Straight Man (39 page)

I’m still standing on my desk staring into the darkness, when the phone at my right heel rings. I can see that it’s Rachel’s outside line that’s blinking, but I climb down off my desk and answer anyway. If it’s for me, I can always pretend to be somebody else. “I was hoping to reach Rachel Williams,” says a vaguely familiar voice.

“Wendy?” I say, placing it.

“Hank Devereaux?” my agent wants to know.

I admit it.

“Well, I guess you’ve become a celebrity after all,” she says. “I can’t believe the play that duck story is getting. There may be a TV movie of the week in it if we play our cards right.”

I can’t tell if she’s joking. “Wendy,” I say. “You know how fond I am of you, but how about I just give you Rachel’s home phone?”

“Long day?”

“This day is already the worst month of my life,” I assure her, “and it’s not over yet.”

“Actually, I just called her at home.”

“Try again. You probably caught her in transit. She picks up her kid at school about now.”

“I’m on my way out myself. I may have to call her tomorrow.”

“I’m glad you decided to take her on,” I say, fishing a little, maybe. “She said you liked the stories.”

She pauses before responding. “I not only liked them, I sold them.”

“When?”

“About twenty minutes ago.” When I don’t say anything right away, she says, “That’s a very unprofessional thing I just did. Telling you before the author. Except I know you helped her. I thought you’d be thrilled.”

“I am, Wendy,” I assure her.

“You sound funny about it, is why I mention it.”

If I sound a little funny, the explanation isn’t one I’m sure I can share with her. In fact, her news has taken me back more than twenty years, to the afternoon this same woman called with the news that
Off the Road
had been bought by a trade publisher, news that ultimately resulted in Julie’s conception, our buying the land in Allegheny Wells that started the faculty stampede, my refusal to sell to Paul Rourke, my promotion to full professor, which deepened our roots in a place we never planned to live for very long. All from one phone call. What her call is going to mean to Rachel I don’t know, but I do know her life is about to change.

“It’s not much money,” Wendy says, as if this will make me feel better. “It won’t be a big seller. There’s a lot of grunge fiction out there since Ray Carver.”

“There’s a lot of grunge out there in real life,” I feel compelled to point out.

“Is her husband like the guy in the stories?”

“They’re separated, but yeah,” I say. “Call her now, okay?”

“What time does she get in to work in the morning?”

“Call her now, Wendy. You’ve no idea what this is going to mean to her.”

“Okay, I’ll call until I reach her.”

“Listen, while I’ve got you on the phone … do you suppose this has ever happened before?”

“What?”

“A guy gets a call from his agent, who informs him she’s just sold his secretary’s book?”

There’s a beat, and then she says, “I can’t sell books you don’t write, Hank. Are you working on a book?”

I have in my hand a sheet of Xerox paper I’ve been absently folding and refolding into half a dozen different shapes. When I unfold it
again and flatten it out on my new blotter with the palm of my hand, I realize it’s one of the thirty copies of the department’s operating paper detailing the rules governing my ouster. I have been hoping that my old agent and friend would ask this very question, so that I could tell her I was thinking of maybe having another go. If the piece of paper I’ve just been worrying into various shapes were the first page, however wretched, of a new book, I might be able to tell her that. But it’s not the first page of anything, and so I feel compelled to give her the simple truth, unadorned. “No,” I tell her. “Call Rachel.”

When we’ve both hung up, I refold the sheet of paper in half, lengthwise, and slip it into the inside pocket of my coat. Outside the frosted glass of my office door, shadows are moving, migrating down the hall toward the English department conference room. Intellectually, I know the purpose of this shadow movement is to determine the immediate administrative future of one William Henry Devereaux, Jr., Department of English Interim Chair. But let’s be frank. It’s a future that doesn’t interest me much.

During my sophomore year in high school, I fell in love with a beautiful black-haired girl named Eliza, and on the night of our third date, at the homecoming dance, she broke up with me, offering not a word of explanation and leaving me to drown my sorrows in one cream soda after another in the dark, strangely unlocked school cafeteria. Having that big, dark, familiar room all to myself suited my sense of tragic loss, especially with the sound of the Everly Brothers leaking in from the gym next door. Whenever I want you all I have to do is dream. Dream, dream, dream. I couldn’t bring myself to leave the cafeteria until I heard the announcement for the last dance, whereupon I got up, collected my armload of Fanta bottles, deposited them in the rack next to the soda machine, and sloshed back into the gym to retrieve my coat where I’d left it on the bleachers. The lights were always turned down low for the last dance, and my plan was to get my coat and slip out into the tragic night unobserved, but suddenly she was there, my Eliza, and she wanted to
know if I would dance with her, even though she was terrible, would I dance with her, please. She touched my elbow bewitchingly.

Well, I could and did dance with her, and when we came together on the dance floor, her small breasts on either side of my jutting, adolescent breastbone, explanation was unnecessary, though I listened to how she’d suddenly realized what she had in me, how she didn’t want to lose me. Even in the dark gym I could see her eyes were full of tears, and it made me a little misty-eyed myself to think how much she loved me after all. The next day I heard the truth from her girlfriend—that Eliza had broken up with me so she could be available for another boy who, she heard, was about to break up with his girlfriend of many months. When this did not happen, she’d come back to me. Even as I’d listened to Eliza’s tearful epiphany, part of me suspected something like the friend’s version, but it must be said that I preferred the tale told by the little minx who nuzzled herself so sweetly against me. What is truth, anyway?

The truth is I am dreaming. I realize this without completely waking up. The truth is I don’t want to wake up. In my dream I’m in bed with my wife, and the bed is in the middle of an empty high school gymnasium. The Everly Brothers are crooning dreamily in the background about all I have to do, and it ain’t much. My wife is contrite. In fact, Lily is offering an act of contrition, her eyes full of tears. I’ve been reluctant to believe she has anything to feel guilty about, and so she’s explaining just how wrong I am. She’s spent the weekend in Philadelphia with a man she met on our honeymoon in Puerto Vallarta over twenty-five years ago. She’s not sure I’d remember him. He sat all alone at the table next to ours, and she fell in love with him then and there, and he with her. They’ve kept in touch over the years, and now after loving each other from afar they’ve spent the weekend together, consummating their faith and devotion. What my wife wants to know is if there is any way I can forgive her.

I would like to believe my wife because this is one beautiful love story she’s telling me, and I’ve got a meaty dramatic role in it myself. I mean, this is truly heroic forgiveness that’s being asked of me. I’m a hell of a guy in this story. And so I forgive my wife despite the fact that there are parts of her story that simply can’t be true. We didn’t honeymoon in Puerto Vallarta, for instance, and she may be lying about other
things as well. Still, my dream logic goes, if I could forgive the lying little Eliza, whose memory seems to have furnished the props for my dream, can I do less for my own wife?

Well, it’s true there are other inducements to Christian forgiveness. My dream-Lily is naked beneath the covers, and apparently she has not lost all fondness for her husband. When she moves on top of me, I feel a terrible, wonderful release. We make love with almost unbelievable gentleness. In fact, there seems to be precious little friction, which may be why my dream orgasm is curiously devoid of, well, sensation. Even so, I don’t want it to end, and it doesn’t. I’m amazed. It’s the longest orgasm of my life, and wouldn’t you know, I can’t feel a thing. Still, if this is what I’m offered, I’ll take it. I’m that delighted to see Lily, that moved she’d confide in me about this other guy she’s been in love with all these years.

There may be no harder admission for a man of my years to make than that he has wet his pants, but this, to my horror, is what I have done. By the time I jolt fully awake, my chinos have gone from tan to dark brown in the crotch and all down one leg. I also have a wet sock and shoe. My whole office smells like the doorway to a lower Manhattan bank at eight in the morning in mid-August. I call Phil Watson, make his receptionist put him on the phone.

“Watson,” I tell him. “I fell asleep and wet my pants.”

“Significantly?”

I notice a shadow go by outside the frosted glass, so I lower my voice. “I’m going to need a new office chair.”

“Huh.”

“I must have passed the stone.”

“There’s no stone, Hank.”

The certainty in his voice is more annoying than I let on. I remember falling asleep with one foot up on my desk, and my logic is that this gravity-shifting posture has caused the stone to move, unlocking my urine. This explanation makes such immediate sense that I can give it up only reluctantly, a necessary concession to my physician’s expertise. This is the way my students feel, I realize, when I suggest stylistic revision. They
like
the sentence the way they wrote it. They defer to my greater knowledge and experience because they must, but they still like the way the original sentence sounded when it had a dangling modifier,
and they secretly suspect that my judgment, while generally sound, may be flawed in this instance. And they’re a little miffed at my insistence, just as I’m now miffed at Phil Watson.

“You think it’s cancer, don’t you?” I accuse him.

“I don’t think it’s a stone,” he admits. “Actually, this emission may be good news.”

“Not from where I’m sitting,” I tell him.

I hang up, examine my situation more closely. This morning it took me a half hour to fill a thimble with urine, barely enough to do a urinalysis. Now, in the half hour or so I’ve been asleep, I’ve voided my bladder enough to soak a pant leg, a wool sock, a size ten shoe, and a deep office chair.

What I require now, I realize, is an escape plan. I’ve talked to the only person in the world who is likely to understand my predicament. Now my duty is to avoid all the others until I can clean up. It’s five-twenty and still light outside, which means I’m going to have to walk halfway across campus in dripping, reeking chinos. Either that or wait until it’s dark and my pants have dried. The good news is that at this hour the faculty (except for those meeting to recall me as chair) have gone home, and most of the students have adjourned to their dining halls. The other good news is that having voided my bladder I feel wonderful, better than I have felt in days. I feel like I could do the quarter mile from Modern Languages to the back lot where I left the Lincoln at a dead sprint. In fact, this is the plan I’ve about decided on when I hear the double doors grind open down the hall and voices heading in my direction. I recognize Billy Quigley’s voice immediately, and I’m grateful that it’s Billy. If I had to choose someone on this campus to find me in my present condition, it would be Billy, who, like all drunks, knows humiliation. If he were alone, I’d go out into the hall and demand his pants, and, knowing Billy, he’d hand them over.

But Billy is not alone. Recognizing his daughter’s voice, I’m filled with blind panic. There are many things I would spare Billy’s beautiful daughter, and the fact that she has been flirting with an incontinent man is one of them. The footsteps and voices stop outside my door. There’s a tap on the frosted glass.

“He was just in there,” I hear Meg tell her father. “I heard him talking on the phone.”

“Come out of there, you peckerwood,” Billy Quigley demands. He’s got a late afternoon load on, I can tell. “Our dimwit colleagues are still at it. Let’s go down there and raise hell. We’ll save your worthless peckerwood bacon.”

“Maybe he went to the men’s room,” Meg suggests. It may be the scent of urine seeping from beneath the door that suggests this possibility.

“Nah, he’s in there hiding.” Billy pounds on the doorframe with his fist, rattling the glass.

“Maybe he’s …” She stops. I can almost hear her thinking. “Are you all right, Hank?”

I hold my breath.

“I know where Rachel keeps the key,” I hear Meg say. “Let me into the office.”

They go next door, and I hear Billy use his key to get them inside. He’s not supposed to have one of these, but most of the faculty do, so they can sneak inflammatory anonymous memos into the mailboxes in the dead of night. A light goes on in the outer office.

“Somebody’s in there,” I hear Billy say. “I can hear him.”

“Here,” Meg says, and a key is inserted into the lock.

They both enter, look around the office for a hiding space large enough to conceal a man my size. Meg checks the cavity under my desk. “It smells like he’s been keeping cats in here,” she observes.

Billy is looking up at the hole in the ceiling. She sees where he’s looking and follows his glance. “You don’t suppose …,” she says.

I withdraw farther into the shadows. My eyes are beginning to adjust to the darkness, but there’s a thick, slanting oak beam overhead that keeps me from rising.

“Nah,” Billy says. “He ducked out the other door when we came in through the office. I heard him.” But he’s still looking up into the ceiling suspiciously. It’s
possible
, he’s thinking. I’m just crazy enough. “Well, screw him,” he concludes. “I’m going to go disrupt that meeting. They must be about ready to vote. They’ve had their hour to posture.”