Straight Man

by Richard Russo

  “Hell no.”

  “I’m glad. Good night, Hank.”

  Good night, Billy.

  When I hang up, Occam slinks over. He’s still dragging his haunches a few inches above the carpet, guilty. I make a sound to let him know it’s okay. I hate to provoke guilt, even in animals. One of my few parental rules has been to try not to inspire or encourage guilt in our daughters. Of course it’s been easy to play good cop, married to Lily, who grew up as Catholic as Billy Quigley. She outgrew its orthodoxy without being able to surrender its methods—a subtle blend of bribery, guilt provoking, and Skinner-esque behaviorism—strategies my wife has used to combat my own encouraged Emersonian self-reliance theory of child rearing, or anarchy, as Lily refers to it. I suspect our daughters survived childhood by cheerfully ignoring both Lily and me rather than trying to reconcile our disparate advice. They seem to have rejected our wisdom as completely as our suggested reading lists, refusing to see the applicability of either The Scarlet Letter (Lily) or Bartleby (whose title character is, like me, a disciple of William of Occam) to their own lives. This despite the fact that one or the other of these stories, it seems to me, applies to everybody.

  I tell this to Occam, who lowers his head to allow for better ear scratching. I have long suspected that some previous owner abused Occam as a pup, and it’s taken him a long time to banish the resulting canine mistrust. It’s only in the last few months that he’s become a joyous, confident dog, sure enough of the fundamental goodness of life to thrust his pointed snout into the crotches of perfect strangers without fear of retribution.

  “One of what applies to everybody?” Lily wants to know from the doorway. For nearly thirty years she’s been sneaking up on me this way. This time she’s wet-headed and fresh from the shower, and she’s got a snifter of brandy. Occam starts at the sound of her voice, eyes her suspiciously. When he sees she’s not holding a rolled-up newspaper, his eyes close again, and he concentrates on the business of getting his ears scratched.

  “I’d like to tell you,” I say to my wife, “but you know my conversations with Occam are strictly confidential.”

  “Mmmm,” she says, taking a sip of brandy and looking around my den as if it were the room of a stranger. It’s been a long time since she’s entered here. The den where I work and Lily’s third-floor loft have been, by unspoken agreement, off limits. She agrees not to clean so long as I keep the door shut to ensure that the chaos I engender is visible to me alone and does not spill out into the rest of the house. She has to move a pile of books and student essays in order to sit on my beat-up old sofa.

  I take a sip of her offered brandy, and its strangely bitter taste suggests to me one of two things. Either somebody is substituting cheap brandy for the stuff I bought or the bitterness has nothing to do with the brandy. What I suspect is that this brandy is intended to brace me for unpleasantness, and that any brandy used for this purpose may be imbued with medicinal bitterness if you suspect the truth. I set the brandy down on a remedial freshman composition entitled “My Neighborhood,” a shrewd little piece of sociology that begins, “The reason my neighborhood is unique is because the people are so friendly,” an observation it shares with over half the others in the stack, which, taken together, have the amusing effect of invalidating each other.

  “What were you and Teddy talking about?” it occurs to me to ask.

  “When?” Lily asks, not unreasonably, though I can’t help feeling she’s stalling.

  “When you walked him to the car.”

  Lily looks sad. “You,” she admits. “He’s worried about you.”

  “He shouldn’t be,” I say, though I’m not sure what I mean. What I feel is an odd combination of “there’s no reason for him to worry” and “he shouldn’t concern himself.”

  “He thinks you’re committing political suicide by not taking this purge business seriously. He says even your friends are ready to strangle you.”

  “You think I should take the rumors seriously?”

  She takes a sip of brandy, studies the murky liquid that remains. “You remember Gladys Cox?”

  “Never heard of her.”

  “You’ve met her half a dozen times.”

  “Oh, that Gladys Cox.”

  “She works in the chancellor’s office. She says the legislature’s not fooling around this year. The cuts in higher education are going to be deep …”

  When I don’t say anything right away, Lily says, “What’s that look that just came over your face?”

  I can’t explain it, of course, and the reason has little to do with the fact that it’s unreasonable to ask a man to explain an expression on his own face when he can’t see it. What I’m really at a loss to explain is the odd thrill I feel at the possibility that the rumor might be true. But I also remember the look of excitement in Teddy’s own eyes when he brought the matter up in the Civic. Could it be that we two middle-aged men are so hungry for something to happen to us?

  “So you haven’t been asked to come up with a list?”

  “Don’t be absurd.”

  “Promise me you never would?”

  “Do I need to?”

  She considers this. For too long, in my opinion, but when she speaks, she sounds sincere. “No,” she admits. “And for what it’s worth, Teddy doesn’t believe you would either.”

  “He just wondered if you thought I would?”

  Now it’s her turn to ignore my question. “Billy all right?” she wonders. This is a change of subject, but what’s hanging in the air between us is the implied connection that exists, in her mind, and perhaps in my own, that we’ve just moved from discussing one troubled man to another.

  “Billy’s never been all right,” I tell her. “He’s probably no worse tonight than usual though. Worried. He can’t afford to lose his job.”

  “Who could?”

  I’m offered and I accept another sip of brandy. This one doesn’t taste so bitter, so I venture, “Julie’s all upset.”

  “I know,” Lily says.

  “You do?”

  She shrugs. “Remember how tough things used to be when we were broke all the time?”

  In truth, I don’t. I remember being broke, but I don’t recall things being that tough.

  “She’s awfully hard on Russell.”

  “I know. We were hard on each other, too.”

  “When?”

  She doesn’t answer right away. “I hated being broke. It never bothered you as much. The only time it ever bothered you was when we had to ask your father for a loan.”

  “When did we do that?” I ask. I feel an uncomfortable tickle of memory, but I can’t place the circumstance.

  “When we moved here. The pub date money for Off the Road hadn’t arrived. We were afraid we’d get here and not be able to pay the movers. Your father wired us fifteen hundred dollars so we could get our stuff.”

  I begin to remember now. “But then the pub money came just before we left Indiana. We returned his check uncashed.”

  “And hurt his feelings.”

  “Whose?” I say, and when Lily doesn’t reply, “Why would his feelings have been hurt?”

  “You made pretty clear that you were desperate, or you wouldn’t have asked.”

  “We were desperate.”

  “Then you sent the check back Express Mail, as if you didn’t even want it in the house overnight. As if by returning it so quickly you could erase the fact that he’d sent it.”

  “I don’t think he took it that way,” I tell her, because I don’t. But it’s an odd thing. About the only time we ever argue is when we talk about our fathers. I persist in liking hers, she in liking mine. Such are the grounds for our ongoing dispute. “He’s always been far too self-absorbed to have his feelings hurt. If you don’t believe me, ask my mother.”

  “She called when you were gone. You should stop by and see her tomorrow before she leaves.”

  “I will,” I say.

  “Don’t tell me, tell her.”<
br />
  “Okay,” I give in. “By the way. Julie says I never notice when you’re unhappy. Are you? Unhappy?”

  “Not often.”

  “When?”

  She rises and comes over to where I’m sitting, kisses me on the forehead. When her robe gaps at the neck, I see that she is naked beneath, and it occurs to me that this kiss, this bewitching view, as well as the rich, beguiling scent of bath oil that I’m being afforded, just might be an invitation. When a man like William Henry Devereaux, Jr., asks his wife if she is ever unhappy, an invitation of this sort is all he wants by way of answer. Such things happen between husbands and wives, even when they’ve been married for almost thirty years. There is no reason I can think of that it shouldn’t happen between my wife and me tonight. “I’m unhappy to be in my period right now,” she says, supplying the reason, and then, more seriously, “and I’m unhappy to see you so lost, Hank,” she adds, running her fingers through what’s left of my thinning hair, stopping at the little scar that remains from my encounter with the garage rafter.

  “Ouch,” I say, pretending it’s more tender there than it is, pretending my wife has hurt me when she has not. Oddly, a split second before embarking on this pretense, I had planned to bury my face in the gap in her robe, inhale the fresh fragrance of her skin deeply into my lungs, tell her I wished she didn’t have to run off to Philadelphia this weekend of all weekends. Instead I choose to pretend that I am wounded by her touch, this woman whose touch has been so light and knowing through the years. And so she stands, looks down at me, disappointed, as if she knows full well the choice I’ve made and why I’ve made it. If she understands the why, she’s ahead of me.

  A moment later, when the door closes behind Lily, I am left alone with Occam, who, it now occurs to me, smells.

  CHAPTER

  5

  The next morning we pull into the Modern Languages lot next to my ancient, pale blue Lincoln, which looks, in the most remote corner of the lot, like the kind of car somebody might leave for dead. My own condition isn’t much better. I’m bug-eyed from lack of sleep, having stayed up late reading, and when I finally did fall asleep, I had a continuing dream of sliding backward in the Lincoln down snowy Pleasant Street Hill. Also, my cold is back, a fact I’m trying to conceal from Lily, who predicted that it would be, thanks to my run. I’ve taken an antihistamine, and it’s beginning to dry me up, but it’s also left me light-headed. Despite relieving myself before leaving the house, I already have to go again. There’s a lot I’d like to say to my wife at this moment of her leaving, and I consider telling her that I think I’ve formed my first stone. Lily would stay if I asked her to, which means I can’t ask. Instead I say, “You look great,” which is true. “I’d hire you.”

  “Thanks,” she says, and there’s genuine gratitude in her voice. The very idea of her going on a job interview fills me with admiration. Tenured these last fifteen years, I find it hard to imagine being in that position again, of allowing myself to be judged.

  “Say hi to Angelo for me. And call before you go over there. He’s liable to gun you down on the front porch if you surprise him.” Ever since her father quit drinking, he’s fallen victim to paranoia, noticing, perhaps for the first time, what’s happened to the neighborhood.

  “I tried to call him a couple times last night, and again this morning,” she tells me. “I kept getting his machine.”

  “Angelo has an answering machine?”

  “I just hope he hasn’t started drinking again.”

  “I always preferred him drunk,” I say, though I know it’s the wrong thing. “At least he was happy.”

  “He was also passing blood in his urine, Hank. His drinking was no joke.”

  “His not drinking is no joke either,” I point out. Again, the wrong thing, and because I don’t want to start an argument, I get out, close the door, come around to her side. She rolls down the window, I think, so she can give me a kiss, but it turns out it’s to observe me better. “Take care of yourself, okay? I have this fear. I can’t decide where you’re going to be when I get home. In the hospital or in jail.”

  Lily always likes to leave me with a prediction. “Jail?” I ask. When I bend down to kiss her, she says, just before our lips meet, “When’s your meeting with Dickie Pope?”

  “This afternoon? No, tomorrow.” In truth, I can’t remember. “Any instructions?”

  “Be the man you are. Be the man I married.”

  Our lips meet. “Which?” I want to know. “Make up your mind.”

  Overnight, two posters have appeared on the outer doors of Modern Languages, one announcing next week’s donkey basketball game pitting administration against faculty, the other announcing that Army ROTC’s scheduled Saturday morning M-16 practice has been canceled. Reason? Ammo did not arrive. These two community announcements suggest how much the campus has changed since the arrival of a certain young, bearded, radical English professor named William Henry Devereaux, Jr., over twenty years ago. Back then, such signs would have been unthinkable. Now it’s hard to imagine anyone objecting. The CIA recruits on campus, so it’s probably appropriate enough for senior faculty to saddle up diaper-clad donkeys for the purpose of mocking sport, our institution of higher learning, the life of the mind, and themselves, the ship of dignity having sailed long ago. I myself am looking forward to the game. The donkeys should negate my age and inability to run the fast break. I’m confident I can shoot from my ass.

  “I’m sure you can,” says a voice behind me.

  When I turn, I see that Mike Law, Gracie’s husband, has come up behind me, and that I’m blocking his entrance. It must be true. I’m speaking aloud without knowing it.

  “Nice nose,” he adds.

  Shaggy-bearded and stoop-shouldered, Mike Law is the most morose-looking man on campus, and that’s saying something. We stand facing each other, two sheepish, middle-aged men, each of whom fears he owes the other an apology. Silly, when you think about it. Mike is certainly not responsible for the behavior of the woman who is his wife. And if I have come into conflict with Gracie, goaded her to violence against my person, then I owe her, not her husband, an apology. Yet here we stand, the two of us, sharing an invalid emotion. On the other hand, nearly all the emotions of men our age are apparently invalid.

  “I’m told I had it coming,” I admit.

  “I’m told the same thing,” Mike informs me. “I’d keep my guard up if I were you. I don’t think she’s finished.”

  I nod and we shake hands. Why we should shake hands is probably as unclear to Mike Law as it is to me.

  “Stop by some evening and we’ll shoot a rack of pool,” he urges me, as he does every time we run into each other. Mike has spent the last five years finishing his basement, where he’s put a pool table, a dartboard, a jukebox stocked with fifties rock and roll, and a wet bar. He’s rumored to have a small keg of beer tapped in the spare refrigerator at all times, and it’s a measure of his isolation that despite such enticements very few of his colleagues will provide company for a man so seriously depressed. “I’ve got my own entrance now,” he explains, another sad enticement. I can visit him without running into his wife, is what he wants me to understand. I should visit him, I know. I was an usher at his wedding—what—fifteen years ago? Longer? Black Saturday, he calls it.

  “How are things downstairs?” I ask him. French, Spanish, German, Italian, and Classics occupy the floor below ours.

  “Silly, small, mean-spirited, lame,” he explains. “Same as English.”

  “Have you been over to the Vatican?” it occurs to me to wonder, since Mike is the senior person in Spanish. “Asked to make out a list?”

  He shakes his head. “There’s just the three of us in Spanish. I heard Sergei had a private meeting, but he denies it, the prick.”

  Sergei Braja, I remember, chairs Languages, which comprises a single department. “What’s your best guess?”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me,” he admits. “Gracie’s convinced, of c
ourse. She may even know, the way she sucks up to Little Dick.”

  “Thank God you and I remain pure,” I say, holding the door for him.

  “We end up stalling in front of doors and talking to ourselves though.”

  This early, the English department corridor is empty, its offices dark, except for those who have been punished with eight o’clock classes. Those plus Finny, who requests eight o’clock classes, five days a week, every term. These requests are viewed by Teddy and June as further evidence of serious perversity in Finny, but I know they are nothing of the kind. In many ways Finny is the most rational member of our ragtag band, at least if you grant him the one or two assumptions he proceeds from. By requesting early morning and late afternoon classes, by enforcing a strict attendance policy, and by devoting the first three weeks of class to differentiating between restrictive and nonrestrictive noun clauses, Finny halves his teaching load each term. Students start dropping out by the second week of classes, and by the end of the term he has a seminar of seven or eight where once there were the regulation twenty-three. This, he maintains when challenged, is the result of genuine university standards, evenly applied.

  Between ten in the morning and four in the afternoon Finny’s days stretch out, long and languorous, and he takes a two-hour lunch at the Railton Sheraton on the other side of town in the company of a favored male student or two, it is rumored. I have my doubts about this rumor, just as I have about all academic rumors. Since returning to his medication and the closet, Finny has maintained strict appearances, often arriving at department functions with a female companion, as if she were capable of dispelling the communal recollection of his two-week career as a transvestite.

  This occurred during the final days of the Vietnam War. Our bugging out of Southeast Asia may even have influenced Finny to flee his marriage, and his logic apparently was that if he could do without his wife, there was a good chance that he could do without his medication as well. In this latter he was apparently mistaken. The first day off his meds, he became garrulous and good-natured, which was bizarre enough, but he also appeared to be wearing eyeliner and mascara. The second day, residual medication flushed from his system, he appeared in full regalia. Black satin dress. Pearls. High heels. Bellowing down the long hallways of Modern Languages: “Blessings, my good people, on this glorious day that God has made! Throw open your windows!” Teddy, then chair, locked himself in the office I now occupy and refused to come out. Otherwise, Finny managed to visit just about everyone.