Straight Man

by Richard Russo

  “Efficient?” I say. “Education?”

  “You bet.”

  “Higher education?”

  “Lean and mean.”

  “Well, it’s always been mean,” I concede.

  “And it’s gonna get lean. Soon.”

  I try not to show how little I like the sound of this.

  “Nobody can stop what’s going to happen,” Dickie assures me. “You can’t stop a tidal wave. All you can do is find high ground and take your friends with you.”

  Here it is again. I can be Dickie’s friend if I want to be.

  “You’re saying I get to save my friends? Watch my enemies drown?”

  Dickie contemplates my question. “Here’s what I’m saying. I know there have been lots of rumors, so I’ll tell you what I can. The sad truth is that the chancellor has given me a mandate. Not just me. I wish it were. But it’s systemwide. All the campus executive officers. Every one. I have to come up with a plan to reduce staff and costs, across the curriculum, by twenty percent. There’s no guarantee that such a plan will have to be implemented. But it has to be drawn up. Twenty percent.”

  I can’t help smiling at this. “If we’re going to save Hank Devereaux’s friends and drown his enemies, we can cut a lot more than twenty percent.”

  “Don’t sell yourself short,” Dickie advises, apparently concerned for my self-esteem. “You’re widely respected on this campus. You’re a gifted and popular teacher and a well-published author. You may think that those of us on this side of the pond don’t know who our good people are, but we do, believe me. I in particular keep my ear to the tracks.”

  When Dickie says this, I can’t help thinking of William Cherry, who apparently did exactly this and had his head borne away and deposited in Bellemonde. For a moment I picture this happening to Dickie.

  “Did I say something funny?” he wants to know.

  “Not at all,” I assure him. “Let me see if I understand. I tell you who to fire and you just do it. You think that’s something we can get away with?”

  Dickie leans back on the arm of the sofa, locks his fingers behind his head. His armpits, I notice, are not even damp. I, on the other hand, am sweating, and this may be one of the things that Dickie is enjoying. Because he clearly is enjoying himself. “I don’t think you fully comprehend. It’s not doing it that we can’t get away with,” he says, pausing to let this sink in. “Because if we don’t do it, somebody else will. Somebody who may be less discriminating than we are.”

  “I get it,” I say. “It can be done well or badly. That’s our choice.”

  “And you wouldn’t tell me who to fire, Hank. I wouldn’t burden you that way. You wouldn’t want such a thing on your conscience. Besides, that’s not what you’re paid for. If such a thing has to be done, it’ll be effected by people whose job it is. No, you’d simply suggest a set of criteria. On the basis of those criteria, I’d be advised who is indispensable to your department, so I don’t compromise your mission. After consulting with the academic deans, I would make recommendations based on your advice. The president of the university would act on my recommendations. The chancellor on his.”

  “All of which would be based on mine?”

  He shrugs a concession. “Why would I want to ignore your recommendations? You’re the expert. If I went off on my own, I could find my hmm-hmm in a sling.”

  “I see how that could happen.”

  He nods, rocking gently, hands still behind his head. “Hank, I’ll be honest. I know a little about you. Heck. I know a lot about you. I know you’re on record as saying your department is full of burnouts. Now’s your chance to fashion the kind of department we could all be proud of.”

  “I said the English department was full of burnouts?” I ask. It’s true I’ve thought it often enough, but I can’t think of who I’ve said it to that would have repeated it to Dickie Pope.

  “Never mind.” He waves this off. “You did, and you were right. Remember. This is just us. Just you and me. Nobody knows what gets said here. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t point something out to you, because I know you’re a man of integrity and this might not occur to you. You want to know the best part, from your standpoint? Number one. There’s no guarantee any of this will come to pass. This particular legislature’s not enamored of higher education, it’s true, but in the eleventh hour, they may see the light. But if they don’t, there’s still no way you’re going to be seen as the bad guy. There’ll be some bellyaching at first, no mistake, but it’s going to be clear that this was mandated from the top, not the bottom. You’ll catch some flack from a small handful of people, but not like the flack I’m going to catch. And what I’m going to catch isn’t going to be anything like what the chancellor’s going to catch. We’re the bad guys, not you. We do the deed, we eat the hmm-hmm, you come out in good shape. Which is fine. We eat a little hmm-hmm, but everybody wins. The institution wins. The students win. And, if a little deadwood gets whittled away, the taxpayers win.”

  “We get trim,” I say thoughtfully. “Lean and mean.”

  “The idea appeals to you, Hank, I can tell,” Dickie says. “And it should, considering the alternative.”

  “Ah, the alternative. The alternative doesn’t look nearly as good,” I admit. “And I don’t even know what the alternative is.”

  “Sure you do,” Dickie assures me. “A smart guy like you knows that if you don’t assist me in these serious deliberations, I’ll have to go elsewhere for the advice I need. And somebody else’s criteria might not be yours. If I were to ask, say, Phineas Coomb, who’s always in here busting me about what a hmm-hmm-hmm you are, who knows? He might advise me to require the Ph.D. for all professorial ranks. Such criteria, evenly applied, would not benefit you, Hank. What’s that screwball degree you’ve got?”

  “A master of fine arts?”

  He nods. “Not a Ph.D. What if I’m advised everybody should have one? It wouldn’t be a good thing. Not for you. Not for Lila. Not for our students. Hell. Not even for me. I wouldn’t want that, Hank.”

  “But if you had to …,” I continue.

  His face clouds over. He’s finally had enough. Apparently he doesn’t like me stepping on his lines. I note with satisfaction that a spot of perspiration darkens one pit before he can put his arms down. “You can’t help yourself, can you?” he says. “This goading thing.”

  Every muscle in his face confronts the task of what the hell to do with a man like me. He finally knows exactly what to make of me, but he can’t seem to act on what he knows.

  “Well,” he says, rising, under control again. “Maybe I’m asking too much here. This is a lot to digest. Heck, I felt the same way back in February when I got the news. Imagine my situation for a minute, if that’s not too much to ask. I came here from an institution that just went through the same dramatic downsizing that’s being discussed here, the result of the same financial exigencies. You think I ever want to go through such a thing again?”

  I have to admit, Dickie is pretty good. His carefully calculated sincerity is almost indistinguishable from the real thing. By asking me to consider his situation, he’s asked for sympathy even as he’s reminded me that he’s done this once already, lest I doubt his resolve.

  As I’m ushered to the door, Dickie’s book-lined wall again attracts his attention, and he goes over to it, scanning the shelves, his hand raised, in the general area where my book was located, where he apparently remembers seeing it last. “I know I’ve got your book here,” he says.

  The fact that he’s wrong about it is oddly heartening.

  Finally he gives up, turns back to me, to the book’s author, who stands before him, poor substitute for the book, the object he’s hoped to put his hands on, to use, who knows, for flattery? for kindling? I force myself not to look down at my coat pocket. Dickie’s got a strange look on his face, like maybe he knows what’s happened to this book he’s looking for. Or maybe he’s reconsidering the possibility that occurred to him this mornin
g and was too hastily rejected—that he could just stab me in the throat with an ice pick. “I hear you don’t write anymore,” he says, which is, in truth, about the last thing I expect him to say.

  “Not true,” I inform him. “You should see the margins of my student papers.”

  “Not the same as writing a book though, right?”

  “Almost identical,” I assure him. “Both go largely unread.”

  “If it weren’t for lawyers and cops, I’d have time to read,” he tells me. “I started that book of yours and liked it. Anyway, take the weekend to think things over. Talk it over with Lila.”

  Better and better. I can feel my grin spreading, buoyed by the fact that he’s gotten my wife’s name wrong a second time. He’s taken the trouble to research me, but even so he’s making mistakes.

  “I always discuss everything with Lila,” I tell him. “Lila’s one shrewd cookie. You think I’m smart? You should meet my Lila. In fact, I don’t know where I’d be without Lila. If I ever do write another book and make a lot of money, I’m going to buy a yacht and name her the Lila.”

  Dickie Pope is staring at me, bewildered now, perhaps even convinced I’m insane. When we shake, he doesn’t let go of my hand right away. “I’m not sure I’ve done a good job of convincing you of the gravity of the situation, Hank. And I do want you to understand that there is a storm coming. A real gully washer.”

  Since we’re right by the window, which affords a sweeping view of the campus all the way to the duck pond, I offer him our entire tenured academic landscape with a sweeping gesture. “Not a hmm-hmm cloud in the sky,” I observe.

  CHAPTER

  16

  On my way back across campus, I see Bodie Pie slip into Social Sciences via the back door and remember she wanted to talk to me, so I follow, risking the possibility that I’ll get lost in the building’s legendary labyrinths. Social Sciences, the newest building on campus, was built in the midseventies, when there was money for both buildings and faculty. According to myth, the structure was designed to prevent student takeovers, and this may be true. A series of pods, it’s all zigzagging corridors and abrupt mezzanines that make it impossible to walk from one end of the building to another. At one point, if you’re on the first floor, either you have to go up two floors, over, and down again or you have to go outside the building and then in again in order to arrive at an office you can see from where you’re standing. The campus joke is that Lou Steinmetz has an office in the building but no one knows where.

  If I’m the most embattled program chair on campus, Bodie Pie, of Women’s Studies, runs a close second, and Bodie takes her troubles to heart, which makes her situation far worse than mine. She can usually use some cheering up.

  “I don’t think I could work in these conditions,” I say when I arrive at the open doorway of her dismal office. Women’s Studies is in the basement, almost entirely below ground. There’s a long, horizontal window in Bodie’s office that affords a narrow view of the sidewalk outside, as well as the feet and ankles of people who pass by on it. “Don’t you have a secretary, at least?”

  I’ve caught Bodie smoking a cigarette, which she quickly stubs out, guilty. “Girls don’t need secretaries. They are secretaries.”

  “Would you feel better if I got you a cup of coffee?” I say, since there’s a pot made and I could use a cup myself. I touch the glass, which is hot. It doesn’t look like it’s been sitting there too long.

  “No, I wouldn’t feel better,” she says. “I saw you come out of the Vatican. I thought I’d ducked in here in time.”

  “Now you’ve gone and hurt my feelings, Bodie,” I tell her, pouring coffee into two Styrofoam cups. “Besides. I thought you wanted to talk to me.”

  “Talk to you, not see you. There’s a difference.” When I don’t know what to say to this, she continues. “You ever have one of those days where you hope you won’t run into anybody you even remotely like? So you won’t have to be civil even?”

  I study her. Bodie and I have been friends for a long time, and she’s another of the women on campus that I’d be a little in love with if I were not in love with my wife, Bodie’s being a lesbian notwithstanding. She is always falling in what she calls romantic courtly love. Sometimes she tells me about it.

  “I see you got my present, anyhow,” I say, noting the sign I had printed and framed, which is hanging on the wall behind her desk: Welcome to Bitch Gulch. I’m not a misogynist, but I can play that role. I’ve also had some special stationery printed up for her. Underneath the university seal, I’ve added a motto: “Where Women are Womyn and Men are Males.”

  Bodie swivels and studies the sign. “Some of my sisters say it’s in bad taste.”

  “That’s their objection?”

  “They’re very serious. Earnest, you’d almost say.”

  We’re grinning at each other now. “Somebody told me that English department floozy gigged you,” she says, studying my nose. “Everybody’s been telling me, in fact.”

  I try to imagine what kind of spin the story would have down here in Women’s Studies, where I’m a suspected chauvinist and Gracie is thought to be an aging, pitiful tramp, one of the very few female faculty members in the college not encouraged to teach a course in Bodie’s interdisciplinary program.

  “I’ve been much in the news lately,” I admit, then remember that Bodie, on principle, doesn’t own a television and therefore has probably seen neither the local news nor Good Morning America. Since nobody’s told her yet about my threat to start executing ducks, I give her the short version of these events while we drink our coffee. Bodie’s reaction to my account is annoyingly similar to Lily’s. This is exactly the sort of thing she’s come to expect from me, her tired acceptance seems to suggest. It was also Bodie who witnessed my descent of snowy Pleasant Street Hill last winter.

  As I tell her my story, she starts to light two more cigarettes, catches herself, and stops. “So,” she says, when I finish. “You’ve been to see Little Dick. Did you get the ‘big storm brewing’ speech?”

  “Tidal wave,” I inform her.

  “It’s a tidal wave now?”

  “Can’t be stopped,” I tell her. “Only thing we can do is move to high ground. Take our friends with us. You want to come with me? I may have room for one more.”

  “I hope his pee-pee falls off.”

  “Don’t perpetuate the stereotype,” I suggest.

  “So? How did you respond?” she wants to know, and I sense that the barometric pressure in the room has changed.

  “I said we’re too far inland to be affected by tidal waves. He insisted I take the weekend to rethink my position. He said I should talk the whole thing over with Lila.”

  Normally, this would get a chuckle out of Bodie, but today, nothing. “And you said there was no reason to think it over. You said it’d be a long, cold day in hell before you’d betray your colleagues. You told the little prick he could go fuck himself.” The way she’s looking at me, I get the impression that this same advice could well be coming my direction, depending upon my answer.

  “I’d have to rewind the tape,” I tell her.

  She ignores this completely. “Because that’s what the people who are loyal to the union are all telling him. That’s what I told him.”

  “I’m not sure I’m all that loyal to the union,” I confess, preparing as I admit this to go fuck myself.

  Bodie looks around her office, as if for someplace to spit. “I can’t believe you’d even consider siding with the administration.”

  “A plague on both their houses, is my feeling,” I tell her.

  This appeases Bodie somewhat, without exactly endearing me to her. “You may be called upon to testify though,” she warns. “In the fundamentalist sense. You won’t be allowed ironic distance. That I can guarantee.”

  I turn my empty Styrofoam cup upside down on her desk. “I have to tell you, Bodie. Once again you have failed to make me feel better about the world and my place in i
t.”

  Suddenly the tension is gone, and we’re friends again. “I’m a pretty constant source of disappointment to men,” she concedes, adding sadly, “and not a few women.”

  “Want to tell me about it?” She usually does.

  She studies me, as if she might be seriously contemplating whether to confide this latest heartbreak to me. And perhaps because in the past she always has, I’m surprised when she waves the issue away. “Just somebody,” she says. “Somebody who’s not supposed to be on my side of the fence even.”

  And she’s no sooner said it than the image has leapt, full blown, up onto my imaginative wide screen—in Technicolor and Dolby stereo—Bodie and Lily, wrestling, naked and sweaty, on top of Bodie’s desk. It’s happening right here, right now. The picture I’ve conjured up is so dramatically vivid that it’s not undermined even by its absurdity. I mean, after all. To be believable, the scene requires Lily, a woman I know, to become a woman I don’t know, a character violation of the sort I’m always warning my fiction writers against. True, I tell them, people have secrets. They have complex inner lives that resist simple interpretation, but what we do know about them cannot be ignored, forgotten, or profaned, and this new role in which I have cast my wife is a clear violation of narrative rules. And this isn’t the only violation. In a good story Bodie Pie cannot be both having sweaty sex with my wife and sitting before me, fully clothed, smoking a cigarette, which she is, though I don’t remember her lighting one, and here it is half smoked. When I focus on the burning tip of her cigarette, the lovers are suddenly gone, and once again Bodie’s small office contains just us two old friends, talking. Actually, Bodie’s the one talking, explaining, I realize, why she left a message for me to call her. “Anyway,” she’s saying. “Tell him to be on guard.”

  Clearly, I’ve missed some damn thing. A small chunk of time, of the life of William Henry Devereaux, Jr., has slipped into some kind of void. “Who?” I say.