Straight Man

another. I set what feels like the smaller of the two on the stair for my mother to inspect. “This one?”
    “Yes,” she says. “And while you’re there? Right next to the suitcases there should be two cardboard boxes marked ‘Memorabilia.’ ”
    “Step back out of the light,” I suggest, though I can see better now. The ceiling, not very far above my head, is a web of pipes, and I negotiate these carefully as I move around. There appear to be a dozen or so cardboard boxes in the vicinity, all of them labeled “Memorabilia” in my mother’s elegant hand.
    “Open the top one,” she suggests.
    I cart the top one over to the foot of the stairs so the light falls on it and open it up. “Photo albums,” I call up, though, wedged along the side of the box, something brightly colored catches my eye.
    “That’s the one,” my mother says. “Hand the suitcase up, then bring the box, if you will.”
    The brightly colored thing, once I’ve tugged it out, I recognize as the dog collar I purchased as a boy in the hope of convincing my parents to get me a dog to attach it to. I toss it up, so that it lands at my mother’s feet. “Ah, Red,” I say. “How I loved that dog.”
    “God, what a little pill you were,” my mother recalls nostalgically.
    “Here’s the suitcase.” I duck my head, go partway up the stairs, and hand it up. When my mother comes into view to receive it, backlit, a dark silhouette, something old washes over me so powerfully that I start to back away at the moment of transfer, and for a second I wonder if I’m going to pull my mother down the stairs after me. I lose track of how many steps up I’ve taken, and suddenly I’m lost, completely lost. Reaching up, I grab one of the pipes, the hot water one as luck would have it, and it’s this pipe that keeps me from going down.
    “Careful,” I hear my mother’s voice. “Are you all right?”
    It’s a good question. I seem to be. Was it dizziness or nausea that passed over me? Did I actually black out for a second? Now it’s my own voice I hear. “I just lost my equilibrium for a moment. I’m fine.”
    “Leave the box. Come on up,” she suggests.
    A moment later, I’m seated at the kitchen table. My mother is holding out a glass of Railton tap water, which no one was ever healthier for drinking. “You’re pale as a ghost,” she would have me know.
    “How old was that cheese spread?” I ask her.
    “Don’t go blaming my cheese spread,” I’m told. “I ate it too, and there’s nothing wrong with me.”
    “I really have to go teach,” I tell her, consulting my watch again. In fact, now that I’m out of the dank cellar and in the light, I feel fine.
    “Look at me,” she says.
    When I do, when I meet her puzzled eyes, I feel a slight aftershock, the trace effects of whatever it was that visited me in the cellar, and then it’s all gone and I’m myself again. My mother must agree, because she doesn’t argue.
    “You must be coming down with something,” she concludes on the porch, putting her hand on my chest when I lean forward to kiss her good-bye. Mr. Purty observes this from his own porch across the driveway. I wave at him on my way down the steps, and he waves back understandingly. He knows what it feels like not to be kissed.

CHAPTER
9
    Often, imagination isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be. I have imagined, for instance, how badly my afternoon seminar will go, and it’s gone that badly and then some. What occurs to me is this: if I’ve been smart enough to predict this disaster, I should have been able to prevent it. But imagination without energy remains inert, and my visit to my mother’s has left me strangely disoriented, made a disinterested observer of me. Normally I’m an amused observer, but there’s nothing all that amusing in today’s class. I wonder if my inability to see any humor represents progress of some sort. I am, after all, frequently accused of a lack of high seriousness. But this class can’t be progress toward anything. Apparently my students agree. They’re looking at each other as if they’re trying to remember what they were thinking back in January when they enrolled.
    Of course the trouble began before I arrived, provoked by the unfortunate Leo’s unwillingness to understate necrophilia. By the time I entered the classroom, the situation was already out of hand. A virulentyoung woman named Solange, who has coal black hair with an angry streak of white—her