Straight Man (7 page)

“My natural physical position, you mean,” I clarified.

He frowned at this distinction.

“My spiritual position is the outfield,” I explained. True, I might be a good target for shortstops to throw at, but I’m most myself ranging in the outfield after fly balls. I no longer have great speed, but I still possess a long, graceful stride. I feel like an outfielder. “Left field is my Zen position,” I continued. “You can damage an outfielder by making him play first. No man should be forced to play out of spiritual position.”

“What’s a spiritual position?” my wife’s voice condescends out of thin air. I look up and spot her in the window of her study, from which vantage point she’s apparently been studying me.

Have I spoken aloud? When I don’t immediately answer her question, she says, “Tell me you aren’t going running in the dark.”

“All the best relationships are based on honesty,” I reply. “I cannot in perfect honesty tell you that I’m not going running. I can promise that I won’t run very fast, if that’s of interest.”

“You’ve still got your cold.”

“I’m all better,” I assure her.

“Hank,” she says. “You’ve been eating antihistamines all week.”

“Allergies,” I explain. “Everything’s blooming.” I look around for an example of something in bloom.

Lily just shakes her head. Hasn’t enough happened to me already today, is her point. My nose is mutilated. Isn’t that sufficient? My going running along our dark county highway right now strikes her as perverse, an invitation to further injury. She believes there is a logic to this line of thinking—that my nose makes me especially vulnerable to a traffic accident tonight. I half-expect her to remind me that I’ve been stalked by mishap all year. Most recently, a couple weeks ago, I climbed a stepladder, lost track of where I was in relation to the garage’s cross beams, and rammed my head into a solid oak rafter. Lily found me fifteen minutes later sitting on the concrete floor, dazed, a thin line of blood squiggling from the part in my hair all the way down to the crewneck of my sweatshirt. I can tell by the look on her face that Lily’s thinking about bringing this up now, but she doesn’t. One of the nice things about our marriage, at least to my way of thinking, is that my wife and I no longer have to argue everything through. We each know what the other will say, and so the saying becomes an unnecessary formality. No doubt some marriage counselor would explain to us that our problem is a failure to communicate, but to my way of thinking we’ve worked long and hard to achieve this silence, Lily’s and mine, so fraught with mutual understanding.

“When you get back, let’s talk,” she says ominously, as if she’s been eavesdropping on my thoughts again.

“Okay,” I say, trying to sound eager or, failing that, agreeable.

“I’m thinking maybe I should cancel this trip,” she says.

“No,” I tell her. “You should go.”

“You’ll be okay?”

“Sure. Why not?”

But now it’s my wife who’s located the perfect rhetorical place for silence.

“Left field,” I explain, “is my spiritual position. Not first base.”

“I know, Hank,” she says, as if she’d like me to understand that this isn’t all she knows.

At the bottom of our hill, I turn left, as I do most evenings, and head out away from town. Lily turns right and jogs toward Railton, explaining that the run is prettier, also flatter. But it’s just like Lily to run toward town and, she would say, just like me to run away from it. My logic is simple. You don’t spend a lot of money building a house out in the country and then run back toward the town you just fled. If running in the opposite direction means that you’re running away, then so be it.

Lily’s logic must be more complex, but then she’s no great believer in Occam’s Razor. A teacher in the beleaguered public schools’ secondary system, she has more reason than I to flee the town but, as the daughter of a Philadelphia cop, also more inclination to turn and fight. Instead of using her tenure, her seniority, her obvious gifts as a teacher to better her position at the high school by teaching the honors students or, like so many of my colleagues’ spouses, by wheedling her way into the college and a somewhat lighter teaching load, Lily has plunged into the community’s educational nether regions, teaching the low-track kids, “the
rocks,” as they are referred to by the other teachers. No, our light, airy home in Allegheny Wells is not an escape from town for Lily, just a temporary refuge into which she can retreat and recharge her batteries for the next day’s wars. Though she goes slower, she jogs farther than I do, and from the crest of the last hill, before she heads back to Allegheny Wells, she can see Railton, sooty and sprawling and self-satisfied in the valley below, see, as it were, her task. Actually, I don’t know this to be true. I don’t know how far she runs. It’s what I imagine.

My running in the opposite direction acknowledges, I suppose, an even sadder truth—that we should have left Railton altogether, instead of making this coward’s march a slender four miles out of town. When the wind is right, wisps of dark, ashy film are borne on the breeze like polluted snow all the way from town. And so I run deeper into the green hills and woods, vaguely aware that these extend, more or less unbroken, all the way to Canada, where, beer commercials tell us, everything is pure and clean.

About a mile up the blacktop is the tiny village of Allegheny Wells proper, a community of some twenty houses, roughly the same size as the two Allegheny Estates developments. Here, the houses are smaller, two-bedroom raised ranches mostly, and they are clustered around, at the village’s only intersection, the steepled Presbyterian church, the lights in the belfry of which are coming on just as I lumber into town. Except during services, the church’s front door is always padlocked, probably to guard against the temporary conversions of cold, winded joggers like me. I consider doing a victory lap around the building and heading back. After all, that would be a two-mile run, and I only began jogging again a couple of weeks ago. But for some reason I’m energized by my throbbing nose and my visible breath escaping in white, reassuring bursts, so I decide to turn right at the intersection and jog up the half-mile grade to where my daughter Julie and her husband, Russell, have just this autumn built their house. My wife may believe that I run away from unpleasantness, but in my view there’s unpleasantness on all points of the compass, including this one.

This house of Julie’s is a proscribed topic. When I bring it up, Lily shoots me one of her warning glances and reminds me that we’ve agreed to butt out of our children’s lives. Basically, I agree. I dislike meddling in their affairs, even when it’s obvious as hell that somebody
ought to. Still, there wouldn’t have been much margin in pointing out to my daughter Julie that they could not afford this house she and Russell were building.

This simple fact is so manifest that it cannot have escaped even Julie, who has never understood money—how it comes to you, how long it’s likely to last, where it goes, how long it will be before there’s more, what you’ll do until then. More painful than her naivete is the fact that she doesn’t believe herself to
be
naive. Should you make the mistake of asking her why she’s doing something so stupid, she’ll explain it to you. The house, she informed me, would be not just a home but also a tax shelter. “You’re kidding, right?” I asked her, looking for signs that she might be kidding, finding instead evidence of anger. “Tax shelters are for people who make too
much
money,” I explained, “not too little. The fact that you resent paying taxes on your earnings doesn’t necessarily mean you need a shelter.” The effect of such fiscal wisdom on my daughter was so predictable that even I might have predicted it. All along it has been her intention not just to build this house but to build it
anyway
—that is, come hell or high water, in defiance of reality and sense, both of which represent for Julie the odds that will just have to be overcome. Julie likes movies, and I suspect she’s seen one too many of the sort where long odds are defied and faith rewarded. By trying to reason with her, I became part of the already long odds she’d vowed to beat. My daughter likes television, too, and I suspect that her thought process has been corrupted by advertising. Like many Americans, she no longer understands the meaning of simple words. She sees nothing absurd about the assertion “you
deserve
a break today” when it’s applied across the entire spectrum of society. She believes she’s
worth
the extra money she spends on her hair. Several of her friends have big houses. Doesn’t she
deserve
one too? Is she
worth
less than her friends?

Still, what Lily means when she says that we should butt out of our children’s lives is that it’s our duty to put the best possible face upon their behavior, even in the privacy of our own home. If my wife had her way, we would never allude to the sometimes insane behavior of our children, as if merely acknowledging their errors in judgment might further jinx their doomed schemes. Be fair, Lily is fond of counseling. Give them a chance to fail.

Fine by me. It’s the attendant pretense that mangles me. We have to pretend they’re being smart when they’re being dumb. Such pretenses, I have tried to explain to Lily, fly in the face of Occam’s Razor, which demands that entities must not be multiplied beyond what is necessary. Lies and pretenses, I explain, always require more lies and pretenses. “Promise you’ll act surprised,” is one of Lily’s favorite, supposedly harmless pretenses, one I’m required to act out every time somebody does an entirely predictable thing that is supposed to take me unawares. Feigned stupidity never strikes Lily as undignified, but it does me. For one thing, it’s always used against you later on. (We thought you might be suspicious when you saw all the cars parked outside on your fortieth birthday. Aren’t writers supposed to be observant?) Lily’s got her reasons too. Often they have to do with not hurting people’s feelings. And so I’m required to act surprised at the announcement of a mutual friend’s pregnancy a few short weeks after a hastily arranged wedding. “It hurts
my
feelings to pretend to be this dumb,” I tell my wife. “Don’t you care what people think of
me
?” But she just smiles. “They won’t notice,” she always explains. “It’ll blend in with all the times you’re genuinely slow.”

With regard to Julie and Russell’s new house, I’ve been required to pretend that the result will not be disaster. To further the illusion of our confidence in their judgment, we’ve loaned them money. That I’ve kept my own counsel on the matter has annoyed Lily and at times made me mildly repentant. If the house bankrupts them now, it will be my fault for having failed them at the level of psychic support.

There’s about a fifty-fifty chance it will. Russell has recently quit a good job for what he thought would be a better one, only to discover that several large government loans needed to start up the project he was to direct have not been approved as expected. It could be months, he now admits. A year maybe. In the meantime I don’t know how they’re living. It can’t be on Julie’s service manager’s salary at a department store at the Railton Mall. Russell, a computer software specialist, does a little freelancing.

The house itself is testimony to their sudden reversal of expectation. From the front it’s a dead ringer for our own house, not coincidentally, since they’ve used our contractor, our plans. And it’s true what Lily says. I’m sometimes genuinely slow on the uptake. Seeing
their house rise out of the ground was an unsettling experience, but it took many weeks for me to tumble to the reason—that our daughter was building our house. Only when I saw the two decks—one front, one back—did the realization come into clear focus. “How’d they get the plans is what I’d love to know,” I told Lily.

“From me, of course,” my wife said, as if this were one of life’s mysteries that even I should be able to plumb on my own.

“You gave them our house plans?” I said, life’s essential sense of mystery undiminished.

“It saved them a lot of money.”

There were other benefits too, according to my daughter. “Carl,” she explained, in reference to our builder, “says he’s going to get the whole thing right this time. He says he remembers all the little ways he fucked up when he built your place. Ours will be perfect.”

Mysteries on top of mysteries. How is it that my daughter is on a first-name basis with the same contractor who worked me like one of his own laborers and pocketed my checks without ever encouraging the tiniest intimacy? And when did my younger daughter start using the phrase “fucked up” in my presence? And, most important, why would Julie want a replica (however perfect) of her parents’ house?

“Does this mean that if I ever tire of living in my own fucked-up house I can come live with you?” I asked. To which my daughter put her hands on her slender hips, a dead ringer for her mother in this posture, truth be told, and said, “Oh, Daddy, you don’t have to get all pissy. You know what I meant.”

Pissy?

“Besides,” she said with a grin, “the houses won’t be identical. Ours is going to have a pool and Jacuzzi.”

It doesn’t though. At least not yet. They’ve put off the construction of these for now. Lily has informed me of this, as if to convince me that there’s nothing to worry about, that Russell and Julie are more sensible than I’ve given them credit for being, the house itself notwithstanding.

But when I chug up to the mailbox and survey their house, there are signs of desperation that transcend the shrunken mound of earth alongside the half-dug hole. That they’ve run out of money and the bank’s confidence rather precipitously is everywhere evidenced. The
winding driveway remains unpaved, the lot unlandscaped, the windows unshuttered. A piece of bright blue tarp flaps over the chimney hole like a flag. Their house sends a chill through me, the fear rendered more personal by the resemblance of their house to Lily’s and mine. I have two thoughts in rapid succession, the second coming before I can dispel the first. The first is: My God, they aren’t going to make it. The second thought is that, in some deeper sense, I’m looking not at their house but rather at my own, and this causes me to recall Teddy’s question to my wife as I watched from the kitchen window. Did she think I was going to be all right, was what he’d wanted to know. Or at least I think that was what he was asking.