Straight Man

my wife, a woman I know.
    My next call is to Meg Quigley, who answers on the first ring. “Call your father and get him to watch the local news,” I suggest, telling her which channel. “You might watch it yourself, actually.”
    “Where are you?”
    “Some dive,” I tell her.
    “It sounds like The Tracks,” she says. “All those model trains.”
    “How does a nice Catholic girl like you know such places?” I ask her, though I remember quite well the dive I fetched her from last year, the afternoon she wanted me to undress her and put her to bed.
    She ignores my question. “Why don’t you call him yourself?”
    “He behaves badly this time of night. He calls me names.”
    “You sound drunk.”
    “By the way,” I tell her, “you ruined my blotter.”
    “Good,” she says.
    “I’m flattered, Meg, really,” I tell her. “Its just that …”
    But she’s hung up.
    Finally I call Rachel. I decide to make this one short. The phone I’m calling from is next to the men’s room, the door of which keeps swinging open and shut, like desire, offering up the stale odor of over-matched urinal cakes. It’s a boy’s voice that answers. Confused, I try to remember Rachel’s kid’s name.
    “Shouldn’t you be in bed?” I say. It’s ten-thirty, after all. Jory. Suddenly his name is there.
    “Who the fuck is this?”
    I’ve about made up my mind to mention this kid’s mouth to his mother when it dawns on me that I must be talking to the boy’s father. Has he moved back in? Have he and Rachel reconciled? I feel a deep, melodramatic loss at this possibility, similar to the loss of Meg Quigley. “Cal?” I say. “Hank Devereaux, Cal. I’m sorry to bother you. Department business,” I add, like a guilty man.
    Silence. Then a distant door opening, a room or two away. Then the boylike voice, muffled but clear enough to make out. “Hey. Telephone. Your fan club.”
    Another silence. Longer. Then Rachel’s voice on the line, incredulous. “Hello?”
    “Rachel,” I say to this dodo’s wife. “I’m a swine for calling so late. Tell Cal I’m sorry.”
    “No, it’s okay? I was in the tub?”
    I’m visited by a vivid mental picture of this, which is banished by the opening of the men’s room door and a fresh blast of urinal cakes. “Listen,” I say. “Take tomorrow off.”
    “Tomorrow?”
    “Off,” I say. “Right.”
    “Why?”
    “I have this feeling it’s going to be a bad day.”
    “I can’t afford to?”
    “I’ll see you’re paid,” I assure her. “Watch the news at eleven.” I tell her which channel.
    “Okay?” she says, sounding genuinely frightened. In fact, I’m not sure I know anybody who’s as frightened all the time as Rachel.
    “Tell Cal I’m sorry I called so late.”
    “Okay?”
    And then it comes over me. “You and he back together? None of my business, I know, but …”
    “No?”
    “Good. In fact, tell him to go screw himself. Tell him I don’t like him even a little.”
    Now that I’m out of women to be in love with, I visit the men’s room, where, standing before the long trough, limp dick in hand, my dribbling is hot and painful. Here I have the leisure to consider life’s fundamental injustice. As the result of merely contemplating adultery, my father’s most conspicuous sin, I’m being visited by my father’s malady. For most of my adult life I’ve considered his periodic battles with kidney stones a kind of karmic justice. What more appropriate judgment on a man who can’t keep his dick in his pants, his seed in his dick? But this logic, taken in conjunction with my own predicament, I now realize, can only lead me in a direction I don’t wish to go. Am I to genuflect before that odd New Testament notion that to think a sin is to commit it? Am I no different from my father because I
think
to do what he did? A hateful and perverse philosophy, surely, and one that makes the world needlessly complex. Against such lunacy William of Occam became a reluctant heretic. No. Simplicity and justice require that thought and deed not be carelessly elided.
    Still, thoughts are not nothing. I recall the way Rachel’s voice did not fall when she said good night to me. Of course this may mean only that she doesn’t know what to call me in front of her idiot husband. Or perhaps she doesn’t know what to call me at this time of night, when neither of us is at the office. Or she just doesn’t know what to call me, period, which means she doesn’t know