Straight Man (6 page)

And is it the secret desire for surprise, I wonder as I do my obligatory deep knee bends on the deck, that has caused me to imagine my wife and friend as lovers tonight? It’s not the first such vision I’ve been visited by lately. Once, several months ago, perhaps because I’d heard he was going through a divorce, it occurred to me that Lily might be involved with a man she worked with at the high school, a man named Vince with whom we’d both been casually friendly for years. Sad, serious, decent, socially awkward, he’d always seemed the sort of man Lily would be attracted to if a frivolous, wisecracking, smooth, long-legged fellow like me weren’t in the picture, and for some reason it felt oddly thrilling to contemplate a new love for Lily, the sort of thing a man could almost wish for his wife if it didn’t involve a betrayal of himself. For a week or so I’d imagined signs of infatuation in Lily, but finally they were impossible to sustain, though for some reason I tried.

Since then they’ve been replaced by increasingly ridiculous yet vivid fantasies of Lily and other men in the throes of passion, and I can’t help wondering what they mean. Because in a sense, they aren’t ridiculous at all. My wife is an attractive woman, and it’s not just Teddy’s enduring devotion I offer in evidence here. There is, in addition, my own. There’s no question of her ability to attract a lover. Is it arrogant of me to assume that, married as she is to William Henry Devereaux, Jr., she’s immune to falling in love with another? Well, yes, it is arrogant, and yet for reasons I could not articulate (I know there are times, like tonight, when Lily is not all that pleased with me), I simply know that she loves me and that she loves no other. Which certainty makes the strange, unsought fantasies that much more unsettling. Many of my male colleagues—married and divorced—regularly confess to sexual longings. They all want to get laid. But, to my knowledge, I’m the only one who regularly envisions my
wife
getting laid.

Yet as I survey these wooded houses it occurs to me that they are probably home to stranger imaginings than mine. Disappointment and betrayal and emotional confusion dwell in most of them. Many are for
sale and have been since the divorces that spoiled them. Jacob Rose’s ex-wife, for instance, still lives in the house nearest ours. Finny’s ex lives at the bottom of the hill. The completion of their house had coincided almost to the day with Finny’s discovery of his true sexual identity, though he later reneged, returning, he claims, to the heterosexual fold, though not to his wife. I doubt my imaginings are more bizarre than those of Finny’s ex, who ventures out of the house they built together only when it’s absolutely necessary.

No doubt we all should have been suspicious of what these new houses represented, built as they were at the crossroads of our careers—a year or two after promotion to associate or full professor, in unspoken acknowledgment of the second or third child that made the house in town too small, an admission that promotion in an institution like West Central Pennsylvania University was a little bit like being proclaimed the winner of a shit-eating contest. Certainly such success did not reflect greater worth on the open academic market. To move to a better college, we’d have to give up something—tenure or rank or salary, or some combination of the three. A few did. Lily and I probably should have. After I published “the book” we might have used the advance to move. But we’d quickly learned how much more expensive it was to live in places where people wanted to live. The advance and promotion that got a bulldozer knocking down trees at the top of our hill in Allegheny Wells wouldn’t have started a Homelite chain saw in Ithaca or Berkeley or Cambridge.

And who knows? Maybe we were wise to stay put. In a little over a month I will be fifty, and the book I published at twenty-nine remains, as Paul Rourke likes to point out, the collected works of William Henry Devereaux, Jr. The bearded, shaggy-haired author who stares down the camera so piercingly from the jacket of
Off the Road
no longer greatly resembles the clean-shaven, thinning-haired, proboscis-punctured full professor who reflected back at me earlier from my kitchen window. I sometimes tell myself that I might have found another book in me if I’d been in a different, more demanding environment, one with better students, more ambitious colleagues, a shared sense of artistic urgency, the proper reverence for the life of the mind. But then I remember Occam’s Razor, which strongly suggests that I am a one-book author. Had I been more, I’d be more. Simple.

And Lily likes to remind me that it wasn’t building the house that proved problematic but rather purchasing the two adjacent lots to prevent neighbors. It was this, she argues, that marked the beginning of the English Department Wars that have raged ever since and that show no signs of abating. Lily would argue that when we purchased those lots, we set in motion the events that would inevitably lead to Gracie DuBois snagging my nose with her spiral notebook. And since the long chain of cause and effect can hardly be played out with so many of the players still alive, there’s every reason to expect further consequence, even from such an increasingly remote cause. Were it not for Occam’s Razor, which always demands simplicity, I’d be tempted to believe that human beings are more influenced by distant causes than immediate ones. This would be especially true of overeducated people, who are capable of thinking past the immediate, of becoming obsessed by the remote. It’s the old stuff, the conflicts we’ve never come to terms with, that sneaks up on us, half forgotten, insisting upon action. Nothing I said in today’s meeting could have provoked Gracie’s attack, though it might provoke another attack, provided we’re both still alive, in another decade or two, after my goading has had a chance to incubate. And if Paul Rourke ever finds a way to murder me and make it look like an accident, it won’t be the result of any recent, half-reasonable grievance he has against me but rather because I refused to sell him a lot almost twenty years ago when he wanted me to. Perhaps that’s the simplicity of it, the way Occam’s Razor might apply to old animosities in general and to Rourke and me in particular—that all things grow from the same seed, planted long ago.

Actually, Rourke’s was the first of many offers we received and continue to receive on our two adjacent lots. What happened was that clearing a service road up through the trees on our hill caused a stampede. The man who owned the land had been promoting its development for years, without success. Everybody thought it was a good place to build houses, but nobody wanted to be first. Before the foundation of our place had been completed, three more lots had been sold halfway down the hill. That fall Jacob Rose was made dean, and he purchased the largest of the remaining lots, two full acres, and began construction on a house twice the size of ours, as befit a dean, even a dean of liberal arts. In November Finny and his wife bought a lot at the bottom of the
hill. When I heard that, I went to the credit union for a loan. “We came out here to escape these people,” I explained to Lily, who hated to go further into debt for such a purpose.

For some reason Lily did not share my sense of impending doom at the Sold signs that kept appearing, nailed to the trees along the service road. I couldn’t understand her failure to grasp what was happening. It was my opinion (then and now) that two people who love each other need not necessarily have the same dreams and aspirations, but they damn well ought to share the same nightmares. “Don’t you get it?” I told her. “The English department is moving to Allegheny Wells.”

She stared at me for a long time, feigning incomprehension, then said my name in that way she has when she wants to suggest that I’m being more than usually unreasonable. “Hank,” she said. “Jacob Rose is your friend. There’s nothing wrong with Finny and Marie.”

“There’s nothing wrong with Finny?” I exclaimed, pretending incredulity. Not quite pretending, actually. “My God, where will it end? Today Finny, tomorrow who?”

Paul Rourke was who. He called me that December, three months after we purchased the adjacent lots with credit union money. “Not for sale,” I told him.

“Everything’s for sale,” he said, pissing me off right away. He’d apparently concluded that I was being greedy. The price of the few remaining lots had doubled in the year since I’d purchased the first, and Rourke reminded me that if I sold both adjacent lots at the price he was offering, my own land would have been free. “Don’t be a prick,” he added. “I hear they’re going to start a new development on the other side of the road. Once they do that, who’s going to bend over for
you
?”

“You’ll always bend over for me,” I recall saying. “And don’t think I don’t appreciate it.”

He’d heard right though. Later that week a yellow bulldozer, a grader, and a large earthmover materialized along the shoulder of our county road, and for the next two days the air was thick with dust from falling trees. From our front deck Lily and I had a pretty good view. It was late November and the branches were barren, making the hill on the opposite side of the road visible. Red surveyors’ stakes were planted like winter blooms all over the hillside, mapping out lots and marking the twistings and turnings of the new access road.

“I thought Harry told us the state owned all the land on the other side of the road,” I said to Lily, who had joined me on the snowy deck to watch.

“Now you don’t want people to live across the road,” she observed. “You get more misanthropic every day.”

“I get older every day,” I pointed out. I do not now and did not then consider myself a curmudgeon, but I can play that role. “My experience of human nature gets wider and deeper.”

“Actually,” she said, “you just get more like your father.”

I knew better than to argue when Lily introduces my father into an argument. It signals a willingness on her part to get down and dirty. Further, it’s an invitation for me to raise the issue of her own father, and I know where accepting such an invitation will lead. “The difference is that my father enjoys being him,” I told her. “Whereas I hate it.”

This must have sounded like some kind of concession to her, because she did not pursue her advantage. “Wish now that you’d sold to Rourke?”

“Good lord, no.”

“You may, though. He’s going to hate you forever.”

This did not strike me as a crystal ball type prediction. I reminded her that Rourke had hated me long before I refused to sell him the lot, that he was predestined to hate me, that he was, after all, a demented rationalist, that his field (eighteenth-century English poetry) was the dullest in the long history of literature, that Rourke was a bitter renegade Catholic and failed seminarian, that he couldn’t quite eliminate the old theology he’d come to despise, that it gave him Jesuit gas. Had I allowed him to become our neighbor, proximity would have provided him with a dozen more reasons to hate me. And, living right next door, where he could keep an eye on my comings and goings, he might even have found by this time some way of murdering me and making it look like an accident. Whereas, if he wanted to kill me now he’d have to cross the street, pass houses occupied by Jacob Rose’s ex-wife, the ex–football coach’s ex-wife, and other ex-wives who know me. I consider these ex-wives my last line of defense.

For a while, though, I doubted even they would protect me, because the new development—Allegheny Estates II—was ill-fated
from the beginning. Though to the naked eye our hills were identical Siamese twins, joined at a slender blacktop vertebra, the houses on the other side seemed cursed. Over there, when it rained everyone’s basement filled with water. Mud slid down the hill and formed an impressive mound at the base of the stone pillars that marked the entrance to the development. Under pressure, the pillars themselves began to lean inward perceptibly. Every wooden deck in the development was warped, and on quiet summer nights, on our side of the road, you could now and then actually hear the sound of a two-by-four snapping across the way.

If all of this weren’t enough, a plague of gypsy moths defoliated the entire forest that surrounded Allegheny Wells one summer, giving us a wintry look in July, allowing those of us on the charmed side of the road a good view of life on the doomed side. The following summer the leaves returned to our hill, their green doubly bright and lush, while across the way more serious damage had mysteriously been done. There many trees died and had to be felled, increasing the severity of the mud slides, while the few remaining trees strained to produce anemic-looking foliage, which turned yellow-brown in early August.

For all this—the flooded basement, the fissure in the family room wall, the mud he has to drive through between the tilting pillars at the entrance to Allegheny Estates II, even the gypsy moths—Paul Rourke holds me personally responsible. His protestations to the contrary, I know Rourke to be a profoundly religious man, not at all an atheist as he claims. His truest belief is in an evil deity whose sole purpose is to tax and heap upon him evidence of life’s fundamental unfairness, of which I continue to be living proof. It was Rourke who inspired my
Railton Mirror
nom de plume. Lucky Hank, he calls me.

I am not myself a religious man, but I can play that role, and I often have through the years with my disgruntled neighbor. I refer to the blacktop that separates our two developments as the Red Sea. It’s Egypt he’s living in, I tell him, and ask him what sort of infestation he expects this spring, what further sign of God’s displeasure will manifest itself, how many more signs he needs in order to become a believer. I tell him he worries me, living so close. So far, God has respected the macadam road that separates us, but the Old Testament is replete with
stories of the sinner’s neighbors getting zapped right along with the sinner. I tell him the way I figure it, if I’d sold him the lot he wanted, I’d be zapped already.

I finish up my stretching exercises as quickly as I can. I only do them as a concession to last summer’s pulled hamstring, done right at the base of our hill. It pinged like a banjo string, leaving me hobbled for a good part of the summer, requiring me to play first base in our summer softball league, and keeping me out of the NBA (the Noontime Basketball Association for faculty) all first semester. I can still feel the injury, a vague leg ghost. I pamper it in the knowledge that virtue is every now and then rewarded and because I’m determined to reclaim left field this summer, though I fear my injury may have cost me the position for good. Unfortunately, I have proven an excellent first baseman. I’m a tall, rangy target for the other side of the infield to throw at, and I have long arms that aid in the stretch. Phil Watson, who doubles as my doctor and the captain of our team, proclaimed after a single inning that first base was my natural position.