Straight Man (16 page)

“How old was that cheese spread?” I ask her.

“Don’t go blaming my cheese spread,” I’m told. “I ate it too, and there’s nothing wrong with me.”

“I really have to go teach,” I tell her, consulting my watch again. In fact, now that I’m out of the dank cellar and in the light, I feel fine.

“Look at me,” she says.

When I do, when I meet her puzzled eyes, I feel a slight aftershock, the trace effects of whatever it was that visited me in the cellar, and then it’s all gone and I’m myself again. My mother must agree, because she doesn’t argue.

“You must be coming down with something,” she concludes on the porch, putting her hand on my chest when I lean forward to kiss her good-bye. Mr. Purty observes this from his own porch across the driveway. I wave at him on my way down the steps, and he waves back understandingly. He knows what it feels like not to be kissed.

Often, imagination isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be. I have imagined, for instance, how badly my afternoon seminar will go, and it’s gone that badly and then some. What occurs to me is this: if I’ve been smart enough to predict this disaster, I should have been able to prevent it. But imagination without energy remains inert, and my visit to my mother’s has left me strangely disoriented, made a disinterested observer of me. Normally I’m an amused observer, but there’s nothing all that amusing in today’s class. I wonder if my inability to see any humor represents progress of some sort. I am, after all, frequently accused of a lack of high seriousness. But this class can’t be progress toward anything. Apparently my students agree. They’re looking at each other as if they’re trying to remember what they were thinking back in January when they enrolled.

Of course the trouble began before I arrived, provoked by the unfortunate Leo’s unwillingness to understate necrophilia. By the time I entered the classroom, the situation was already out of hand. A virulent
young woman named Solange, who has coal black hair with an angry streak of white—her mean streak, as I’ve come to think of it—was in the process of observing that the reason Leo always writes about pussy is that he is one. He pretends to be some kind of Hemingway, but the truth is he’s a wimp, a wanna-be, a case of arrested development. Trouble has been brewing between these two all semester. For the last couple weeks she’s been saying things under her breath, and I’ve made the mistake of ignoring them. But there was no way to ignore this. When I asked Solange if she was finished, if we could begin our workshop of Leo’s story, she replied that she would be happy to begin it herself. The story, in her view, was more of this author’s incessant, sexist nonsense. Trash, without a single redeeming feature. She could see no use for it beyond kindling.

Such remarks seldom stimulate discussion, and they have not done so here. Leo, his cheeks aflame, tried to summon his usual smug grin but failed. As the semester has progressed, it’s become more and more difficult for Leo to maintain his public posture, which is that he and I are, after a fashion, team-teaching the course. He’s the only student taking the workshop a second time, and he’s intimated to his classmates that, of course, I hold him to a higher standard and that we have an unspoken understanding. Since he’s the only student on campus who’s properly obsessed with becoming a writer, I see it as my duty to push him harder than the others, to make sure he’s not ruined by too much praise. From the author interviews Leo devours, he has learned that about the worst thing that can happen to a talented young writer is to be given too much praise, so Leo is grateful to me for protecting him. I don’t know whether he’s grateful to the other students in the workshop, who have been even more determined than their instructor not to ruin him with too much praise. Or any praise.

Right now, with the exception of Solange, they are all looking to me for guidance, aware that I don’t, as a rule, encourage the kind of in-your-face dismissal of someone’s labors that Solange has accorded Leo. There are two rules in my workshop, and most of the time these head off trouble. The first rule is that all comments and criticisms are to be directed at the manuscript and not its author. In return for this consideration, the author is not permitted to speak in defense of the manuscript.

These are excellent, though fundamentally flawed, rules. The problem with the first is that what’s wrong with any given manuscript is often easily located in the personality or character of its author, as is the case with Leo’s story. Leo needs more than aesthetic and technical advice in short story writing. Leo needs, among other things, to get laid. His grim young face bears eloquent testimony to the fact that no young woman has ever been kind to him. His stories are a revenge on the lot of them. At this particular moment, having been branded a wimp, he’s a study in scarlet. In addition to his red hair and flushed face and long, pimply neck, two of the fingers of his right hand are bleeding at the cuticles. Throughout the winter his raw fingers have been full of hangnails. The tiny deltas of skin are always peeled back, like tomato skins, revealing the tender pulp beneath. I see that today it’s the index finger of his right hand he’s been excavating, and there are several bright pinpoints of blood at the cuticle for him to suck at, then examine secretly, as if he suspects the truth of his nature—that he’s red to the core.

Although they have been chafing each other all semester, Leo and Solange are not so different. Both are friendless, so far as I can tell. Neither seems to have discovered a way to exist in the world. Solange fancies herself a poet, and to her this has less to do with writing poetry than it does with adopting a superior attitude. She dresses in black, eschews makeup, smokes dope, feigns a kind of exhausted boredom. She’d like to think she’s smart (she is) but fears she isn’t, at least not smart enough to justify her superiority. She’s pale-skinned and bony, and this, I suspect, is partly why she objects so strongly to Leo’s lurid adolescent fantasies. In his stories girls like Solange don’t rate notice, much less ravishing. To attract the attention of one of Leo’s vengeful ghosts, a girl has to have big breasts, not a protruding breastbone. Last fall, Solange fled Gracie’s poetry seminar, I suspect, because Gracie herself is all womanly excess, and not above conveying to young women like Solange that their hips may be too narrow for childbearing, their breasts too flat to satisfy infant or lover, their lips too dry to inspire passion, their eyes too cold to welcome.

Of course such things cannot be said to students like Leo and Solange (or, for that matter, to Gracie). And since the only things that
might be helpful are the things that cannot be said, I am without a strategy for the present circumstance. I should tell Solange she’s out of order. Clearly, that’s what everyone expects me to do. They all know my view that tough, rigorous criticism is predicated on good, not ill, will. And so they are confused by my reluctance to take Solange to task in this instance. Is it because her personal assault took place before the official beginning of class? Or am I suggesting that in this instance the attack is justified, that Leo has brought it on himself over the last several months, aggressively exhausting our charity by assaulting us with one bloody pussy story after another?

The truth of why I do nothing is that imaginatively I’m still back in my mother’s basement, still feeling the lingering effects of whatever it was that washed over me there. For some reason the tips of my fingers are tingling, and I can’t shake the feeling that I should have examined the contents of all the cardboard boxes stacked up against the wall, that one of them contained something of importance to me, something I’ve forgotten. I flex the palm of my hand where I grabbed the hot water pipe. The skin there has that smooth, shiny, burned look, like it might split open. If I am right that Leo is red to his very core, what color is William Henry Devereaux, Jr., at his center? I wonder.

So, instead of earning my pay with this group of expectant students, I exercise the prerogative of all bad teachers by conveying that I’m disappointed in the lot of them, that they have proven unworthy of my guidance, that they will now have to earn their way back into my good graces. I tell the class that I don’t intend to say a word until somebody locates an issue worth discussing. Something specific and objective, not general and subjective. Sorting out these terms, I rationalize, will give everyone time to simmer down. I take off my watch and set it on the table beside me, watch its hands move, study my chastened students. Solange, having had her say, takes out a Penguin
Macbeth
and pretends to read it. Leo has become catatonic except for throwing the occasional murderous glance in my direction. I know what he’s thinking. I have allowed this bitch to unman him. Whatever.

When, by my watch, there are only two minutes left in class, I rouse myself from my lethargy and summon the muse of melodrama by allowing my forehead to clunk heavily down on the metal seminar table that happens at this moment to be the only thing we all have in
common. When I raise it again, everyone is looking at me, wide-eyed, fearful. Even Solange, who’s dropped
Macbeth
like a bloody knife.

“I know
you
, Tiffany,” I say.

Everyone groans. I’m returning them to the beginning, to a character exercise from their intro class. It’s called “I know you, Al. You’re (not) the kind of man who—” The exercise is designed to test the writer’s understanding of his characters by challenging him to complete the sentence in an interesting and revealing way. I know you, Al. You’re the kind of man who still opens doors for women. I know you, Susie. You’re not the kind of girl who forgets an insult. In advanced workshops, “I know you, Al” has become shorthand for suggesting the story’s characters are not sharply defined.

“Are the victims in this story characters?”

A general shaking of heads, Leo alone abstaining.

“What do we know of the murderer beyond what was done to him?”

“Nothing.” Grudging grumbles. This is old, insulting stuff.

“There,” I say. “If someone had been astute enough to observe that this story has no characters an hour ago, we could have all gone home.”

“Tiffany is very real to me,” Leo insists. He looks like he would like to slaughter us all. “Very real.”

“The only thing real to you”—Solange puts
Macbeth
in her bag—“is her bloody snatch. Grow up.”

Since this should not be the last word, I say, “Class dismissed,” just as the bell rings.

Everyone files out. Except Leo, who wants to escort me to my office. He can’t believe I’ve actually said there are no characters in his story. He reads part of the rape scene aloud as we walk, just to show me how wrong I am. By the time we arrive at my office, my good spirits are restored.

Rachel has several messages for me.

Herbert Schonberg, the union rep, is very disappointed I’ve chosen not to return his calls. To me, his choice of the word
disappointed
suggests insincerity. June Barnes, Teddy’s wife, wants me to call her at home at my first convenience, never mind why, just do it. Mysterious and intriguing. Orshee wants to consult me about a real estate matter. Mysterious without being intriguing. Gracie still begs an audience. Neither mysterious nor intriguing, but possibly dangerous. Tony Coniglia wants me to know he’s booked a racquetball court for four-thirty and asks if I could be on time for once. Vaguely insulting. And Rachel says there’s another message for me on my desk, which there is. In the center of my blotter sit five peach pits, a dark, wet spot radiating outward. As I study these, it occurs to me that a lot of people are taking liberties with my excellent disposition. After all, I
am
the chair of a large academic department, however temporarily.

There’s no reason I should be treated as if I were wearing a Kick Me sign.

Rachel buzzes and says she’s going home.

“Already?” I say. “You’re going to leave me all alone?”

“It’s three-fifteen?” she says, her intercom voice full of all too real guilt. “I have to pick up Jory?”

“I’m kidding,” I tell her. “Go.”

“You really liked the stories?”

“I sent them to Wendy, my agent,” I tell her. “At least I think she’s still my agent.”

I wait to see how Rachel will react to what I’ve done without her permission. Last fall she started submitting her stories for publication but then quit when her husband began saying I told you so about the rejections and complaining about the cost of postage. I’ve told her to use the department mail so it won’t cost her anything, but she’s far too ethical. Besides, she suspects that her moron husband is right about her not being good enough. She may even believe he’s right about my trying to get her into bed.

Rachel doesn’t say anything for a minute, and in the silence I consider whether I just might be trying to get Rachel into bed. I can almost picture it, but not quite, probably because I’m still staring at the peach pits soaking my blotter. Can Meg Quigley have eaten all these peaches? And what is she trying to say? Is she extending Eliot’s metaphor by suggesting that, unlike timid Prufrock, she dares to eat a half a dozen peaches? What would that mean, in purely sexual terms? Or does she just want me to understand I’m the pits?

Imaginatively, I appear to be in bed with both of these women at once, unequal to either task. I go through the batch of memos again, hoping there’s a message from Lily that I missed—she ought to have arrived in Philly by now—but there isn’t.

“Thanks?” Rachel finally says. “When?”

“Last week. I made a copy.”

Another silence. “Promise that if she hates them you won’t tell me?”

“Why?” I ask her. “What makes her the final arbiter?”

Silence, for a moment. “Who is?”

“I am,” I say. “How many times do I have to tell you?”

“I really have to go?” she says.

Me too. All this imagination is not without consequence. I have to pee again. My last visit was on my way to class, what, an hour ago? Now I have to go again.