Straight Man (27 page)

Standing here, I become aware of a low, droning sound, like a far-off vacuum cleaner, and I feel a distant tingling in the extremities. I can’t help wondering if the brief temporal ellipses I’ve been suffering these past few days are a sign of approaching illness, but I remind myself that they aren’t all that different from the sort of thing that used to happen all the time when I was working on the book that now occupies my jacket pocket. Lily, whenever she noticed that I’d disappeared during a conversation at the dinner table, used to chide me for being physically present but emotionally absent without leave. And my daughter Karen told me years later that she could always tell by looking at me whether I was really there or off in some other world, revising fictional reality. If it’s not illness, could it be that there’s another book nagging at me? Would I even recognize one now, after so long? If a new book
were
clamoring for attention, what should I do? I am no longer, if indeed I ever was, a romantic with respect to authorship. Bad books call to authors with the same haunting siren song as good ones, and there’s no law that says you have to listen, not when there’s an ample supply of cotton for the ears. On that note I zip.

Outside, the hall is empty, so I slip into my office through my private door, close it quietly, turn on my small Tensor desk lamp rather
than the overhead, hoping for a few moments of peace. Here, the low, droning sound I kept hearing in the men’s room is more pronounced. Then, all of a sudden, it’s gone. I shake my head but can’t bring it back. I see that Rachel has found me a new blotter, so I take young Hal out of my jacket pocket and, instead of shelving him as intended, I open to the first page and begin to read. I’m only a few sentences into the text when Rachel’s voice crackles over the intercom, causing me to jump about a foot. “Are you in there?” she wants to know. Which me? I wonder. Young Hal, the wide-ranging outfielder? Or the tenured first baseman with warning-track power? Rachel sounds worried, like it’s the door of Dr. Jekyll’s laboratory she’s been listening at.

“I’m thinking about writing another book, Rachel,” I tell her.

“Really? That’s great?”

The droning is back, as if triggered by my assertion. It sounds like distant thunder now. Rolling. Rumbling. The storm Dickie pointed to in the sky seems to have arrived.

“You have some messages?” Rachel informs me.

I sigh. These messages, it occurs to me, are the cotton for my ears that I thought to make use of back in the men’s room. The academic memo, the voice message, the e-mail (which I don’t receive) taken together are the cotton plugs that drown out the siren’s song. At first resentful, we scholar-sailors come to be grateful for them.

“Sing them out, Rachel,” I tell her bravely, though I see jagged rocks ahead. “And don’t spare my feelings. Give them to me straight, kid. I can take it.”

“Herbert Schonberg called twice?” The union rep I’ve been evading for days. “He says he intends to see you this afternoon if he has to track you with bloodhounds?” It occurs to me now that I’ve been dodging him for the wrong reason. I’ve assumed he wanted to bust my chops about the various grievances filed against me, including the most recent one, Gracie’s, but now I realize it’s about Dickie’s tidal wave.

“Boring stuff, Rachel. You can do better.”

“The dean called again? Long distance? He said thanks a lot? He said you’d understand?”

And I do. My shenanigans, their timing, are not a good advertisement for Jacob. I’ve disobeyed his strict orders to do nothing in his absence. I may have knocked him clean off the short list. Jacob and I go
back a long way, and if I’ve botched his escape from Railton, I’ll deserve to lose his friendship.

“What do you say we go back to the boring ones, Rachel?” I suggest.

Rumble rumble rumble. I lean back in my swivel chair and study the ceiling tiles, which actually appear to be vibrating. “Your daughter called?”

“Julie?”

“She wanted to know if you could come out to the house this afternoon?”

“No,” I tell Rachel, the wrong person. “Out of the question.”

“She sounded like she was crying?”

“Do you have her number?”

Rachel says she does.

“Call her back. Ask her if she was crying.”

Silence.

“Okay, I agree. Bad idea. Bad boss. Call her back and let me talk to her.”

I close young Hal. Just as well.

“I’m getting their machine?” Rachel’s back on the intercom.

“I’ll pick up,” I tell her.

I listen to Russell’s voice message, and at the beep, say, “It’s me, darlin’. Pick up if you’re there.” I wait several beats. “Okay, it’s almost noon. I’ll try to come by later.”

Suddenly, she’s on the line. “Okay,” she says, sounding remarkably like her mother, and then just as suddenly she’s hung up. I call again, get the machine, wait, tell her to pick up, listen to dead air until the machine clicks off. What the hell is this about? Melodrama, knowing Julie.

I get back on the intercom with Rachel, a sensible woman. “Let’s take a long lunch,” I suggest. “We’ll drive out to the Railton Sheraton. If we’re together there won’t be anybody to take these messages.”

“Sorry? Today’s my sexual harassment lunch?”

Sexual harassment lunch? “Okay, I’ll bite.”

“It’s for all the department secretaries?” she explains. “Sort of a workshop?”

“What sort of food do they serve at a sexual harassment lunch?” it occurs to me to ask.

“Nouvelle cuisine?” she suggests. Near as I can remember, this is the first joke Rachel’s ever made around me.

“It’s come to this,” I tell her. “Now I’m playing straight man to my own secretary.”

“You’re really going to write another book?”

The idea seems to have completely dissipated. “Probably not,” I admit, adding, before she can object, “Is that thunder we’re hearing?”

“Asbestos removal.”

Relieved to discover that my external reality matches Rachel’s, at least in this one respect, I study the ceiling tiles, which
are
vibrating, damn them.

“It’s our turn? They’re detoxing the whole building?”

“God,” I say. “Animal rights thugs guarding the pond, sexual harassment lunches, the detoxing of Modern Languages. Something’s happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.”

Ambient crackling from the intercom. Indicating what? Puzzlement at my Buffalo Springfield allusion? It’s true what they say. Ours is a fragmented culture. If I wrote another book, who would read it?

In the outer office, I hear the phone ring, hear Rachel answer. Then she returns to the intercom. “Professor Schonberg’s on his way up?” she says. “I’d hurry? I’d take the south stairs?”

I do as I’m instructed, but only after I’ve made a place for young Hal on my crowded bookcase. There isn’t much room, even for such a slender fellow, so I have to wedge him in pretty tight. Speaking of tight, I just make it through the double doors at the south end of the corridor when I hear the doors at the north end clang open. I don’t hear my name. I don’t look back.

The Railton Campus has a rear entrance that’s seldom used because the road is treacherous in winter, winding and full of potholes in all seasons, and because it doesn’t go much of anywhere but Allegheny Wells, the hard way, over the mountain. The only other reason to head out that direction is to go to the county’s one notorious bar, a roadhouse called The Circle, which sits just outside the city limits and the short arm of Railton law. The Circle offers free pool on Tuesdays, free darts on Wednesdays, wet T-shirt contests on Thursdays, and dances with live country-western bands on Friday and Saturday nights, during which half a dozen fights usually break out in its huge dirt parking lot. If
The Rear View
is to be believed, the occasional knife is pulled out there in the dark, but weapons more lethal than the pointed toe of a cowboy boot are frowned upon. Lose a fight outside The Circle on a weekend night and chances are you’ve been stomped, not knifed or shot. Saturday morning finds you in the hospital with cracked ribs and mashed cheekbones. You’re probably coughing up blood, but you
aren’t dead. The Circle is one of the Railton area bars that Billy Quigley wishes his daughter Meg would spend less time in, the one I fetched her from earlier in the year.

I’m nearing The Circle when I become aware that I’m being tailgated by a big, shiny, red pickup truck whose driver is honking his horn and making a gesture which, seen in my rearview mirror, may or may not be obscene. My first thought is that the driver of this vehicle is Rachel’s husband, Cal, who’s found a way to eavesdrop on our intercom conversations and become confused by our conversational intimacy, her sexual harassment lunch. But this is a far better-looking truck than I suspect Cal drives. And besides, it can’t very well be Rachel’s husband if it’s Mr. Purty, and that’s who it is, now that I have a chance to look twice. I’m only mildly disappointed. Had I been pulled out of my car and beaten up by a jealous husband who has nothing to be jealous about, I’d be pretty much in the right. Even Bodie Pie’s Bitch Gulch crew would be on my side. Maybe even the majority of my own department would sympathize.

I pull into The Circle’s lot and park beneath the big sign that announces Friday night’s dance, music to be provided by Waylon’s Country Cousins. Mr. Purty, a small man, gives an agile hop down from the cab of the truck, adjusts his hearing aid, and flashes me a grin. “What do you think?” he wants to know.

I whistle. “New?”

“Practically. Fifteen thousand miles, is all. Cherry. The dee-lux model. Three-fifty engine. Tow a U-Haul easy. Room for three in the front seat,” Mr. Purty explains, “and I didn’t pay what’s on that sticker either.”

“I’m glad to hear it, Mr. Purty,” I tell him, noting the price on the sticker. I didn’t know used pickups could cost this much. Or new ones, for that matter.

“I chewed him way down from there,” he says, unself-consciously.

“You what?”

“Got him to come way down,” Mr. Purty explains. “Young kid. Twenties. Played him for two weeks. Every afternoon I come in and look it over, ask him a new question, then leave. Every afternoon, a different question. How many miles to the gallon? You sure it ain’t been in an accident? How firm’s that price? Then I leave. Next afternoon,
I’m back. Same thing. Finally, he don’t know whether to eat shit, chase rabbits, or bark at the moon. He didn’t want to give it to me for my price, but he finally had to. Put brand-new tires on it too. Radials, not them recraps.”

I study Mr. Purty for a sign that he’s made a joke, but nothing. When I’m with him, I often feel like I’m the one who should be wearing a hearing aid. “It’s a beauty,” I tell him, though I know this isn’t the response Mr. Purty is really after. What he really wants is for me to ask him how much below sticker he got the kid to go. Previous conversations with Mr. Purty have revealed that he’s a man obsessed with deals, the kind of man who’d rather have something he doesn’t really want at a heavy discount than the thing he yearns for at full price. Cheap, is the way my mother sums him up.

“Get in,” he says after a beat. “Have a listen to the stereo.”

I start to say no, to tell him I’m in kind of a hurry. Despite Julie’s propensity for melodrama, her phone call, the more I think about it, has me worried. But I also realize that this means a lot to Mr. Purty, so I go around the passenger side and climb up and in. I’m a tall man with long legs, and even for me it’s a pretty good step up. I can’t help smiling when I think of my mother, “the aristocat,” who will require a helpful hand under her fanny.

Mr. Purty turns the key in the ignition to its auxiliary position and slips a tape into the stereo. Patsy Cline’s voice thunders forth from the speakers at a decibel level loud enough to wake Patsy Cline. Mr. Purty lets it stay that way for a few seconds, until he’s sure I’ve had the full benefit of the system. “Good speakers,” he says when he’s turned the music down so that we can converse. “You’re like me, though, I can tell. You don’t like your music loud.”

I admit that this is true.

“How ’bout your ma?” he wants to know. “I bet she don’t like it loud either.”

“You do that to her, she’ll have you arrested.”

I can tell that Mr. Purty takes this warning seriously. Like most of our conversations, the purpose of this one is to allow me the opportunity to give him tips on how to handle my mother. I know her better than he does, is his thinking. What he doesn’t quite grasp is the size of the gap between my knowledge and his own. Even if he managed to
get the phrase “chewed him down” correct, he’d be surprised to discover that anyone would object to it. He imagines that what his own approach needs is a little fine-tuning. I don’t even know how to begin to tell him how wrong he is.

He punches Patsy out of the tape deck, inters her in the special compartment behind the gearshift, slips in another tape. It’s Willie Nelson this time, and Willie can’t see nothin’ but blue skies. “I picked up Patsy for your ma,” Mr. Purty explains. “Me, I like Willie. What about your pa?”

“Unless he’s changed, he prefers silence.”

Mr. Purty shrugs, as if to acknowledge there’s no middle ground between those who like music and those who prefer silence.

I smooth my hand over the dash, admire the interior of this truck that Mr. Purty, poor bastard, has purchased to impress my mother. “Pretty spiffy,” I say, hoping one more compliment may release me from the cab. Fat chance.

“It’s got antibrakes,” he explains, pointing at the floor, as if you could tell antilock brakes by looking at the pedal. “Extracab.”

I admire the space between the seat and the back of the cab.

“That tark’s usually extra,” he explains, “but I made the kid give it to me for no charge.”

I myself have no idea what a tark might cost because I don’t know what a tark is, until I follow Mr. Purty’s gaze out the back window and into the bed of the pickup truck, which is covered with a slate gray tarp.

“You think your ma will like it?”

With a tark and antibrakes? How can she not?

“Let’s eat breakfast,” he suggests, indicating The Circle, which I never would have guessed served food.