Straight Man

by Richard Russo

  And Lily likes to remind me that it wasn’t building the house that proved problematic but rather purchasing the two adjacent lots to prevent neighbors. It was this, she argues, that marked the beginning of the English Department Wars that have raged ever since and that show no signs of abating. Lily would argue that when we purchased those lots, we set in motion the events that would inevitably lead to Gracie DuBois snagging my nose with her spiral notebook. And since the long chain of cause and effect can hardly be played out with so many of the players still alive, there’s every reason to expect further consequence, even from such an increasingly remote cause. Were it not for Occam’s Razor, which always demands simplicity, I’d be tempted to believe that human beings are more influenced by distant causes than immediate ones. This would be especially true of overeducated people, who are capable of thinking past the immediate, of becoming obsessed by the remote. It’s the old stuff, the conflicts we’ve never come to terms with, that sneaks up on us, half forgotten, insisting upon action. Nothing I said in today’s meeting could have provoked Gracie’s attack, though it might provoke another attack, provided we’re both still alive, in another decade or two, after my goading has had a chance to incubate. And if Paul Rourke ever finds a way to murder me and make it look like an accident, it won’t be the result of any recent, half-reasonable grievance he has against me but rather because I refused to sell him a lot almost twenty years ago when he wanted me to. Perhaps that’s the simplicity of it, the way Occam’s Razor might apply to old animosities in general and to Rourke and me in particular—that all things grow from the same seed, planted long ago.

  Actually, Rourke’s was the first of many offers we received and continue to receive on our two adjacent lots. What happened was that clearing a service road up through the trees on our hill caused a stampede. The man who owned the land had been promoting its development for years, without success. Everybody thought it was a good place to build houses, but nobody wanted to be first. Before the foundation of our place had been completed, three more lots had been sold halfway down the hill. That fall Jacob Rose was made dean, and he purchased the largest of the remaining lots, two full acres, and began construction on a house twice the size of ours, as befit a dean, even a dean of liberal arts. In November Finny and his wife bought a lot at the bottom of the hill. When I heard that, I went to the credit union for a loan. “We came out here to escape these people,” I explained to Lily, who hated to go further into debt for such a purpose.

  For some reason Lily did not share my sense of impending doom at the Sold signs that kept appearing, nailed to the trees along the service road. I couldn’t understand her failure to grasp what was happening. It was my opinion (then and now) that two people who love each other need not necessarily have the same dreams and aspirations, but they damn well ought to share the same nightmares. “Don’t you get it?” I told her. “The English department is moving to Allegheny Wells.”

  She stared at me for a long time, feigning incomprehension, then said my name in that way she has when she wants to suggest that I’m being more than usually unreasonable. “Hank,” she said. “Jacob Rose is your friend. There’s nothing wrong with Finny and Marie.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with Finny?” I exclaimed, pretending incredulity. Not quite pretending, actually. “My God, where will it end? Today Finny, tomorrow who?”

  Paul Rourke was who. He called me that December, three months after we purchased the adjacent lots with credit union money. “Not for sale,” I told him.

  “Everything’s for sale,” he said, pissing me off right away. He’d apparently concluded that I was being greedy. The price of the few remaining lots had doubled in the year since I’d purchased the first, and Rourke reminded me that if I sold both adjacent lots at the price he was offering, my own land would have been free. “Don’t be a prick,” he added. “I hear they’re going to start a new development on the other side of the road. Once they do that, who’s going to bend over for you?”

  “You’ll always bend over for me,” I recall saying. “And don’t think I don’t appreciate it.”

  He’d heard right though. Later that week a yellow bulldozer, a grader, and a large earthmover materialized along the shoulder of our county road, and for the next two days the air was thick with dust from falling trees. From our front deck Lily and I had a pretty good view. It was late November and the branches were barren, making the hill on the opposite side of the road visible. Red surveyors’ stakes were planted like winter blooms all over the hillside, mapping out lots and marking the twistings and turnings of the new access road.

  “I thought Harry told us the state owned all the land on the other side of the road,” I said to Lily, who had joined me on the snowy deck to watch.

  “Now you don’t want people to live across the road,” she observed. “You get more misanthropic every day.”

  “I get older every day,” I pointed out. I do not now and did not then consider myself a curmudgeon, but I can play that role. “My experience of human nature gets wider and deeper.”

  “Actually,” she said, “you just get more like your father.”

  I knew better than to argue when Lily introduces my father into an argument. It signals a willingness on her part to get down and dirty. Further, it’s an invitation for me to raise the issue of her own father, and I know where accepting such an invitation will lead. “The difference is that my father enjoys being him,” I told her. “Whereas I hate it.”

  This must have sounded like some kind of concession to her, because she did not pursue her advantage. “Wish now that you’d sold to Rourke?”

  “Good lord, no.”

  “You may, though. He’s going to hate you forever.”

  This did not strike me as a crystal ball type prediction. I reminded her that Rourke had hated me long before I refused to sell him the lot, that he was predestined to hate me, that he was, after all, a demented rationalist, that his field (eighteenth-century English poetry) was the dullest in the long history of literature, that Rourke was a bitter renegade Catholic and failed seminarian, that he couldn’t quite eliminate the old theology he’d come to despise, that it gave him Jesuit gas. Had I allowed him to become our neighbor, proximity would have provided him with a dozen more reasons to hate me. And, living right next door, where he could keep an eye on my comings and goings, he might even have found by this time some way of murdering me and making it look like an accident. Whereas, if he wanted to kill me now he’d have to cross the street, pass houses occupied by Jacob Rose’s ex-wife, the ex–football coach’s ex-wife, and other ex-wives who know me. I consider these ex-wives my last line of defense.

  For a while, though, I doubted even they would protect me, because the new development—Allegheny Estates II—was ill-fated from the beginning. Though to the naked eye our hills were identical Siamese twins, joined at a slender blacktop vertebra, the houses on the other side seemed cursed. Over there, when it rained everyone’s basement filled with water. Mud slid down the hill and formed an impressive mound at the base of the stone pillars that marked the entrance to the development. Under pressure, the pillars themselves began to lean inward perceptibly. Every wooden deck in the development was warped, and on quiet summer nights, on our side of the road, you could now and then actually hear the sound of a two-by-four snapping across the way.

  If all of this weren’t enough, a plague of gypsy moths defoliated the entire forest that surrounded Allegheny Wells one summer, giving us a wintry look in July, allowing those of us on the charmed side of the road a good view of life on the doomed side. The following summer the leaves returned to our hill, their green doubly bright and lush, while across the way more serious damage had mysteriously been done. There many trees died and had to be felled, increasing the severity of the mud slides, while the few remaining trees strained to produce anemic-looking foliage, which turned yellow-brown in early August.

  For all this—the flooded basement, the fissure in the family room wall
, the mud he has to drive through between the tilting pillars at the entrance to Allegheny Estates II, even the gypsy moths—Paul Rourke holds me personally responsible. His protestations to the contrary, I know Rourke to be a profoundly religious man, not at all an atheist as he claims. His truest belief is in an evil deity whose sole purpose is to tax and heap upon him evidence of life’s fundamental unfairness, of which I continue to be living proof. It was Rourke who inspired my Railton Mirror nom de plume. Lucky Hank, he calls me.

  I am not myself a religious man, but I can play that role, and I often have through the years with my disgruntled neighbor. I refer to the blacktop that separates our two developments as the Red Sea. It’s Egypt he’s living in, I tell him, and ask him what sort of infestation he expects this spring, what further sign of God’s displeasure will manifest itself, how many more signs he needs in order to become a believer. I tell him he worries me, living so close. So far, God has respected the macadam road that separates us, but the Old Testament is replete with stories of the sinner’s neighbors getting zapped right along with the sinner. I tell him the way I figure it, if I’d sold him the lot he wanted, I’d be zapped already.

  I finish up my stretching exercises as quickly as I can. I only do them as a concession to last summer’s pulled hamstring, done right at the base of our hill. It pinged like a banjo string, leaving me hobbled for a good part of the summer, requiring me to play first base in our summer softball league, and keeping me out of the NBA (the Noontime Basketball Association for faculty) all first semester. I can still feel the injury, a vague leg ghost. I pamper it in the knowledge that virtue is every now and then rewarded and because I’m determined to reclaim left field this summer, though I fear my injury may have cost me the position for good. Unfortunately, I have proven an excellent first baseman. I’m a tall, rangy target for the other side of the infield to throw at, and I have long arms that aid in the stretch. Phil Watson, who doubles as my doctor and the captain of our team, proclaimed after a single inning that first base was my natural position.

  “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.

  CHAPTER

  3

  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 build
ing 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?