Straight Man (38 page)

“That still leaves the fact that you’re an asshole though,” he points out, a thin smile creasing his lips.

“Well, sure,” I tell him. “There’s still that.”

Could it be that Rourke is also feeling the strange, momentary camaraderie? Because otherwise this is where our conversation would end. Instead he says, “You missed the fireworks upstairs.”

“Which?”

“Juney and Orshee. She called him a hypocritical little putz. Shouted at him, actually, out in the hallway.”

I’m not sure how to feel about this news. “Was Teddy there?”

“No, he was hiding in his office. Too scared to come out, probably. Now Orshee’s hiding in
his
office.”

“Thanks for warning me. I think I’ll go hide in mine.”

He nods, as if to suggest this would be a good tactic for a man like me.

“So,” he continues. “How does it feel to be in your final hours as chair of this pathetic department?”

“You sound sure.”

He snorts at this, starts for the Camaro. “I can count. And don’t worry. I’ll be back for the meeting.”

“Tell me something,” I call after him. “How come you never drive anymore?” It’s just occurred to me that the last half dozen times I’ve seen the Camaro, a car Rourke never used to let anyone drive, it’s been the second Mrs. R. at the wheel.

He turns back toward me, apparently considering how, perhaps whether, to answer. His hesitation makes me realize that the question
is more personal than I intended. “I’m not really supposed to,” he finally says. “I started having dizzy spells around the first of the year. Blacked out once.”

“I had no idea.”

“It’s not common knowledge.”

“I won’t say anything.”

“Don’t.” Not a request. A warning.

I’ve got half a mind to tell him what my own doctor suspects is wrong with me, just so the words could be spoken.

“They’re running some tests. In the meantime she drives, so I don’t hurt anybody.”

“And here I always thought you wanted to hurt everybody,” I say.

He snorts at this but doesn’t appear to take particular offense. “No fun hurting somebody if you aren’t even awake to watch.”

“Right.”

He’s grinning again. He seems as aware as I that this is the longest, pleasantest conversation we’ve had in fifteen years. What can it mean? we both seem to be wondering. “We should round up the gang and play one more Sunday afternoon game of football. Before half of us get canned.”

“Remember how Gracie played for a while after we hired her?” I ask. “Jacob would take the snap, hand her the ball, and then tackle her himself?”

“Fucking Jacob. I’d like to snap that little prick in two,” he says, like he means it. So much for nostalgia.

I shake my head. “Reverend,” I tell him. “You’ve cheered me up. As usual.”

“I never mean to.”

“I know it,” I assure him.

A campus security cruiser glides by, its driver peering into the illegally parked Camaro at the second Mrs. R. “Go ahead. Stop,” her husband mutters beneath his breath. “Get out of the car and say something. I’ll feed you your revolver.”

The cruiser continues on its way. Which reminds me. “What was going on with all the Railton cops earlier?”

“Some lunatic townie crashed a class. Took all her clothes off and started speaking in tongues, is what I heard.”

“Whose class?”

“That I didn’t hear,” he says. “Women ever take their clothes off in your classes?”

“Never,” I admit.

“Mine either. How about in your office?”

“Not there either. Yours?”

“Just once. Her.” He nods in the direction of the second Mrs. R., who’s now watching us thoughtfully and chewing on her hair. “I should have been prepared, but I wasn’t.”

My afternoon comp class is not persuaded. In fact, they feel ill-treated. I’ve asked their advice, in essay form, then apparently gone ahead and killed a goose before they’ve even handed their papers in. A couple of the students in this class were present for my on-camera interview this morning, at which time I did not deny that I was the perpetrator. Worse, they have heard my implied threat to continue the carnage unless I get my budget. And so they are upset with me, despite the fact that I have apparently followed the explicit advice of the majority of their essays, which I have glanced through after collecting them and separated into two unequal piles. From the larger “kill a duck” stack, I’ve read three short essays aloud, anonymously, for the purpose of inspiring discussion or, failing discussion, private misgiving. It’s my hope that if the majority of these intellectually addled young folk actually hear their words aloud, if they are forced to digest not only their advice to me but the logic that led to this advice, they will, if not change their minds, at least become acquainted with doubt.

The three essays I have read aloud, authored by two young men and a young woman, proceed along similar lines. I should kill a duck, they argue, because I have threatened to, and if I don’t follow through, no one will ever again take my threats seriously. The writers draw foreign policy parallels. They hate it when America threatens third world nations and then, in the words of Bobo, the student I have threatened with failure if he misses another class, “pussy out.” The great thing about Desert Storm was that we said we were going to kick butt and then we kicked it. If we made a mistake, it was that we stopped kicking butt too soon. We should have kicked it all the way to Baghdad. Same way with World War II. When we were done kicking German butt, we should have kicked Russian butt and saved ourselves the necessity of kicking it later. All three writers seem to be under the impression that we did kick it later.

I don’t need to ask my class whether they find these arguments persuasive. The more outrageous, the more historically inaccurate and fallacious the analogies, the further the essays drift from the assigned topic, the more the authors are cheered. Apparently,
some
form of persuasion has taken place here. The majority of my students have persuaded each other and themselves, and they’ve done so in such an enthusiastic and raucous fashion that they’ve effectively smothered dissent. Among my twenty-three comp students, I have a half dozen or so who are daring to frown disagreement, but that’s all they’re daring. My best student, Blair, who is pale and thin and has impossibly delicate hands with veins that are large and blue, is actually squirming in her seat, but I know from experience that she’s paralytically shy, and, perhaps because of this, she thinks it’s my job to show these louts the error of their ways. I’m the one who’s paid to be here, after all. Everyone else pays. There is some merit to this argument, though I disagree with it. Still, it probably
is
my job to start the process.

“I’m not persuaded,” I finally tell my unworthy majority, eliciting a massive groan. They’ve suspected as much. They know me. They know that if they think one thing, I’ll think another. Their parents have agreed to pay their tuition on the condition that they major in something sensible and pay no attention to people like me, who are, they warn their kids, intent on transforming their values and undermining their religious principles. If Angelo were here, he’d
assure them they’re right to be wary. Look what happened to
his
daughter.

And of course the fact that I am not persuaded can mean only one practical thing—more bad grades. My handful of thoughtful students perk up a bit when I say I’m not persuaded, but they are aware that they are a small minority. Also, the majority is espousing violence, even more reason to be cautious. Blair starts to raise her hand, then lowers it again, which, for some reason, makes me angrier than the essays I’ve just read aloud. “Is there anyone besides me who is not persuaded that I should kill a duck?” I say, looking directly at Blair and letting her know that I’ve caught her gesture. The look she gives me in return could not be more eloquent. “Don’t do this to me,” she’s pleading silently. “Just read my essay at home. You’ll see what I think.”

“Blair?” I say. Another communal groan. Not only do Bobo and company know me, they know this Blair girl. They know that she gets good grades. They know that she can spell and everything. They are convinced that if she were not in this particular class, their own grades would go up dramatically. She invites invidious comparison, and they wish to hell she’d quit it.

Blair draws a deep breath, the kind of breath you take when you fear it’s the last you’ll get before the anesthesia brings you down, down, down. “I saw it,” she says in a voice so quiet I can barely hear it.

“What?” says Bobo from the back row.

“I saw it,” Blair repeats. “The goose. Hanging from the tree branch this morning. It made me sick.”

She’s embarrassed to say this last, I suspect, not because she’ll be derided, which she will, but because the person who hung it is perhaps her instructor.

“I bet you’ve eaten goose for Christmas dinner.” Bobo goes on the attack, to the delight of his compatriots in the back row. “I bet you went back for seconds.”

Although Blair looks like she’s never gone back for seconds of anything, she does not dispute her adversary’s claim, or even acknowledge him. I can tell that she’s conceded defeat, surrendered the field. If she’s angry with anyone, she’s angry with me. Or she would be if she thought she had a right to be.

“Blair,” I say.

“Please,” she whispers, but she’s pleading with the wrong man.

“It made you sick,” I repeat, noting that she looks more than a little ill right now. “But tell me. Did it surprise you, seeing that goose hanging there from a tree?”

At first she seems not to understand my question. Am I trying to trick her? I’m not above tricking students, as they all well know. If she says yes she was surprised, isn’t she accusing me of being all talk? If she says no, she wasn’t surprised, isn’t she suggesting that, sure, she thought me capable of violence? There seems to be no way out of this without insulting her instructor.

“Be honest,” I suggest.

“Yes,” she says, I hope, honestly. “I was surprised.”

“Why?”

Another deep, painful breath. She’s already taken several since the one she feared would be her last before passing out in dread.

“I didn’t think you’d do it.”

At this point I could help her with my inflection. What is there that prevents me? Why not help my best student off the hook? Why let her twist? There’s another pretty good student next to her who has raised his hand. I could turn to him. “Why? Why did you think I wouldn’t? I threatened to, didn’t I?”

She’s in the front row, and I’ve come out from behind my desk to stand over her, loom over her. She reminds me a little of Lily when she was young, when we were wielding signs together, except Blair lacks Lily’s steely combativeness. This girl’s mortification is tangible, which has the effect of taking me outside myself, seeing the whole scene as an objective observer would. I imagine Finny standing outside my door the way I stood outside his, even more aghast at my classroom behavior than I was at his.

When I begin again, I try to lower and soften my voice, but what comes out is little more than a croak. I’m seeing through the eyes of Finny the Man, speaking through the constricted larynx of Finny the Goose. “Didn’t I?”

Blair neither speaks nor moves, and who can blame her?

I can. “Blair,” I say, as calmly as I’m able. “You’re right. But it doesn’t do any good to be right if you won’t
speak
.”

“Then I’ll be wrong,” she says, gathering her things from beneath her chair, shoving everything hurriedly into her backpack. Everyone is watching her now. No one has paid the slightest attention to my question. When I step back to give her room, she’s out the door with breathtaking speed and grace.

I’m the next to speak, but it takes me a while. “Anyone,” I say. “Why was Blair right to be surprised, given my public threats?”

No one moves or speaks, not even the boy whose hand had been in the air and ignored for so long. In the end it’s the bell ending class that breaks the silence.

“Because,” I explain to them, without conviction, “it was a comic, not a serious, threat. Because the man who threatened to kill a duck a day until he got a budget was wearing a fake nose and glasses. Because it makes no sense to carry out a comic threat to serious consequence.”

Needless to say, we end where we began, unpersuaded. My argument, that comedy and tragedy don’t mix, that they must remain discrete, runs contrary to their experience. Indeed, it may run contrary to my own. These students have watched this very class begin in low comedy and end in something, if not serious, at least no longer funny. They file out, sullen, confused. Bobo is last. He stops at my desk as I’m stuffing the essays into my satchel. “You can flunk me if you want,” he says, “but that was a shitty thing to do to her.”

“Congratulations, Bobo,” I say, looking up. “You’ve just articulated a persuasive ethical position.”

Back in the halls of the English department, people have begun to cluster outside their offices in anticipation of the department meeting that’s twenty minutes away. Paul Rourke has come back, as promised, and is caucusing with Finny and Gracie at the far end of the hall. Teddy, returning from class, head down, disappears quickly into his office, pulling the door closed behind him. There’s no sign of June or Orshee.

Rachel, to my deep regret, has gone to pick up her son at school. She’s left a swatch of messages and a personal note in her elegant hand: “Good luck? Call me tonight? Let me know how it turns out?” I can’t help smiling. Question marks even in her Post-it notes. Perhaps it’s not all insecurity though. Rachel knows ambiguity when she sees it, knows
that good luck in this instance may mean my opponents win. She may even suspect that I’m considering not distributing the guidelines for the recall of a department chair that she’s located and reproduced for me. “Sorry about the ceiling mess?” the note continues. “I’ve called the physical plant? They’ll replace the tile tomorrow?”

Sure enough, there’s a large rectangular tile missing from the ceiling directly over my desk where one of the asbestos removal workers charged with detoxing Modern Languages apparently stepped through. The jagged shards of the tile are sticking up out of my wastebasket. It’s actually a relief to see both the hole in the ceiling and the tile in the wastebasket because I’d been puzzling over why the air in the room seemed full of suspended dust. What I can’t help wondering is if there’s anybody still up there. When I stand on my desk I can almost see up into the dark cavity in the ceiling. All seems to be quiet. Apparently asbestos removal workers keep sensible hours.