Straight Man

us of ourselves and all the opportunities we found compelling reasons not to seize. Finny could have finished his dissertation and didn’t. June, on the strength of a good, well-placed article, had a job offer at a decent university over a dozen years ago, but Teddy had just gotten tenure and the other university couldn’t be talked into taking him as part of a package deal. Later, Teddy got an opportunity to move into administration, which would have been doing both himself and his students afavor, but June, perhaps out of revenge, talked him out of it. Even Gracie’s poetry once showed promise.
    We hadn’t, any of us, intended to allow the pettiness of committee work, departmental politics, daily lesson plans, and the increasingly militant ignorance of our students let so many years slip by. And now in advancing middle age we’ve chosen, wisely perhaps, to be angry with each other rather than with ourselves. We’ve preferred not to face the distinct possibility that if we’d been made for better things, we’d have done those things. Tony is one of the few contented men I know, and at the present moment he’s reaping the benefit of being so sensible. He is no doubt fondling the very breasts that Missy Blaylock believes are wasted in Railton. That she allows him to do so will deepen his conviction that he has a lot to offer women, and he’s far too intelligent to waste time wondering whether, when Missy’s eyes close and she begins to purr, it’s his tequila-marinated affection or her dream of a more upscale market that’s causing her nipples to harden.
    But these are the thoughts of a dripping man in the dark, dripping woods, and when I finish thinking them I punctuate the process with a good, confident zip of my fly. When I emerge from the shadows, I come face to face with a young woman who’s laboring on foot up the steep, slick sidewalk. She appears to be in her middle twenties, maybe younger. She has a full, pretty face, which seems almost to apologize for the fact that beneath her heavy, quilted winter coat she’s huge. Unaccountably, she’s wearing only rubber flip-flops on her bare feet. Her expression is so open, so unguarded that it reminds me of a begging dog that fully expects to get booted but can’t help licking you anyway.
    “I know you,” this girl says, though she’s not quite looking at me, or at least not at my eyes. “What’s your name?”
    She doesn’t know me, I’m certain, nor do I know her. The only thing I know for sure is that I’m not going to tell her my name. I’ve come out of the woods at three o’clock in the morning, and this girl is no more frightened of me than a wet kitten, and that, oddly enough, makes me frightened of her.
    “What’s your name?” she says again. She pronounces the word
name
so that it rhymes with
mime
. And then she repeats the question twice more, barely allowing her voice to drop before beginning again.
    She’s moving toward me now, as if she’d like to reach out and touch my face, and I take an instinctive step backward. “Are you all right?” I ask her, not sure what I mean by the question.
    It’s the sound of my voice, not my question, I think, that stops her. “You’re not him,” she exclaims, her voice full of calm wonder. “You’re not him at all.”
All
, pronounced
owl
.
    “No,” I agree. “I’m not.”
    “You’re not him at all,” she repeats, and turns away.
    “Are you okay?” I ask again, rather stupidly, but she has resumed her course up the hill. When her flips-flops skid on a slick patch of smooth concrete, she says, “Oooooh. Slip … er … eee.”

CHAPTER
14
    My father, William Henry Devereaux, Sr., whose return to the bosom of his family my mother enigmatically claims I am unprepared for, was always a frighteningly reasonable man, and like most reasonable men, he preferred day to night. Unless he’s changed, he’s still an early riser, usually up, bathed, and dressed by six-thirty. As a boy, I’d frequently find him in his study reading, idly sipping tea in his wing-back reading chair. No matter how early I got up, no matter how late he and my mother had been out the night before, there he’d be. According to my mother, he possessed an uncanny internal chronometer that allowed him to wake and turn off the alarm clock mere moments before it would have gone off.
    Anyway, here’s my theory. All men are assailed by doubts. Even those like my father who don’t seem to be. And we are all, I