Straight Man

at the same rate I’m emptying it.
    Twice since we’ve climbed into the tub, the phone has rung and Tony has left Missy and me alone in the burbling water. It’s a pretty noisy hot tub, and that, together with the drumming of the freezing rain on the deck, has discouraged conversation. Tony has been equal to the challenge and regaled us with all kinds of stories and the sorts of unrelated arcane bits of knowledge that enchant his students, but when the phone rings a third time, he leaves behind a silence that Missy and I don’t even attempt to fill. It’s only the third call that causes me to be curious about who’s calling Tony at two-thirty in the morning. I can see his head and thick shoulders through the kitchen window. He’s turned his back to us, as if he suspects that Missy or I possess lip-reading capabilities. If it’s Missy he’s worried about, there’s no need, for I note that she’s snoring peacefully, her head back on the tile, her lips parted slightly, her chest rising and falling to the beat of her respiration. Sleet is actually dancing off her forehead.
    Inside, Tony hangs up the phone, stares at it for a second, then takes the receiver off the wall-mounted hook. I wait for him to punch in a number, but instead he opens a kitchen cabinet and places the receiver inside. “Problem?” I inquire when he returns, since, under the circumstances, not asking would seem more unusual than asking.
    He waves away my suggestion that there’s a problem, though clearly there is something. Still, the sight of Missy Blaylock, naked and fast asleep in his hot tub, is enough to restore his good spirits. “What a picture,” he says, surveying Missy, her breasts buoyant on the surface of the water.
    Actually, it occurs to me that there are two pictures. The other is Tony, who is himself no more self-conscious than he’d be stepping out of the shower in the men’s locker room. He appears to feel neither misgiving nor regret over his tenured paunch and dark, sagging genitals.
    “Stay put,” he says, prancing impishly back into the house. When he returns he’s got a Polaroid camera. Missy, true to her profession, wakes up when she hears the shutter click. Tony takes several pictures, keeping the snapshots dry beneath a towel until they can develop. We huddle together in the tub then and wait for Missy to emerge from photographic darkness. She seems pleased with the result.
    “Are these great boobs or what?” she says, handing me one of the Polaroids. “Jugs like these are just plain wasted in the Railton market.”
    When the rain lets up, I tell Tony and Missy that it’s been great fun, but …
    “It was just one …,” Tony sings.
    “Of those things,” Missy finishes, surprising me that she knows a song lyric of that vintage. Maybe she’s older than she looks. In truth, I don’t care how old she is, and I feel no regret about leaving her with Tony. I locate my clothes, putting the Polaroid that Missy has pressed upon me as a memento of the occasion in my pocket, and dress in the warm kitchen, feeling full of my own virtue.
    It’s only when I get outside that I remember my car is downtown, that for the second time in as many days I’ve been chauffeured somewhere against my will. It’s about a ten-block walk down the hill. When I’ve gone about halfway I realize that I’m full of something all right, but it’s not virtue. There’s a patch of woods on my left, so I duck into the shadow of these to pee. I drip at about the same rate as the branches above, a leisurely process that allows for contemplation. Now that I’m not rubbing haunches with Missy in Tony’s hot tub, I can’t help ruminating on her lament that breasts like hers are wasted in a small media market like Railton, a remark that struck me as funny when she said it but sad upon further reflection. It’s Jacob Rose’s and Gracie’s and Rourke’s and Teddy’s and June’s and perhaps my own position in a nutshell. We have believed, all of us, like Scuffy the Tugboat, that we were made for better things. If anyone had told us twenty years ago that we would spend our academic careers at West Central Pennsylvania University in Railton, we’d have laughed.
    We aren’t laughing now though, and the thought of growing old together is not pleasant, though there’s nothing else for us to do. We might manage to be happy, even here, if the faces around us were new, but we have to look at each other every day, and this reminds