Straight Man

can’t resolve the conundrum. She examines each one of us at the table. “Am I missing something?” she wants to know.
    “Volumes,” June says.
    Missy ignores this, turning back to Tony. “I mean, it’s really, like, weird that you’d just say that in front of her,” she explains, again using her thumb as a pronoun reference.
    “It’s not true,” Teddy tries to explain. “It’s a joke. He just likes to cause trouble.”
    Missy’s eyes first narrow as she considers this possibility, then widen with a recollection. “It’s true!” she says. “
You
’re the one who started everything back at the lake!”
    When Tony looks over at me, I warn him, “If you say pond, I’m going to club you over the head with this pitcher.”
    Seeing the margarita pitcher reminds Tony that his glass is empty. He fills it, then Missy’s, then tops off the rest of our glasses. The margaritas run out just before they get to June, though Tony seems not to notice.
    My threat to brain Tony Coniglia stirs a memory in Teddy, who says enthusiastically, “You should have been with Hank and me yesterday afternoon,” unaware that June is switching glasses with him. Then he recounts, Teddy-style, how we were forced off the road by Paul Rourke’s Camaro, how there was almost a fistfight right there on the shoulder of the road. I can tell that in the twenty-four hours since the event, Teddy has come to think of this melodramatic account as true. I can also tell he’d like me to back him up.
    “Were
you
there?” I ask innocently, just to see the look on his face. I mean, he’s known me for twenty years and knows better than to involve me in one of his stories. “Oh, right,” I say. “I remember now.”
    “Thanks a lot,” Teddy says, wounded, bleeding. And he’s lost his margarita to boot, he notices. Now we need another pitcher, and if he acknowledges this need, he’ll have to pay for it, something he’d rather not do. Only when June offers him a thin smile, draining the last of his drink, do I feel regret.
    “Can we get some more of those clams?” Missy wants to know.
    “Ah!” Tony says. “The sea.” As if what he means by this phrase is something very different from what the words denote.
    When Missy Blaylock gets up and heads for the women’s room, Tony watches her full, round hips. “I’m not easy,” he reminds us, “but I can be had.”
    “No,” June says, unpleasantly. “You’re easy.”
    “It’s true,” Tony sighs ruefully before catching a waitress and ordering more clams and another pitcher of margaritas.

CHAPTER
12
    It’s later than it should be, and I’m farther gone than I should be, and the moment when I might have exerted my free will, held up my hands, and shouted “No más!” to the cheering crowd is long past. I seem to recall trying to say “No más” at one point, only to discover that this turned the cheering crowd into a jeering crowd. And so, I’ve decided that it is the will of the people that I remain part of the festivities.
    That was then. Now we’re heading to Tony’s house, and “we” are Tony and Missy Blaylock and William Henry Devereaux, Jr. We three are wedged into the front seat of Tony’s Nissan Stanza. Tony and Missy would not hear of my reclining quietly in the backseat. No, I must be Porthos to their Athos and Aramis. We must be all for one in the front seat as the Stanza climbs dutifully up the dark, deserted streets toward Tony’s house, which abuts the woods high in the Railton hills, beyond which the slope becomes too severe to clear and build on. Missy is stroking the inside of my thigh, but I attach no significance to this, because she’s stroking the inside of Tony’s more meaningfully, andcooing at him too, nibbling his earlobe. I suspect that Missy is wired in parallel, so that her right hand does whatever her left is doing. Apparently she can’t rub the inside of Tony’s thigh with her left hand without doing the same to mine with her right. The front seat of the Nissan, designed for two, not three, makes it difficult to keep affection discreet.
    “Green,” I announce, when the traffic light we’ve been stalled at changes.
    “Envy,” Missy coos. She and Tony have been playing a word association game, and Missy must have concluded that I want to play too.
    “Green light,” I explain.
    “
The Great Gatsby
,” Tony answers confidently. “That’s an easy one.”
    I see no way out of this, except to point at the traffic signal above