Straight Man

name?”
    “Julie,” I tell him. I don’t bother to correct him, though in fact Julie did go to several colleges. She enrolled. We paid tuition. She movedinto the dorm. But in the most important sense, Billy is right. Julie never went to college.
    “And you a college professor,” he says. “Is that any way to raise a kid, you peckerhead?”
    I’m getting a little tired of this. “We all do the best we can, Billy,” I say. “You know that.”
    “You could send her to school at least,” he insists. “Even I could do that, and I’m just a drunk.”
    We’re winding down now, I can tell. These conversations with Billy have a rhythm to them. “You aren’t just a drunk,” I tell him. “You’re a drunk all right, but you aren’t just a drunk.”
    The line is quiet for a moment except for some muffled sounds on Billy’s end, and I realize he’s cupped his hand over the receiver. When he finally speaks again, I can tell he’s been crying. “How come you always let me talk to you like that?” he wants to know. “How come you don’t just hang up?”
    “I don’t know,” I tell him. Which is true. “In fact, you’re beginning to gripe me. I’d really prefer you didn’t bring up my kids.”
    “I know it,” he admits. “I shouldn’t do that. That’s going too goddamn far. I don’t know what comes over me. Sometimes I just feel like I’m going to explode. You ever feel like that?”
    I tell him no, and in truth anger—if it’s anger he’s describing—is an emotion that’s foreign to me. Which infuriates Lily, who comes from a family of brawlers. She has dreams where, when she tries to pick a fight with me, I laugh at her, and she holds me accountable for this behavior, though I never laugh at her when she’s awake.
    “That’s because you’re a peckerwood,” Billy says, though there’s humor in his voice now. “Anyhow, I gotta go. More papers to grade.”
    “Right,” I say.
    “I want that extra section of comp next fall. And a summer session. And make damn sure Meg gets her two sections, too.” Another of Billy’s daughters. My favorite. This one teaches for the English department in an adjunct capacity.
    I tell him what I’ve
been
telling him—that I’ll do my best, that I don’t have a budget yet, that nobody has a budget yet, absurd though that is. “You should just do a regular load,” I advise, at the risk of getting him angry again. “What good are you going to be if you crack up?”
    “Best thing that could happen,” he says. “The loans are all insured. Something happens to me, they’re all paid off.”
    “Good strategy,” I tell him. “Get some sleep.”
    “Okay,” he agrees. “The bitch didn’t hurt you, did she?”
    “Hell no.”
    “I’m glad. Good night, Hank.”
    Good night, Billy.
    When I hang up, Occam slinks over. He’s still dragging his haunches a few inches above the carpet, guilty. I make a sound to let him know it’s okay. I hate to provoke guilt, even in animals. One of my few parental rules has been to try not to inspire or encourage guilt in our daughters. Of course it’s been easy to play good cop, married to Lily, who grew up as Catholic as Billy Quigley. She outgrew its orthodoxy without being able to surrender its methods—a subtle blend of bribery, guilt provoking, and Skinner-esque behaviorism—strategies my wife has used to combat my own encouraged Emersonian self-reliance theory of child rearing, or anarchy, as Lily refers to it. I suspect our daughters survived childhood by cheerfully ignoring both Lily and me rather than trying to reconcile our disparate advice. They seem to have rejected our wisdom as completely as our suggested reading lists, refusing to see the applicability of either
The Scarlet Letter
(Lily) or
Bartleby
(whose title character is, like me, a disciple of William of Occam) to their own lives. This despite the fact that one or the other of these stories, it seems to me, applies to everybody.
    I tell this to Occam, who lowers his head to allow for better ear scratching. I have long suspected that some previous owner abused Occam as a pup, and it’s taken him a long time to banish the resulting canine mistrust. It’s only in the last few months that he’s become a joyous, confident dog, sure enough of the fundamental goodness of life to thrust his pointed snout into the crotches of perfect strangers without fear of retribution.
    “One of
what
applies to everybody?” Lily wants to know from the