Straight Man

by Richard Russo

  “Bear down,” he says now with the score 14–7, his favor. “I’m awfully tough today. You’re going to have to play harder.”

  Tony’s most ironic statements are always delivered deadpan. Either that or he doesn’t consider them ironic. Maybe he really thinks he’s tough today. I suspect there are times when he forgets the handicap that allows him to compete in the first place. He loves to compete and to wager. He’d bet money on our games if I would go along. I might go along except that I never know who’s won the point until he tells me. So we make other, nonracquetball wagers, though I never understand these either. Tony has a sister in Tampa, and therefore he follows the Tampa Bay Buccaneers football team, and every season he comes up with some crazy scheme that will allow him to bet on them. Last year he told me to pick any team I wanted, and he’d take the Bucs. For twenty dollars. Whichever team had the best record at the end of the season. “Okay,” I said, “I’ll take the Oakland Raiders.”

  “You can’t have them,” Tony explained. “It has to be a comparable team.”

  “Comparable to Tampa Bay?” I said, already confused.

  “Any comparable team.”

  It turned out I could have any team without much talent. I could take the Jets or the Rams or the Seahawks, for instance. “I still don’t understand. What are we betting on?”

  “On which is the better team, of course,” Tony explained, as if he suspected I was being intentionally dense.

  “What if they don’t play each other?”

  “Overall record,” he said. “Playing each other doesn’t count.”

  “How can it not count if they play each other?” I objected, attempting to apply Occam’s Razor. “Wouldn’t that game settle the issue right there?”

  But he wouldn’t hear of it. The more he thought about it, the more wrinkles he wanted to throw in. If the Bucs made the play-offs and my team didn’t, I’d have to pay double (and vice versa, he added reluctantly).

  “And you promise to tell me if I win?” I said when he was finished explaining.

  “It’s simple. Pay attention,” he said, and then he explained the wager again, this time adding another wrinkle or two. So I picked the Chargers, who lost in the first round of the play-offs. Tampa Bay finished in the cellar. He paid up, too, though he was pretty pissed off that I wouldn’t go double or nothing next season. Again I could take any team I wanted (except the Chargers were now on the list of teams I couldn’t choose) and he’d take the Bucs. I took his money and put it in my pocket.

  “Bear down,” Tony advises now. “There’s not much point to this if you aren’t going to try.”

  In fact he’s been running me all over the court, and I’m exhausted, frustrated, ready to concede. Also, I have to pee again.

  “Game point,” Tony reminds me, then serves. I return the ball hard, and it whistles off the front wall, the perfect passing shot I’m not allowed, well out of Tony’s reach.

  “Game,” he says. “Mine.”

  I throw up my hands in defeat. “Thank God,” I say. I’ve grown used to losing on my best shots.

  “Let’s go one more,” Tony suggests.

  “No,” I tell him.

  “One more,” he says.

  We play one more. If anything, my play improves, which means that I lose by an even greater margin. He terms this final defeat of mine a humiliation. Myself, I’m not sure how to feel about it.

  Tony always knows how to feel. In the shower he sings Rigoletto full bore. He never cares who’s in there with us. The operatic urge that accompanies victory is too strong to be denied, no matter who stares. Today, we’re alone, so it’s just me staring in my customary disbelief.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about women lately,” Tony says, when we’re toweling off. He enjoys the effect of omitted transition. “Of fornicating with them, actually.”

  I know there’s no need to respond to Tony when he introduces subjects in this fashion, so I work on my lock, which is tricky and usually requires two or three correct applications of the combination.

  “Do you realize that I’m far better at fornication now than I was at eighteen?”

  I tell him I’m glad to hear it.

  “It’s true,” he says, still deadpan. “I have a lot more stamina, more desire, more technique. I have a lot to offer women.”

  Indeed, Tony has something of a reputation in this regard. In addition to a few faculty wives, his conquests include not a few undergraduate students, though he never dates or beds them, he assures me, until after his final grades are in. Such professional scruples notwithstanding, Tony’s indiscretions have cost him a final promotion to full professor, a penalty he accepts with great good grace.

  “More than any other human activity,” he says, stepping into his Jockey shorts, adjusting himself carefully in them, “the act of fornication defines us. That’s a known fact. All the evidence suggests that I’ve got a lot of good years left.”

  On the fifth try my lock finally opens.

  “Fornication is more spiritual than physical,” Tony continues. “Most women know that, but not so many men. Which is why men like me are in demand. You laugh,” he adds.

  It’s true. I am laughing, though not so much at Tony’s genial boasting as at the fact that he doesn’t consider it boasting. Having introduced this subject, he sees no reason why he shouldn’t explore it fully, as if his interest were purely analytical, scientific. “You’re the only man I know who claims to know what women want,” I explain.

  “There’s nothing mysterious about what women want,” Tony informs me. “They want everything. Just like us. What’s interesting is what they’ll settle for. What’s interesting is that often they’ll settle for me.” He pauses to let me contemplate this mystery. “I don’t know if they’d settle for you,” he adds.

  “Well—” I begin.

  “The intensity of the orgasm isn’t there anymore,” Tony concedes, as if he’s anticipated that I’m about to register this objection. “My first time was when I was thirteen, in Brooklyn. There was a woman who lived in our building. She invited me up one afternoon. I had this incredible orgasm standing in the middle of her living room before she could get out of her brassiere.”

  “I’m not sure that qualifies as fornication.”

  “That was my brother’s position,” Tony says. “When I told him about it, he set me straight. I even went back to the woman and apologized.”

  “Did she accept it?”

  “Accept what?” Tony says. “If you’re going to be careless with pronouns, we’re going to have to talk about something else. Fornication requires precision.”

  “Not to mention patience,” I add.

  “Not to mention skill and stamina and affection,” Tony continues. “Not to mention other things you’re too young to understand. But in answer to your question, she did accept it, all of it, quite graciously.”

  When we finish dressing, we dry what’s left of our hair under wall-mounted dryers. Tony’s is black and steely gray, my own sandy and baby-fine. To look at the two of us, you’d never guess what we’ve been talking about.

  “In fact,” Tony says, slipping his comb into his back pocket, “I wouldn’t object to a little fornication this evening after I’ve had my supper. Except that I’ve got a lot of other things I’ve been putting off. And our friend Jacob has asked me to chair the internal review of the English department.”

  Tony is watching me in the mirror, one eyebrow arched significantly. I do what I can to disappoint him, as Gracie disappointed me earlier by not reacting to my fake nose.

  “I was asked if I thought I could be objective, since you and I are friends.”

  “And you said?”

  “I said sure. I said I didn’t consider you to be my friend. I said I’ve never been friends with you.”

  I can’t help grinning at this. I can hear Tony delivering the line to Jacob Rose, who knows better.

  “You should have refused,” I tell him. “It’s a thankless job
.”

  “I would have,” Tony says, “except that I’ve heard that the word has come down from above to fornicate you people.”

  “Why would anyone want to fornicate us?” I say, feeling more than a little silly about having slipped into Tony’s metaphor. “We’ve pretty thoroughly fornicated ourselves, I should have thought.”

  We grab our gym bags and head outside, where it’s still light out. The days are growing longer. Most of the students have adjourned to their dorm rooms and dining halls, but across the pond, in the VIP visitors’ lot, there’s a van that bears the logo of the local Railton television station. The dedication of the new Technical Careers Complex, I remember.

  “It’s all these grievances and litigation,” Tony is saying. “The English department has fifteen grievances pending—against you, the dean, the campus executive officer. That’s more than all other faculty grievances put together. What I hear is that since you people can’t get along, they’re going to fornicate the lot of you.”

  “I don’t know,” I tell Tony. “These grievances are the only sign of life we’ve had from some of these folks in years. Do we want them to return to their slumbers?”

  Tony shrugs. “Consider the market. All us old farts could be replaced with young guys at half our salaries. There’s a bull market in young scholars.”

  “We’re tenured though,” I remind him. “Where do you think we found the courage to fall asleep in the first place and then to wake up pissed off?”

  “Enrollments are down,” he says cryptically, and if it weren’t Tony I’m talking to, I’d suspect he knows more than he’s saying. Maybe he’s stumbled across an old copy of the Chronicle of Higher Education in his dentist’s office. On the other hand, Tony’s a pretty shrewd observer of local campus politics, even though he doesn’t participate in its machinations. I consider seriously for the first time that maybe something is brewing. This very day Jacob Rose has told me in almost the same breath that we aren’t going to get the new department chair we’ve been promised and that he himself is interviewing for another job. These might well augur a sea change. Dickie Pope’s hiring two years ago as our campus executive officer also occasioned a wave of paranoia. His strengths were in the areas of budget and fund-raising, not academics, so a rumor quickly began to circulate that he’d been hired to preside over budget cuts and executions, though so far he’s done little more than absorb into his own budget academic positions freed up by retirements, a practice my colleagues in other institutions seem to regard as standard. As I’m considering these things, I’m conscious of something like a thrill, and I realize that my heart is racing faster than when Tony and I were playing racquetball. Also, I have neglected to pee after our match. I feel like I could arc my stream all the way into the campus pond, fifty yards away.

  When we arrive at the water’s edge, the ducks and geese are gathered along the bank, squawking loudly. A couple of guys from the TV station are tossing them popcorn. A camera with the station’s logo has been mounted on a tripod.

  A young woman I recognize from the eleven o’clock news is speaking into a microphone. Tony and I stop to watch, along with a handful of students getting out of late afternoon classes. “I’m standing on the future site of the new multimillion-dollar Technical Careers Complex here on the campus of Shit Bird State University …” The young woman repeats this same incomplete sentence four more times, switching the microphone from one hand to the other as she inspects the bottoms of her shoes for duck guano. It’s not the words, apparently, that matter. Her sound guy is watching arrows dance on a meter. “Okay?” she says, impatient, tired of her practiced lead-in.

  “I wonder if she would enjoy some fornication a little later in the evening,” Tony speculates.

  With anybody else I’d say, “Why don’t you ask her?” But in fact I’m distracted by another drama. The goose I dubbed Finny earlier in the day is angry. The popcorn is gone, a fact he holds against the man who’s been feeding it to him. He hisses first at the empty bag that the man has dropped to the ground and then at the hand that was holding it.

  “I can’t get a level with all this noise,” the soundman complains.

  When someone stamps a foot near the flock, several frightened mallards take crippled, awkward flight, but Finny holds his ground, hissing and honking with even greater vehemence.

  “Somebody want to lose the duck?” the young woman reporter says to no one in particular.

  “Goose,” Tony tells her. “The little black ones are ducks.”

  “I hate coming here,” the reporter says to her cameraman. Then to the boy who’d been feeding the ducks, “Jerry, go buy another bag of popcorn and lead the noisy bastards across the lake someplace.”

  “Pond,” Tony tells her. “The big ones are lakes. The little ones are ponds.”

  The young woman raises the microphone to her lips and speaks into it. “We’re here on the campus of Podunk College speaking with an authority on every goddamn thing. And what is your name, sir?”

  She holds the microphone out in our direction, and the camera swings around. I notice that the rolling light is on. Tony, to complete the jest, is hiding behind me, and when I turn around to locate him, Finny (the goose) is there. His long neck thrusts forward like a snake, nipping my pinkie, as if to say that he remembers me perfectly well from this morning. When I shove my hand into my jacket pocket to prevent a second attack, Finny follows suit, trying to get his bill into the pocket where my hand has disappeared and where he may imagine I’m stingily hoarding food. In truth, all that’s in my pocket, except for my hand, is the fake nose and glasses I got from Mr. Purty. Finny latches onto these and yanks them out. A tug-of-war ensues, and it takes all my strength to wrest them away. Losing the prize he has no use for makes Finny frantically angry, and he begins to trumpet and hiss and flap his enormous wings with renewed vigor. “This is better than what we came here for,” I hear the camera guy say.

  But here’s the crazy part. I’m suddenly angry too, and the thrill I felt a few moments before as Tony was hinting at the perhaps malicious designs of the university administration toward my department has not diminished one jot, and these three elements—my anger, the thrill I can’t explain, a sudden tidal wave of righteousness—dovetail together sweetly, dangerously, and before I have a chance to consider the wisdom of doing so, I have grabbed the trumpeting Finny by his long, graceful neck and raised him aloft. He’s much heavier than I imagined, as if he’s full of sand. The rolling light is still on the camera, which I turn to face. I hear myself speaking with a remarkably steady voice. I have slipped on the fake nose and eyeglasses. First, I identify myself as a department chair at the college who wishes to remain anonymous, then I explain that I do not, even at this late spring date, have a budget for next year that will allow me to hire the adjunct staff I need to cover freshman composition courses next fall. Despite the fact that the university has committed millions to a new building project, it can’t seem to commit to the additional dozen or so comp sections we’ll need, even though these will cost a paltry three grand per section. I state all of this very succinctly, aware as I am of television time constraints. I am eloquent and ironic concerning the values of our educational system. I am only vaguely aware that as I’ve been talking, the crowd has grown and that I’m being encouraged with applause. Also I see in my peripheral vision that a limo has pulled up in the parking lot.

  “So here’s the deal,” I shout. I need to shout if I’m going to be heard over Finny’s strangled trumpeting and the crowd’s applause. “Starting Monday, I kill a duck a day until I get a budget. This is a nonnegotiable demand. I want the money on my desk in unmarked bills by Monday morning, or this guy will be soaking in orange sauce and full of cornbread stuffing by Monday night.”

  For emphasis, I give the now wild-eyed Finny a quick shake, so that he squawks even more horribly and renews his useless attempts at flight.

  Among the men who have gotten out of the limo, I recognize Dickie Pope, the
campus executive officer, and Jack Proctor, our state representative, on crutches still, who’s here to take credit for the new building project. These are not men of great imagination, but one can hardly blame them for not being prepared for this particular contingency, the sight of a tweed-jacketed, tenured, middle-aged senior professor and department chair in a fake nose and glasses, brandishing a live, terrified goose.

  The crowd and the camera crew are now cheering me wildly, not the least interested in the scheduled dedication, but I am not without sympathy for the guys in the suits.

  CHAPTER

  11

  It’s almost time for the eleven o’clock news, and I’m in a downtown Railton bar called The Tracks, a favorite watering hole of the local news media—the TV station and the newspaper, the Railton Mirror. It’s an amazingly noisy place. In addition to several televisions and loud music, half a dozen model trains circumnavigate the bar, clacking and whistling along a shelf that’s been specially constructed about eight feet off the floor.

  I have an entourage. We’ve pulled together half a dozen tables so everyone can crowd around, and nobody’s going easy. The booze is arriving in pitchers, two at a time, one beer, one margaritas. I can’t make out who’s ordering them, and nobody seems to be paying either. I’m drinking the margaritas, and so is Tony, whom I have talked into joining the party. I myself have been talked into joining the party by the newswoman, who claims I have made her day, her week, her year. Just when she thought she was going to die of boredom on “The People Beat,” a feature that locates colorful rural people with bizarre hobbies like carving soap figurines. “Travels in Six-Finger-Land,” she calls it.

  Her name is Missy Blaylock, which I remember as soon as she tells me. I’ve been almost watching her on the tube for a year. Her segment, usually the last on the eleven o’clock news, after even the weather and sports, represents a signal to Lily and me, should either of us still be awake, to turn off the bedroom television, the overhead light, and go to sleep. Now, in the dim light of The Tracks, I’m seeing Missy Blaylock anew. She’s been to the station to deliver the tape and stopped off somewhere to change, having exacted a promise from Tony and me to wait for her. The idea is that we’ll watch the news together on the bar’s big-screen TV. “You’ve got tenure, I hope,” she says.