Straight Man

hear.”
    “Well, Hank,” Russell admits, “we owe you too much money to enjoy casual conversation.”
    I don’t know quite what to say to this, partly because I’m not sure how much money we’ve loaned them. The right thing to say is probably “don’t worry about it,” but I’d hate for them to take me literally, especially if Lily has been more generous than I know.
    “What’s up is mortgage payments,” Julie says. “What’s down is personal income and savings accounts.”
    “And the spirits of a certain privileged young woman,” Russell says, looking past me to where Julie is gathering cups and saucers. Then he adds, “Sorry, Hank. That sounded like I was criticizing your child rearing, didn’t it?”
    “Not at all,” I assure him. “Lily raised her. I was teaching
The Red Badge of Courage
.”
    “While Mom was earning it,” Julie says. She’s serving the coffee in fancy cups I’ve never seen before. “Menstruation always was the real red badge of courage.”
    Russell and I exchange a look. Julie has always been the least thoughtful but the most outspoken of the three Devereaux feminists. “I guess I should have taken more of an interest,” I acknowledge. I don’t consider myself a chauvinist, but I can play that role.
    Julie joins us at the table, spoons three sugars into her own coffee. “Too late now, Pop,” she says, patting my hand. What I’d like is for her to pat Russell’s hand, the same sort of I’m-just-kidding pat she gives mine. When Russell sees the gesture, he looks away.
    We drink our coffee in silence for a minute. I’ve stopped sweating from my run, and the drumming in my nose is quieter too. Emotional atmospherics notwithstanding, I’m comfortable in their kitchen, perhaps because of its resemblance to our own, Lily’s and mine. Lily is precisely what we’re missing, it occurs to me. If she were here, the electricity resulting from Russell and Julie’s financial problems would disappear. A natural humidifier is Lily, somehow conveying that things cannot seriously go wrong, at least not in her presence. Even as kids Karen and Julie never fought in front of her, as if they considered their mother’s emotional equilibrium essential to the general welfare. Lily has, I’m told, the same effect upon her low-track students, her “rocks.” They’re a tough bunch, many of them, and a fair number end up in jail, whence they write Lily apologetic letters, explaining, “When I knifed Stanley, I never meant no disrespect to you or what you tried to teach us about living good. I know your pretty disappointed because I’m the same.” Lily’s the kind of woman who loses sleep over ambiguities like the one in that last statement, and her kids seem to understand that, even the ones who couldn’t locate the word
ambiguity
in a dictionary for a free trip to the Bahamas.
    “So, how did you come by that nose?” Russell finally asks.
    Aware that the truth will probably sound more absurd than my previous lie about the wasp, I tell him, “A poet did it to me.” And I can’t help grinning at the fact that I’ve acknowledged that Gracie is a poet.
    “Mean one,” Russell says.
    “About average, actually,” I say. “They run to meanness.”
    “Unlike novelists,” Julie says, really surprising me this time. After all, my one novel came out the year she was born, and though we’ve never told her, there’s a pretty good chance she was conceived in celebration of its acceptance for publication. Is my daughter stretching a point, as I just did by conceding poet status to Gracie, or does she really think of me, despite my twenty-year silence, as a writer? Maybe to her my newspaper op-ed pieces count. Maybe she can’t see much difference between them and novel writing. Truth be told, I seldom think of myself as a writer anymore, though I write all the time—churning out film and book reviews for the
Railton Mirror
, along with my “The Soul of the University” pieces. But I haven’t published, or even written, so much as a short story in the long years since the novel was published, given a foolishly positive review in the
Times
(a review instigated, I later learned, by my father, who knew the editor), and then dove precipitously into that unmarked grave of books that cause no significant ripple in the literary pond. Apparently I’m not the only one who no longer considers me a writer. Last Christmas was the first since
Off the Road
’s publication that I did