Straight Man (43 page)

“The job he wanted me to take before is gone, of course,” he continues. “But he says he thinks he can scare something up.”

“In Atlanta.”

“That’s where the company is, Hank. Atlanta. If the company were in Railton, this whole story would be different.” Now that he’s got Julie out of his mind’s eye, Russell is his mischievous, slightly mocking self again.

“I understand that, Russell.”

“Good. I thought maybe you’d nodded off there for a minute.”

I assure him I’ve been hanging on every word.

“Anyway. If this guy calls back, I guess I’ll take the job. If I can scrape together plane fare.”

The phone rings inside. “That must be Lily,” I tell him, “calling to offer you the money.”

“She’s always right there,” he admits. “You lucked out.”

We listen to the phone ring.

“Aren’t you going to answer that?” Russell wants to know, as the machine picks up.

After a few seconds we hear a voice leaving a message. With the closed patio door between us and the machine, I can’t tell who it is.

Russell gets to his feet. “I guess I’ll let you go back to your life. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention Atlanta to Julie.”

I promise him I won’t.

“And thanks for everything,” he says, looking around the deck. “I always feel right at home here for some reason.” He surveys my house with more affection than I’ve ever seen him view his own. “You lied about the wasps though,” he says, pointing at the eaves where a nest would hang if we had truly identical houses.

We shake hands. “Promise me you won’t leave without seeing Julie,” I tell him, because I suspect that this is his plan.

“I’ll call her,” he says. “I don’t think she wants to see me.”

“You should go see her anyway,” I tell him. He needs to see that she’s all right. That she isn’t on the floor anymore. That she won’t be going around for the rest of her life with one hand over her eye. “Lily will be back tomorrow, sometime. You can meet over here if you want.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Where are you staying?”

“With a friend.”

I hand him a slip of paper and a pen. “Leave me a number where I can reach you if I have to.”

He’s reluctant, but he does as he’s told.

“Aren’t you going to tell me how you managed to fall in the sewer earlier?”

I consult the stars for dramatic effect. “I fell asleep and wet my pants. Then I got embarrassed and hid in the ceiling above my office.”

He shrugs. “You don’t want to tell me, just say so, Hank.”

“Maybe some other time,” I suggest. Later, I’m sure I’ll be able to come up with something more plausible than the truth. Sure, I’m out of practice, but
The New York Times
once said of young William Henry Devereaux, Jr., son of the famous literary critic, that his stories had “taken firm root in the garden of realistic fictions.”

“My feelings are kind of hurt,” Russell admits. “I mean, I told you everything.”

“Not everything, Russell,” I say. “We never tell everything.”

He looks surprised to learn that I know this. Like maybe it’s his secret. What does he think a man like me
does
for a living?

Russell has been gone maybe twenty minutes when a car pulls in at the foot of our road. I track its headlights through the trees as it snakes up the incline past my neighbors’ houses. When it passes the driveway of the last of these, it can mean only one thing. I am to have a visitor.

I momentarily hope it’s Lily, returning early to surprise me, but I know it isn’t. You’re married to a woman as long as I’ve been married to Lily, you get to know not only the sound of her vehicle but the sound that vehicle makes with her at the wheel. I’ve watched my wife come up this hill hundreds of times, and I know this is not she. It’s not Lily’s car, not her speed, not her headlight pattern. This is someone who’s been here before, but not for a while, at least not at night, who remembers how sharp the turns in the road are without remembering exactly where they are, who has to go slow enough to really watch. I fear it’s Teddy Barnes come to celebrate my victory, to ask if it’s true, what Gracie said about my being in the ceiling, to plan further strategy, to find out if Lily’s returned and bring her up to date on
her husband’s lunacy. Or, worse, he may want to talk about his wife and Orshee.

Telling Occam to stay, a command he occasionally obeys, I get up and turn on the outside lights, then go over to the railing in time to see Tony Coniglia, one of the very few people in the world whose companionship I might actually enjoy tonight, get out of his car. “
You
are not answering your phone,” he observes. “And you’re not returning calls, as that lying machine of yours promises.”

He’s carrying a bottle. Occam woofs down at him.

“I myself have had a dozen calls for you tonight,” Tony informs me. “Your colleagues say you disappeared after the department meeting. They seem to think you might be hiding out at my place.”

“You know the kind of company I keep. If it weren’t for erroneous conclusions, these people would never arrive at any at all.”

He hasn’t made any move to join me on the deck. Instead he’s leaning against the grille of his car. The night has grown quiet, and I can hear the ticking of his engine as it cools. The temperature has fallen since Russell left. Occam circles himself twice, collapses onto the deck, sighs, and puts his head back down on his paws.

“Come on up.”

“I will,” Tony says, without showing any such inclination. “I’m trying to solve a mystery first.”

“Okay, I’ll bite,” I tell him. “What mystery?”

“There’s vomit on the hood of your car,” he points out.

He’s parked right next to me, and now that I look, I see he’s right. This, it occurs to me, is my father’s fault. But for his books taking up space in the garage, my car would have been safely inside.

Tony goes over to examine the mess. “Fresh, I’d say. A good forensic team would put the time within the hour.”

I can’t help grinning.

Tony trots up the deck stairs, goes in through the sliding door to the kitchen, and returns with two glasses, handing me one. “Alcohol,” he says conspiratorially, holding up the bottle for my inspection. It’s a fifth of very expensive Kentucky sour mash, about two-thirds full. Even in the poor light of the deck I can see that Tony’s eyes are bloodshot, that he’s started on this bottle without me. “When this bottle is gone, I know a place where we can score another.”

He sets the bottle down, leans forward, hands on the railing, peers down at the hood of my car. “Whoever was sick,” he says, “was sitting in this chair.” He examines his hands for further evidence, brushes them off on his pants legs before pouring two heavy shots of whiskey. I take a sip, and it’s everything you could hope for. Billy Quigley, were he here, would weep religious tears.

Tony is studying me, deadpan. “He was a small man. Left-handed. He walked with a limp. He served in India. So much is obvious, but beyond this I can tell you nothing except that he may have recently eaten asparagus.”

While Tony has been investigating this mystery, I’ve solved one that’s been on the periphery of my thoughts all afternoon. Seeing Tony has somehow caused the penny to drop. The girl I saw in the back of the police car this afternoon is the same one I saw last Thursday night when I left Tony’s, the big girl who wasn’t afraid when I came out of the trees at three in the morning, who told me I wasn’t him. The “him” she referred to, I now realize, is Tony, and I also comprehend that it was to his house that she was heading. I remember the phone calls that kept getting Tony out of the hot tub, as well as the fact that after the last one he left the phone off the hook, which must have made her decide to come see him. And I remember Missy Blaylock’s insisting, this afternoon, that I ask Tony about what happened at his house after I left. My final intuition is that it must have been Tony’s class the girl crashed this afternoon, causing the police to remove her from campus, the ramifications of which caused Tony to cancel our scheduled racquetball match. William of Occam would be pleased with my deduction, which accounts for the major facts, is contradicted by none of them, and is not unnecessarily complex. All my theory lacks is reasons, human motives, the truth behind the known facts. The former novelist in me wonders this: How close could I get to the deeper truths, proceeding from the factual outline?

Not very, probably. Tony’s mock investigation of the vomit on the hood of my car suggests how wide is the gap between known facts and a genuine understanding of their meaning. How could he be expected to intuit Russell and Julie, the breakup of their marriage, the failure of their love. What ails people is never simple, and William of Occam, who provided mankind with a beacon of rationality by which to view
the world of physical circumstance, knew better than to apply his razor to the irrational, where entities multiply like strands of a virus under a microscope. Russell is not a small man, he’s not left-handed, he hasn’t served in India, he doesn’t walk with a limp, and he probably hasn’t eaten asparagus recently, but past a certain point, almost any set of random details stand about as good a chance of being true as any other.

The limitations of intuition, of imagination, are what make one-book authors of men like William Henry Devereaux, Jr., I fear, and perhaps this is why I am envious of Rachel tonight. For though I told my agent that I was not jealous, the truth is that I am. Not of her success. The envy I feel has less to do with accomplishment or validation than with the necessary artistic arrogance that these breed. Usually all questions, Rachel, tonight, will feel like she got some of the answers right, saw some of the patterns clearly enough to detail them convincingly. She will consider the possibility that the leaky vessel of her talent may be seaworthy after all. Instead of being dictated to by the waves of doubt that threaten to swamp all navigators, she’ll turn bravely into the wind. The moment she does is the moment I envy.

Tony is peering at me strangely, and I realize I’ve just suffered another ellipsis. As I usually do when this happens, I consult my watch to see if I can ascertain how long I’ve been away. And as usual I’m prevented from arriving at a valid conclusion by not having noted when the ellipsis began.

“Pay attention,” Tony says, “because we’re about to embark on an intricate topic.”

I’m glad to hear this. Nothing could please me more than to be assured that Tony has come armed with a subject, prepared to hold forth.

“I’ve been considering the mystery of human affection,” he says, by way of preamble.

I nod. “You’ve moved on. Last week you were thinking about fornication.”

“I’m thinking of giving up fornication,” he says, deadpan, as always.

“The act or the subject?”

“Both. There wasn’t much point in discussing the subject with you, and I’ve concluded that the act may be coming between me and my true vocation, which is religious.… You laugh.”

“Now you’re saying you have a lot to offer God?”

“I happen to have the loftiest spiritual dimension of any person you know,” Tony insists. “Are you aware that I attend Mass every day of the week?”

I tell him the truth, that I was not aware of this. In fact, from the way he’s informed me, I can’t tell whether it’s true or not.

“I
do
have a lot to offer when it comes to spiritual matters. The mystery of human affection, especially as it pertains to desire, is a spiritual matter, though not everyone understands this.”

I settle deeper into my deck chair. We’re rolling now.

“Take men like us,” he suggests. “We are, in the end, true men of faith.”

“We are?”

“I shit you not.”

“Good,” I say. “Great.”

“For instance. I believe it would not be inaccurate to say that you feel considerable affection for your wife. A lovely woman, if I may say so, well worthy of your highest regard.”

“According to Teddy I don’t love her enough,” I tell him.

“Aha!” Tony exclaims. “Teddy also bears the burden of human affection for the very same woman. Whose affection is greater? Yours by virtue of knowing the beloved, or his by virtue of
not
knowing her?”

“We’re talking biblical knowing here?”

“We’re talking knowledge with a capital
N
. We’re talking epistemology. We’re no longer talking fornication except insofar as fornication helps us to know our spiritual world. I thought that was clear. You feel affection for your wife but also, if I’m not mistaken, for other women?”

I don’t respond right away, having concluded that this question, like most of Tony’s questions, is rhetorical. Apparently not. “What are we talking about here, love?”

“Affection,” Tony says. “Human affection. Oh, all right, love. You’re in love with your wife.”

I do not deny this.

“And yet you feel affection for other women?”

“I feel”—I search for the word—“crushes.”

“Ah,” he sounds sad, disappointed. “This unfortunately supports the consensus view that you are a case of arrested adolescent development.
But let’s not be hasty. Let’s assume that a crush is intuitive knowledge of the virtue of another human being. And that our attraction to virtue, in the final analysis, is our desire to know God.”

“By all means,” I say, though I can think of no reason why we should assume any such thing. I recall looking down the front of Meg Quigley’s shirt this afternoon, and the undeniable attraction I felt was pretty much devoid of theological dimension.

“But is it love? Are you in love with other women?”

“Maybe half in love.”

Tony squints at this, but there’s no stopping him. “You’re half in love with other women who are not your wife,” he sums up, nodding, as if this is a perfectly reasonable position. “Half is okay. Half is legitimate. There’s nothing wrong with the fiftieth percentile. No
more
than half is the rule. You’re sure it’s not fifty-one percent?”

I take another sip of whiskey and track its warm glow all the way down into my belly. “Teddy thinks I only half-love my wife though. If true, that would mean I love these women equally, those who are my wife and those who are not.”