the procedure done in New Haven, where our daughter Karen lives. Surgery may not even be necessary in a big, metropolitan hospital. I’ve read somewhere that there’s a whole new technology for the treatment of stones that involves busting them up with concentrated blasts of ultrasound.
    When my undignified dripping finally ceases, some of the pressure seems to have been released. I give myself a final shake and return to the kitchen and the polite society of my daughter and her husband.
    As soon as I sit down at the table I’m aware of electricity in the air. Julie and Russell have had quiet words. The scar at the edge of my daughter’s eye, where she flew over the handlebars of her first bike and then into the road, is aflame, and seeing this always makes me feel both sad and responsible, a failed parent. It’s not a big scar, just a tuck at the corner of her eye, a small reminder that life is capable of far worsethings. When my daughter is happy, the scar disappears completely. But anger and frustration and weariness drag at the corner of her eye, causing her at times to look almost sinister, as she does now. If Lily were here, and I wish she were, she’d find a way to touch the scar gently, her signal to Julie, across the long years, to smile, to make herself beautiful, an act of will.
    If unkind things have been said in my absence, Julie has said them, not Russell. I can tell this by looking at him. Now that I have the opportunity to examine Russell, he looks a little heavier to me. He’s always been trim and athletic-looking, though he’s never played sports, but in the month or two since he’s been out of work, he appears to have put on about ten pounds. He’s looking slightly unkempt too. He wears his hair fashionably short, usually moussed up in bristles. When you catch him just before he and Julie go out somewhere, he always looks wet. By the end of the evening his hair takes on a more human, Tom Sawyer–ish quality. At the moment his hair looks long and limp, and it occurs to me that though we live close by, I’ve seen neither Russell nor Julie in about a month. I’ve been kept up to date on their lives by Lily in much the same fashion that I’m informed about what’s happening in the life of our other daughter, Karen, who lives sensibly in a second-floor New Haven flat that bears no resemblance to her parents’ house. “So,” I say to Russell. “What’s up? Long time no