Straight Man (22 page)

“Lily who?”

All right, so it’s not Jacob Rose, I conclude, hanging up, half disappointed, half puzzled. I don’t think I would have been pleased to discover evidence of my wife’s unfaithfulness, but there would have been something exciting about having made a chilling intuitive leap and had it turn out to be correct. It would have spoken far better of the leaper than to have made the same leap and been wrong, which is what I’ve been.

Motor functions I have, so I drive into town and stop at my favorite lunch counter for breakfast and the morning newspaper. My appearance on the eleven o’clock news was apparently too late to make the morning edition, but I note that there is a short, one-column article on page seven, below the fold, about the suicide of William Cherry, who lay down on the railroad tracks two weeks ago. Neither his wife nor his children apparently observed any symptoms of discouragement or despair, though they acknowledged that he had grown more remote of late. Other than this he seemed upbeat and full of plans for his retirement.

The best thing for tequila poisoning is pancakes, so I eat a plate of these, smothered in syrup, then adjourn to the men’s, where I find a
private stall with a door that latches, and deposit in the toilet the pancakes, last night’s raw clams, the tequila, and my deep conviction that when William Cherry’s severed head was borne up the tracks by a train in the direction of Bellemonde, no one, not even his loved ones, suspected what was in it.

Outside, the morning sky is a brilliant blue, and, taking a deep breath, I feel something of my father’s optimism. There’s no denying the beauty of this brisk spring day in Pennsylvania, no denying that I now feel much, much better.

I arrive at the high school just as the bell between periods rings. I duck into a doorway to avoid being trampled by hordes of young Goths and Visigoths and Vandals, who are running, shoving, slamming into lockers, hurling vicious profanities at each other in the most casual manner, insults which seem not to register. When I was in school such language would have resulted in fistfights and a trip to the principal’s office.

I spy Harold Brownlow, one of Lily’s colleagues, down the hall. Harold seems to have prevented a mugging, and he’s got a huge black boy pinned up against a bulletin board by means of nothing more lethal than Harold’s own gnarled index finger. “Give the boy back his lunch money, Guido,” Harold warns the big kid solemnly. Guido hangs his head and hands a small white kid a couple bills.

“I didn’t mean to take his lunch money, Mr. Brownlow,” Guido says. “It was an accident.”

“I understand, Guido,” Harold says, as the white kid scampers off. “But I don’t want any more accidents, understand?”

“Okay, Mr. Brownlow,” Guido says, and he lumbers off, looking oddly innocent, as if he himself believes in the concept of accidental extortion.

When Harold sees me, he grins and comes over.

“Guido?” I say, watching the big black kid until he disappears through the double doors.

“Go figure,” Harold says, extending a hand. “I think I speak for the entire staff here at the penitentiary when I say how damn proud of you we all are. Who says there’s nothing good on television?”

“Too much violence though,” I admit.

“I thought it was tasteful, but then that’s me,” Harold says. “You heard from Lily?”

“She called last night, but I was out.”

“Tell her not to do anything rash,” Harold advises. “My sources inform me there’s been some movement on the school board. People really do want her to stay.”

“I’ll tell her.”

“Of course, if she wanted to start something new, I’d understand,” Harold admits sadly. “Time’s winged chariot and all that. When I was her age, I got it into my head somehow I was going to die. I played golf every day all summer, convinced every round would be my last. Cost a fortune.”

“And here you are.”

He nods. “Cured my slice, though. You should come out with Marjory and me sometime.” His wife, by coincidence, is Jacob Rose’s secretary.

“Maybe this summer.”

“All in your head, golf,” Harold muses. “A thousand and one contingencies.”

“I’m looking for a game with just one contingency,” I tell him. “Two at the most.”

“Mind if I ask you kind of a personal question?”

“Go head, Harold,” I say, though I wish to hell he wouldn’t. Still, nothing is more personal to Harold than golf, and having shared with me his most intimate thoughts on this subject, he may feel I owe him something.

“Is that vomit on your collar?” he wants to know.

He shows me where, but it’s beneath my chin, and I can’t see it.

“Stop at the men’s,” he suggests. “I don’t do so hot when Marge is gone either,” he adds, in an attempt to comfort me, surely. Throwing up on yourself is the kind of thing that can happen to married men our age when our wives are gone, is his logic.

In the men’s room I address the business of my soiled collar with paper towels and tap water. I also try to think of something to say to Lily’s “rocks.” About the only people to visit the low-track kids, she says, are reformed drug abusers and promoters of safe sex. Kids like
these are told what to avoid, not what to aspire to. And she warned me to be prepared for straightforward, unsophisticated questions. Give them honest answers, she advised, though she may not have anticipated that they’ll be asking me about the spot on my collar.

Her rocks are rumbling nervously when I enter the classroom. I see Lily has found a couple copies of
Off the Road
, which are making the rounds without sparking much interest, though one tough-looking young girl in the front row squints at me suspiciously, turns the book over, and studies the author photo, then me again. What the hell happened to you? is what she’d like to ask, I can tell.

“Hey,” says a skinny black kid, “you the dude from TV.”

At this they look me over with renewed interest. “The duck guy,” somebody says.

“We done that shit, you know what’d happen to us?” somebody else wants to know.

And they’re off. I can see why Lily likes these kids. In two seconds flat they’ve got their own conversation going. Everybody’s talking but me. I’m the Rosetta stone they’re trying to translate, and they don’t want any help just yet. After a while though they remember their manners. Lily probably reminded them, last thing, that I’m their guest, that they’re supposed to behave, that they’re not to hurt me.

“So,” says Guido, the accidental extortionist, from the back row. “How much money you
make
on this book?”

When I pass Orshee’s office on the way to my own, his door is open, and he invites me in. His office, one of the worst on the English department floor, overlooks the parking lot, and no doubt he has seen me coming. He’s dressed in jeans, sneakers, a T-shirt, and a thrift shop sport coat, sort of academic grunge. The look isn’t all that different from the one sported by people like Jacob Rose and William Henry Devereaux, Jr., back when we were ourselves young campus radicals. The resemblance, I’m always relieved to note, ends there. There are very few books in my young colleague’s office, but he’s rigged up a small TV with a built-in VCR. His bookshelves are stacked with videotapes, each one full of recorded, decade-old sitcoms, which he plays throughout the day, even when he’s consulting with students. His
research on these same shows he publishes, for environmental reasons, in electronic magazines, thereby sparing himself the criticism that his essays are not worth the paper they’re printed on. At the moment he’s researching an episode of a sitcom that, if I remember correctly, was called
Diff’rent Strokes
. I angle the chair I’ve been offered so that my back is to the screen.

“This was a seminal show,” Orshee informs me, with what appears to be genuine excitement.

“A seminal sitcom?” I say. “High praise.”

If he knows I’m tweaking him, he doesn’t rise to the bait.

“Conservative white America’s great race fantasy. Young black males, nonthreatening and loving. Old white guys who care about the black community. It’s great stuff.”

As I listen to him, it occurs to me that Orshee was probably the kid who got his lunch money extorted in high school by some demographic relative of Guido’s. Here at the college he’s safe at last. Nobody’s even allowed to make fun of his ponytail.

“I’m thinking about doing a special topics course next year, maybe compare a couple of episodes of
Diff’rent Strokes
with
Huckleberry Finn
. You know, like, the great American racist novel? Show how white attitudes haven’t changed, how the basic fantasy’s still intact today? June thinks it’s a good idea.”

Something about the sound of June Barnes’s name in Orshee’s mouth reminds me of the rumor I keep hearing about my young colleague and Teddy’s wife.

“I thought you didn’t want them reading books,” I say. “Writing being a phallocentric activity and all that.”

He locates a remote among his papers and presses pause, freeze-framing the cherublike face of the little black kid who starred in the show. “I’m not against books. You can get in a rut with them though.”

“I know. I’ve been in that rut since I was thirteen.”

He blinks. “You didn’t learn to read till you were thirteen?”

“I didn’t love to read until about then. It’s the love that makes the rut.”

“Right,” he nods seriously. “Hey, what’s it like living out in Allegheny Wells?”

“There’s cable,” I assure him. “Some people have satellite dishes.”

“Paul’s got one,” he says. “Professor Rourke?” he adds, so I’ll know who he’s talking about.

I decide there must be no significance to his having mentioned June a moment ago. He’s just dropping names. He’s up for tenure next year and wants me to understand, in case I’m still chair, how well he’s fitting in. He’s on a first-name basis with all factions. I nod to show I’m with him. “Big guy. Surly.”

Orshee ignores this. “I like his house, except I think it may be sliding down the hill.”

I suppress a grin.

“June thinks so too.”

The article they’ve been working on all year, I recall, is on clitoral imagery in Emily Dickinson. The way Teddy explained it to me, June, being herself in possession of a clitoris and therefore more sensitive to its encoded appearances in the Dickinson poems, was going to draft the article, which she and Orshee would then revise, making use of his up-to-date critical theory vocabulary. “It’s weird,” Teddy confessed to me one day back in the fall semester when June’s notes were strewn all over the house. “Back when I was fifteen, I was obsessed with pussy. Now I’m fifty and
my wife’s
the one obsessed with it.”

“We’ve looked at a couple houses out there, but I don’t know,” Orshee says. I must look puzzled, because he quickly clarifies his meaning. “Sally and I.”

“Right,” I say. Sally is the seldom seen young woman who accompanied him to Railton four years ago who has reportedly been “finishing her dissertation.”

“I mean, it’s really nice out there, and I wouldn’t mind being among the trees. But we’d, like, have to give up our dream of living in an integrated neighborhood.”

“Right,” I say, indicating the television screen over my shoulder with my thumb.

“We shouldn’t even be looking at places until I find out about my tenure next year,” he concedes. “Except it’s a buyer’s market right now. According to our realtor, now’s the time. Next year, who knows?”

“Tomorrow, who knows?” I agree.

“That’s the other thing,” he says, studying me carefully now. “All this talk about layoffs this year. If it’s last hired, first fired …”

“April is the cruelest month, rumor-wise,” I remind him.

“Well, if you hear anything, I hope you’ll let me know, because we really are considering taking the plunge. June thinks Allegheny Wells is a good investment.”

“Sally, you mean.”

“No, June. She’s been trying to get Teddy to buy out there.”

Actually, she’s been trying to get Teddy to do this for over a decade, but Teddy can’t bring himself to spend that kind of money.

“I just hate to see you give up your dream,” I tell Orshee.

He looks blank.

“Of living in an integrated neighborhood,” I remind him.

“Oh, right,” he says. “Well, we’re looking at other places, too.”

“And there’s always the chance that it will
become
integrated,” I remind him, getting up from my chair. “I understand Coach Green is looking to build out there.”

“And it’s not like we’ll be here in Railton forever,” he adds.

At this I can’t help smiling. “That’s what we all thought, kid.”

Paul Rourke is collecting his mail in the English department office when I enter. He studies me over the rim of his reading glasses, and it occurs to me to wonder how long he’s had these. Also I note that there’s more gray in his hair and flesh in his cheeks than the last time I observed him carefully, which was maybe a decade ago. He has a dissipated look about him now, and I can’t help wondering if he’s become, like Billy Quigley, a solitary drinker. He looks like he could be taken in a fight. Not by me, but by somebody. Not anybody in Humanities, probably. Maybe someone over in P.E.

“Morning, Reverend,” I say. “Another beautiful day, praise God.”

“Hello, dipwad,” he says, returning his attention to his mail, most of which he’s tossing directly into the wastebasket at his feet, unopened. “I caught your act last night,” he continues without looking up from his task. “It needs work.”

Rourke’s position regarding me never varies. Despite the fact that I try to make everything into a joke, I’m never funny. Rachel stops typing at her word processor and watches us fearfully. To show her that everything is fine, that an outbreak of hostilities is unlikely between us
two old former combatants, I give her a wink. She remembers, as everyone does, that Rourke once threw me up against a wall at the department Christmas party, and she hates to see the two of us in the same room. Maybe, if she’s half in love with me, she doesn’t want to see me injured.

“Look up
dipwad
for me,” I tell her, spelling it. “I think I’ve been insulted, but I’m not sure.”