Straight Man

and I consider telling her that I think I’ve formed my first stone. Lily would stay if I asked her to, which means I can’t ask. Instead I say, “You look great,” which is true. “I’d hire you.”
    “Thanks,” she says, and there’s genuine gratitude in her voice. The very idea of her going on a job interview fills me with admiration.Tenured these last fifteen years, I find it hard to imagine being in that position again, of allowing myself to be judged.
    “Say hi to Angelo for me. And call before you go over there. He’s liable to gun you down on the front porch if you surprise him.” Ever since her father quit drinking, he’s fallen victim to paranoia, noticing, perhaps for the first time, what’s happened to the neighborhood.
    “I tried to call him a couple times last night, and again this morning,” she tells me. “I kept getting his machine.”
    “Angelo has an answering machine?”
    “I just hope he hasn’t started drinking again.”
    “I always preferred him drunk,” I say, though I know it’s the wrong thing. “At least he was happy.”
    “He was also passing blood in his urine, Hank. His drinking was no joke.”
    “His
not
drinking is no joke either,” I point out. Again, the wrong thing, and because I don’t want to start an argument, I get out, close the door, come around to her side. She rolls down the window, I think, so she can give me a kiss, but it turns out it’s to observe me better. “Take care of yourself, okay? I have this fear. I can’t decide where you’re going to be when I get home. In the hospital or in jail.”
    Lily always likes to leave me with a prediction. “Jail?” I ask. When I bend down to kiss her, she says, just before our lips meet, “When’s your meeting with Dickie Pope?”
    “This afternoon? No, tomorrow.” In truth, I can’t remember. “Any instructions?”
    “Be the man you are. Be the man I married.”
    Our lips meet. “Which?” I want to know. “Make up your mind.”
    Overnight, two posters have appeared on the outer doors of Modern Languages, one announcing next week’s donkey basketball game pitting administration against faculty, the other announcing that Army ROTC’s scheduled Saturday morning M-16 practice has been canceled. Reason? Ammo did not arrive. These two community announcements suggest how much the campus has changed since the arrival of a certain young, bearded, radical English professor named William Henry Devereaux, Jr., over twenty years ago. Back then, suchsigns would have been unthinkable. Now it’s hard to imagine anyone objecting. The CIA recruits on campus, so it’s probably appropriate enough for senior faculty to saddle up diaper-clad donkeys for the purpose of mocking sport, our institution of higher learning, the life of the mind, and themselves, the ship of dignity having sailed long ago. I myself am looking forward to the game. The donkeys should negate my age and inability to run the fast break. I’m confident I can shoot from my ass.
    “I’m sure you can,” says a voice behind me.
    When I turn, I see that Mike Law, Gracie’s husband, has come up behind me, and that I’m blocking his entrance. It must be true. I’m speaking aloud without knowing it.
    “Nice nose,” he adds.
    Shaggy-bearded and stoop-shouldered, Mike Law is the most morose-looking man on campus, and that’s saying something. We stand facing each other, two sheepish, middle-aged men, each of whom fears he owes the other an apology. Silly, when you think about it. Mike is certainly not responsible for the behavior of the woman who is his wife. And if I have come into conflict with Gracie, goaded her to violence against my person, then I owe her, not her husband, an apology. Yet here we stand, the two of us, sharing an invalid emotion. On the other hand, nearly all the emotions of men our age are apparently invalid.
    “I’m told I had it coming,” I admit.
    “I’m told the same thing,” Mike informs me. “I’d keep my guard up if I were you. I don’t think she’s finished.”
    I nod and we shake hands. Why we should shake hands is probably as unclear to Mike Law as it is to me.
    “Stop by some evening and we’ll shoot a rack of pool,” he urges me, as he does every time we run into each other. Mike has spent the last five years finishing his basement, where he’s put a pool table, a dartboard, a jukebox stocked with fifties rock and roll, and a wet bar. He’s rumored to have a small keg of beer tapped in