Straight Man (36 page)

“Sure. Think about it.”

Actually, although my public posture is incredulity, a picture has been forming in my head over the weekend. The whole university is being reorganized, duplicate programs eliminated, the academic missions of each campus redefined. Technical Careers will be the center of our particular campus.

“You must be relieved to be shut of the whole mess.”

Again Jacob appears to consider his response carefully. “I’m not shut of it quite yet,” he says. “What I’m hearing is that you will be shut of it before I will. This afternoon, is what I’m hearing.”

“My troops are in mutiny,” I concede. “I could maybe rally them. I’m told it’s still possible. The question is, should I?”

Jacob meets my eye and shrugs. “Honest Injun? I don’t see how it matters.”

I nod. “Once again, you’ve failed to cheer me up.”

What’s really depressing is the idea of Jacob leaving. He’s been a reasonably well-intentioned, lazy, honorable, mildly incompetent dean, and that’s about the best you can hope for. And he’s been a friend I’ll miss. Worse, I have to admit to feeling the jealousy of one crab for another that has managed to climb out of the barrel.

“I doubt this will cheer you up either,” Jacob says, “but what the hell, I’ll ask. How would you feel about being my best man?”

I blink at him, thinking, What an odd metaphor. I recall Jacob saying last week that if he got the job, he’d take me with him, but he couldn’t have been serious. Then it occurs to me, it’s no metaphor. Jacob is getting married.

He risks a weak smile. “Gracie will kick, but she’ll get over it.”

I must look stupid, staring at him as I am. He seems to have forgotten that I know nothing about the woman, whoever she is, that he intends to marry. I had no idea he was dating, much less serious about anyone. And why would Gracie have been commissioned to arrange his wedding? It’s true she’s often consulted about putting on the various festivities at the university, and Dickie Pope purportedly conferred with her in the matter of books for his empty shelves. Still. The whole thing comes into focus a split second after I hear myself ask, “What’s Gracie got to do with it?”

“Well, it’s her wedding too,” Jacob says. The bride chooses the bridesmaids, the groom his groomsmen, but neither chooses parties who are anathema to the other, is his point.

Even though the penny has dropped, I’m still confused. “Gracie’s already married,” I feel compelled to point out.

“Her divorce becomes final next month,” he says. This is the first I’ve heard about any divorce. True, Mike Law has been looking especially depressed lately, but I took this to be the result of his
union
to Gracie, not of the dissolution of that union. “We’re thinking maybe a June wedding.”

I try to think of something to say.

“That’s a very unnatural way for a man to hold his jaw,” Jacob remarks.

Perhaps. “Did you get a good look at my nose last week?”

He’s grinning again. “Admit it,” he says. “You had that coming. Besides. I know everything there is to know about her. Her flaws. Her insecurities. We’ve been fighting for twenty years. Also fucking. My wife kicked me out over Gracie, you recall. Gracie married Mike to piss me off when I wouldn’t marry her before.”

“And these strike you as compelling reasons for matrimony?”

“There
are
no compelling reasons for matrimony,” Jacob admits. “Getting married is something you do despite compelling reasons.”

“Have you mentioned you’ll be taking her to Texas?”

“If that’s what we decide, she’s okay with it. Actually, I doubt we’ll be going to Texas. This other offer looks better.”

Again, I’m speechless.

“Anyway. We’ll work things out. Marriage is about working things out.”

“Have you ever noticed that it’s only divorced people who ever say that?”

“Don’t be a smart ass, always,” Jacob advises me. “You and Lily always work things out. It’s time for me to make something work. Seriously. You live by yourself out in West Railton for eight or ten years, you look at things differently. I don’t look forward to dying alone.”

I bite my tongue. Jacob was wise to leave the English department. The competition is stiff, but he’s a straight man extraordinaire. “Marry
this woman and you’ll learn to,” is the punch line I bite off the tip of my tongue. “Marry Gracie and you’ll look back on your terrible loneliness as the good old days.”

But these are not things for me to say to an old friend, even one who’s been keeping secrets. I know that. No, my role in this is the offered one. I’ll be best man and make a toast. It looks like I’ve got a couple months to come up with one.

“Well, I’ll mark June on my calendar then,” I tell him.

We’re standing now, facing each other. Suddenly, Jacob looks inexpressibly sad, and to my way of thinking, he’s got his reasons. Another baser thought tracks warily across the nether regions of my consciousness, stopping to gnaw, like a rat through a rope. I could be dean. A phone call to Dickie Pope. A verbal list of the most egregiously incompetent and burnt-out members of the English department, a promise to cease and desist killing geese (an easy pledge, given my innocence in the matter of the first goose). As Dickie Pope himself has said, those who are fired will deserve to be fired, and everyone else—the institution and its students—comes out a winner. And
I
would come out a winner. I do not, I think, covet Jacob Rose’s job or his office, but there is the matter of karma, and I’m greatly attracted to the idea of my English department colleagues impeaching me as their chair today, only to discover me reborn as their dean tomorrow.

Still. I would trade it all for a good pee.

“Anyway, thanks,” Jacob is saying as we shake hands. He seems to think this a particularly poignant moment, and perhaps it is.

“What for?”

“For not ridiculing my decision. For not telling me I’m a fool.”

“Would I do that?”

He gives me a look. We let our hands drop.

“You’re sure the wedding can’t happen before June?” I ask.

“I don’t see how,” he says seriously, our poignant moment clouding his vision. “Why?”

“I was just thinking that maybe you could do it during halftime of the donkey basketball game,” I tell him.

Suddenly there’s such a braying behind me that I half-believe a donkey has materialized to complete the joke. But it’s only Marjory, who returned while I was inside. It takes her a moment to compose
herself, and when she does, she looks like a woman who’d willingly slit her own throat if someone would only loan her a knife. There are tears of sheer mortification in her eyes. “Oh, Jacob,” she says. “I’m
so
sorry.”

Truth be told, I’m almost as ashamed as she is, and I can’t look at Jacob, who hasn’t moved. I should have looked at him, though, because then I wouldn’t be looking at Marjory, who has started braying all over again.

“Then where is it?” Phil Watson wants to know.

We’re studying the hanging X ray, looking for the stone I’m convinced is there for the simple reason that it has to be. Phil has tried his best to cover his reaction upon seeing me, but without much success. He’s also seen no reason to order this X ray. He’s done it to humor me, I know. I’m the one who wanted the X ray, and I wanted it to prove him wrong, to prove that there is a stone. Something’s got me all backed up, and I’ve been both imagining and dreading this stone for a week. It’s become too real to give up without a fight. Phil Watson, who has the advantage of not being tormented by an imagination, and whose father is not William Henry Devereaux, Sr., stone former extraordinaire, has not jumped to my conclusions but rather retreated lamely into standard medical procedure. Before agreeing to X-ray me, he’s done a urinalysis and, despite my protest that he’s going about things ass backwards, given me a rectal examination that was remarkable, it seemed to me, for its thoroughness. He’s also done something
called an IVP, results available tomorrow, and ordered blood work, results due by the end of the week. Meanwhile, if there’s a stone, it’s invisible, and Watson, to his credit, has not said I told you so, at least not in those words. If there had been a stone, he’s explained, there’d be blood in my urine. Calculi are not like beach pebbles, worn smooth by tidal motion. They’re sharp, jagged, ugly little monsters. He’s shown me photographs. No, the problem, I’m told, is that my prostate is enlarged, my bladder slightly distended, though neither quite enough to cause the extreme symptoms I’m claiming. And I do, Phil admits, look like hell. What the hell’s wrong with me? is what he’d like to know. At least we agree about the question.

“Maybe it’s hiding somewhere?” I suggest, still unwilling to surrender the stone. “Maybe it’s behind something.”

Phil makes a face to let me know that this isn’t much of an explanation. “Calculi don’t hide. One large enough to cause an obstruction will show up every time.”

I study the X ray. “According to this I don’t even have a dick,” I point out, though this is not precisely true. It’s kind of an outline, a shadow, a ghost dick.

“Look,” Phil explains again. “There are two kinds of calculi that are germane to the urinary tract. A kidney stone, here, could obstruct the ureter. They’re tiny and very painful. Could conceivably not show up on the X ray even. Problem is that kidney stones don’t restrict the flow of urine. What you’d have would be lower back pain. And you’d be peeing like a racehorse.”

In fact, now that he says this, I do have a distant memory of my father doubled over in pain, getting my mother to massage his back. And he was always in the bathroom. “Not with that dick,” I point out. “I’ve seen racehorses.”

Watson ignores this. “Now a bladder stone, up here, can shut you right down. Back the urine right up to your eyeballs. Unless they’re removed or broken up, the kidneys fail, then the patient fails. Trouble is, a stone large enough to do that is huge. It’d show up like a Susan B. Anthony dollar.”

“So there’s no stone.”

“Other scenarios make more sense. Three I can think of.” He shuts off the screen with an air of finality. I and my ghost dick disappear in a
beat. “Enlarged prostate, as I said. You’re the right age, unfortunately. Maybe a little young, but it happens.”

“What do we do about that?”

“Long term? Possible removal of prostate gland. Short term? Catheterization to relieve the pressure may be warranted. Let’s wait for the results of the IVP on that though.”

I try not to wince. “What’s scenario two?”

He hesitates. “We won’t worry about that until we get the blood work back.”

“Cancer?”

More hesitation. “A tumor is a possibility. Remember though. Not all tumors are cancerous.”

“Wouldn’t a tumor show up on the X ray?” I say, suddenly aware that Phil has turned off the screen before beginning this discussion of scenarios.

“Not always.”

“Let’s look again,” I suggest.

He shakes his head. “We’ll wait for the blood work.”

“Just flip it on.” I lean forward to do it myself.

“No,” he says, preventing me. “In the rectal exam I felt an asymmetry that concerns me. Not large. Probably nothing.”

How to explain this? How to describe the strange exhilaration at this information? Fear? Surely. But more than this, and it’s the “more” that I can’t explain. Because surely fear, given the circumstance, would be a perfectly adequate emotion. Unalloyed fear of death would satisfy William of Occam, and it should satisfy me. It’s my mortality we’re discussing. There’s no need for complexity, no need to multiply entities, no need to court anticipation. But there it is, regardless. I can feel the exhilaration where it begins in my groin and radiates outward and upward like my backed-up urine. “What’s scenario three?” I wonder. “I’m already dead, and this is all your dream?”

“The third scenario is more remote, more rare,” he admits. “There have been cases where anxiety and tension have resulted in the symptoms you describe.”

“This doesn’t feel psychological to me,” I tell him.

“Frankly, you don’t seem like the type, Hank,” Phil admits. “You aren’t experiencing big money problems right now?”

I shake my head. “Not that I know of. Lily writes the checks.”

“She and the girls okay?”

I’ve anticipated this question, so I don’t hesitate. “Fine.”

“You haven’t taken up with some young graduate student or something?”

I blink at him. I’ve told Phil Watson about my father’s propensity for forming stones but not, unless I’ve suffered another ellipsis, about his penchant for bedding female graduate students. How has he intuited that I may possess this infidelity gene? “No,” I say, trying to sound convincing, which should be easy. I have, after all, declined to share a peach with Meg Quigley. “Should I?”

He ignores this. “Any other symptoms?”

“Of what?”

“Of anything.”

I figure what the hell. “Time is slipping.”

He blinks. “You mean it’s slipping away?”

“Not exactly.” I explain the phenomenon of what I’ve come to think of as my ellipses. How suddenly I’ll be aware that a small chunk of time has passed without my being able to account for it. I explain what happened in Bodie Pie’s office last Friday, how one second she was sitting there trying not to light a cigarette, and a second later she was asking me where I’d been, a half-smoked cigarette dangling from her lips.

“Sounds like simple abstraction to me.” Phil shrugs when I finish. “But it’s interesting. How old are you?”

“Fifty this summer,” I confess.

He nods, studying me. “Rough age.”

“I’m having a ball,” I tell him, vaguely pissed off at the direction the conversation has taken. The thrilling glow of anticipation I felt while we were discussing the hypothetical tumor has dissipated.

“The fifties make first basemen of us all, Hank.”

“Let me understand this,” I say. “You think I can’t pee because I don’t want to play first base?
That’s
your diagnosis?”

At this he surrenders a reluctant grin. “I haven’t made a diagnosis. For that we await the blood work.”

There’s a knock on the door then, and a nurse appears. Phil follows her into the corridor, leaving me to dress. When I hear their voices
receding down the hallway, I find the switch on the X-ray screen and flip it on. The screen is full of shapes and shadows, and I can’t be sure which is the asymmetry that troubles Phil Watson. As I study the image, I can feel the warm glow of anticipation return and radiate all the way to my fingertips. I confront the question: Is it even remotely possible that I
want
to die?