Straight Man (30 page)

I explain that I’m hiding from Finny in a phone booth in the basement of Modern Languages. It’s a measure of how long she’s been married to an academic that Lily sees nothing unusual about this.

“Your cold is back,” she remarks.

“Nah,” I say, though of course it is, as predicted, even though I took another twelve-hour antihistamine before leaving the house this morning.

“I talked to Julie earlier,” she says. “I guess I picked a bad time to leave, didn’t I?”

“I don’t know what to make of it yet,” I tell her. “I haven’t seen Russell.”

“It’s been brewing for some time,” she says.

“It has?”

“Yes, Hank, it has,” she says, the remark trailing accusation.

“Why didn’t I know it?”

A pause. “I don’t know, Hank. Why
don’t
you know these things?”

“Because I don’t want to? Is that what you’re saying?”

“No,” my wife says gently, perhaps even affectionately. “Just that you depend on me to know them. Anyway. I’m less worried about Julie than about her father.”

“I gather you saw me on television.”

“Yes, this morning.”

“I’ve become a hero in certain quarters,” I tell her. “Not to Dickie Pope. And of course Rourke still insists my whole act needs work.”

“I wish …,” she says, but now it’s her turn to let her voice trail away.

“What?” I say. “Go ahead.”

“I wish you’d just request a leave of absence. Or even resign, if that’s what you want. You’ll have to do something worse before they’ll fire you, and I don’t want you to do anything worse.”

“You think I’m trying to get myself fired?”

“Aren’t you?”

I consider the possibility. “What I want may be a moot point. Dickie told me this morning there’s likely to be a twenty percent reduction in staff in the fall.”

“Then the rumors are true.”

“My colleagues are eager to believe I’ve sold them out.”

“Have you reassured them you didn’t?”

“You know the English department. They’ll believe what they want.”

“No, Hank. The majority will believe
you
, if you tell them. If you tell them straight.”

“I promised Dickie I wouldn’t decide anything until I’d talked the whole thing over with you. He insisted. The last thing he said to me was, ‘Talk it over with Lila.’ So tell me, Lila, when are you coming back?”

“Tuesday, I think.”

“I thought Monday.”

“Me too. I had to postpone the interview.”

“How come?”

“Look, Hank, there’s … a problem here in Philly,” she says. And as soon as she says this, I know that it’s something real and serious, something she’s been sitting on while we talked about academic matters. “How about if we talk tonight?” she suggests. “Aren’t you supposed to be in class?”

I consult my watch and see that class is, at this moment, starting without me.

“Angelo?” I say, remembering that I’ve not been able to reach her father when I’ve called.

“Yes.”

“Is he okay?” Dumb question. It’s been a long time since Angelo could be described as okay. Most likely he’s tumbled hard off the wagon.

“Yes and no.” Her voice is flat now. I’m to understand that it will do me no good to ask further questions. “Did you remember to visit my class this morning?”

I tell her I did. “Guido wanted to know how much money I made from
Off the Road
.”

“Poor Guido.”

“Poor Guido extorts lunch money off skinny white kids,” I tell her, adding, for good measure, “Your husband
was
a skinny white kid once. Bullies used to take
my
lunch money, you know.”

“God, I wish you were here, Hank. You just made me smile for the first time in twenty-four hours.”

“I used to make you laugh,” I recall. “Out loud. Uncontrollably.”

“Not uncontrollably,” she corrects me.

“Well,” I concede. “Maybe not uncontrollably.”

“We had more energy then,” my wife reminds me. “For laughter. For most things. Plus everything was newer.”

“Do you ever wish things were new again?”

“Sometimes,” she admits. “Not often.”

“Sweet-talker.”

When I hang up, I notice a shadowy human movement on the glass of the phone booth door. I see it’s Leo, who’s apparently observed me sneaking out of the department and followed me into the basement.

For all I know he’s been standing next to the phone booth for the whole conversation. Right now, he’s so close that he has to step back when I open the door. I study him and wonder if it can really be youth I’ve been regretting the loss of. Leo’s got a manuscript in hand, and there’s a tremor in his voice that’s part excitement and, more strangely, part rage. He can’t quite keep his hands still. The way he’s holding the pages out to me suggests that one end is on fire, the end he wants me to grab. What I’d like to grab and ring is Leo’s long, gooselike neck.

“Great news,” he tells me, and I half-expect him to report that Solange, the young woman who eviscerated him in workshop, has been hit by a truck. But the truth, as always, is even stranger. “I’ve had a story accepted,” he says. “For publication.”

Attendance is always sparse on Friday afternoons, especially so near the end of the term when the topic is persuasion. So far, I haven’t persuaded my freshmen that the ability to persuade is an important skill. Even Blair, my best student, a pale young woman I’ve been trying all term to coax into confident utterance, seems to doubt the whole enterprise. This particular group of students, like so many these days, seems divided, unequally, between the vocal clueless and the quietly pensive. Somehow, Blair and others like her have concluded that what’s most important in all educational settings is to avoid the ridicule of the less gifted. Silence is one way of avoiding it. If I could teach Blair how to become invisible, she’d be interested, but she doesn’t want to argue with anybody, and who can blame her? Students like Blair have learned from their professors that persuasion—reasoned argument—no longer holds a favored position in university life. If their professors—feminists, Marxists, historicists, assorted other theorists—belong to suspicious, gated intellectual communities that are less interested in
talking to each other than in staking out territory and furthering agendas, then why learn to debate? Despite having endured endless faculty meetings, I can’t remember the last time anyone changed his (or her!) mind as a result of reasoned discourse. Anyone who observed us would conclude the purpose of all academic discussion was to provide the grounds for becoming further entrenched in our original positions.

Or perhaps I’m just the wrong person for the job of teaching persuasive techniques. After all, the list of people I myself have failed to persuade recently is pretty impressive. It contains Dickie Pope, Herbert Schonberg, Paul Rourke, Gracie, and Finny (both the man and the goose). I haven’t even been able to persuade Leo to temper his excitement at having had a story accepted for publication by a “prestigious anthology” of new American student writing. It’s an old scam. Accept the student story or poem for publication, convince the writer to pay production costs, then sell the anthology to proud relatives at extortionary cost. Leo’s eyes narrowed suspiciously when I explained how the scam worked, his angry validation morphing to indignant suspicion. Of me. Neither have I been able to convince Leo that he should write a story with no violence in it, a suggestion that’s got him plotting, I suspect, the next chapter of his novel, the one where his murderous ghost pays a visit to his old writing teacher. I’ve read this chapter before, though Leo hasn’t written it yet.

With ten minutes left in class, which (thanks to Leo) started fifteen minutes late, my worst student, who’s only present today because I threatened to flunk him for the term if he missed another class, leans back in his chair and says, apropos of nothing, “So. Like, are you going to kill a duck, or what?”

Bad students are almost always inspiring students. Most often they inspire despair, but occasionally they’ll inspire an assignment. “You tell me, Bobo,” I say. Bobo is not the student’s name but rather my name for him. “By Monday, in fact. I want from each of you a cogent, persuasive essay. There are two possible theses. Either I should or I should not kill a duck. Don’t straddle the fence by suggesting that I maim a duck or pluck a duck.”

As I explain the assignment, there’s a communal groan, but I’m cheered by the fact that more hostile glances are thrown in Bobo’s direction than in my own. Bobo has assumed the posture of a man who
should have known better, who
did
know better, in fact, and was the victim of a spasm. His fellow students all seem to understand that they were minutes away from a rare weekend without a writing assignment.

“By
Monday
?” Bobo says, incredulous.

“I’ve threatened to kill a duck by Monday, Bobo,” I remind him. “By Tuesday I won’t need your advice.”

“Typed?” someone wants to know.

On the way back to the office I skirt the pond, which has returned to its placid aspect, the demonstrators who earlier linked arms against me having all gone home with the TV crews, leaving the fowl unguarded for the weekend. A single
STOP THE SLAUGHTER
placard has been planted in the bank to ward off evil. Ineffectually, for here I am, able if not ready to wreak mayhem. I notice Finny (the goose, not the man) some fifty yards farther along the bank, and something about his appearance strikes me as curious. When I get a little closer I see what it is. Finny has been fitted with a foam neck brace, like a whiplash victim. He eyes me curiously as I approach, as if he fears I’ll make a bad joke at his expense. Animals, I am convinced, are as adamant as humans about maintaining their dignity, and Finny seems to be struggling to maintain his. A cartoon goose in a turtleneck, he cannot quite meet my eye. “Finny,” I say, checking to make sure Leo isn’t lurking nearby to hear this second conversation with a goose. “Qué pasa?”

A noise issues forth from deep inside Finny, not a sound I’ve come to associate with this particular goose. It’s higher and thinner, a lament. Isn’t this a fine state of affairs? he seems to say. Who am I to disagree? There’s a bench nearby, so I sit for a few minutes and listen to Finny elaborate until I’m visited by a sneezing fit, the suddenness and violence of which frightens us both.

When I return to the office, Teddy and June Barnes are hanging around the department, pretending to have business, an act I’m not buying this late on a Friday afternoon. Apparently I look suspicious too, at least to Teddy and June and Rachel, who are staring at me with alarm. “Have you been crying?” June wants to know.

“Don’t be absurd,” I tell her. “I’ve been talking to a goose.”

“Your eyes are slits,” Teddy says.

“Maybe I’m allergic,” I say. The worst of my cold symptoms have, as predicted, come crashing down on me like Dickie’s tidal wave. It’s
not an easy thing for a man like me to live for twenty-five years with a woman who unerringly predicts illness, whose favorite observation is that she knows me better than I know myself, and who never seems to want for ready evidence. A man like me, who gravitates so naturally to omniscient storytelling, probably should not be married to an oracle. He’ll spend all his time trying to prove the oracle wrong, an uphill battle. Ask Oedipus. Ask Macbeth. Ask Thurber. And this role can’t have been all that pleasant for Lily either. Oracles must grow tired of talking to people who never listen (Ask Cassandra. Ask Oprah), especially the ones who flirt with omniscience.

When I let myself into my inner office, Teddy and June follow before I can close the door behind me. “We have to talk,” Teddy says when I finish blowing my nose and wiping my eyes. He takes a seat in the only chair, other than my own, that I keep in my office.

“Monday,” I tell him. I can feel my eyes closing, blindness coming on. Oedipus at Colonus. Thurber in Manhattan. Already I’m watching Teddy and June in letterbox format.

When Teddy notices that June has nowhere to sit, he leaps to his feet to offer her his chair. His reward for this anachronistic gesture is predictable contempt. How long have you been married to this woman? I’d like to ask him. I may be blind, but even I know better. I put my feet up.

“This won’t wait till Monday,” June says. “You may not have noticed, but we’re in full-blown crisis mode here. Everybody knows about your conference with Herbert. Finny’s telling people you’ve cut a deal with the administration. By Monday, you’ll be recalled as chair.”

There’s a knock, and Rachel pokes her head in. “Sorry?” she says, this lovely woman whose sense of timing could bring a man like me to dramatic climax. “Can I interrupt?”

“Rachel?” I say, as if I can’t be sure it’s her I’m seeing through my slits. “Is that you?”

“I just wanted to tell you I’m heading home?”

“Already?” I say, my usual line. I consult my watch and see that she should have left half an hour ago. “Come sit on my lap. I want to hear all about your sexual harassment lunch.”

This proves too much for June, as I hoped it would. “Talk to this asshole,” she tells her husband. “Tell him how few friends he has left.”

Rachel, alarmed by the use of the word
asshole
among people who boast so many advanced degrees, steps back from the doorway to let June pass and jumps again when the outer door to the English department slams hard enough to rattle the glass.

“I
really
have to go?” she pleads, placing mail and messages before me, apologetically.

“I’m not worthy of you, Rachel,” I tell her, and halfway into a joke I find I haven’t the heart to finish.

“I’ll see you Monday?” she says, glancing warily at Teddy and then back at me. “Could we have lunch, maybe? Talk about my stories?”

“Make a reservation,” I tell her. “Someplace nice. There’s about a hundred dollars left in the department’s general fund. We’ll see if we can spend it.”

When she’s gone, Teddy says, “You’re
trying
to get recalled, aren’t you?”

“I’ve been trying all year, pal,” I say, thumbing through my mail. “It’s about time somebody noticed.”