Straight Man

what to call our relationship.And who can blame her? “Hank,” I tell her, I tell Rachel, who again stands before me in the mirror above the urinal, fresh from her bath, wearing nothing but a towel, which is about to drop when another voice intrudes.
    “No,
you’re
Hank,” says the man who’s joined me at the trough. “I’m Dave. The sound guy, remember?”
    And his urine explodes against the porcelain with a force that makes me weak in the knees with envy.
    “What are you trying to do?” he wants to know. “Pass a stone?”
    I may have saved Missy from the deadly boredom of “The People Beat,” but it’s Tony Coniglia who has her complete attention now. Having discovered that the bar serves raw clams, he’s ordered several dozen, which arrive on crushed ice with cocktail sauce and lemon wedges. When Missy takes a clam, spears it with a cocktail fork, and dips it into the red cocktail sauce, Tony refuses to let her eat it that way. He is adamant, as if some article of his personal credo has been affronted. He wants to show Missy how it’s done, and she looks interested to learn. Holding up a clamshell between thumb and index finger, he squeezes two measured drops of lemon from the wedge. Spurning the cocktail fork, he raises the clam as if it were a communion wafer and allows it to slide off the shell and onto his waiting tongue.
    “Ooooh,” Missy coos.
    “The sea,” Tony says, having chewed twice and swallowed.
    “
All right!
” Missy exclaims, reaching for a clam.
    Tony cannot allow this. “Don’t rush,” he tells her gravely, as if dangerous, unforeseen consequences may be lurking. He will do one for her. She watches him dress the clam and then, eyes closed, offers her tongue, which quivers in anticipation. Tony takes his time delivering the clam, and Missy shivers when it finally arrives, crossing her arms over her ample bosom, hugging herself. Already I have to pee again.
    “The sea,” Tony says, by way of benediction, when she swallows.
    “Ooooh,” Missy repeats. “That’s good!”
    I spoon about a tablespoon of cocktail sauce onto a clam and eat it.
    “Pay no attention to that man,” Tony warns her seriously. “He can be mildly amusing upon occasion, but in his deepest heart, he is unrefined. He is a cretin.”
    Missy looks me over to see if this can be so. I eat another clam, the same way, not wanting to confuse her. She’s wearing too much makeup, it seems to me, though this may have to do with her work before the camera. Or maybe she has bad skin.
    Tony fixes her another clam, feeds her so that she must hug herself again. “I love your friend,” she confides to me in a stage whisper. Tony grins at me, one eyebrow arched, as if to suggest that he can’t help having this effect on young, large-breasted professional women. “He reminds me of my father,” she says.
    “Is your father alive?” I ask.
    She confesses that he died several years ago.
    “Then I see the resemblance.”
    When a shout goes up, I see myself on the big-screen TV, holding Finny aloft by his slender neck. It’s quick, then I’m gone again, and I realize this is a promo. First, there will be a commercial, then the story.
    “Turn it up!” Missy bellows.
    It takes a minute, but by the time the commercial is over, we have sound. For some reason I don’t look right, standing there, and it’s not the fact that I’m gripping a goose by the neck. Only when the camera pulls in close do I remember that I conducted this interview wearing the fake nose and glasses. I had imagined these to be a more obvious exaggeration of my features, but on television at least they aren’t. The black plastic rims of the glasses don’t look obviously toylike, and the flesh-colored plastic nose just looks big. In close-up, on a large-screen TV, you can see that it’s a fake nose, but I wonder how many people at home watching regular TV’s will conclude that this is the way I look.
    To my surprise, the film editor at the station has cut very little of my unprepared text, and now, sitting here in The Tracks, I deeply wish that he had cut it all. I begin to suspect, for the first time, that the sight of a fiftyish English professor with a stranglehold on a startled, terrified goose may not be funny. When I hear myself repeat my threat to kill a duck a day until I get my budget, the camera zooms in on Finny, whose bulging eyes and flapping wings convey to the folks at home that this wacko means business. But the crowd at