Straight Man

necrophilia.”
    I lean back and study her. What’s in the bag is a peach. “I just ran into your old man,” I say. “He didn’t look so hot.”
    “I give him a year,” Meg says. On the subject of her father, Meg’s talk is always hard, casual. The two of them fight tough, cruel battles. Meg’s public stance is that her father is a moron. I suspect that her private stance is pretty different. She’s been married, once, to a man who didn’t measure up to Billy. Now she’s playing the field, trying to find a man who might and not having much luck, at least in Railton. Her behavior is one of the things she and her father fight about. Late one afternoon in the middle of the fall semester I got a call at the department from a man looking for her father. Meg had passed out drunk at a pub downtown, and the man wanted Billy to come fetch her. Because Billy was in class and because it was the sort of thing he could live without knowing, I drove over myself, loaded Meg into the backseat of my Lincoln, and took her back to her apartment, depositing her on the sofa in the front room and beating a hasty retreat when she woke up enough to ask me to undress her and put her to bed.
    “In that case I’d try to make things up with him,” I suggest. “You’re his favorite.”
    Meg shakes her head. “It makes me crazy to go over there. I can’t even describe what it’s like in that house.”
    I can imagine though. Over the years the Quigley house has gone into the same serious decline as the rest of the neighborhood, its paint peeling, its porch rotting, its tiny lawn, even its sidewalk, given over to weeds. When Lily and I first moved to Railton, Billy’s had been a respectable lower-middle-class neighborhood, home to several junior faculty from the university. Now it’s the domain of demoralized Con-rail workers who have gone from unemployment to subsistence checks from the government, whose marauding kids roam the streets at night,neglecting the homework my wife has assigned them, marking time until they’ll be old enough to acquire the fake ID’s that will allow them to climb onto barstools next to their sad parents in seedy neighborhood taverns that sport out-of-date beer signs in their dark windows.
    “He could use a little moral support is all I’m saying.”
    “Couldn’t we all,” she says, toughness falling away for an instant, then returning almost immediately. “It’s not easy knowing you owe your very existence to other people’s stupidity.”
    I know better than to disagree, unless I want to be drawn into a serious quarrel right here in the student center. Meg’s feelings on the subject of her parents’ strict Catholicism are intense. After delivering the tenth little Quigley (there’d been three miscarriages as well), their family doctor had told Meg’s mother that if she had another she’d be risking her life, but even then birth control had been unthinkable until a young parish priest, new in Railton, had taken her aside and told her that she’d done her part, that God expected no more. Meg was the fifth of the ten kids, and she always maintained that if her parents had possessed a brain between them they’d have stopped at four. It’s one of the things I like about Meg. Most human beings want the door to swing shut behind them.
    Since I’ve been a good boy and not started an argument, Meg offers me a bite of her peach.
    “Do I dare?” I say.
    “That’s the question all right,” she agrees.
    In truth, I don’t, though the issue may not be the daring. Meg has been flirting with me ever since I declined to undress her and put her to bed, and I’ve been flirting back, perhaps because we both seem to understand that it’s just flirting. My cowardice is always understood to be the only impediment to our becoming lovers. Which will make a man my age curious. Almost curious enough to find out for sure, if it weren’t for the suspicion that Meg enjoys watching me squirm more than she’d enjoy the sex. Squirming, I think I’d enjoy the sex more.
    “Nope,” she says after a moment. “It took you too long to decide.”
    When she finishes the peach, she hands me the pit. “See?” she grins. “All gone.”
    “There are other peaches,” I can’t help pointing out.
    “Not like that one,” she insists. “That was the best one ever.”
    Regrets, I have a few.
    She gets up. “I’ve got a class. Will I be teaching in the fall?”
    “I hope so,” I tell her, as I told her