Straight Man (5 page)

The reason the untenable Threlkind was still part of our deliberations was that Gracie had come down with the flu last November and missed the meeting at which she might have had him dismissed from further consideration. Her own field was Twentieth-Century British, and she’d desktop-published, just last year, a second volume of her poetry. If the untenable Threlkind were hired, Gracie would have to share courses in these areas, courses that she had long considered her own private stock.

“And I’d also like to point out that the candidate is yet another white male,” she concluded, closing her notebook in a gesture of finality.

“Do we already have a poet?” I heard William Henry Devereaux, Jr., inquire innocently. Teddy and June stared at their hands, traces of smiles curling their lips. They had a long list of political enemies, and Gracie was near the top, having been part of the coalition that had brought Teddy down off his chairmanship.

“That’s an out-of-order remark,” Finny declared without conviction, and I caught a whiff of his minty breath mixing dangerously with Gracie’s perfume.

“I think we should eliminate both male candidates,” Orshee offered.

“Are you suggesting that we not consider male candidates?” Teddy wondered. “Simply on the basis of gender?”

“Exactly,” Orshee replied.

“That would be illegal,” Teddy said, but his voice didn’t fall quite right, leaving an implied “wouldn’t it?” hanging in the air.

“It’d be moral,” Orshee insisted. “It’d be right.”

“Still, it’s not the procedure we followed when we hired you,” Finny reminded him. Finny, who’d come out of the closet several years ago and then gone back in again, had even more reason than the rest of us to be disappointed in our young colleague. He’d been Orshee’s most vocal advocate, having apparently concluded on the basis of several remarks made during his interview that Campbell Wheemer was gay, whereas it turned out that all Orshee was trying to imply was that gay people were fine with him, as were black people and Asian people and Latino people and Native American people. In fact, Orshee would have preferred to be one of these people himself, politically and morally speaking, had the choice been his. Bad luck.

“You
should
have hired a woman,” Orshee continued. He seemed on the verge of tears, so deep were his convictions in this matter of his having been hired over a qualified womaṇ. “And when I come up for tenure, you should vote against me. If we in the English department don’t take a stand against sexism, who will?”

This time even I was aware of my gurgling.

“I’m not in favor of eliminating both male candidates,” Gracie clarified her position. “Just Professor Threlkind. Because we don’t need another white male. Because we don’t need another person in Twentieth Century. Because we don’t need another poet. That’s three strong reasons, not one.”

As she spoke I could see Teddy shaking his head out of the corner of my eye, probably because he knew me, and because he knew Gracie, and because he knew Gracie was going to tee it up for me one more time, and because he knew I’d yank the driver out of the bag and let her rip.

“Who’s our first poet?” I asked of no one in particular. “Somebody remind me.”

The spiral notebook caught me full in the face with enough force to bring tears to my eyes. Everyone, including Finny, who brought to meetings he chaired the emotional equilibrium of a cork in high seas, looked on, bug-eyed. But what confused me was the fact that the notebook Gracie used remained, unaccountably, right in front of my face. For an irrational moment I actually thought she had written something on the cover that she was inviting me to read. Cross-eyed, I tried to examine what was before my nose. Only when I realized that Gracie was in fact trying to retrieve her notebook, and that each tentative tug sent a sharp pain all the way up into my forehead, only then did I realize that the barbed end of the spiral ring had hooked and punctured my right nostril, that I was gigged like a frog and leaning across the table toward Gracie like a bumbling suitor begging a kiss.

The next moment I was surrounded, though I couldn’t see anyone through the tears. “Oh my Gawd,” I heard Gracie say, and she let go of the notebook, as if to suggest that by doing so she could end her involvement with me. I could just go ahead and keep her notebook if I wanted.

“This is crazy,” Orshee kept repeating, as if he were being forced to witness the sort of thing he would have preferred not to see happen, even to a white male.

Finally, at my own suggestion, Teddy was dispatched in search of a custodian, and by the time the two men returned with a set of needle nose pliers with wire-cutting capabilities, the other members of the personnel committee had all clustered safely behind me because I had sneezed twice, spraying blood the length of the seminar table and flecking Finny’s white suit with pink.

All of this Teddy now reports to my wife, and to his credit he doesn’t end the story there. He’s not an English teacher for nothing, and he understands a thing or two about dramatic movement.

“So here we are, all back in our seats at the table.” He grins at Lily. “Your husband is honking blood into a swatch of brown paper towels from the men’s room. Gracie is blubbering how sorry she is. Finny is daubing his white suit with his handkerchief. And you’ll never guess what your husband does next.”

From the look on his face, I can tell that Teddy is confident that nobody in a million years could guess what William Henry Devereaux, Jr., did or said next, but he’s forgotten who he’s talking to, namely the woman who’s been living with William Henry Devereaux, Jr., for thirty years and who claims to know him better than he knows himself.

“I bet he called the question,” my wife replies, apparently without having to give the matter much thought, and looking right at me when she speaks, as if challenging me to deny it.

Teddy’s face falls. He looks like he’s been groined a second time. “Right,” he admits, his voice saturated with profound disappointment. “He said, ‘Let’s vote.’ ”

My wife looks disappointed as well, as if there’s no particular glory to be garnered in predicting what a man like me will do next. “You know how sensitive Gracie is about her poetry. What’s wrong with you?”

In truth, I don’t know. I had not intended to belittle Gracie. At least not until I got started, after which it felt like the natural thing to do, though I no longer remember why. I don’t dislike Gracie. At least I don’t dislike her when I think about her. When I’m in one place and she’s in another. It’s when she’s near enough to backhand that back-handing her always seems like a good idea. This is true of several of my colleagues, actually, though they don’t bother me in the abstract.

“Anyway,” Teddy is saying. “I thought I better bring him home. So far he hasn’t even said thank you.” Part of Teddy’s camaraderie with Lily has always been based on their shared belief that I am an ingrate.

In my view, I am not an ingrate, but I can play that role. “Thank you for what?” I ask him. “Thanks to you my car is still in the faculty lot. Lily will have to take me to campus before she leaves for Philadelphia. All so you can come out here and flirt with her.”

Teddy goes so scarlet at this that Lily leans over and gives him a kiss on the cheek, which makes him redder still. “It’s nice to be flirted with occasionally,” she tells him, though if I’m not mistaken this remark is aimed at me.

“Philadelphia?” it occurs to Teddy to inquire.

“A job interview,” she explains.

And now he blanches, all the blood of embarrassment draining out of his face. He looks first at Lily, then at me. “You guys might leave?”

“No.” She pats him on the hand. “But keep that to yourself. The principal at the high school is retiring next year. I’m trying to force the school board to name his successor.”

You can actually see the relief on Teddy’s face.

“Have June give me a call if she wants me to pick anything up.”

“She’ll want some of that good olive oil,” Teddy says sadly, as if he knows his wife’s desires and would rather not think about them.

When Teddy slides off his barstool, Lily offers to walk him out to the car, and when they’re gone I take the empty coffee cups over to the sink. From the kitchen window I can see the tops of their heads as they stand in the driveway below the deck and hear their muffled voices through the glass. Something about the way they’re standing there, some hint of heretofore unthinkable intimacy, causes me to imagine Teddy and Lily as lovers. I place them in our bed, Lily’s and mine, and for some reason Lily is on top. Probably because I can’t imagine Teddy on top. With Lily, with his own wife, with any woman over the age of eighteen. He’s just too apologetic. Even more bizarre, I imagine myself in the room with them, a witness on the brink of several possible but not necessarily compatible, or even valid, emotions—surprise, anger, jealousy, curiosity, excitement. I tell myself that if I’m a little detached from this imaginary betrayal, it’s because I know that Teddy and Lily are not lovers. In real life if Teddy’s fantasy ever came true, he’d confess it. He’d come to my office, haggard and happy and damned, and tell me what he’d done, then go out and buy a gun and shoot himself in the foot by way of comic penance, and then apologize all over again for lacking the courage to make a stronger statement. He’s an academic, after all, like the rest of us.

When they share a quick hug and separate chastely, I’m almost disappointed. I think I hear Lily tell him to give her best to June, whom she hasn’t seen since when. Then Teddy asks her something that I can’t make out at first. What he wants to know, what I decide it sounds like, is whether Lily thinks I’m going to be okay. It occurs to me rather forcefully that he is not inquiring after my nose. I wish I could make out Lily’s response, but I can’t.

Across the way, on top of the opposite hill, I can see Paul Rourke’s satellite dish partially obscured by tree branches, and it chooses this moment to search out a different satellite. Rourke’s dish is constantly
in motion. A compulsive pro basketball watcher, he’s always looking for feeds. I know it’s an optical illusion, but this time when the dish stops, it appears aimed directly at me. In a sci-fi movie, a beam of light would emit from its dark center and I would be reduced to cinders. Between the dish and me is my own pale reflection in the glass. I try to take Teddy’s question seriously, but for a man like me it’s not easy. Of course I’m going to be okay. True, this is not a young man’s face looking back at me from my kitchen window, but the nose is its only gruesome feature.

I’m still engrossed in its purple swelling when Lily’s reflection appears behind mine and she observes sadly, “You can be
such
a jerk.”

As a rule I jog before dinner, but Teddy has thrown everything off by coming home with me and drinking coffee and flirting with Lily. By the time my wife and I finish a quiet supper, it’s almost dark, but there’s a full moon and very little traffic on our country road. I get into my sweats and go out onto the deck to loosen up. From there I can survey the thing we’ve for so long called our lives.

The house—this house we’ve lived in since moving out of Railton—is situated at the top of a long, winding, tree-lined incline. Nestled down among the trees are a half dozen other houses, all more expensive than ours, all owned by university people—senior professors, administrators, a coach. In summer, when everything is green, no house on our hill is visible from the others, which creates the impression of solitude, dispelled only by the occasional glint of painted metal as our cars glide among the trees, the yellow window at night winking through the stirring foliage, the distant argument conducted at an open kitchen window and borne along on the breeze. Starting in late
autumn, though, and continuing through the long Pennsylvania winter, we are more aware of our neighbors’ existence, as we become partially visible to each other among the naked trees. And so during half the year, at least, we wave to one another apologetically, getting into and out of our cars, taking the trash out to the road, shoveling snow off our decks. Now, in April, we are anxiously awaiting our solitude—the reason we all moved to Allegheny Wells to begin with.

Lily and I purchased the first lot in the development nearly twenty years ago, using the advance on my novel to make the necessary down payment to buy the land and begin construction. Unlike those who followed, we cut down the majority of trees on the lot and put in grass. Lily, who grew up in a grim, dark neighborhood in Philly, wanted light and plenty of it, and long, sloping lawns for me to mow. She also wanted decks, front and back, and lots of patio furniture, as if the presence of summery chaise longues possessed the power to ward off Pennsylvania winters. Needless to say, we store the patio furniture in the garage below the front deck seven full months of the year. But our deck is the best one around for sitting. Cutting down so many trees seems to have reduced the insect population, and we are seldom bothered by bugs. Our neighbors farther down the hill and across the road complain that they are driven indoors as soon as the sun gets below the trees. From our deck we listen to the syncopation of their bug zappers.

Summer deck sitting is one of the ways Lily and I are compatible. Once we’re done with classes in a few short weeks, the summer evenings will stretch before us, long and languid. We’ll bring bottles of chilled white wine out with us and either read or talk until the quiet and the dark and the wine make us sleepy. Years ago, when the house was new, we occasionally made love outdoors on the deck, but it’s been a long time since we’ve done that. There’s something to be said for outdoor sex, with its vague danger and attending excitement, but sensible middle-aged people are apt to feel foolish screwing on plastic outdoor furniture. Your skin sticks to it, and the sound it makes when you peel yourself free is the sound of folly. And soon the special excitement associated with the possibility that you will be discovered in the act of passion begins to fade because, of course, you are not discovered. On dark, quiet summer nights in the country you can hear a visitor’s car approaching on the county road below from half a mile off, and you
know when it turns off onto your access road, and you can track its progress as it labors up the hill toward the house. By the time whoever it is parks and climbs the creaky deck stairs, you could be showered and freshly dressed, a pot of coffee brewing, cookies arranged on a dish. Surprise, at our age?