Straight Man (11 page)

“I’m sure you can,” says a voice behind me.

When I turn, I see that Mike Law, Gracie’s husband, has come up behind me, and that I’m blocking his entrance. It must be true. I’m speaking aloud without knowing it.

“Nice nose,” he adds.

Shaggy-bearded and stoop-shouldered, Mike Law is the most morose-looking man on campus, and that’s saying something. We stand facing each other, two sheepish, middle-aged men, each of whom fears he owes the other an apology. Silly, when you think about it. Mike is certainly not responsible for the behavior of the woman who is his wife. And if I have come into conflict with Gracie, goaded her to violence against my person, then I owe her, not her husband, an apology. Yet here we stand, the two of us, sharing an invalid emotion. On the other hand, nearly all the emotions of men our age are apparently invalid.

“I’m told I had it coming,” I admit.

“I’m told the same thing,” Mike informs me. “I’d keep my guard up if I were you. I don’t think she’s finished.”

I nod and we shake hands. Why we should shake hands is probably as unclear to Mike Law as it is to me.

“Stop by some evening and we’ll shoot a rack of pool,” he urges me, as he does every time we run into each other. Mike has spent the last five years finishing his basement, where he’s put a pool table, a dartboard, a jukebox stocked with fifties rock and roll, and a wet bar. He’s rumored to have a small keg of beer tapped in the spare refrigerator at all times, and it’s a measure of his isolation that despite such enticements very few of his colleagues will provide company for a man so seriously depressed. “I’ve got my own entrance now,” he explains, another sad enticement. I can visit him without running into his wife,
is what he wants me to understand. I
should
visit him, I know. I was an usher at his wedding—what—fifteen years ago? Longer? Black Saturday, he calls it.

“How are things downstairs?” I ask him. French, Spanish, German, Italian, and Classics occupy the floor below ours.

“Silly, small, mean-spirited, lame,” he explains. “Same as English.”

“Have you been over to the Vatican?” it occurs to me to wonder, since Mike is the senior person in Spanish. “Asked to make out a list?”

He shakes his head. “There’s just the three of us in Spanish. I heard Sergei had a private meeting, but he denies it, the prick.”

Sergei Braja, I remember, chairs Languages, which comprises a single department. “What’s your best guess?”

“Wouldn’t surprise me,” he admits. “Gracie’s convinced, of course. She may even know, the way she sucks up to Little Dick.”

“Thank God you and I remain pure,” I say, holding the door for him.

“We end up stalling in front of doors and talking to ourselves though.”

This early, the English department corridor is empty, its offices dark, except for those who have been punished with eight o’clock classes. Those plus Finny, who requests eight o’clock classes, five days a week, every term. These requests are viewed by Teddy and June as further evidence of serious perversity in Finny, but I know they are nothing of the kind. In many ways Finny is the most rational member of our ragtag band, at least if you grant him the one or two assumptions he proceeds from. By requesting early morning and late afternoon classes, by enforcing a strict attendance policy, and by devoting the first three weeks of class to differentiating between restrictive and nonrestrictive noun clauses, Finny halves his teaching load each term. Students start dropping out by the second week of classes, and by the end of the term he has a seminar of seven or eight where once there were the regulation twenty-three. This, he maintains when challenged, is the result of genuine university standards, evenly applied.

Between ten in the morning and four in the afternoon Finny’s days stretch out, long and languorous, and he takes a two-hour lunch at the Railton Sheraton on the other side of town in the company of a favored male student or two, it is rumored. I have my doubts about this rumor,
just as I have about all academic rumors. Since returning to his medication and the closet, Finny has maintained strict appearances, often arriving at department functions with a female companion, as if she were capable of dispelling the communal recollection of his two-week career as a transvestite.

This occurred during the final days of the Vietnam War. Our bugging out of Southeast Asia may even have influenced Finny to flee his marriage, and his logic apparently was that if he could do without his wife, there was a good chance that he could do without his medication as well. In this latter he was apparently mistaken. The first day off his meds, he became garrulous and good-natured, which was bizarre enough, but he also appeared to be wearing eyeliner and mascara. The second day, residual medication flushed from his system, he appeared in full regalia. Black satin dress. Pearls. High heels. Bellowing down the long hallways of Modern Languages: “Blessings, my good people, on this glorious day that God has made! Throw open your windows!” Teddy, then chair, locked himself in the office I now occupy and refused to come out. Otherwise, Finny managed to visit just about everyone.

Never was a man dressed as a woman more full of joie de vivre than Finny off his meds. “We have to let out the dragon,” he insisted to one and all. “Just let him out! Let him fly off and lay waste to other kingdoms. Let him
be gone
!” he thundered, from atop his unsteady high heels, his rapture bringing tears to his eyes and causing his mascara to run. “If you don’t get out of my office,” Paul Rourke told him, “I’m going to rip your nylons off and strangle you with them.” June Barnes merely counseled him against pearls before five. Only Billy Quigley, who normally had no use for Finny, seemed glad to see him. He offered Finny a seat and a generous belt from his flask. “I’ve drunk with uglier broads than you,” he informed his colleague, adding, “Not much uglier though.”

But Finny’s freedom and happiness were short-lived. By the time the last marine was choppered off the roof of the American embassy in Saigon, his soon-to-be ex-wife had Finny hospitalized and drugged back into disheartened heterosexuality and male attire. After a month-long convalescence he returned to the classroom in Modern Languages with half a dozen new exercises illustrating the difference between
restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses, and since then he’s caused no problems, unless you considered his arrogant incompetence and brain-scalding classroom tedium problematic.

I stop outside Finny’s classroom and peer in through the small window in the door. Finny’s soft monotone makes it impossible to hear what he’s saying. His students have the grim look of death camp dwellers, and in a sixty-second timed test, six of the eleven consult their watches. Four yawn. One starts violently awake. And they’re only fifteen minutes into class. By the time I’ve completed the timed test, one or two students have noticed my face framed in the small window. Pretty soon, everybody but Finny is aware of me. A couple of these students are also taking a class with me, and these roll their eyes, as if to say, “Can you believe this? Why doesn’t somebody
do
something? Why don’t
you
do something?” I roll my eyes back at them. Because.

I make what I think is a clean getaway, but then I hear the classroom door open behind me and feel pursuit. “This,” Finny hisses at my retreating form, “is harassment.”

I turn to face him. Finny is resplendent, as always these days, in a white suit, pink tie, white shoes. “Finny,” I say. “Qué pasa?”

His rich tan deepens. “And so is that,” he points out, quite rightly. Within the last year Finny, an ABD from Penn, has become the proud recipient of a Ph.D. from American Sonora University, an institution that exists, so far as we’ve been able to determine, only on letterhead and in the form of a post office box in Del Rio, Texas, the onetime home, if I am not mistaken, of Wolfman Jack.

In truth I shouldn’t goad him. I know this. It was my malicious goading of Gracie in yesterday’s personnel committee meeting that resulted in my mutilated nose, which is at this very moment throbbing like a guilty conscience.

“I know you don’t respect me, or anybody else in the department,” he tells me. “But that doesn’t mean you get to ridicule me in front of my students.”

I hold up my hands in surrender. “Finny—”

“Stay away from my classroom, or I’ll file a grievance,” he warns me. “I’ll get a restraining order if I have to.”

“I teach in that room too,” I point out, since it’s true. “I don’t think I can be restrained from a room I teach in.”

This stops him momentarily.

“When
I’m
in it,” he explains seriously.

“Oh. Well. That. Sure,” I agree, as if I couldn’t be more delighted to have the whole misunderstanding cleared up. “Just one question.”

He pauses at his classroom door, hand on the knob. “What?”

“How did you get the bloodstains out of that?”

“The suit you’re referring to is at the dry cleaner’s, thanks to you.”

Thanks to me? “You have two identical white linen suits?”

“Is there any law against that?”

“Well, there’s natural law, of course.”

“It’s only fair to warn you,” he warns me, “that I spent part of last night on the phone. There’s considerable sentiment among our colleagues for a recall of the chair.”

I can’t help but chuckle at this. “Name one time in the last twenty years when that wasn’t true.”

Rachel, our department secretary, is at her computer terminal when I enter. Like Finny, she dresses up for work. Unlike him, she doesn’t wear cologne. Rachel is one of the half dozen women on campus with whom I have to work at not falling in love. The majority of these women are in their midthirties to midforties and married to men who don’t deserve them. (I regard these men the way Teddy regards me.) Rachel’s husband, from whom she is recently separated, is an enormously self-satisfied local man who is frequently employed by Conrail (and just as frequently laid off), a man whose inner emotional equilibrium is not easily tilted. Only a wife with aspirations of her own could manage it, but unfortunately that’s what he had in Rachel, who, in addition to serving as department secretary and raising their son, Jory, has been, for the last ten years of their depressing marriage, quietly writing short stories and working up the courage to show them to me. This year I’ve been helping her rewrite them, teaching her the little tricks of the craft she needs to know. That’s about all I have to teach her, since the requisite heart, voice, vision, and sense of narrative are already there, learned intuitively.

Last fall, buoyed and excited by my enthusiastic response to a new story, she made the mistake of sharing my comments with her husband and inviting him to read one of her stories. It took him most of the
evening, she said, sitting there in his armchair, laboring over her sentences, his brow darkening, phrase by phrase, pausing every so often to glance at her. When he finished, he got up, scratched himself thoughtfully, and said I must be trying to get her in the sack. Where literary criticism is concerned, he’s a minimalist.

Rachel is surprised to see me so early. It’s only eight-twenty, and I’m not due for another two hours by conservative estimate. Rachel’s hours are seven-thirty to three-thirty, so she can pick up her son at the elementary school. I had no idea she actually came in so early, but here she is, so she must. When she gets a gander at my nose, which is even uglier this morning than last night, Rachel starts visibly, and the look on her face remains frightened, as if she fears the explanation will only intensify my injury’s horrific aspect. “Rachel,” I say, pouring myself a cup of coffee, “you’re on the job.”

She is speechless, looking at me, and her reaction, I realize, is what I’d secretly been hoping for from Lily, who over the years has learned to take me in stride. There’s no reason a wife shouldn’t take her husband in stride, of course, yet it’s disappointing to be so taken, especially for a man like me, so intent on breaking people’s gait.

“I stayed up reading a good book last night,” I tell her.

“Really?” she says. I can tell she’d like to think I’m alluding to her revised story collection, given to me a couple weeks ago, but she’s afraid to presume. The hope in her voice is excruciating.

“Let’s have lunch,” I suggest. “I’ll tell you all about it.” I’m not trying to get Rachel in the sack, as her husband, the minimalist, fears, but I did spend the evening with her, in a manner of speaking, so I consider lunch with Rachel a platonic reward.

“You’re having lunch with the dean?” she says, holding up a pink message slip. Most of Rachel’s statements sound like questions. Her inability to let her voice fall is related to her own terrible insecurity and lack of self-esteem. She’s been working in the department for nearly five years now, and it’s only recently that she’s stopped excusing herself to go to the women’s room to vomit when someone is cross with her. According to Rachel, only Paul Rourke causes her gag reflex to kick in anymore, and I assure her that this is perfectly normal.

I take the memo, glance at its scant information. The time noted in the upper-left-hand corner is seven-thirty.

“What’s Jacob doing in so early?” I wonder out loud. An academic dean in his office before midmorning cannot be good news. Jacob and I are friends, and I know he never buys lunch except to mitigate bad news. “Anything else?”

Rachel reluctantly hands me two more messages, as if she would have spared me if she could. I take them into my office, close the door. The first memo is from Gracie, who would like me to set aside some time this afternoon to meet with her. Her message contains neither apology nor suggestion of regret at having mutilated her chairman. The second is from the faculty union representative, Herbert Schonberg, who has been begging an audience for weeks, probably in order to discuss my continuing misconduct as interim chair, a position I’ve been elected to precisely because my lack of administrative skill is legend.

No one for an instant considered the possibility that I would do anything. No one imagined I could locate the necessary forms to do anything. I am regarded throughout the university as a militant procedural incompetent. This is partly due to the fact that I have maintained loudly, publicly, for twenty years that not policy but rather epic failures of imagination and goodwill are the reason for our collective woes. My lack of political acumen, coupled with my perverse inclination to side occasionally with my enemies (much to Teddy’s dismay when he was chair, since mine was often a deciding vote), my inattention to the details of political machination, and my failures of short-term memory made me, my colleagues thought, the perfect compromise candidate for the temporary chair of our hopelessly divided department. How much harm could I do in a year?