Straight Man (26 page)

I’ve caught Bodie smoking a cigarette, which she quickly stubs out, guilty. “Girls don’t need secretaries. They
are
secretaries.”

“Would you feel better if I got you a cup of coffee?” I say, since there’s a pot made and I could use a cup myself. I touch the glass, which is hot. It doesn’t look like it’s been sitting there too long.

“No, I wouldn’t feel better,” she says. “I saw you come out of the Vatican. I thought I’d ducked in here in time.”

“Now you’ve gone and hurt my feelings, Bodie,” I tell her, pouring coffee into two Styrofoam cups. “Besides. I thought you wanted to talk to me.”

“Talk to you, not see you. There’s a difference.” When I don’t know what to say to this, she continues. “You ever have one of those days where you hope you won’t run into anybody you even remotely like? So you won’t have to be civil even?”

I study her. Bodie and I have been friends for a long time, and she’s another of the women on campus that I’d be a little in love with if I were not in love with my wife, Bodie’s being a lesbian notwithstanding. She is always falling in what she calls romantic courtly love. Sometimes she tells me about it.

“I see you got my present, anyhow,” I say, noting the sign I had printed and framed, which is hanging on the wall behind her desk: Welcome to Bitch Gulch. I’m not a misogynist, but I can play that role. I’ve also had some special stationery printed up for her. Underneath the university seal, I’ve added a motto: “Where Women are Womyn and Men are Males.”

Bodie swivels and studies the sign. “Some of my sisters say it’s in bad taste.”

“
That’s
their objection?”

“They’re very serious. Earnest, you’d almost say.”

We’re grinning at each other now. “Somebody told me that English department floozy gigged you,” she says, studying my nose. “Everybody’s been telling me, in fact.”

I try to imagine what kind of spin the story would have down here in Women’s Studies, where I’m a suspected chauvinist and Gracie is thought to be an aging, pitiful tramp, one of the very few female faculty members in the college not encouraged to teach a course in Bodie’s interdisciplinary program.

“I’ve been much in the news lately,” I admit, then remember that Bodie, on principle, doesn’t own a television and therefore has probably seen neither the local news nor
Good Morning America
. Since nobody’s told her yet about my threat to start executing ducks, I give her the short version of these events while we drink our coffee. Bodie’s reaction to my account is annoyingly similar to Lily’s. This is exactly the sort of thing she’s come to expect from me, her tired acceptance seems to suggest. It was also Bodie who witnessed my descent of snowy Pleasant Street Hill last winter.

As I tell her my story, she starts to light two more cigarettes, catches herself, and stops. “So,” she says, when I finish. “You’ve been to see Little Dick. Did you get the ‘big storm brewing’ speech?”

“Tidal wave,” I inform her.

“It’s a tidal wave now?”

“Can’t be stopped,” I tell her. “Only thing we can do is move to high ground. Take our friends with us. You want to come with me? I may have room for one more.”

“I hope his pee-pee falls off.”

“Don’t perpetuate the stereotype,” I suggest.

“So? How did you respond?” she wants to know, and I sense that the barometric pressure in the room has changed.

“I said we’re too far inland to be affected by tidal waves. He insisted I take the weekend to rethink my position. He said I should talk the whole thing over with Lila.”

Normally, this would get a chuckle out of Bodie, but today, nothing. “And you said there was no reason to think it over. You said it’d be a long, cold day in hell before you’d betray your colleagues. You
told the little prick he could go fuck himself.” The way she’s looking at me, I get the impression that this same advice could well be coming my direction, depending upon my answer.

“I’d have to rewind the tape,” I tell her.

She ignores this completely. “Because that’s what the people who are loyal to the union are all telling him. That’s what
I
told him.”

“I’m not sure I’m all that loyal to the union,” I confess, preparing as I admit this to go fuck myself.

Bodie looks around her office, as if for someplace to spit. “I can’t believe you’d even consider siding with the administration.”

“A plague on both their houses, is my feeling,” I tell her.

This appeases Bodie somewhat, without exactly endearing me to her. “You may be called upon to testify though,” she warns. “In the fundamentalist sense. You won’t be allowed ironic distance. That I can guarantee.”

I turn my empty Styrofoam cup upside down on her desk. “I have to tell you, Bodie. Once again you have failed to make me feel better about the world and my place in it.”

Suddenly the tension is gone, and we’re friends again. “I’m a pretty constant source of disappointment to men,” she concedes, adding sadly, “and not a few women.”

“Want to tell me about it?” She usually does.

She studies me, as if she might be seriously contemplating whether to confide this latest heartbreak to me. And perhaps because in the past she always has, I’m surprised when she waves the issue away. “Just somebody,” she says. “Somebody who’s not supposed to be on my side of the fence even.”

And she’s no sooner said it than the image has leapt, full blown, up onto my imaginative wide screen—in Technicolor and Dolby stereo—Bodie and Lily, wrestling, naked and sweaty, on top of Bodie’s desk. It’s happening right here, right now. The picture I’ve conjured up is so dramatically vivid that it’s not undermined even by its absurdity. I mean, after all. To be believable, the scene requires Lily, a woman I know, to become a woman I don’t know, a character violation of the sort I’m always warning my fiction writers against. True, I tell them, people have secrets. They have complex inner lives that resist simple interpretation, but what we do know about them cannot be ignored,
forgotten, or profaned, and this new role in which I have cast my wife is a clear violation of narrative rules. And this isn’t the only violation. In a good story Bodie Pie cannot be
both
having sweaty sex with my wife
and
sitting before me, fully clothed, smoking a cigarette, which she is, though I don’t remember her lighting one, and here it is half smoked. When I focus on the burning tip of her cigarette, the lovers are suddenly gone, and once again Bodie’s small office contains just us two old friends, talking. Actually, Bodie’s the one talking, explaining, I realize, why she left a message for me to call her. “Anyway,” she’s saying. “Tell him to be on guard.”

Clearly, I’ve missed some damn thing. A small chunk of time, of the life of William Henry Devereaux, Jr., has slipped into some kind of void. “Who?” I say.

“Tony,” she says, studying me suspiciously now. “Tony Coniglia. The person we’ve been talking about.”

“Right.” I nod demonstratively, as if this has clarified everything.

But she must suspect I’m still not up to speed because she says, “Where did you go just then?”

“What do you mean?” I ask, though I know what she means.

She exhales a long, deep, thoughtful lungful of smoke. “You should have seen your face.”

To get back to my office, I must go by the student center and the duck pond. On my way I pass half a dozen students I know, most of whom seem to be looking everywhere but at me. Unless I’m getting paranoid, one student actually changes direction in order to avoid running into me. Is this the result of my television celebrity, I wonder, or am I still wearing the expression alluded to by Bodie Pie? A third explanation occurs to me, and I check to make sure I’ve zipped up after my last vigil at the urinal. I spend a lot of time with my dick outside my fly these days. Maybe it’s begun to feel natural there. But everything seems to be in order.

When I come around the corner of the student center, I see why so many students are embarrassed to meet my eye. On the very spot where I faced the cameras last night, a large group of protesters have gathered. They’re carrying placards and chanting something I can’t
quite make out, because the clucks have joined in quacking and the geese honking and trumpeting, a hell of a din. The TV crew has returned, just pulled up in fact. To my amazement, Missy Blaylock is among them. She climbs out of the van like an arthritic, closes the door softly, leans her broad forehead against its cool metal surface. The sound guy, the same one who last night wanted to know if I was trying to pass a stone, sees me coming and grins. “You’re in a world of shit now, son,” he says. “These animal rights assholes play for keeps.”

“That’s who they are?”

“That’s who they are. And they want nothing less than your balls,” he assures me. “And, hey, I’ve gotta ask. What’d you guys do to her last night?”

We turn and study Missy, who looked up briefly when she heard my voice, groaned once, and went back to cleaving unto the van.

“I
really
hate coming here,” she says. “Did I mention that?”

“I don’t think coming to campus was your mistake,” I point out.

“Tell me about it,” she agrees. “I’ve got to talk to you about that guy.” She says all of this with her forehead still melded to the van.

“Okay,” I tell her, “but you know him better than I do.”

She straightens up, gives me a narrow-eyed look. “And I believe you have a photograph of me that I would like returned.”

“Okay,” I agree reluctantly. “But I’ve spent the whole morning trying to find just the right frame.”

When the crew starts carrying equipment over to the pond, I volunteer to help, in the hope that this way I won’t be noticed. When we get closer, I can read the placards the protesters are carrying. The most popular seems to be
STOP THE SLAUGHTER
, and that’s what the group is chanting. Some of the placards have my grainy, blown-up photograph on them in the center of the now ubiquitous symbol:

I don’t know who any of these people are, but I have to admire their efficiency, their ability to mobilize so quickly. After all, they’ve only had about fourteen hours to organize this protest, locate a photograph of the villain they intend to symbolize (it’s the photo from my book jacket, I realize), blow it up, nail the poster board to the sticks. And there are probably other organizational difficulties I’ve not imagined.

As I’m surveying the protesters, it occurs to me that they aren’t all strangers. I recognize one thin, balding young fellow from faculty
meetings, though I have no idea what department he’s in. He notices me at the very moment I notice him, and he points me out to two youngish women at his elbow. They observe me through narrowed eyes, pass the information along to the others. You can actually trace the progress of dubious knowledge among their ranks. Some have to be convinced that I’m the same man as the more youthful one pictured on their signs.

“The jig’s up,” the sound man warns. “You better split.”

Missy, with no cool truck to lean on here, is massaging her temples with the ball end of her microphone. “Could someone ask them to chant more softly?”

“Quit fucking with the mike,” her sound guy says. “How can I get a level with you doing that?”

Missy turns toward him, rubs the microphone vigorously on the seat of her tweed skirt, causing the man to remove his headset hastily.

I point to one of the protesters who’s carrying a
STOP THE SLAUGHTER
sign. “You’re too young to remember,” I tell Missy, “but I used to carry a sign like that during Vietnam.”

“Some things never change,” she says. She actually thinks she’s agreeing with me.

Her comment, more than any fear for my personal safety, convinces me that it is probably time for me to leave. The protesters have begun to link arms, forming a semicircle around the ducks and geese, daring evil to approach. They’ve altered their chant, and now they’re shouting directly at me:
STOP DEVEREAUX. STOP THE SLAUGHTER
. Finny (the goose, not the man), perhaps made claustrophobic by so much protection, breaks through the line of defense and trumpets loudly and off key.

“There,” the sound man says, confident he’s got his level. “We’re ready.”

At the far edge of the crowd, which has now swelled to about a hundred and fifty people, I spot Dickie Pope and Lou Steinmetz. Lou looks grim but prepared for action if things get out of hand. Dickie is grinning at me, for some reason. In fact, he’s pointing with his index finger at the sky. When I look up, I half-expect to see buzzards, but it’s not that. In the forty-five minutes since I left his office, the sky has darkened. The clouds directly overhead look positively ominous.

•     •     •

Alone in the men’s room down the hall from my office, I have a lot to think about and plenty of time. Picture it, a fifty-year-old man with a purple nose, his heavy, limp dick in hand, and, it must be confessed, a rather heavy heart as well. What’s he thinking there at the urinal? He is thinking, in truth, about himself. About William Henry Devereaux, Jr. There are other things a man like me might think about, but at this moment I am unavoidably the subject of my own dubious contemplation, and I’ve got my reasons. I have myself in hand, as it were. And yet here, I’m also surrounded by me in the numerous, merciless men’s room mirrors. The drawn and settled William Henry Devereaux, Jr., who looks back at me invites comparison with the light, bouncing Prince Hal nailed to sticks outside and waved angrily at the duck pond. If all this me weren’t enough, I am also in my own pocket, in the sense that my book is there, the one I stole from Dickie Pope’s office. Me, me, and more me. So much me. And so little.