Straight Man (21 page)

We hadn’t, any of us, intended to allow the pettiness of committee work, departmental politics, daily lesson plans, and the increasingly militant ignorance of our students let so many years slip by. And now in advancing middle age we’ve chosen, wisely perhaps, to be angry with each other rather than with ourselves. We’ve preferred not to face the distinct possibility that if we’d been made for better things, we’d have done those things. Tony is one of the few contented men I know, and at the present moment he’s reaping the benefit of being so sensible. He is no doubt fondling the very breasts that Missy Blaylock believes are wasted in Railton. That she allows him to do so will deepen his conviction that he has a lot to offer women, and he’s far too intelligent to waste time wondering whether, when Missy’s eyes close and she begins to purr, it’s his tequila-marinated affection or her dream of a more upscale market that’s causing her nipples to harden.

But these are the thoughts of a dripping man in the dark, dripping woods, and when I finish thinking them I punctuate the process with a good, confident zip of my fly. When I emerge from the shadows, I come face to face with a young woman who’s laboring on foot up the steep, slick sidewalk. She appears to be in her middle twenties, maybe younger. She has a full, pretty face, which seems almost to apologize for the fact that beneath her heavy, quilted winter coat she’s huge. Unaccountably, she’s wearing only rubber flip-flops on her bare feet. Her expression is so open, so unguarded that it reminds me of a begging dog that fully expects to get booted but can’t help licking you anyway.

“I know you,” this girl says, though she’s not quite looking at me, or at least not at my eyes. “What’s your name?”

She doesn’t know me, I’m certain, nor do I know her. The only thing I know for sure is that I’m not going to tell her my name. I’ve come out of the woods at three o’clock in the morning, and this girl is no more frightened of me than a wet kitten, and that, oddly enough, makes me frightened of her.

“What’s your name?” she says again. She pronounces the word
name
so that it rhymes with
mime
. And then she repeats the question twice more, barely allowing her voice to drop before beginning again.

She’s moving toward me now, as if she’d like to reach out and touch my face, and I take an instinctive step backward. “Are you all right?” I ask her, not sure what I mean by the question.

It’s the sound of my voice, not my question, I think, that stops her. “You’re not him,” she exclaims, her voice full of calm wonder. “You’re not him at all.”
All
, pronounced
owl
.

“No,” I agree. “I’m not.”

“You’re not him at all,” she repeats, and turns away.

“Are you okay?” I ask again, rather stupidly, but she has resumed her course up the hill. When her flips-flops skid on a slick patch of smooth concrete, she says, “Oooooh. Slip … er … eee.”

My father, William Henry Devereaux, Sr., whose return to the bosom of his family my mother enigmatically claims I am unprepared for, was always a frighteningly reasonable man, and like most reasonable men, he preferred day to night. Unless he’s changed, he’s still an early riser, usually up, bathed, and dressed by six-thirty. As a boy, I’d frequently find him in his study reading, idly sipping tea in his wing-back reading chair. No matter how early I got up, no matter how late he and my mother had been out the night before, there he’d be. According to my mother, he possessed an uncanny internal chronometer that allowed him to wake and turn off the alarm clock mere moments before it would have gone off.

Anyway, here’s my theory. All men are assailed by doubts. Even those like my father who don’t seem to be. And we are all, I think, more receptive to doubts and fears (and perhaps even guilt) in the dark than we are in the light of day. I don’t think my father cared for these sensations. When I was a boy, of course, I had no way of knowing that
the man I found clean shaven and cologned in the book-lined den of the big, old house my parents rented a few blocks from the university might be subject to doubt or fear or guilt. A child’s life is full of these, and I may even have concluded that adulthood represented triumph over them. There were probably mornings when I found him there in his reading chair, sweet-smelling and intent upon the printed page, that he was fresh from some illicit encounter with a young female graduate student mere hours before. Apparently he’d had a number of relationships with young women before he settled on the one in his D. H. Lawrence seminar that he preferred to my mother. I’m sure I took his early rising as a sign of virtue, and probably even understood my mother’s remaining in bed, her eyes defiantly clenched against the new day, as a character defect, especially given the mood she was in when she finally came downstairs around midmorning and peered in at my father and me with an expression that verged upon menace.

It was my habit on Saturday and Sunday mornings to stretch out on the floor at my father’s feet and pore over the encyclopedia. I knew not to interrupt my father’s reading, risk one of his monumental scowls, so by the time my mother appeared, I was usually starved. “When’s breakfast?” was always my first question to my bathrobed mother, whose already threatening expression always darkened dangerously. I suspect it was those weekend mornings that first led my mother to conclude that I was my father’s son, a conviction she still adheres to. My “when’s breakfast?” by way of hello must have unhinged her, knowing as she did that I’d just spent two or three hours quietly in my father’s company without asking for so much as a glass of water. Who could blame her for not sharing my father’s deep appreciation of the new day?

Lily is also a morning person, and I often overheard her tell our daughters, when they were growing up and full of adolescent self-doubt, that things would look different in the morning, and of course this is wise counsel. Not only do things look different in the morning, they look better, which is not, of course, the same as to say that they
are
better. Still, if things look more manageable in the sunlight, we are wise, like my father, to greet the new day early, and I suspect now that there were very few moonlit indiscretions he was not able to banish from his thoughts at six in the morning with the aid of a virtuous book
of literary criticism and his own sweet child stretched out at his feet, soaking up Britannica by osmosis.

I am neither a morning person nor, I maintain, my father’s son. After a night of misbehavior I cannot tell when my alarm clock is about to go off. I often don’t immediately recognize the sound of the alarm even
after
it’s gone off. Neither tea nor literary criticism banishes guilty memory in William Henry Devereaux, Jr., who has dreamed, powerfully and variously, all this night long. Only when the ringing continues after I switch off the alarm do I realize it’s the telephone I’m hearing. By the time I pick up, the line’s dead.

It occurs to me that Lily has been trying to call. She probably tried to reach me last night until it got too late, and now she’s begun again. Missing me now may even have convinced her that I didn’t come home at all last night, that her prediction has already come true. I’m either in the hospital or in jail.

I wish she’d call back now, because I’d like to share with her the last of my dreams, in which the new College of Technical Careers building has turned out to be yet another replica of my own house, like Julie’s, this one on a Brobdingnagian scale. It’s the size of the Modern Languages Building, which houses the English department, but it’s my house, Lily’s and mine, monstrously swollen. Same number of rooms, same floor plan, except built for giants. Inside it, I am a little dollhouse person. To go upstairs I have to stand on a chair, hoist myself up the step, pull the chair up behind me with a rope, then repeat the process. The reason I’m mountain-climbing my way upstairs is that Lily has been calling down to me. She wants to explain to me why she thinks I’m so unhappy. Odder still, I can’t wait to hear her explanation, because in the dream I
am
unhappy. In fact, I’m weeping pitifully as I leap, latch on to, and chin my way up the stairs. Of course, you should have seen those stairs. They were enough to make anyone weep. But now, sitting up in bed, safe in my own human-scale house, the clear light of the guiltless new day streaming in the window, I wish I had not conceded my unhappiness to Lily, even in a dream.

Occam is whining pitifully at the bedroom door, as if he too has been troubled by dreams, so I invite him in, something I would never do were my wife in residence. He takes in which side of the bed I’m on,
comes around to this side, rests his chin on the bed, and sighs meaningfully, as if to suggest what I already know, that this does not promise to be a good day. To delay imagining its details, I turn on the television by remote to a morning news-talk show and scratch Occam’s ears idly, hoping that Lily will call again. Perhaps because I’ve got the sound muted, I don’t immediately comprehend when I see myself brandishing wild-eyed Finny. Adding sound only deepens my confusion. Occam, as a rule not one to be distracted during an ear scratch, perks up at the sound of his master’s voice, looks at the television, then at me. When I don’t have an explanation, he trots over to the television and sniffs it. The big shock comes, at least to me, when the short segment (I’ve been edited more severely this time) concludes and I realize that this isn’t the local news that occurs when the network cuts away. No, it’s the regular
Good Morning America
crew that’s laughing, almost out of control, before heading into the weather.

The telephone is ringing again when I step out of the shower. I’m no longer anxious to pick it up, but I do.

“It’s June,” Teddy’s wife informs me.

“Hi, June.”

“How can you associate with that man?” she wants to know.

“What man?” I say, though I know she’s referring to Tony Coniglia.

“He’s a debauched old rummy,” she continues, still fuming about last night. “That thing with the clams was sickening. I bet that reporter with the tits is having second and third thoughts.”

“I wouldn’t know, June. I don’t even know why you’ve called me.”

“Rachel asked me to,” she admits. “I’m in your office, actually. All the lines in the outer office are tied up. Rachel must have a crush on you, the grief she’s taking on your behalf.”

“Who from?” I wonder out loud while pausing to consider the pleasant possibility that a woman I’m half in love with might be half in love with me.

“It’s a long list. She’s even caught hell from the CEO for refusing to give him your home phone.”

“Tell her to go ahead and give it to him. I’m about to leave here anyway.”

“She says to remind you about your meeting with Dickie this afternoon. And I’d be prepared for a world of shit when you get here.”

“Tell Rachel I have to visit the high school, but I’ll be in after that. In fact, tell her I said to take the rest of the day off.”

“Seriously?”

“Absolutely,” I say. I don’t want Rachel taking abuse on my account. “Tell her to go home. Tell her I’m putting her in for a raise.”

“I’ll tell her, but Vegas odds are four to five you won’t last the day.”

“Then you all get raises.”

Downstairs, I notice what failed to attract my attention last night, that the message light on the answering machine is blinking. Thanks, I suspect, to my television appearance last night, there are twenty-five messages, a new record. That’s the bad news. The good news is that twenty of them are hang-ups. There’s also one from Billy Quigley, who’s apparently gotten impatient and started talking before the sound of the beep. As a result, his message is one slurred word, “Peckerwood.” My wife’s voice is the only one I care to hear, and it comes late, number 17, in the scheme of things, though I’ve no idea what time that would make it, whether I was standing in front of the urinal at The Tracks, or on the pay phone flirting with Meg Quigley, or eating raw clams, or sitting in Tony’s hot tub with a naked young woman when she called.

There’s a flatness to Lily’s voice on the tape that suggests she’s intuited all of my misbehavior. Her message is brief, leaving the number and name of the hotel she’s checked into, which explains why she wasn’t at her father’s last night when I tried to reach her there. I try to remember why I thought she’d be staying with her father. Was it something she told me? Something I concluded on my own? The former, I’m pretty sure, but my brain is still marinating in tequila, and it hurts to access my memory function. “Don’t forget you’re visiting my class,” Lily reminds me, last thing before saying good night, as if she’s anticipated, somehow, the state I’ll be in this morning.

I call the number she’s left, but when the switchboard puts me through to her room, she doesn’t answer. Either she’s already left or she’s in the shower. Consulting my watch, I try to access the part of the brain that handles analytical functions, but it doesn’t seem to be on-line either. When the hotel operator comes back on, I’m visited by an oddly encouraging thought. Maybe the flatness, the regret I’ve detected in my wife’s voice is the result of misbehavior not on my part but rather on
hers. I ask the operator to connect me to Jacob Rose’s room, which suggests something about the way the human brain prioritizes duties. I’ve been denied access to memory and analysis, but whatever department handles jealousy and suspicion (intuition?) is offering its services without being asked. After a long moment the operator tells me there’s no Jacob Rose registered in the hotel, but there’s something in her voice. “There’s a Jack Rosen,” she offers.

“That’s what I said. Jack Rosen,” I explain, and a moment later Jack Rosen’s room is ringing, and the phone is picked up before I can figure the odds that Jacob would use this alias. A man answers. He sounds a little like Jacob Rose. Or a little Jewish, anyway, which is not surprising, given his name, whether or not he’s Jacob Rose. “Jacob,” I say. “Thank God I tracked you down.”

After a beat, “Who is this?”

“Hank,” I tell whoever I’m talking to. “Who do you think? Put Lily on.”