Straight Man (40 page)

“I’ll wait here a few minutes,” Meg says, “in case he comes back.”

When her father’s gone and out of earshot, I hear Meg pick up the phone, dial a number. After a moment she says, “Hi, it’s me. He’s still here at school if you want to see him … I don’t know … suit yourself.”

When she hangs up, I lean forward, sneak a peek below at Meg, who’s begun to pace. Next to finding me in my hiding place, the thing I fear worst is that she’ll decide to see what it feels like to sit in the chair’s chair. Perhaps she suspects what it will feel like, because she doesn’t. She stays on her side of my desk, and I’ve just decided that Meg is a good, respectful Catholic girl when she pauses and turns her head at an odd angle so she can read what’s sitting in the middle of my desk, which happen to be the Xeroxes of the department operating paper that Rachel gave me this morning. Meg reads part of the text upside down, then sensibly turns the papers around, rotating the neck of my desk lamp and bending over the small print in earnest. She’s wearing a shirt with a scoop neckline, no bra on underneath.

My behavior at this moment, it occurs to me, is undignified. I lean back into my self-imposed darkness to contemplate the position I find myself in, though the privileged view I have just been afforded is of precisely the sort that muscles out abstract thought. It’s not entirely dark up here among the rafters, I realize, now that my eyes have adjusted. By the light coming from the office below I’m able to examine the close, low space I’ve folded myself into so unnaturally. Directly above me, inches above both my head and knees, is the slanted ceiling. I have difficulty turning around, but when I do I see, off in the distance, other shafts of light shooting up from below like lasers, and I hear, though just barely, Billy Quigley greeting our colleagues as he enters the meeting. Also, now that I’m paying attention, other distant voices.

There’s an urgency to these murmurs that reminds me of the distant arguments I listened to as a boy. The old university houses we lived in transmitted sounds through heat registers in the walls and floors, and some nights, when I wasn’t sleepy, I’d crawl out of bed and put an ear to the cold register and learn what I could before the heat clicked on about what was on the minds of my parents. Once I heard them discussing what they were going to get me for Christmas, which was good to know, since it was something I didn’t want. Knowing their plan so far in advance meant I’d have many natural opportunities to subvert it. On another occasion, I heard a man’s raised voice say the words, “You bet your ass,” which caused me to conclude we had a visitor downstairs. The only other time I’d heard the same expression was
outside a restaurant where my mother had taken me. There, propped up against a parking meter, a man dressed in dark, shabby clothing seemed to be waiting for us when we came out. He looked right at us from beneath hooded eyes and said, “You bet your ass.” My mother whispered that I was to pay no attention, the man was drunk, but it was hard for me to understand that his words were not meant specifically for us. What in the world, I now wondered, my ear to the cold register, was this same man doing as a visitor in our house? The heat clicked on before I could discover.

The next morning the question was still fresh in my mind when I came down to the breakfast table, and I was about to inquire when I saw something in my father’s expression that stopped me. My mother and father hadn’t said a word to each other since I came in, and suddenly I knew it was my father who had uttered those strange words, that he spoke them in anger to my mother, and I believe this may have been the first time I intuited that adults had secret lives, that there were things about my parents I didn’t know, things they didn’t want me to know, maybe ever. Moreover, there was apparently some common emotional denominator between my elegant father and the shabby, leering drunk outside the restaurant. I felt strange all that day when I thought about it, and I remember it was scary at first. But by the end of the day I felt the thrill of knowledge, and when I arrived home and my mother asked if I’d had a good day at school, I very nearly said the words that I’d been practicing in my head all afternoon. You bet your ass.

I’m thinking these words when the light goes out below, plunging me into near total darkness. Meg has apparently grown tired of waiting for me to return and switched off the desk lamp. I hear my office door open and shut. Only the light from the other side of the frosted glass keeps the darkness from being complete. I can barely see the outline of the hole in the ceiling I’ve climbed up through, and it occurs to me that if I tried to lower myself through it, blind, I might very well end up in the hospital, as Lily predicted. But never mind. I have no intention of returning to my office just yet. Many inspired plans are hatched in darkness. And once dignity is surrendered, there are plenty of options.

“Let’s vote and go home, for Chrissake,” Billy Quigley is saying, directly below me.

“You weren’t even here for the discussion,” Finny, who’s chairing the meeting in the absence of the chair, points out.

“I’ve been listening to you people for thirty years,” Billy reminds his colleagues. “Don’t tell
me
I haven’t been here for the discussion.”

“That doesn’t mean you can stroll in an hour late, reeking of whiskey, and call the question,” Finny says, not unreasonably.

“Better whiskey than hypocrisy,” Billy says before putting his head down on the table and falling asleep.

“We do seem to be all talked out.” I recognize this voice as belonging to Jacob Rose. His attendance surprises me until I remember that either the dean or the dean’s representative must be present during proceedings initiated against a department chair. Jacob is also, technically, still a member of the English department.

My perch is far from ideal. I’m right above the long conference table, having been drawn to this spot by a thin crease of light. I don’t dare move around for fear of making noise that will result in my discovery. Still, I can’t see much. Billy Quigley’s balding head is directly below. Paul Rourke, doodling geometric designs on a notepad, is across from him. Gracie is somewhere nearby. I can smell her perfume wafting up. I try jimmying the ceiling tile with the point of a pen to give me another half inch or so, but I have to give up when fine particles of the pressed tile begin to float down like pollen onto Billy Quigley’s scalp.

“We appear to have a motion before us to call the question.” Finny sighs. “Do we have a second?”

“I second,” Jacob Rose says.

“You’re ex officio,” Finny, ever the parliamentarian, points out. “The rules permit you neither to move nor to second.”

The motion dies for lack of a second.

“Further discussion?”

Silence. This is my department, all right. A motion to call the question dies for lack of a second, and the discussion dies right along with it. We do understand irony though. I detect nervous tittering below.

“Look,” Jacob says. “By all means. Talk as long as you want, but when you finish there are still two issues. If you want to recall Hank as chair, do it. But you will then have to elect a chair.”

“You’re certain our search is dead?” Gracie wants to know.

“Yes,” Jacob says. “I know you all were counting on going outside. But the funding didn’t come through. What can I tell you? You knew that was a possibility.”

“Do you know how many hours the personnel committee has worked to arrive at a final list?” Gracie wants to know of the man she’s planning to marry.

“No,” Jacob admits, “but I know all of you. This is a department that can’t agree to call a question, regardless of the question. So my guess is, many hours. The fact remains. If you recall the chair, you’ll have to elect another. Do you want one election or two? Do you really want another interim chair for the last two weeks of the spring term? Then yet another election in August for the fall? My advice is that you resolve this procedural issue first. Don’t recall your chair before you decide how and when you’re going to elect another.”

“How long have you known all this?” Paul Rourke stops doodling long enough to ask.

“About the outside search?” Jacob says. “Since late Friday morning. I heard just before I had to leave town. I got back this morning, and now I’ve informed you.”

“How long has Hank known?” Rourke again.

“Since he’s not here, I have to assume he doesn’t know even now.”

“You and he haven’t discussed this?”

“I’ve been out of town. I told you.”

Rourke smiles, bored. “Since you didn’t answer my question, I’ll ask it again. Have you and Hank discussed the fact that our search was canceled?”

“No,” Jacob says, and if I didn’t know better, I’d believe him.

Rourke, I can tell, does not, though he goes back to doodling. “Sorry,” he says. “I always feel better after I’ve made you tell an outright lie.”

“Why would I lie to you?” Jacob wants to know. The aggrieved innocent is one of his better roles.

“Because that’s what deans do?” Rourke suggests. “Because you and Hank are friends?”

“Hey,” Jacob says. “We’re all friends here, aren’t we?”

Rourke lip-farts.

“That’s a motion somebody
should
make.” Orshee’s voice. “In fact, I will. I move that we all try to be friends here.”

Silence. This motion too dies for lack of a second, though it may not have been taken seriously. I hear June Barnes, somewhere below, mutter, “Grow up, friend.”

And hearing these words I believe, perhaps for the first time, that there has been something between Teddy’s wife and Orshee. Maybe it’s just the silence that her muttered words engender, as if to acknowledge that somehow life—something real—has wormed its way into this living parliamentarian death, something no one quite knows how to deal with. How many meetings like this one have we sat through in the last twenty years? How many hours, weeks, months would they total if measured out in Prufrock’s coffee spoons? How many good books have gone unread, essays unwritten, research discontinued, in order to make room for brain-scalding meetings like this one? How many books might I myself have authored? I know what William of Occam would say. He’d say it doesn’t matter. Had I been meant to write books instead of sit in English department meetings, I’d have written them. I made my choice, the fact that I can’t remember making it, to the contrary, notwithstanding.

I am now literally above all this, a posture I have long attempted to suggest from my seat at the table. For years Lily has been urging me to stand up and testify. Either I’m one of these people or I’m not. To her way of thinking I should either throw in my lot with them, live among them, my friends and colleagues, or take my respectful leave and find out where I
do
belong. Other people make their peace with who they are, what they’ve become. Why can’t I? Why live the life of a contortionist, scrunched in among the rafters? So that I can maintain the costly illusion that I am not what my father is? Is this pretense worth the effort? To this reasonable argument I offer my father’s own words. You bet your ass.

Below, the procedural issue has been decided. The Finny-Rourke contingent, having seen through Jacob’s strategy, has forced a vote on the recall issue today and scheduled another meeting for Friday to enter nominations, the election itself to follow the Friday after. I’m
grateful things have speeded up. It has to be ninety degrees up here among the rafters. I’m sweating profusely, and when I lean forward, a drop of perspiration from the tip of my nose finds the crevice I’m peering down through and lands with an almost audible plink in the center of the long conference table. Finny is distributing the ballots, explaining that a yes will be construed as a vote
for
impeachment, a no as a vote of confidence in the chair. Several of my colleagues are confused by this. Billy Quigley is awakened to vote, though he cannot be made to comprehend the significance of the yes and no. When he marks the yes box, someone, June, I think, angrily snatches the ballot from him and fills in the no.

“I’m
for
him,” Billy protests.

“Then you vote no, against the recall,” she sighs.

Billy shrugs and passes in the ballot.

“How do you live with this bossy bitch?” he wants to know. Which means Teddy must be down there somewhere. I recall the way he looked returning from class earlier in the afternoon, head down, unwilling to meet his colleagues’ eyes. How long has he known? I try to put myself in his place, imagine what he must be feeling. His and June’s marriage has always appeared to be one of professional and political convenience, and what romantic yearnings Teddy allows himself are safely vested in Lily, a woman he knows he can’t have. Still it can’t be pleasant for any man to swallow the fact that his wife is consorting with the likes of Orshee. In the end it all comes down to horse trading, and being traded breaks, if not the heart, then some mechanism in the heart necessary to its proper functioning. You don’t believe me, ask my mother.

The counting of ballots is under way below. Chairs are scraped back, and a dozen private conversations begin. The dramatic moment I’ve been waiting for approaches, so I shunt Teddy’s problems aside. A clever contortionist like William Henry Devereaux, Jr.,
can
have it both ways, I’ve decided, as I prepare, after a fashion, to join my colleagues. I remove the folded sheet of paper from my jacket pocket and fit it into the crease between the ceiling tiles. There is just enough room. Released into the atmosphere, it catches a draft and skitters into one of Billy Quigley’s hairy knuckles, startling him. He stares at it, confused. He looks around at the people nearest him for a sign as to where it came from.

Gracie and Jacob come into view below, and I hear Gracie whisper, “What’s that smell?” I can’t help smiling. This is the first time I’ve ever used scent to overpower her.

Jacob ignores this, having noticed the sheet of folded paper in front of Billy Quigley. “You might as well count them all,” he suggests to Finny, having apparently concluded that it’s another ballot.

Billy, I can tell, has come to the same conclusion and is about to pass it on, but then he opens it and begins to read. When he’s finished, he wads it up and makes as if to fire it across the room at the wastebasket in the corner. To prevent this, I send him a telepathic thought. I see him receive it, clutch in midstroke, then unwad the sheet, as Finny announces the results of the vote: eighteen yes votes, favoring my recall, nine nos.