Straight Man

father’s last night when I tried to reach her there. I try to remember why I thought she’d be staying with her father. Was it something she told me? Something I concluded on my own? The former, I’m pretty sure, but my brain is still marinating in tequila, and it hurts to access my memory function. “Don’t forget you’re visiting my class,” Lily reminds me, last thing before saying good night, as if she’s anticipated, somehow, the state I’ll be in this morning.
    I call the number she’s left, but when the switchboard puts me through to her room, she doesn’t answer. Either she’s already left or she’s in the shower. Consulting my watch, I try to access the part of the brain that handles analytical functions, but it doesn’t seem to be on-line either. When the hotel operator comes back on, I’m visited by an oddly encouraging thought. Maybe the flatness, the regret I’ve detected in my wife’s voice is the result of misbehavior not on my part but rather onhers. I ask the operator to connect me to Jacob Rose’s room, which suggests something about the way the human brain prioritizes duties. I’ve been denied access to memory and analysis, but whatever department handles jealousy and suspicion (intuition?) is offering its services without being asked. After a long moment the operator tells me there’s no Jacob Rose registered in the hotel, but there’s something in her voice. “There’s a Jack Rosen,” she offers.
    “That’s what I said. Jack Rosen,” I explain, and a moment later Jack Rosen’s room is ringing, and the phone is picked up before I can figure the odds that Jacob would use this alias. A man answers. He sounds a little like Jacob Rose. Or a little Jewish, anyway, which is not surprising, given his name, whether or not he’s Jacob Rose. “Jacob,” I say. “Thank God I tracked you down.”
    After a beat, “Who is this?”
    “Hank,” I tell whoever I’m talking to. “Who do you think? Put Lily on.”
    “Lily who?”
    All right, so it’s not Jacob Rose, I conclude, hanging up, half disappointed, half puzzled. I don’t think I would have been pleased to discover evidence of my wife’s unfaithfulness, but there would have been something exciting about having made a chilling intuitive leap and had it turn out to be correct. It would have spoken far better of the leaper than to have made the same leap and been wrong, which is what I’ve been.
    Motor functions I have, so I drive into town and stop at my favorite lunch counter for breakfast and the morning newspaper. My appearance on the eleven o’clock news was apparently too late to make the morning edition, but I note that there is a short, one-column article on page seven, below the fold, about the suicide of William Cherry, who lay down on the railroad tracks two weeks ago. Neither his wife nor his children apparently observed any symptoms of discouragement or despair, though they acknowledged that he had grown more remote of late. Other than this he seemed upbeat and full of plans for his retirement.
    The best thing for tequila poisoning is pancakes, so I eat a plate of these, smothered in syrup, then adjourn to the men’s, where I find aprivate stall with a door that latches, and deposit in the toilet the pancakes, last night’s raw clams, the tequila, and my deep conviction that when William Cherry’s severed head was borne up the tracks by a train in the direction of Bellemonde, no one, not even his loved ones, suspected what was in it.
    Outside, the morning sky is a brilliant blue, and, taking a deep breath, I feel something of my father’s optimism. There’s no denying the beauty of this brisk spring day in Pennsylvania, no denying that I now feel much, much better.
    I arrive at the high school just as the bell between periods rings. I duck into a doorway to avoid being trampled by hordes of young Goths and Visigoths and Vandals, who are running, shoving, slamming into lockers, hurling vicious profanities at each other in the most casual manner, insults which seem not to register. When I was in school such language would have resulted in fistfights and a trip to the principal’s office.
    I spy Harold Brownlow, one of Lily’s colleagues, down the hall. Harold seems to have prevented a mugging, and he’s got a huge black boy pinned up against a bulletin board by means of nothing more lethal than Harold’s own gnarled index finger. “Give the boy back his lunch money, Guido,” Harold warns the big