Straight Man

will win.
    I am about to confide a few other things to my dog when I remember that Julie is inside. In fact, it may be her gaze upon me that causes my daughter to return so forcefully to my consciousness. When I look up at the window of the room Lily uses as her study, I see Julie framed there under the eaves. I give her an embarrassed wave and point to my car to let her know I’m leaving again. When she doesn’t respond, I realize she’s on the phone, perhaps not looking at me at all. Her expression is complex, not easily read, but in it I can imagine Lucky Hank’s luck heading south.

CHAPTER
19
    When I stop by the office on my way to class, I discover that Lily has called just minutes before and left a number for me to call her back. According to Rachel, who’s handed me a sheaf of pink message slips, half a dozen other people want to talk to me too. “And that red-haired boy’s been lurking outside your office again?” she informs me. In general, students are not encouraged to loiter inside the English department office, where they are likely to overhear things that will reveal how much their professors dislike each other, but Leo is the only student strictly prohibited from doing so. His intense presence particularly unnerves Rachel. “Every time I look up, he’s watching me with this look on his face? Like he’s got X-ray vision?” she confessed to me back in January. “I feel like I’m sitting here in my underwear?”
    “I’d be very surprised if you were wearing even that much in Leo’s imagination.”
    “Also, Finny’s been coming in every fifteen minutes to see if you’ve returned?”
    “This is the true nature of power in academe,” I tell Rachel sadly, having taken her warnings to heart and preparing to duck out again. “Those who have any at all have to use the back stairs.”
    It’s only ten minutes until my class, but I take the elevator down to the basement, where there’s a recreation room lit by a regiment of soda and juice machines lined up against the far wall. There’s also an old-fashioned telephone booth, the kind you can enter and close the folding door behind you. This I do, despite the robust bouquet of undergraduate urine inside. I use my calling card. Lily picks up on the first ring.
    “Hank,” she says, sounding so weary and melancholy that I wonder if her interview has gone badly, until it occurs to me that it must have been Lily that I saw Julie talking on the phone with as I left. “It feels like a week.”
    “My thought exactly,” I confess, and that’s not all I’m thinking. Because it’s both wonderful and oddly sad to hear the familiar voice of this woman who shares my life, to feel how much I’ve missed it. By what magic does she softly say my name and in so doing restore me to myself? More important, why am I so often ungrateful for this gift? Is it because her magic also dispels magic? Is it because her voice, even disembodied as it is now, renders lunatic the fantasies that have been visiting me of late? “Lily …,” I say, allowing my voice to trail off and wondering if, when I say her name, it has for my wife any of these same magical properties.
    “Where on earth are you?” Lily wants to know, apparently puzzling over a different vocal mystery altogether. “Your voice sounds funny.”
    I explain that I’m hiding from Finny in a phone booth in the basement of Modern Languages. It’s a measure of how long she’s been married to an academic that Lily sees nothing unusual about this.
    “Your cold is back,” she remarks.
    “Nah,” I say, though of course it is, as predicted, even though I took another twelve-hour antihistamine before leaving the house this morning.
    “I talked to Julie earlier,” she says. “I guess I picked a bad time to leave, didn’t I?”
    “I don’t know what to make of it yet,” I tell her. “I haven’t seen Russell.”
    “It’s been brewing for some time,” she says.
    “It has?”
    “Yes, Hank, it has,” she says, the remark trailing accusation.
    “Why didn’t I know it?”
    A pause. “I don’t know, Hank. Why
don’t
you know these things?”
    “Because I don’t want to? Is that what you’re saying?”
    “No,” my wife says gently, perhaps even affectionately. “Just that you depend on me to know them. Anyway. I’m less worried about Julie than about her father.”
    “I gather you saw me on television.”
    “Yes, this morning.”
    “I’ve become a hero in certain quarters,” I