Straight Man

by Richard Russo

  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.

  A car that I’m aware has been following me up the long hill catches me here at its crest. I trot into my daughter’s drive to let the car pass. But whoever it is has slowed down in what appears to me comic concern for my safety. When whoever stops, blinker blinking, I realize it’s Julie, who toots me out of the way and then waves for me to follow her up the drive. The last thing I want is to visit her and Russell, but I’m stuck, so I do as I’m told. Actually, I’ve run farther than I planned, so maybe resting up before I head back isn’t such a bad idea.

  “You didn’t look like you were going to make that hill,” my daughter says when I trot up. She hands me a small sack of groceries from the trunk and slams it.

  “I’m going to be fifty this summer,” I remind her, panting. “One of these days you’re going to find me alongside the road.”

  Julie usually chides my morbid humor, but she’s caught sight of my nose. “Good lord, Daddy!”

  I know this girl, so when she raises a delicate index finger with its carefully sculpted and brightly lacquered nail to touch the purple nostril that my run seems to have further expanded in my lower peripheral vision, I’m quick enough to catch her slender wrist. The rapid circulation of my blood has the nose pounding in time with my pulse, and even the gentlest of touches is, at this moment, a pretty terrifying prospect. “Please,” I warn her.

  She promises not to, but she can’t help leaning in close and making me turn so she can inspect the injury more closely under the porch light. “Yuck” is her final word on the subject, and I can tell how much she’d like to probe the wound with her long-nailed pinkie. “What is there about something revolting that makes you want to touch it?” she wonders out loud.

  What indeed? What would William of Occam say? There’s a simple explanation, surely.

  “Where’s Russell?” I say, eager for a change of topic, hoping he will not be home, though I like Russell.

  Julie takes the bag of groceries from me and puts it on the kitchen table. “He’s around somewhere.” She bellows his name. We hear a faint reply.

  “Upstairs,” Julie says.

  “Outside,” I say. “Back deck.” Their house carries sound the same way ours does, even though ours is fucked up. I can tell Russell is out back. What I can’t guess is why. It’s far too cold to be deck sitting.

  “Come on out,” Russell’s voic
e, barely audible, finds us.

  What I really need, suddenly, urgently, is to pee, for about the tenth time today, I think, and at the thought of what this probably means, my sweat goes cold. No, I tell myself. Don’t even think about it.

  We go out on the back deck, where Russell is standing on the bottom rung of a stepladder under the eaves a few feet away. He’s got a flashlight in one hand, and he’s shining it up into a pretty amazing wasps’ nest that’s attached to the overhang. There’ve been several warm days this week, and apparently that’s been enough. In Russell’s other hand is an enormous can of Raid. He looks like he’s been standing in just this attitude for a long time.

  “You think they’re asleep?” he says.

  What I think is that this man should not be a homeowner. My daughter, now that she’s seen the nest, has backed up near the sliding deck door, through which she clearly plans to duck.

  “I’m not sure wasps do sleep, Russell,” I tell him.

  The flashlight locates me. Apparently Russell had not noticed, until I spoke, that his wife was not alone. “Hank,” he says, altogether too glad to see me, as if, now that I’m here, he’s got a friend.

  “Hi, Russell.”

  “God. What happened to your nose?”

  “Stung by a wasp,” I tell him.

  “No shit?”

  “Would I shit you, Russell?” The answer to this rhetorical question is obviously yes, but Russell has been standing too long beneath a wasps’ nest, trying to work up the courage to Raid it. There’s nothing more real to him at this moment than a wasp sting, and some damn thing has happened to my nose that a wasp sting just might account for. “They always build their nest right in that same spot in our house too,” I tell him. “I came over to warn you. I think we may have identical wasps.”

  When he finally lowers the flashlight, I can see he’s caught on. “I’d sure hate for us to have identical noses,” he says. “Yours is the ugliest one I ever saw.”

  The flashlight returns to my face for another look. I hold up my hand this time, tired of the light in my eyes, and of Russell’s curiosity. “I bet if I had that flashlight I could find something ugly on you too,” I tell him.

  “Jules. Come hold the flashlight while I spray,” he suggests.

  “Be real,” Julie tells him.

  I go over, take the flashlight, locate the nest.

  “Ready?” Russell wants to know, his voice grim, determined, scared.

  “You’ve never been to war, have you,” I say.

  “Neither have you,” he correctly points out. “You were a typist in Vietnam.”

  This is not precisely true. I was a typist during Vietnam. “I teach The Red Badge of Courage every year, though,” I tell him. “Spray the bastards so we can go inside.”

  Russell sprays the gray, paperlike cone until it glistens and begins to drip. There’s no activity. I begin to suspect it’s last year’s cone we’re dousing. “That’s the way I want to go,” Russell says, satisfied with the job once he’s finished.

  “You want someone to asphyxiate you with insecticide?” I say.

  “Nope,” he says. “I want to die in my sleep.”

  “Much as you sleep,” Julie says, “there’s a good chance you will.”

  We go inside, to the kitchen, their only fully furnished room. Russell and I sit down. Blessedly, my daughter and son-in-law have not tried to copy our interior furnishings. Perhaps our stuff is fucked up. Perhaps Julie’s imagination is functional regarding tables and chairs and sofas. In place of our island, they have an inexpensive kitchen table, half wood, half glass, in a complex geometric design that makes it hard to see whether you got the oatmeal spill with the rag or missed it.

  Russell sits down at the table while Julie starts a pot of coffee and I visit their bathroom, where I stand before their commode like a medieval man of faith. The sensation I had a few minutes earlier, of being powerfully backed up, of risking an explosion, is now belied by what might best be described as a slow faucet drip. What I have, I fear, is a stone. My father has been visited by them all his adult life, though he started earlier, in his thirties. His father before him had also been tormented with them, and my great-grandfather actually died of blood poisoning, the result of a bladder stone the size of a mango that blocked his urethra, backing urine all the way to his eyeballs. I’ve been putting off the appropriate diagnostic measures in the hope that they would not be necessary. Now, I will have to go to the hospital and be X-rayed, the stone identified, surgery recommended.

  I’m less afraid of the knife than of the comic dimension of the malady. My colleagues will consider it just like me to have a joke affliction. “This too will pass,” they’ll assure me. Given today’s mutilation, I’m even more adamant about keeping the stone a secret, somehow getting through the rest of the semester. Then having it taken care of when people are away. Maybe I can even get the procedure done in New Haven, where our daughter Karen lives. Surgery may not even be necessary in a big, metropolitan hospital. I’ve read somewhere that there’s a whole new technology for the treatment of stones that involves busting them up with concentrated blasts of ultrasound.

  When my undignified dripping finally ceases, some of the pressure seems to have been released. I give myself a final shake and return to the kitchen and the polite society of my daughter and her husband.

  As soon as I sit down at the table I’m aware of electricity in the air. Julie and Russell have had quiet words. The scar at the edge of my daughter’s eye, where she flew over the handlebars of her first bike and then into the road, is aflame, and seeing this always makes me feel both sad and responsible, a failed parent. It’s not a big scar, just a tuck at the corner of her eye, a small reminder that life is capable of far worse things. When my daughter is happy, the scar disappears completely. But anger and frustration and weariness drag at the corner of her eye, causing her at times to look almost sinister, as she does now. If Lily were here, and I wish she were, she’d find a way to touch the scar gently, her signal to Julie, across the long years, to smile, to make herself beautiful, an act of will.

  If unkind things have been said in my absence, Julie has said them, not Russell. I can tell this by looking at him. Now that I have the opportunity to examine Russell, he looks a little heavier to me. He’s always been trim and athletic-looking, though he’s never played sports, but in the month or two since he’s been out of work, he appears to have put on about ten pounds. He’s looking slightly unkempt too. He wears his hair fashionably short, usually moussed up in bristles. When you catch him just before he and Julie go out somewhere, he always looks wet. By the end of the evening his hair takes on a more human, Tom Sawyer–ish quality. At the moment his hair looks long and limp, and it occurs to me that though we live close by, I’ve seen neither Russell nor Julie in about a month. I’ve been kept up to date on their lives by Lily in much the same fashion that I’m informed about what’s happening in the life of our other daughter, Karen, who lives sensibly in a second-floor New Haven flat that bears no resemblance to her parents’ house. “So,” I say to Russell. “What’s up? Long time no hear.”

  “Well, Hank,” Russell admits, “we owe you too much money to enjoy casual conversation.”

  I don’t know quite what to say to this, partly because I’m not sure how much money we’ve loaned them. The right thing to say is probably “don’t worry about it,” but I’d hate for them to take me literally, especially if Lily has been more generous than I know.

  “What’s up is mortgage payments,” Julie says. “What’s down is personal income and savings accounts.”

  “And the spirits of a certain privileged young woman,” Russell says, looking past me to where Julie is gathering cups and saucers. Then he adds, “Sorry, Hank. That sounded like I was criticizing your child rearing, didn’t it?”

  “Not at all,” I assure him. “Lily raised her. I was teaching The Red Badge of Courage.”

  “While Mom was earning it,” Julie says. She’s se
rving the coffee in fancy cups I’ve never seen before. “Menstruation always was the real red badge of courage.”

  Russell and I exchange a look. Julie has always been the least thoughtful but the most outspoken of the three Devereaux feminists. “I guess I should have taken more of an interest,” I acknowledge. I don’t consider myself a chauvinist, but I can play that role.

  Julie joins us at the table, spoons three sugars into her own coffee. “Too late now, Pop,” she says, patting my hand. What I’d like is for her to pat Russell’s hand, the same sort of I’m-just-kidding pat she gives mine. When Russell sees the gesture, he looks away.

  We drink our coffee in silence for a minute. I’ve stopped sweating from my run, and the drumming in my nose is quieter too. Emotional atmospherics notwithstanding, I’m comfortable in their kitchen, perhaps because of its resemblance to our own, Lily’s and mine. Lily is precisely what we’re missing, it occurs to me. If she were here, the electricity resulting from Russell and Julie’s financial problems would disappear. A natural humidifier is Lily, somehow conveying that things cannot seriously go wrong, at least not in her presence. Even as kids Karen and Julie never fought in front of her, as if they considered their mother’s emotional equilibrium essential to the general welfare. Lily has, I’m told, the same effect upon her low-track students, her “rocks.” They’re a tough bunch, many of them, and a fair number end up in jail, whence they write Lily apologetic letters, explaining, “When I knifed Stanley, I never meant no disrespect to you or what you tried to teach us about living good. I know your pretty disappointed because I’m the same.” Lily’s the kind of woman who loses sleep over ambiguities like the one in that last statement, and her kids seem to understand that, even the ones who couldn’t locate the word ambiguity in a dictionary for a free trip to the Bahamas.