Straight Man

doorway. For nearly thirty years she’s been sneaking up on me this way. This time she’s wet-headed and fresh from the shower, and she’s got a snifter of brandy. Occam starts at the sound of her voice, eyes hersuspiciously. When he sees she’s not holding a rolled-up newspaper, his eyes close again, and he concentrates on the business of getting his ears scratched.
    “I’d like to tell you,” I say to my wife, “but you know my conversations with Occam are strictly confidential.”
    “Mmmm,” she says, taking a sip of brandy and looking around my den as if it were the room of a stranger. It’s been a long time since she’s entered here. The den where I work and Lily’s third-floor loft have been, by unspoken agreement, off limits. She agrees not to clean so long as I keep the door shut to ensure that the chaos I engender is visible to me alone and does not spill out into the rest of the house. She has to move a pile of books and student essays in order to sit on my beat-up old sofa.
    I take a sip of her offered brandy, and its strangely bitter taste suggests to me one of two things. Either somebody is substituting cheap brandy for the stuff I bought or the bitterness has nothing to do with the brandy. What I suspect is that this brandy is intended to brace me for unpleasantness, and that any brandy used for this purpose may be imbued with medicinal bitterness if you suspect the truth. I set the brandy down on a remedial freshman composition entitled “My Neighborhood,” a shrewd little piece of sociology that begins, “The reason my neighborhood is unique is because the people are so friendly,” an observation it shares with over half the others in the stack, which, taken together, have the amusing effect of invalidating each other.
    “What were you and Teddy talking about?” it occurs to me to ask.
    “When?” Lily asks, not unreasonably, though I can’t help feeling she’s stalling.
    “When you walked him to the car.”
    Lily looks sad. “You,” she admits. “He’s worried about you.”
    “He shouldn’t be,” I say, though I’m not sure what I mean. What I feel is an odd combination of “there’s no reason for him to worry” and “he shouldn’t concern himself.”
    “He thinks you’re committing political suicide by not taking this purge business seriously. He says even your friends are ready to strangle you.”
    “You think I
should
take the rumors seriously?”
    She takes a sip of brandy, studies the murky liquid that remains. “You remember Gladys Cox?”
    “Never heard of her.”
    “You’ve met her half a dozen times.”
    “Oh,
that
Gladys Cox.”
    “She works in the chancellor’s office. She says the legislature’s not fooling around this year. The cuts in higher education are going to be deep …”
    When I don’t say anything right away, Lily says, “What’s that look that just came over your face?”
    I can’t explain it, of course, and the reason has little to do with the fact that it’s unreasonable to ask a man to explain an expression on his own face when he can’t see it. What I’m really at a loss to explain is the odd thrill I feel at the possibility that the rumor might be true. But I also remember the look of excitement in Teddy’s own eyes when he brought the matter up in the Civic. Could it be that we two middle-aged men are so hungry for
some
thing to happen to us?
    “So you haven’t been asked to come up with a list?”
    “Don’t be absurd.”
    “Promise me you never would?”
    “Do I need to?”
    She considers this. For too long, in my opinion, but when she speaks, she sounds sincere. “No,” she admits. “And for what it’s worth, Teddy doesn’t believe you would either.”
    “He just wondered if
you
thought I would?”
    Now it’s her turn to ignore
my
question. “Billy all right?” she wonders. This is a change of subject, but what’s hanging in the air between us is the implied connection that exists, in her mind, and perhaps in my own, that we’ve just moved from discussing one troubled man to another.
    “Billy’s never been all right,” I tell her. “He’s probably no worse tonight than usual though. Worried. He can’t afford to lose his job.”
    “Who could?”
    I’m offered and I accept another sip of brandy. This one doesn’t taste so bitter, so I venture, “Julie’s all upset.”
    “I know,” Lily says.
    “You do?”
    She shrugs. “Remember how tough things used to be when we were broke all the