Straight Man (41 page)

“The chair is recalled by the necessary two-thirds majority,” Finny declares.

My colleagues have begun to file out of the room when I hear Billy Quigley clear his throat.

Many things will occur to a man like me when trapped in a filthy crawl space, separated from light and camaraderie by asbestos-contaminated ceiling tiles and insulation. During the half hour since the vote, thirty long, hot minutes spent on my hands and knees, scuttling about in the dark, looking for a place to alight, I’ve reluctantly been forced to confront a dark reality. I appear to be a man in trouble. I have hated to admit to this, but facts are facts, and I know what William of Occam would conclude on the basis of these facts. As recently as late last week I was able to view Teddy Barnes’s concern for my well-being as alarmist. The consensus view of my friends and enemies alike, that I am out of control, a genuine loose cannon, is a view that, stubborn as I am, I would still like to contest. But here are the facts. I am nearly fifty years old. When I woke up today, I put on chinos, a blue button-down oxford shirt, a cloth tie, scuffed but serviceable loafers, the threadbare, tasteful tweed coat of my profession. I was then and I still remain, however temporarily, the chairperson of a large academic department in an institution of higher learning.
I have written and published a book that was favorably reviewed in
The New York Times
. And I should not be trapped in urine-soaked trousers in the ceiling of Modern Languages, afraid to alight.

Descending into my own office is no longer an option, even if I were willing to risk it in the dark. The corridor is full of my excited colleagues, flying into and out of their offices, and every few minutes one of them checks my office to see if I’ve returned. The dramatic developments of the department meeting have my colleagues all abuzz. They remind me of the wasps on Russell and Julie’s deck after Russell doused their hive with Raid. With the whole wide world to travel in, they persist in circling the hive. Agitated, they seek each other’s company and reassurance. They try every conceivable configuration.

So. The men’s room being occupied, I descend into the women’s and quickly lock the door in order to prevent having to share with those persons who have a more legitimate claim. There I discover my condition is even worse than I have imagined. My pants have mostly dried in the forty-five minutes since I wet them, but they have also served as a magnet for all the dust, dirt, grime, asbestos fibers, and mouse droppings of the crawl space I’ve been confined in. In the long, fiercely lit wall mirror of the women’s room, I am a genuine sight. I have no idea how many women have studied themselves in this same mirror in the years since the building was constructed, but I’m certain it has never reflected a reality like this one. Even Lily, who predicted I was going to have a rough few days in her absence, could not have imagined this. I look like a B-movie commando, my face smudged darkly with perspiration and grime, my clothing grayed with fibrous muck, my hair matted with sweat. I have a candy wrapper stuck to my elbow. I could be convicted of murder, looking like this, and I’m not talking about killing ducks. I’m visited by an insight not unlike the one I entertained last week when I saw myself on TV holding Finny (the goose, not the man) up to the cameras. This isn’t funny.

I’ve cleaned up a little when someone tries the door, and I hear Gracie curse mildly. Then the door rattles more violently, and I hear Jacob remark that it seems to be locked from the inside. I’m tempted to let them in and be done with it. Having admitted to myself the possibility that I am a man in trouble, I know only one thing for sure: I’m not going back up into that ceiling.

“Why would it be locked from the inside?” Gracie wonders.

“How should I know?” Jacob says. “Maybe June Barnes is dealing crack again.”

“June, are you in there?” Gracie raises her voice to the door.

“No, I’m right here.” I hear June’s voice down the hall. A door closes, June coming out of her office, locking the door behind her. “And I heard that crack crack, Jacob.”

“Crack crack? Who who? Me me?”

“Come away from there, Teddy,” I hear June say. “We’re going home.” I can picture this. Teddy, keeping a vigil outside my office door, awaiting my return. Somebody’s gone inside, reported that my satchel is still there, which means that I must be around.

“I can’t understand it,” he says. “Where can he have gone?”

Apparently all the commotion has distracted Teddy from his own problems.

“He’s probably playing handball with that defiler of young womanhood.”

“Racquetball,” her husband clarifies.

“I’m telling you,” Gracie says. “He was up in the ceiling.”

“Jesus,” Jacob says.

“That piece of paper dropped out of the ceiling.”

Silence.

“It came
out
of the ceiling,” Gracie repeats. “I saw it drop. It fell right past me.”

“You people are all certifiable,” Jacob says.

“I really need to use the little girls’ room,” Gracie says. “I’m not kidding.”

“Oy,” June says. “I knew that somewhere in this country there had to be a woman who still uses the term ‘little girls’ room.’ ”

“Use the little boys’,” Jacob suggests. “There’s nobody in there. We’ll stand guard.”

“Check for me,” Gracie says. “Make sure.”

I hear the men’s room door creak open and then shut again. “All clear,” Jacob says.

Then the door opens, shuts, and opens again more violently. “Goddamn you, Jacob,” Gracie says. There’s a soft thud, as of a purse making
contact with a dean. “Finny’s in there with his dick in his hand, as you well know.”

“I didn’t think you’d mind Finny,” Jacob says, aggrieved innocent again.

“Damn,” Gracie says, jiggling the women’s room door one more time, just in case she was hallucinating before. “All right. I’m going to use the one downstairs.”

I hear the men’s room door open again. Finny exiting.

“I’m sorry, Finny,” Gracie says. “I didn’t see anything.”

“Now you’ve really hurt his feelings,” Jacob says.

It’s the double doors I hear swinging open now, signaling Gracie’s exit.

“I can’t understand where he can have gone to,” Teddy says again.

“He’s insane,” Finny says. “Last week I caught him outside my classroom door, making faces at my students.”

“He certainly seems to have captured your imaginations,” Jacob says. They’re all moving down the hall now. “Gracie believes he’s in the ceiling. You’re seeing him outside your classroom.”

“If we had a dean who took things seriously …,” Finny begins.

“He’d have killed himself years ago,” Jacob finishes.

“Maybe I should drive out to Allegheny Wells and check on him,” Teddy proposes halfheartedly.

I hear an office door open and close somewhere down the hall.

“Jacob,” Billy Quigley says. “Are you aware that Gracie is going around telling people that you two are getting married?”

“I asked our pal Hank to be best man,” Jacob tells him by way of rebuttal. “But if he’s going to kill ducks and crawl around in the ceiling, I may need to rethink my options.”

“I don’t think he killed that goose,” Teddy says, with what sounds like real regret.

“Surely you don’t think he’s too squared away? Too emotionally stable?” Paul Rourke’s voice.

“What are these pink spots that go all up your sleeve?” Jacob wants to know, apparently of Finny.

“You can see them?” Finny says, clearly alarmed.

“Not really. Only in a certain light,” Jacob assures him.

“Isn’t Gracie still married?” Billy Quigley says, reassuring me, since this was my first question too. Their voices are growing distant.

“Only in the legal sense,” Jacob assures him, and then the double doors at the end of the corridor open and close on their conversation.

I cautiously unlock the women’s room door and peek out. The corridor is deserted, quiet. I study the double doors at the end of the corridor through which my colleagues have passed. Each of these doors contains a small rectangular window, but they’re too far away and the lighting is too dim for me to see whether these windows contain faces. I take a chance, slip out of the women’s room and quickly down the hall and into my office, where I gather my satchel and my workshop stories for tomorrow. Then down the back stairs.

Outside, darkness is falling, for which I’m grateful. I sneak out of Modern Languages and cut across the lawn toward the back lot where my Lincoln awaits. This late in the evening there are only a half dozen cars in the two-acre lot, and maybe it’s odd that there should be another car parked right next to mine, but I don’t pay any attention. It’s been too long a day to confront minor riddles, slight statistical anomalies. There’s nobody in either car anyway. I can see that from fifty yards away. I unlock mine, get in, insert the key in the ignition. In my peripheral vision, I see the car next to me rock gently and a head pop up. I draw the conclusion that William of Occam would draw. Surely William was once a young man, subject to the impulses of spring, especially a late-arriving one. No doubt I’ve interrupted a young couple who thought they would be safe way out here in the back lot. They wish now they’d waited for it to be completely dark. I find reverse and start to back out. When a horn toots, I can’t help looking over at the car next to mine, and in it I see my son-in-law Russell’s bristly head framed in the window. I put the Lincoln in park, and Russell gets out, stretching and yawning. I lean over, unlock the passenger door. He gets in, still rubbing his eyes.

It’s the smell that wakes him up. “Whoa!” he says, looking over at me, startled. He hasn’t closed the door yet, so the dome light is on and he can get a good look. “Jesus, Hank. What the hell happened to you? Don’t tell me another poet.”

“Teaching English isn’t the clean work it used to be,” I explain. “Most people don’t realize.”

He’s leaning out, gulping air. “Sorry,” he says, and he sounds genuinely sorry too. “I’ve got a hair-trigger gag reflex. I lose it if I smell cabbage cooking.”

“How about oral sex?” It occurs to me to ask this.

“Oh, God, Hank.” He’s still hanging out the door, this fastidious son-in-law of mine, who may or may not have given my daughter a shiner. “Have a heart.”

“I mean in general. I’m not talking about you and me.”

He gets out of the car again. He really does look sick.

“What are you doing here, Russell?”

“Waiting for you. I have been for over an hour. I thought we could go have a beer someplace. Talk.”

“Okay. Let’s.”

He peers in at me to see if I’m serious.

“If you don’t mind, I’d like to shower and change my clothes first though.”

“I insist.”

“You want to follow me out to the house?”

He hesitates. “Will Julie be there?”

“Could be. I doubt it though. I think she’s back in hers. Yours. Now that the locks have been changed.”

“I don’t think I’m ready to see her,” he says.

“You’re married to her, Russell. You may have to see her again.” I doubt he even registered the information about the locks.

He’s still peering in at me, grimacing. “You really got like that
teaching
?”

Russell follows me out to Allegheny Wells. It’s fifteen minutes of solitude for each of us. He probably uses his fifteen minutes to consider the implications of the fact that he plans to seek marital advice from a fifty-year-old man who kills ducks and wets his pants. I use my own solitude to consider what may well be my worst character flaw, the fact that in the face of life’s seriousness, its pettiness, its tragedy, its lack of coherent meaning, my spirits are far too easily restored. Darkness is very nearly complete by the time we arrive in Allegheny Wells. Our headlights do little more than pierce the epidermis of the Pennsylvania woods that border the narrow blacktop. In their deep, dark interior, it’s
easy to imagine wolves roaming, gathering into packs, circling, closing in, howling and slathering. They may even be close enough to hear me chuckling.

When I’ve showered and dressed, I find Russell outside, camped in a deck chair, Occam snoring peacefully alongside. The tape on my message machine looks pretty close to full, its green light blinking in rapid-fire bursts. I consider it, but I hate to ruin my good mood by pressing play and allowing my colleagues to share their thoughts with me. Most of them just want to tell me what happened in the department meeting, but hell, I was there. It’ll be interesting to compare their versions with each other and with the truth but, frankly, not that interesting, so I put on a jacket and join my son-in-law on the deck. The wolves I imagined closing in earlier seem to have found other distractions. I sniff the air for evidence of lupine presence, find none. Perhaps in the shower I’ve removed the scent they’ve been following.

Russell informs me that the phone has rung several times since I was in the shower. I ignore this, pull up a chaise longue. “There’s beer in the fridge,” I tell him.

“Like hell,” he says. “I looked.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

I consider this. “Does Julie drink beer?”

“Sure.”

“Since when?”

“Since she was sixteen, like everybody else,” Russell assures me. Sons-in-law like knowing things their fathers-in-law don’t. They like sharing what they know.

The evening is surprisingly warm. Still too cool to sit outside without a jacket, but warm enough to imagine summer. On such nights as this Lily and I have, over the years since we built the house, welcomed the approach of summer this way, by enduring the mild discomfort of a reluctant spring, substituting promise for reality, knowing our days are headed in the right direction. Tonight, a fast-moving cold front is forecast to pass through central Pennsylvania. Temperatures
are predicted to plunge, though by tomorrow warmer weather will return.

Russell observes me stroking the arms of my chaise longue fondly. “Deck furniture was one of the things we were going to buy before the money ran out,” he tells me.

When I don’t say anything to that, he continues tentatively, “Tell me honestly. Do you like your house?”