Straight Man (4 page)

“The man is out of control,” Teddy says admiringly.

We go inside because it is still chilly in mid-April and the temperature is dropping with the sun down. I hear Occam whimpering to be let out of the laundry room, to which Lily banishes him when he’s been a bad dog. When I open the door, the dog, beside himself with joy, bolts past me and does a frantic lap around the kitchen island, his nails scratching for traction on the tile floor, before he spies Teddy, whose face blanches. Occam is a big dog, a nearly full-grown white German shepherd who’d appeared in our drive almost a year ago. Lily heard him barking, and we went out onto the deck to study the odd spectacle the dog presented. He stood in the middle of the drive as if he’d been instructed to remain there but doubted the wisdom of the command. He seemed to want a second opinion from us. “I think he wants us to follow him,” Lily said. “Where do you suppose he came from?”

“If he wants us to follow him, he came from television,” I said, but in truth that’s what he did look like standing there, barking at us without advancing. Actually, he’d start to come toward us, then appear to remember something horrible, yelp in a completely different register from his bark, retreat a few steps, and start the whole process over again.

We approached cautiously, stopping a few feet from the animal, which was now wagging his tail wildly and grinning at us in a lopsided, rakish manner.

“I’ve never seen a dog grin like that,” Lily observed. “He looks like Gilbert Roland.”

I was curious about a glint in the dog’s mouth. He looked for all the world like he had a gold tooth.

“Lord, Hank,” Lily said. “I think he’s snagged.”

Which was exactly the animal’s problem. What I had perceived as a gold tooth was a treble hook embedded in the dog’s lip. He was trailing a long tether of monofilament line, invisible except when the dog strained against it, resulting in that Gilbert Roland smile. Lily held him steady while I bit the line in two. He’d been trailing about a hundred
yards of it, apparently all the way up from the lake, two miles away. Back in the house, under Lily’s gentle hand and voice, he waited patiently for me to find a pair of wire cutters, nor did he move when I snipped the shaft and removed the hook. “Okay,” he seemed to say when the hook was out. “Now what?”

We advertised, put signs up around the neighborhood, but no owner ever came forward, so there was nothing to do but feed the animal and watch him double in size. Since his arrival, we’ve had few visitors, a fact Occam clearly cannot understand, given how much he enjoys them. He’s so elated at seeing this one that he’s immune even to the sound of Lily’s raised voice, which usually causes him to quake. Teddy, who hasn’t seen Occam since his face-licking stage, raises both arms to protect himself. Occam, no longer a face licker, executes his favorite move, the one he uses on all strangers, irrespective of gender. When Teddy’s arms go up, Occam burrows his long, pointed snout in Teddy’s crotch and lifts, as if he imagines he’s got Teddy impaled on the end of his wet nose. In fact, Teddy goes up on tiptoes, furthering the illusion.

“Occam!” Lily bellows, and this time her voice penetrates the animal’s canine joy. He lowers Teddy and looks around just in time to catch a rolled-up newspaper on the snout. Yelping pitifully at this reversal of fortune, he slinks across the floor, dragging his haunches in melodramatic humiliation, yelping every step of the way. My own snout throbs in sympathy.

“Good dog!” I tell him, just to confuse things, and Occam’s tail comes out from between his legs, darts back and forth, sweeping the floor.

Lily helps Teddy onto one of the stools that ring the kitchen island while I take Occam out onto the deck, where he clatters noisily down the steps. It’s his plan to do several furious laps around the house to dispel the humiliation. I know and understand my dog well. We share many deep feelings.

Back inside, the blood is returning to Teddy’s face. “Lily taught him that trick,” I explain, adding, “I thought he’d never learn it either.”

“It’s a good thing you’re already injured,” Lily says, as if she means it. She’s both flustered and embarrassed by Teddy’s have been groined this way. She’s a woman who naturally tends to injuries, and she’s trying to think of a way to tend to this one of Teddy’s.

“I want you to know that a good-looking woman did this to me,” I tell her.

Teddy quickly fills her in. “Gracie,” he explains.

“Gracie is no longer a good-looking woman,” my wife reminds us. “I’m much better looking than she is since she got fat.” She’s gone to the counter and returned with a carafe of steaming coffee.

Teddy is considering telling her that she was always better-looking. I can tell by the pitiful, lost look on his face. He actually opens his mouth and then closes it again. In fact, Lily does look wonderful, it occurs to me. Slim, athletic, aglow, she runs a couple miles a day, and if her muscles ache like mine do after a run, she keeps those aches a secret, feeling perhaps, that complaining about aches derived from athletic endeavor is male behavior. She does not have a high opinion of male behavior in general.

“What did she use on you,” she says, now that she’s had a chance to examine my schnoz close up, “a shrimp fork?”

When Teddy tells her it was the ragged end of Gracie’s spiral notebook that she used to gig me, Lily winces, testimony, I’d like to think, to her continued tender feeling for me. Teddy launches into an enthusiastic but imaginatively pedestrian account of the personnel committee meeting that has resulted in my maiming. His entire emphasis is on my goading of Gracie. He misses all the details that even an out-of-practice storyteller like me would not only mention but place in the foreground. He’s like a tone-deaf man trying to sing, sliding between notes, tapping his foot arhythmically, hoping his exuberance will make up for not bothering to establish a key. It makes for painful listening, and I privately edit his account—restructuring the elements, making marginal notes, subordinating, joining, cleaving, reemphasizing. I even consider writing up my own version for the
Railton Daily Mirror
(known affectionately to the locals as
The Rear View
). Last year I did a series of op-ed satires under the heading “The Soul of the University,” deadpan accounts of academic lunacy under the pseudonym Lucky Hank. A narrative of today’s personnel committee meeting might resurrect the series.

Whether it should be resurrected is another issue. Past installments have raised the ire of university administrators and my colleagues, both of whom have accused me of a lack of high seriousness, of undermining
what little support there is in the general population for higher education, and of biting the very hand that feeds me. A well-written account of my maiming today would not even require exaggeration to achieve the desired absurdist effect, as Teddy’s pedestrian telling proves, but his account lacks something vital. As I tell my students, all good stories begin with character, and Teddy’s rendering of the events fails entirely to render what it felt like to be William Henry Devereaux, Jr., as the events were taking place.

William Henry Devereaux, Jr., had, in fact, been suffocating. Phineas (Finny) Coomb, as chair of the personnel committee, had chosen a small, windowless seminar room for us to meet in. Understandable, since there were only six of us. Except that two of the six—Finny himself and Gracie DuBois—were heavily perfumed, and William Henry Devereaux, Jr., had gotten up three times to open a door that was already open. Teddy, his wife, June, and Campbell Wheemer (the only untenured member of our graying department) all seemed to be in complete control of their gag reflexes, but William Henry Devereaux, Jr., was not.

“Are you all right?” Wheemer interrupted the proceedings to inquire. He was only four years out of graduate school at Brown, and he wore what remained of his thinning hair in a ponytail secured by a rubber band. After being hired he had startled his colleagues by announcing at the first department gathering of the year that he had no interest in literature per se. Feminist critical theory and image-oriented culture were his particular academic interests. He taped television sitcoms and introduced them into the curriculum in place of phallocentric, symbol-oriented texts (books). His students were not permitted to write. Their semester projects were to be done with video cameras and handed in on cassette. In department meetings, whenever a masculine pronoun was used, Campbell Wheemer corrected the speaker, saying, “Or she.” Even Teddy’s wife, June, who’d embraced feminism a decade earlier, about the same time she stopped embracing Teddy, had grown weary of this affectation. Lately, everyone in the department had come to refer to him as Orshee.

“I’m fine,” I assured him.

“You were making funny noises,” Orshee explained.

“Who?”

“You.” Four voices seconding my young colleague’s observation: Finny’s, Teddy’s, June’s, Gracie’s.

“You were … gurgling,” Orshee elaborated.

“Oh, that,” I said, though I had not been aware of gurgling. Gargling perhaps, on Gracie’s cloying, heady perfume, but not gurgling. Was it her proximity in the small, airless room, or had she made a mistake this morning and applied her perfume twice?

Looking at Gracie now, you had a hard time remembering the effect of her hiring twenty years ago. She had been like one of those dancers in black fishnet stockings and tails and a top hat, being passed from hand to sweaty hand over the heads of an otherwise all-male revue. As Jacob Rose, then our chair and now our dean, was fond of observing, every man in the college wanted to fuck her, except Finny, who wanted to
be
her. That was then. I doubt we could hoist her over our heads now. We’re not the men we used to be, and Gracie is twice the woman. The sad thing is that anybody has only to look at Gracie (or, in my case, catch a whiff of that perfume) to know she still wants to be that woman. And, hell, we understand. We’d like to be those men.

“Would you quit staring at me?” Gracie turned to face me, alarmed. “And would you quit sniffing like that?”

“Who?” I said.

“You!” Four voices. Finny’s, Teddy’s, June’s, Orshee’s.

“Does the chair have anything to report on the status of the search?” Finny inquired. Finny was dressed today as he was dressed every day after spring break, in a white linen suit and pink tie that showed off to great advantage his recently acquired Caribbean tan. Several years ago he’d let his white hair grow bushy, then hung a large color portrait of Mark Twain in his office, which he was fond of standing next to.

“Limbo,” I reported. Our search for a new chairperson had gone pretty much as expected. In September we were given permission to search. In October we were reminded that the position had not yet been funded. In December we were grudgingly permitted to come up with a short list and interview at the convention. In January we were denied permission to bring anyone to campus. In February we were reminded of the hiring freeze and that we had no guarantee that an exception would be made for us, even to hire a new chair. By March all
but six of the remaining applicants had either accepted other positions or decided they were better off staying where they were than throwing in with people who were running a search as screwed up as this one. In April we were advised by the dean to narrow our list to three and rank the candidates. There was no need to narrow the list. By then only three remained out of the original two hundred.

“Is the dean pushing?” Finny wanted to know. This was the sort of thing I should be able to find out, he was suggesting, since Jacob Rose and I were friends. My not having concrete information to report was evidence to Finny, were any needed, that I was attempting to scuttle the search for a new chair, a search I’ve not been in favor of from the beginning. My position has been that our department is so deeply divided, that we have grown so contemptuous of each other over the years, that the sole purpose of bringing in a new chair from the outside was to prevent any of us from assuming the reigns of power. We’re looking not so much for a chair as for a blood sacrifice. As a result of my stated position, Finny suspects that the dean and I are secretly attempting to subvert both the search and the department’s democratic principles.

“I believe it would be accurate to describe the dean as more pushed against than pushing,” I reported.

“He’s a wimp,” June agreed, though she and Teddy are also friends with Jacob.

“Or she,” I added, apropos of nothing.

Orshee looked up, confused. This was his line. Had he missed an opportunity to say it?

“Why are we here?” Teddy wondered, not at all philosophically. “Why not wait until the position has been approved before ranking the candidates? This is liable to take hours, and we have no guarantee that the position won’t be rescinded tomorrow, in which case we will have wasted our time.”

“The dean has requested that we rank the remaining candidates,” Finny intoned, “and so rank them we shall.”

Common sense efficiently disposed of, endless discussion of the three remaining candidates ensued. Twice I had to be requested to stop gurgling. Three times I beat Campbell Wheemer to his “or she” line. No one seemed able to recall what had attracted us to these three candidates
to begin with. I doubted, in fact, that we ever
were
attracted to them. They represented what was left after we’d winnowed out the applications that were personally threatening. To hire someone distinguished would be to invite comparison with ourselves, who were undistinguished. Not that this particular logic ever got voiced openly. Rather, we reminded each other how difficult it was to retain candidates with excellent qualifications. To make matters worse, we were suspicious of any good candidate who expressed interest in us. We suspected that he (or she!) might be involved in salary negotiations with the institution that currently employed him (or her!) and trying to attract other offers to be used as leverage with their own deans.

Gracie was anxious to whittle the final three applicants down to two, having discovered something alarming about the third. “Professor Threlkind is an untenable candidate given our present scheme,” she pointed out. As she spoke, she referred to notes on the untenable Threlkind that she’d written down in her large spiral notebook. During the course of our personnel committee meetings, she’d worried the spiral out of its coil, so that its hooked, lethal end was exposed, using it to chip flecks of lacquer from her raspberry thumbnail. “We’re already overstaffed in Twentieth Century,” she reminded us. “Also, we have no demonstrated need for a second poet,” she added, since the candidate had listed several poetry publications in little magazines.