Straight Man (42 page)

“I don’t think much about it, Russell. I guess I like it well enough. We’ve had a comfortable existence since we built.” If Lily were here, she’d explain that I’m like most men, oblivious to my surroundings. But I do like the fact that the house we built has lots of windows, plenty of light. And I like being far enough away from the university that I can’t be called in to campus every time somebody leaves the lights on.

“I ask,” Russell says, “because I’ve never hated anything so much in my life.”

“You hate my house, Russell?”

He looks over at me in the dark. “My house,” he clarifies.

“But they’re identical,” I remind him. “I can’t help feeling you’ve insulted my house.”

Russell wisely ignores this. “I hate the house itself,” he continues. “I hate the furniture. I even hate all the things we’d have if the money hadn’t run out.”

“Next you’ll be saying you hate my daughter.”

I expect a quick denial, and I don’t get it. “Here’s what I don’t understand,” he says. He’s choosing his words very carefully, as well he might. He knows I’m fond of him but doesn’t know how much this will count for in the overall scheme of things. He’d like my fondness for him to be trump in this game, but he suspects it isn’t. Or maybe it’s just that what he has to say is hard. “You and Lily aren’t … acquisitive,” he says finally.

Again, I’m not sure how to respond to this. His compliment trails an insult, as he well knows. How did two people like Lily and me manage to raise such an acquisitive daughter? is what he wants to understand. He actually seems to want me to explain it to him. What I’d like to explain is that I don’t think Julie in her heart of hearts is all that
acquisitive either. She’s just unhappy and frustrated and she hasn’t yet discovered how to “be” in the world. Unsure what to desire, she simply wants. Or this is the conclusion I’ve come to. A father’s too generous theory, perhaps. Applied evenly, it might be a rationale for acquisitiveness in general, not just in my daughter. Who
is
truly at home in the world? Who
is
sure what to desire? Well, lots of people, I answer my own question. Lots of people know exactly what they want. I just can’t believe Julie is one of them. I can’t believe my daughter’s soul is so easily purchased.

“You want to tell me how she got that shiner, Russell?” I ask, before our discussion becomes too abstract.

“She didn’t tell you?”

“Last Friday she said you shoved her,” I tell him. “This morning she suggested maybe that wasn’t the full story.” These are approximate statements I’m making to him actually. Julie neither told nor suggested anything to me this morning. She told my machine, while I stood by, paralyzed, and listened.

Russell nods, gets to his feet, and leans over the railing of the deck, peering down in the dark, at I can’t imagine what. When the breeze shifts, I catch a distinct whiff of lupine presence. I’m expecting Russell to speak when I see his body heave violently, and he begins to retch off the side of the deck. Occam awakens, gets quickly to his feet, goes over to survey the situation, then turns and looks at me expectantly. Humans have a more complex response to regurgitation than animals do, and I’d like Occam to understand this. I’d like for him to understand that we people do feel natural sympathy for someone in this sort of distress, even as we choose to limit our personal involvement. I try to convey all this to my dog in a look, but he’s having none of it, I can tell. He’d like to
do
something. If he could think what, he wouldn’t mind getting his paws wet. He can always lick them dry later. Wet paws are a small thing when weighed against suffering. What’s wrong with me? is what he’d like to know. Well, I’ve just showered, for one thing. Still, he’s right. I
should
do something. So I go inside and get a swatch of paper towels and return with them when it feels safe. Russell is still standing at the rail, but his body has stopped heaving. I hand him the paper towels, which he accepts gratefully. “I warned you about my gag reflex,” he says. “I’ve felt like doing that all day. I wonder if I’m coming down with something.”

He collapses back into his deck chair. Occam sniffs the paper towels. There’s no aspect of this entire proceeding he doesn’t want to understand.

“What’s down there anyway?” Russell wants to know, indicating whatever is below the spot where he lost the contents of his stomach. I haven’t turned on the exterior lights, so beyond the deck, which is illuminated by the kitchen light, it’s pitch black.

“Don’t worry about it,” I tell him.

He uses a clean paper towel to wipe his forehead. “I feel better,” he confesses.

“I bet.”

He looks over at me and offers up a weak grin. “Do you realize that during the last hour we’ve managed to entirely gross each other out?”

“Male bonding, they call it.”

“It works,” he shrugs.

This is a funny, touching thing for Russell to say, and I
am
touched, though the emotion is complicated by the fact that I too have a hair-trigger gag reflex.

“I appreciate the fact that you haven’t gone ballistic over all this, Hank. All weekend I’ve been thinking you probably wanted to kill me. I guess that’s why I had to see you. To find out.”

“I harbored a violent thought or two,” I assure him. Now that we’ve bonded, I wouldn’t want him to get the idea that I’m incapable of righteous fury, that my daughter can be knocked about with impunity, just because her father’s an English professor and in theory a pacifist. Not that I ever really believed that Russell knocked Julie around. Some damn thing has happened though, and apparently he’s going to tell me what. Whether what he’ll tell me is true, whether I’d recognize the truth if I heard it, these are other questions. I can tell one thing. Whatever Russell means to tell me is either a difficult truth or a difficult lie. He doesn’t launch right in. He’s scratching behind Occam’s ears, and the animal’s limbs are palsied with pleasure.

“She came home with this chair,” Russell finally says, his words small in the dark, and again I imagine wolves gathering in the woods behind the house. “For the guest room. As if we could afford to have guests. She’s telling me she got this great deal because the store is going into bankruptcy. Sixty percent off. Only three hundred dollars.”

He stops scratching Occam to rub his own temples with the thumb and index finger of his left hand. His right hand contains the wadded up paper towels. I can tell he’d like to toss them over the railing, but he doesn’t.

“The idea of buying something at a bankruptcy sale …,” he begins, then stops and laughs bitterly. “I mean, you’ve got no idea how strapped we are, Hank.”

He shakes his head, a lost man. “Actually, that’s a dumb thing to say, after all the money you guys have loaned us.”

I nod, agreeing about something, I’m not sure what. “How much money have we loaned you?” I ask, genuinely curious.

“Too much,” he says, leaving me in the dark, where, if Lily were here, she would say I belong. “Anyhow, I felt something in me snap,” he explains, staring out over the tops of the trees. The darkness is so complete that the trees and the sky blend into each other.

“I looked at her and that chair and I
did
hate her, Hank. I’m ashamed to admit it, but right that second, I did. Lately, I’ve mostly hated myself for being out of work when she was working, but right then I hated her worse, and God it felt good to hate her more, that look on her face when she brought in the chair.”

He’ll allude to her face, but not her eye, I think, and for this I am grateful. I know the expression he’s referring to, and I know the way that old injury drags the one side of Julie’s face down, making her look like a stroke victim. It’s a thing she can’t help, so Russell won’t mention it. He’s too decent to enter that detail in evidence before her father, even though it’s the thing that contains and represents what he most wants me to understand. What he wants me to understand is how, under the right circumstances, a person you love can be ugly, repulsive.

“Anyhow,” he continues. “I knew I couldn’t stay in any house that contained that chair. That sounds ridiculous, I know, but it was the one thing I was most sure of.” He chuckles, like a man who knows that what he’s chuckling at isn’t funny. “You’ll appreciate this, Hank. A man and his wife. Faced off. Ultimatum time. It’s either me or the chair, he says with a straight face. Not, it’s either me or him. Your husband or this other man you’re in love with. That would be a tough one,
right? No, I tell her to choose between me and a chair she bought on sale, sixty percent off.”

“Well, it may have been on sale, but it wasn’t cheap,” I tell Russell. “Three hundred bucks is not a cheap chair.”

“I’m not sure you’re grasping my point,” Russell admits. “My point is that, when she had a choice between her husband and an inanimate object, she chose the chair.”

“I understand that, Russell, I do. And I can see where it would hurt your feelings.”

“She didn’t even hesitate, Hank.”

“Except it doesn’t prove that she doesn’t love you,” I tell him.

“She just loves the chair more? Is that what you’re telling me?”

“Actually, I was going to say it proves she knows where to plant the knife. She doesn’t really prefer the chair. She just knows how much it will hurt you if she acts like she does.”

He hangs his head. “I know,” he admits. “By the time I packed my bag and came back downstairs, I could see everything had changed. She’d put the chair off to the side. She had tears in her eyes, and she was standing in front of the door. We could have made it all up right there. It was my inch to give, and I couldn’t give it. I didn’t hate her anymore. In fact, I wanted to take her and make love to her right then.”

“Careful, Russell,” I warn him. I know he’d like me to understand, to chart his emotional trajectory, but this is my daughter we’re talking about.

“I wanted my marriage and I wanted my wife. Hell, I even liked the damn chair. It’s not a bad-looking chair or anything.”

“She’s got her mother’s good taste,” I admit.

“But like you said, she’d hurt my feelings, and I wanted to hurt her back. And I felt this strange … rush. She’d tried to run this bluff, see, and I’d called it. She’d lost, and now it was time for her to learn her lesson. So instead of …”

I wait awhile for him to finish, but he doesn’t. “Right,” I say, because I hate to see him struggling for something I understand already. Hell, I could finish this story for him.

“So I went over to where she was standing in front of the door and told her to get out of the way. I remember it didn’t even sound like my
voice. I kept wondering, who are these people? And I was still thinking, I can stop all this right now.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No,” he says. “When she wouldn’t get out of the way, I set the bag down and took her by the shoulders.”

He held his hands out before him in the dark, seeing her there.

“Then … I don’t know. She must have tripped over the bag. I heard a crash, and when I turned she was on the floor. She’d fallen into …”

He stops, unable to continue.

“The chair,” I say.

He stares over at me through moist, confused eyes. “No, the stereo cabinet.”

“Oh, sorry,” I say. In my writing workshop I’d have explained to my students why, for symmetry, it had to be the chair.

Russell isn’t interested in symmetry. “I kept thinking, this isn’t right. She can’t have fallen. All I’d done was move her aside. Maybe I was a little rough, but I didn’t push or shove her. What was she doing down there on the floor?”

Again, I wait for him to continue, until I realize that this is the end of his story. He hasn’t reached any conclusions about these events because he hasn’t moved past the moment when he turned and saw Julie on the floor and imagined himself responsible, even though he didn’t quite see how he could be. As I’ve listened to him relate what happened, the thing that’s puzzled me is that he hasn’t asked how Julie is, and the deeper he’s plunged into his story, the more I’ve feared the reason for this was that he didn’t care. Now I suspect it’s something else. The image of Julie on the floor has burned onto the retina of his mind’s eye. It hasn’t occurred to him that she might be okay, because every time he thinks of her, he sees her there, on the floor, one hand clutching the already damaged eye. There simply is no
after
. If I asked him where he thought Julie was right now, the question would confuse him. Intellectually, he knows that days have passed, but where Julie
is
for Russell is right where he left her. Probably he went to her, tried to see how bad she was hurt, tried to take the hand away from her eye, but by then the dramatic focus of the scene would have shifted. A few minutes earlier it was
his
scene, and he could have
altered its course had he chosen. Now it was
her
scene to play out as she chose. Her decision, to exclude him, was the same as his own decision to punish her.

And now his life has turned mysterious. Because it can’t go forward, he can only keep going over and over how he got where he is. “Anyway,” he says. “I wanted you to hear my side. I know you have to believe Julie, but …”

“Listen, Russell,” I begin, without the vaguest idea how I’ll continue.

“I want you and Lily to know that I’m going to pay you back every nickel of the money you loaned us. I mean, even if Julie and I don’t make it.”

“Russell.”

“It may be a while,” he admits ruefully, this son-in-law of mine who’s been out of work since last fall. “I mean, maybe this has gotten me jump-started, finally. I’ve got to do something, even if it’s wrong.”

“People often say that before they do the wrong thing, Russell.”

“I called this guy in Atlanta today,” he says. “Last summer he offered me this great job there, terrific money. But we were building the house, so I said no.”

“This is a story I’ve heard before.”

“I don’t think so, Hank,” he says. “I never even told Julie.”

I just grin at him in the dark.

“Oh, I get it,” he says. “It’s a familiar story, you mean. How does it turn out?”

“I forget,” I tell him. I and the majority of my colleagues in the English department are how it ends. There’s no need to depress him further.