Straight Man

money on our games if I would go along. I might go along except that I never know who’s won the point until he tells me. So we make other, nonracquetball wagers, though I never understand these either. Tony has a sister in Tampa, and therefore he follows the Tampa Bay Buccaneers football team, and every season he comes up with some crazy scheme that will allow him to bet on them. Last year he told me to pick any team I wanted, and he’d take the Bucs. For twenty dollars. Whichever team had the best record at the end of the season. “Okay,” I said, “I’ll take the Oakland Raiders.”
    “You can’t have them,” Tony explained. “It has to be a comparable team.”
    “Comparable to Tampa Bay?” I said, already confused.
    “Any comparable team.”
    It turned out I could have any team without much talent. I could take the Jets or the Rams or the Seahawks, for instance. “I still don’t understand. What are we betting on?”
    “On which is the better team, of course,” Tony explained, as if he suspected I was being intentionally dense.
    “What if they don’t play each other?”
    “Overall record,” he said. “Playing each other doesn’t count.”
    “How can it not count if they play each other?” I objected, attempting to apply Occam’s Razor. “Wouldn’t that game settle the issue right there?”
    But he wouldn’t hear of it. The more he thought about it, the more wrinkles he wanted to throw in. If the Bucs made the play-offs and my team didn’t, I’d have to pay double (and vice versa, he added reluctantly).
    “And you promise to tell me if I win?” I said when he was finished explaining.
    “It’s simple. Pay attention,” he said, and then he explained the wager again, this time adding another wrinkle or two. So I picked the Chargers, who lost in the first round of the play-offs. Tampa Bay finished in the cellar. He paid up, too, though he was pretty pissed off that I wouldn’t go double or nothing next season. Again I could take any team I wanted (except the Chargers were now on the list of teams I couldn’t choose) and he’d take the Bucs. I took his money and put it in my pocket.
    “Bear down,” Tony advises now. “There’s not much point to this if you aren’t going to try.”
    In fact he’s been running me all over the court, and I’m exhausted, frustrated, ready to concede. Also, I have to pee again.
    “Game point,” Tony reminds me, then serves. I return the ball hard, and it whistles off the front wall, the perfect passing shot I’m not allowed, well out of Tony’s reach.
    “Game,” he says. “Mine.”
    I throw up my hands in defeat. “Thank God,” I say. I’ve grown used to losing on my best shots.
    “Let’s go one more,” Tony suggests.
    “No,” I tell him.
    “One more,” he says.
    We play one more. If anything, my play improves, which means that I lose by an even greater margin. He terms this final defeat of mine a humiliation. Myself, I’m not sure how to feel about it.
    Tony always knows how to feel. In the shower he sings
Rigoletto
full bore. He never cares who’s in there with us. The operatic urge that accompanies victory is too strong to be denied, no matter who stares. Today, we’re alone, so it’s just me staring in my customary disbelief.
    “I’ve been thinking a lot about women lately,” Tony says, when we’re toweling off. He enjoys the effect of omitted transition. “Of fornicating with them, actually.”
    I know there’s no need to respond to Tony when he introduces subjects in this fashion, so I work on my lock, which is tricky and usually requires two or three correct applications of the combination.
    “Do you realize that I’m far better at fornication now than I was at eighteen?”
    I tell him I’m glad to hear it.
    “It’s true,” he says, still deadpan. “I have a lot more stamina, more desire, more technique. I have a lot to offer women.”
    Indeed, Tony has something of a reputation in this regard. In addition to a few faculty wives, his conquests include not a few undergraduate students, though he never dates or beds them, he assures me, until after his final grades are in. Such professional scruples notwithstanding, Tony’s indiscretions have cost him a final promotion to full professor, a penalty he accepts with great good grace.
    “More than any other human activity,” he says, stepping into his Jockey shorts, adjusting himself carefully in them, “the act of fornication defines us. That’s a known