Straight Man by Richard Russo

“The Soul of the University” pieces. But I haven’t published, or even written, so much as a short story in the long years since the novel was published, given a foolishly positive review in the
Times
(a review instigated, I later learned, by my father, who knew the editor), and then dove precipitously into that unmarked grave of books that cause no significant ripple in the literary pond. Apparently I’m not the only one who no longer considers me a writer. Last Christmas was the first since
Off the Road
’s publication that I did not get a holiday greeting from Wendy, my agent, though my fall from her good graces may have been the result of a note I sent her the previous year. She’d informed all her clients that due to increased costs of doing business in New York she was going to have to go from a 10 to a 15 percent commission. She may not have seen the humor in my sarcastic refusal to pay her an additional 5 percent of nothing. Have I brought this on myself, I wonder, that people who know me refuse to take me seriously, while to virtual strangers my ironic sallies are received with staunch, serious outrage?
    Regardless, the fact that my daughter still thinks of me as a novelist cheers me, its further evidence of her unworldliness notwithstanding.
    “I noticed the tennis courts are nearly dry,” Julie remarks. She and I play hard, competitive tennis throughout the summer and as far into the fall as weather permits. She’s got age and talent on her side, along with a sweet, hard, two-handed backstroke, and she would beat me easily if she could keep her concentration. I am the reason she can’t keep her concentration. Part of my game—the only good part, according to Julie—is gamesmanship. She hates to be talked to during a match, so I find all sorts of things to discuss with her. I keep this up until she screams, “
Shut up, damn it!
” a sign that her concentration isshot and that it’s okay for me to just play. Our games mystify Russell, who’s too nice a fellow in general to understand either sport or competition, and far too uncoordinated to benefit from instruction. When he and Julie started dating seriously and he wanted to make a good impression on me, he suggested we play some one-on-one basketball. The contest was so lopsided, with Lily and Julie looking on, that both my wife and daughter were furious with me afterward. “You didn’t have to humiliate him,” Lily said.
    “I never meant to,” I assured her. “I tried to keep him in the game.”
    “You could have let him score one basket.” Julie frowned. “One basket. Would that have been so terrible?”
    “He kept throwing the ball over the backboard,” I reminded her. “Four times I had to go up on the roof.”
    “You did everything but slam-dunk over him,” Lily said.
    “And not for lack of opportunity.”
    Russell joined the conversation then, taking my side. “Hank’s right,” he admitted sadly. “I suck. I suck bad. I suck the big one. I never should have asked you to play.”
    “We’ll find another game where we’re a better match,” I suggested.
    “I don’t know,” he grinned sheepishly. “Basketball’s always been my best sport.”
    No, that was our first and last contest.
    “Watch out for the old man this year,” I warn my daughter. “My hamstring’s healed. I’m already up to two miles a day.”
    “How come you and Mom never jog together?” my daughter asks so seriously that I’m momentarily puzzled. I’ve heard the words, but the tone of my daughter’s voice suggests a different sort of question entirely, something more on the order of “How come you and Mom have separate bedrooms?” Some damn thing seems to have caused a blip on my daughter’s psychic radar screen. Unlike her sister, Julie has never excelled in ordered thinking, but from the time she was a child, she’s always been capable of chilling intuitive leaps.
    Or possibly she’s just curious about why Lily and I never jog together.