Straight Man (48 page)

Using the telephone in his kitchen, I dial the number he left me in case I needed to reach him. It’s a woman who answers, and when I recognize her voice I hang up without even saying hello. It’s only then that I remember the telephone call she made from my office, the intimacy in her voice, reporting my whereabouts, to Russell, who was waiting for me in the parking lot. I look up her number in the phone book, compare it with the one Russell gave me. Why shouldn’t Meg Quigley answer? It’s her number I just dialed.

I make a note of the address. It’s in the student ghetto, a neighborhood full of big, old houses that have been subdivided into seedy flats. This late in the spring term, the sidewalks, even on weekday mornings, are strewn with beer cans, and every third sloping porch sports a dented silver tub large enough to hold a full keg of beer. Student life is
no different, my Ivy League colleagues tell me, at Dartmouth and Princeton.

I pull into the driveway next to the house Meg’s living in and just sit there for a few minutes, hoping one or the other of them will look out the window, see me there, and come down so I won’t have to go up. But the windows are shaded and still, and I know this plan is doomed. When the screen door of the house next to Meg’s swings open, a young man dressed in jeans and a baseball cap and no shirt emerges, scratching his stomach and yawning. I recognize him as Bobo from my comp class. It’s probably not a good thing that I can’t remember Bobo’s real name. It suggests that I may have been unfair to him in other ways. I’ve just about decided that this must be the case when Bobo ambles over to the side of the porch, turns his baseball cap around backwards, yanks himself out of his fly, and arcs an impressive stream over the porch railing and onto the door of the car parked in the drive below, the one I’ve pulled in next to. I’m pleased to observe that when I get out of my car Bobo soils himself getting back into his jeans.

“Dr. Devereaux,” he says nervously. “I didn’t see you sitting there.”

He really is stunned by my sudden appearance, I can tell. He hugs his bare chest, as if somebody’s just this second whispered into his ear that it’s cold outside. What he’d like to know, and what he’s too hungover to figure out, is how much power I might wield over him in the present circumstance. He knows I have the authority to grade his compositions and make these grades stand despite his protests, and for all he knows I may have other powers too. I can see the wheels turning in Bobo’s slow brain. I’ve caught him with his dick in his hand in broad daylight peeing on somebody’s car. On the other hand we’re not on campus, which means I may be outside my legal jurisdiction. What the hell am I
doing
here? is what he’d love to know. He’s trying to think of a way to ask.

“I’m curious,” I tell him, because I am. “Why is it necessary to turn your hat around backwards in order to pee forwards?”

Bobo entertains this question with high seriousness, as if I’d just asked him to explain the disappearance of the Fool after Act Three of
King Lear
. “It isn’t,” he finally explains, without much confidence, it seems to me.

“Kind of a precaution?” I suggest, confusing him further, though he agrees that this is what it must be. “You have a nice day, Bobo,” I tell him.

“You too, Dr. Devereaux.”

Meg’s flat is on the second floor, and I meet her on the stairs. Her hair is wet, and normally I would find this intimate detail attractive in Meg, but today she stirs little in me besides misgiving.

“You the cowardly person who called and hung up fifteen minutes ago?” she wants to know, suggesting that I’m not the only person on this staircase suffering misgivings.

“I wasn’t expecting to hear your voice,” I explain.

“I can’t believe he gave you my number. He must have forgot you and I knew each other.”

“Must have.”

We both become aware at the same moment how awkward it is for us to be talking on the landing of a dark hallway. “Look,” she says, not meeting my eyes now. “I’ve got the feeling he’d like to stay. And I really need him to go, okay?”

“He’ll be gone within the hour,” I assure her.

“He’s a sweet man, but I’m friends with Julie too.”

“Right.”

“I mean, it’s not like the sex is a big thing,” she explains, “but I feel weird about the deception part.”

“I can understand how you would.”

“Well, the door’s unlocked,” she says, turning away and heading down the stairs. She stops suddenly, as if she’s just realized something. “You’re
really
pissed, aren’t you?”

“Maybe sex is a bigger thing with me,” I say. What I don’t say is that right now I’m very glad I didn’t share that peach with her.

She seems to understand this without my saying it. “You’re just like my old man,” she says, shaking her head on the way out, “only sober.”

Meg’s flat, at least the living room, is typical graduate student chic, decorated as if to suggest that she still hasn’t made up her mind whether to drink or read. Everywhere there are candles, half burned, dripping colorful wax down the necks of wine and liquor bottles. There are about two tons of books stacked on boards spaced atop concrete blocks. A quick scan of the books’ spines reveals that many of her favorite authors are ones who also couldn’t decide whether to drink or write. Her copy of William Henry Devereaux, Jr. (funny the way it
leaps off the shelf) is wedged in between a Frederick Exley and a Scott Fitzgerald.

Finding Russell fast asleep in the tangle of Meg’s sheets, I jiggle the bed with my foot until he wakes up. He’s even more surprised to see me than Bobo was. He’s so surprised, in fact, that he looks around to make sure of his whereabouts. It would be strange enough to wake up in his own bed and see his father-in-law standing over him, but in Meg Quigley’s bedroom, with him in Meg’s bed, my presence makes no kind of sense.

“See what I meant last night?” I say. “Nobody tells everything.”

This is definitely anger I’m feeling right now, and I’d like it to be righteous anger, but it’s hard to feel that toward a man whose undershorts you’re wearing.

“Get dressed,” I suggest. “Take a shower first.”

He makes no immediate move to do as he’s told, despite the clarity and simplicity of my directions. “Are you going to leave,” he finally asks, “so I can?”

Unbelievable. “What, are you shy, Russell?”

He’s sitting up in bed now, covers pulled up to his waist. “This isn’t anything, Hank,” he says. “Meg doesn’t mean anything to me.”

I nod my understanding. “At least your stories are consistent. She just assured me you mean nothing to her either.”

Russell looks a little hurt to hear this, but he covers it quickly. “It’s just …”

“It’s kind of like a support system,” I suggest, recalling Julie’s explanation for all the phone calls she made over the weekend. “You shouldn’t try to be the Lone Ranger when you’re hurting.”

He’s squinting at me now, unsure whether this New Age, talk-show language of mine constitutes mockery. “You look funny,” he says finally.

“Funny how?”

“Violent funny,” he acknowledges nervously. “Like you wouldn’t mind killing somebody you were sure deserved it.”

“Get dressed, Russell,” I tell him again. “Shower first. Then dress. Then pack everything you’ll need in Atlanta for a week or so. Maybe longer.”

I go back into the living room so he can begin. It’s a tiny apartment with thin walls, and I can’t help hearing his powerful postcoital stream in the toilet bowl. It’s only fair, I suppose. I’ve mocked him, so now he’s mocking me. First Bobo, now Russell.

I consult my watch, try to gauge how long it will take to drive to the airport and back. I’ve got a lot to do before my workshop at two in the afternoon. I call the office to get Rachel to schedule an appointment with the dean, but instead of Rachel I get her voice mail. Hard to believe, but she seems to have followed a direct order and not reported for duty today. Which means I’m on my own. Thankfully, when I call the dean’s number I get Marjory, not Jacob.

“I need to see him late this afternoon,” I tell her.

“I think he wants to talk to you right now,” Marjory informs me.

“Well, I don’t want to talk to him,” I tell her, but I hear a muffled sound on her end, and then Jacob is on the line.

“Goddamn it, Hank,” he says before I can hang up on him.

To pass the time, I count the William Henry Devereaux books on Meg’s bookcase. The final tally is four—three of my father’s, the one of mine. When I hear the shower thunk off, I call Marjory back.

“Boy, is he pissed at you,” she informs me.

“Good,” I tell her. “I’ve been having bad thoughts about him all morning. One right after another.”

“He’s doing the best he can, Hank.”

So I tell her the joke about the priest who hires an old woman to play the organ at services. Nine o’clock Mass on Sunday morning, the church is full. Everyone stands for the processional hymn, and the organ thunders to life, but the notes are completely random. Nothing like this has ever been heard in a church before. All through Mass it’s like this, as if a small child has been allowed to experiment on the instrument. After Mass is over, the priest is pretty steamed. Clearly the old woman has lied about knowing how to play the organ. Furious, the priest wants to know what she has to say for herself. “Guess what the old woman replies,” I ask Marjory.

“I’m doing the best I can?” she guesses, confirming what I and others have long suspected, that
she
should be dean. “How’s three-thirty this afternoon?”

I tell her three-thirty is perfection.

“So,” Russell says when we’ve driven halfway to the airport in silence. “You’re, like, running me out of town?”

“I think you need to look into this job opportunity in Atlanta, Russell,” I tell him.

He nods, his hair newly moussed and prickly. “I forgot all about your old man,” he tells me. When I glance over at him and frown, he continues. “Julie told me he was, like, this Olympic adulterer. He left you and your mother and ran off with a grad student, right? In that context I guess I can see why you’re so upset with me.”

“Shut up, Russell.”

He ignores this friendly, heartfelt advice. “Still, it’s pretty amazing you think you can just run me out of town like this. I mean, a man in your condition.”

“What condition is that?”

He studies me. “You look awful,” he confesses reluctantly. “I could easily overpower you. I could wrest the wheel from your control. I could toss you out and leave you by the side of the road and take your car. You know I could.”

“Overpower?” I say. “Wrest the wheel?” What kind of language is this?

“I could,” he says. “You want to know the reason I don’t?”

“Because you feel guilty and humiliated, a failure in marriage and life?”

“Ah,” he says, staring straight ahead now. “You
do
understand why.”

What I understand is that a bad thing is beginning to happen, one I might have predicted. Now that he’s not in Meg Quigley’s bed anymore, all my affection for Russell is returning at a gallop. I haven’t liked him this much since the day I thrashed him at basketball, since he made that wild, awkward, desperate hook shot and the ball landed on the roof, wedged in behind the backboard so that I had to climb up and get it, his new wife, my daughter, looking on.

“I hope you don’t think my running you out of town means that I don’t like you, Russell,” I tell him. “This isn’t forever. I just think everything will be better if you leave town for a while. I know
I’m
going to feel a lot better.”

“I just hope you don’t imagine I have plane fare to Atlanta.”

I glance over at him and raise an eyebrow, as if to ask just how dumb he thinks I am.

“Or money to live on when I get there,” he adds, sheepishly.

“Don’t try to talk me out of this, Russell,” I warn him.

We make the airport in record time. Russell puts up exactly no fuss. His only visible resentment of his father-in-law is manifested by his refusal to let me carry either of his bags.

“I hate commuter flights,” he tells me after I’ve booked him on one to Pittsburgh, where he will connect with a direct flight to Atlanta. We’ve left the return open-ended. I write him a check for expenses. He studies it dubiously. “Stay someplace cheap,” I advise. “Call Julie when you get in.”

“Really?”

“Take my advice,” I say. “Tell her this was your idea. She’ll like you better.”

“What are
you
going to tell her?”

“I haven’t decided,” I say, though I have.

Russell notices his flight is boarding, and he takes a deep breath. “I’m really scared of these little planes,” he confides, and I can see he’s not kidding.

“You’re not going to die on this flight, Russell. You came closer to dying in bed this morning before you even woke up.”

“Knowing how scared I am, you’re still going to make me do this?”

“That’s right.”

He shrugs, as if to say he’s not surprised. “Well, good-bye then.”

We shake hands like two men who may never see each other again.

“Meg told me she’d been flirting with you for a long time.”

“She did, huh.”

“She said you wanted to fuck her. She could tell.”

“Really.”

“She said you wanted to, bad.”

“Not bad enough.”

He nods. “That kind of hurt her feelings. I told her about your father, so she’d understand.”

“So she wouldn’t misunderstand my stubbornness for virtue?”

“Hey,” he says. “I never thought of it that way.”

“Good luck in Atlanta,” I tell him, and I wish it for him, too. I wish for it with a hard, determined, childlike intensity. A prayer, almost.

When he’s on the plane and the stewardess pulls up the stairs and locks the aircraft’s door, I immediately regret having done this. Russell is always good company, and I wish I had some for the trip home.

By noon, when I pull up to the curb in front of my mother’s place, she and Mr. Purty are just backing out of the driveway in his truck. Which means I’ve narrowly missed witnessing her climbing into it, something I feel sure would have cheered me up.