Straight Man (51 page)

“Every time I see you, you look worse,” Marjory observes when I limp in.

“I should come over more often,” I tell her. “That way my decline wouldn’t seem so pronounced.”

“See this?” she says, indicating her large blotter calendar. She turns April over so I can see May. The fifteenth is circled in bold red. On the sixteenth a small note in Marjory’s neat hand: “Happy days are here again.”

“You’re taking your retirement?”

“With a vengeance. Thanks to Jacob, I was made a nice offer. Harold and I are looking at condos in the Chapel Hill area.”

“Harold really enjoys golf, doesn’t he?”

“More than sex. It’s one of the things we have in common. I like it more than sex too.” She’s been studying me all this time. And it occurs to me to wonder if this is Marjory’s way of suggesting that after I’m fired my life may actually improve. Surely I would prefer golf to academe, if not to sex.

“You’ve known about all this shit for a long time, haven’t you?”

Her guilty expression makes me regret pinning her down this way. “Since last fall when Jacob was fired.”

“And that’s why you were thinking about coming back to the English department.”

“This early-retirement golf package is even better.”

The door opens then, and Jacob Rose emerges, to my surprise, in the company of Terence Watters, the university’s counsel, whose face is the same blank mask he was wearing when I saw him last week coming out of Dickie Pope’s office. Henry Kissinger was emotive by comparison. What he’s doing talking to Jacob Rose I can’t imagine.

“You know Hank Devereaux?” Jacob asks.

Terence Watters surrenders the slightest of nods, as if to suggest that it may be necessary to disavow all knowledge of me later. By tomorrow this whole meeting may not have taken place. It may be necessary to send someone to rub out Marjory, because she too is a witness. For now, it’s too soon to tell.

“All right, get in there and drop your pants,” Jacob tells me when Terence Watters has taken his leave. “Marjory, bring the switch.”

We go into Jacob’s office. He closes the door behind us.

“Sit there,” he instructs me. “And keep your hands where I can see ’em.”

This is some good mood he’s in. I can’t for the life of me figure out why, and I need to. A liberal arts dean in a good mood is a potentially dangerous thing. It suggests a world different from the one we know. One where any damn thing can happen. Which is exactly what this present circumstance feels like. I mean, this is a
really
good mood that Jacob Rose is in. Not just the kind of good mood that may descend upon a man when he’s gotten a couple of job offers and asked a woman to marry him and she’s said yes. A
really
good mood. He looks like a man convinced not just of his own inherent goodness but that virtue is destined to prevail, evil predestined to failure. In other words, he looks nothing like a liberal arts dean, especially one who’s just compiled, for the purposes of termination, a list of four names, one of which is that of his best man.

“Let’s start small, shall we?” Jacob suggests. “How come you’re terrorizing my niece in class?”

“Your niece?”

“Blair,” he explains. “I’m her uncle.”

“You are? I had no idea.”

“She didn’t want any special treatment.”

“She won’t stand up for her convictions,” I explain. “I didn’t realize the problem was genetic until now. I wouldn’t have been so hard on her.”

This is one of my better jabs, but Jacob doesn’t even flinch. He just chuckles. “God, you are
such
an arrogant prick. You remember when we came here?”

“Black September, 1971? Sure.”

“Remember old Rudy Byers? Even twenty years ago people were saying what an arrogant prick you were. Rudy said, Don’t worry, he’ll grow up. Pups are supposed to mess themselves. Swat him on the ass with a rolled-up newspaper a couple times and he’ll get the message.”

“Now
there
was a dean,” I say nostalgically.

“The thing is, you’re worse now than you were then. And you think you’re just being frisky. Fifty years old and you’re still shitting on the carpet and thinking it’s clever.”

“Well,” I say, “at least one of us got trained. Somebody says ‘heel’ and you heel. Somebody says make out a list, you make out a list.”

I study him carefully, because this is where he’ll start denying, if he’s going to. I guess I’m surprised when he doesn’t. Jacob and I go back a long time, and it’s time that makes you think you know people. But instead of looking guilty, Jacob appears even more full of himself.

“That other job offer was from right here, wasn’t it?” I say. “That’s why you didn’t have to worry about what Gracie would say about Texas.”

“I think she would have gone with me,” Jacob says.

“So now, finally, you’re a player,” I say. “And all you had to do was write down four names.”

“Wrong again,” he says. “It wasn’t all I had to do. It was the easy part of what I had to do.”

“That’s the first thing you’ve said I don’t believe,” I tell him. “I refuse to believe that writing down those names was easy.” What I don’t tell him is that I know how hard it must have been because I considered doing it.

He raises his hands in the air like he’s going to surrender. “Dee-fee-cult for you, easy for me.” Still grinning.

“Jacob,” I say.

“It’s a rough break for Orshee,” he admits, “but he’ll be given a year to find something else. He’s publishing that trendy cultural theory crap, and he’s sufficiently smarmy. Somebody will hire him.”

“I wasn’t thinking about Orshee,” I tell him.

“Who then? Finny?” Jacob says. “Finny will be given a year’s sabbatical at half pay to finish his dissertation at Penn. He won’t, but that’s
his problem. After his sabbatical, we’ll keep him on to teach comp as an adjunct if he wants. That’s more than he deserves.”

“And Billy Quigley?”

“Walter is retiring over in university publications. Billy will be offered his job. He can nip in private all day. I know for a fact he’s wanted Walter’s job for a long time.” Jacob is having all he can do to contain himself now. I half-expect him to leap up on his desk and do a jig. The expression of pure delight on his face makes him look like a Jewish leprechaun. “Which leaves only William Henry Devereaux, Jr. What’s to be done with
that
asshole?”

Until this moment I’ve felt myself to be a match for Jacob, even though he’s had the advantage of playing a concealed hand while most of my cards are face up on the table. But now I have a sinking feeling. Jacob knows he’s got me beat on the board. It doesn’t matter to him what I’m holding. And when I realize the card he’s about to turn over, a wave of pure nausea passes over me, and I feel the weight of my backed up urine pressing down hard on my groin.

“You’re wrong,” I say, a little desperately. “It doesn’t leave just me. It also leaves you.” And I’m about to ask him what his price was, what sort of carrot Dickie had to dangle in front of him in order to get Jacob to play ball, when the penny drops. Terence Watters doesn’t waste his time talking to liberal arts deans.

“My God,” I say. “Dickie’s out, isn’t he?”

Jacob chortles. “Big tidal wave came and washed him clean away.”

“And you’re in. Congratulations.”

“Thanks,” he says, and it’s only now that his grin disappears. It was at this point, no doubt, that he expected me to be happy for him. And maybe I am.

“Is it what you want, Jacob?”

“It is,” he admits, a little sadly, it seems to me. Perhaps he’s remembering that when we were hired, we were
both
loose cannons. With this move, it’s official: the revolution has become an institution. “I don’t expect you to understand …”

But of course I do, or I think I do. Jacob is a decent man of sound, thoughtful principles and educational values, who’s been subservient throughout most of his career to lesser men. He’d like to see what he
can do while he can still do it. He won’t get another chance, and I can’t find it in my heart to blame him for seizing this one.

“Listen,” I say, getting to my feet. “I’m sorry. Since I came in here, I’ve been trying to hurt your feelings. I really have no idea why.”

He waves this off. “Forget it. I’ve known you for twenty years. I know you’ve got no idea why you do what you do.”

“I’m sure you’ll make a good CEO.”

“Hey,” he grins. “I’m sure you’ll be a good dean of liberal arts.”

I go over to the window, to
my
window if I want it to be, just in time to see the last of the tethered donkeys being led up a ramp into the women’s gym. Truth? I’m tempted. The same thing has occurred to me that no doubt occurred to Jacob. Just imagine the two of
us
in power. What fun we’d have. And, for a man like me, who’s so enjoyed rattling the English department’s cage, a promotion represents a wider field of play. Sure, I’ve always taken pride in my ability to wreak havoc from any position on the game board, but from this one …

I indulge the fantasy for a long moment, then put it away. Even if I wanted this job, and I don’t, I can’t let Jacob do it. Of all the moves he’s made, appointing me dean is the only one that would cost him, and it would cost more than he can afford. No one will miss Orshee. No one will deny the justice of his decision concerning Finny, except possibly Finny himself. And Billy Quigley’s reassignment will be seen as an act of kindness. On the other hand, making me dean would be seen as an act of arrogance and defiance, a plum given a friend. He couldn’t do a worse thing without appointing Gracie.

“Of course nothing is free,” Jacob is saying. He’s apparently read my temptation in my hesitation. “This is going to cost you your secretary. Marjory’s going to hit the links, and I’m going to need someone to make me look competent. Since Rachel damn near made
you
look competent, I’m going to have to steal her. I figure we get our department colleagues to elect Paul Rourke chair, then we take turns abusing him. What do you say?”

What does William Henry Devereaux, Jr., say? Nothing for a long moment, then, “Listen, Jacob. Thanks anyway.”

Jacob just stares at me for several beats before exploding. “I knew it.” He’s gotten up from his desk now and is pacing behind it. “I knew you’d do this. What’s
wrong
with you?” he wants to know, and he’s not
the only one. Another wave of nausea has crashed over me. I have all I can do not to double over. “What kind of man goes through life content to be a fly in other people’s ointment? What kind of pleasure do you derive from that? How old are you?”

All these questions mix dangerously with my nausea, and I have to sit down, certain that I will pass out if I don’t. I try to remember if I’ve ever felt worse in my life. The tips of my fingers are tingling, the edges of my vision blurring. Jacob appears blissfully unaware of my plight.

“You know who I feel sorry for?” he’s saying. “Your wife. Women are always telling me I can’t see anything from a woman’s point of view. But I’ll tell you, my heart fucking bleeds for any woman—much less a woman as bright and kind as Lily—who has to spend a lifetime with a bonehead like you.”

At the mention of Lily I break into a cold sweat. I can feel four distinct tracks of perspiration moving down my trunk and into the waistband of my shorts. Waves of nausea are rolling over me like contractions. Like Jacob—like every man our age—I have been accused of not being able to imagine anything from a woman’s point of view, but sitting here, paralyzed with something very much like fear, I feel like I’ve just crossed into the final stage of labor. Transition!—the term for it suddenly returns to me. I feel fully dilated, like it’s now okay for me to push. Except that this is not the place. I know the place. It’s just outside the dean’s office and down the hall a couple of doors. Time? At a dead run, ten seconds, if I were capable of a dead run. In my current cramped condition, limping tenderly, grabbing onto the backs of chairs and door-frames, three times that, at least. I wait for a monster contraction to subside and struggle to my feet.

“You know what you are?” Jacob asks me. He’s got a good, righteous head of steam up, and I envy him this. He’s saying things that friendship has kept him from saying for twenty years, and their release at this late date is orgasmic. Asking him to stop would be like asking him to pull out. “You are the physical embodiment of the perversity principle,” he gives me to understand. “Fake left, go right. Fake right, go left. Keep everybody in suspense, right? What’s Hank going to do? If you have to fuck yourself over to surprise them, so be it.”

Somehow, I’ve made it out into Marjory’s office, and Marjory, who prefers golf to sex, and who is not, like Jacob, in the throes of an intense
rhetorical orgasm, is looking at me with such alarm that it’s clear she’s intuited my distress. I’m tempted to tell her I’m in labor, the contractions are coming one right after the other. Instead I fix her with a homicidal glare and say, “Get him away from me!”

But this merely encourages Jacob. “There he is, Marjory,” he addresses her. “Hank Devereaux. The man who fucked himself and claimed it was the best lay he ever had.”

“Jacob,” Marjory says sharply. “I think Hank is sick.”

I’ve made it as far as the door that leads to the outer office where the students who have come to petition the dean are required to wait. They too look alarmed when they see me.

“They don’t come much sicker,” Jacob agrees.

My palm is so slick with sweat that I can’t get a grip on the stainless steel doorknob. It keeps slipping. I wipe off my palm on my tweed coat and try again.

“Just answer me one thing before you go,” Jacob says, leaning against the door so it stays shut. “I’ll ask you the simplest question I know, and I bet it stumps you.”

I try to bring him into focus, but I can’t. I swear to God if I had a forty-five I’d blow him across the room and into eternity.

“Just answer me this,” he insists, blind, apparently to the fact that perspiration is now pouring off me. There’s a bead of ice cold sweat on the tip of my nose. “Just one simple question. It’s one your wife and your kids and all your friends would like you to answer.” He’s close enough to whisper now, so he does. It’s a nice, short question, but he pauses between its elements for emphasis. “What … the fuck … do you … 
want
?”