Straight Man

by Richard Russo

  “You sound like a man that has half ownership of an ark, Herbert,” I say.

  “I wish to hell I did, Hank. I do wish it. Before this is over, a lot of people are going to wish they had one. You too, maybe.”

  Rourke is looking out the window like a man who’s already found the high ground and has only an academic interest in those below.

  “I’m not here to pressure you, Hank,” Herbert continues. “It’s true I’ve got a favor to ask you, but it’s a small one, and I think you’ll agree it’s reasonable.”

  He pauses again here, and if I didn’t know better I’d swear he wants me to agree that the favor is reasonable before I’ve heard what it is.

  “We know you’ve had your meeting with Dickie,” Herbert continues significantly.

  “Next you’ll be telling me the room was bugged.”

  Herbert looks genuinely pained by this remark. “We don’t have to bug anything, Hank. The bastards are advertising what’s going on in these meetings. They’re letting on that it’s all hush-hush, but the thing is, they don’t care. That’s the scary part. They’re that confident. They’re watching us scurry around like bugs. Getting a big kick out of it.”

  “That’s a mighty paranoid view,” I say.

  Rourke gets to his feet. “Herbert,” he says. “I told you before. You’re wasting your time. This guy’s a rogue. He doesn’t give a shit. You’re asking him to take something seriously, and it’s not in him. If he does anything, he’ll write the whole thing up as a satire for the Sunday edition. Guess who’ll play the part of the fool.”

  “I’m trying to convince him it’s his ass too,” Herbert says.

  “Don’t bother,” Rourke says. “When you’re gone and I’m gone and Dickie Pope is gone, Hank Devereaux will be the last one left on the payroll. He isn’t called Lucky Hank for nothing.”

  When Herbert looks at me, as if to ascertain whether this could be true, it occurs to me that maybe they’re playing good cop–bad cop. Maybe this was the strategy they were working out in the woods.

  “Paulie,” Herbert says, weighing his words carefully, “I disagree. And if you don’t mind, I’d like to finish this conversation with Hank alone.”

  “I didn’t want to come over here to begin with,” Rourke reminds him, his hand on the doorknob.

  “Help yourself to whatever’s in the fridge,” I call to him when the door closes behind him. “Mi casa, su casa.”

  “That man truly loathes you,” Herbert says, when he’s sure Rourke isn’t coming back.

  “I don’t think so.” I smile. “I just give his life focus, that’s all.” In truth, it’s more likely that Herbert loathes me, but I don’t say that.

  “Look,” Herbert says, “I see no reason why the cards shouldn’t be faceup on the table. We both know you’ve had your differences with the union over the years. Pretty much right from the beginning. Is this a fair assessment? Is this a fair thing to say?”

  “I’ve had a few differences with the other guys too,” I remind him. “You’re not the only ones who think I’m a prick.”

  He ignores all this. “And I’m not just talking about all these grievances against you,” he adds. “I know it runs deeper than that. You think we defend incompetence, promote mediocrity.”

  “I wish you would promote mediocrity,” I assure him. “Mediocrity is a reasonable goal for our institution.”

  Herbert makes a gesture that suggests he doesn’t necessarily agree but won’t dispute the matter now. “Here’s my point, Hank. It’s this. There are a number of people who agree with you, but they’re on our side on this one. Your buddy Paulie is one of them. He also voted no on the union, if you recall.”

  “The vote was over a decade ago,” I remind Herbert. “And I don’t recall how he voted because it was a secret ballot.”

  “He voted no,” Herbert says. “So did you. Trust me.”

  I do trust him on this one matter, though it’s a little disconcerting for both of us to remember so clearly what only one of us is supposed to know for sure.

  “What I’m saying is, nobody expects you to become a union man. We win this thing and you can go right back to the way you were before. Be a rogue, like Paulie says, if that’s what you enjoy. I don’t blame you. It’s nice to be courted, not to be taken for granted. I understand that.”

  “Herbert,” I start to demur, but he holds up a hand to stop me, as if to suggest that he knows my motives better than I do, so there’s no point.

  “We’d like you to be on our side because it’s the right side and because we could use you. The way you handle yourself on TV, I can see you being our point man on this if you wanted to be. At the very least you could rally your own troops. English has more votes than any other department.”

  “They never go anywhere in a block, though, Herbert,” I assure him.

  “This time they might. Hell, I just talked with Teddy and June. When was the last time they ever sided with Paulie and Finny?”

  He’s watching me carefully now, waiting to see how I’ll absorb this news. I realize that the subtext of this discussion is very different from its text. On the surface Herbert wants me to know that I’m indispensable to the cause. Below it, I’m to know that my department and my friends have already aligned themselves against me. I can be point man, or I can cease to exist. It’s testimony to Herbert’s rhetorical sophistication that text and subtext do not appear to contradict each other. It makes no difference.

  But even if I’m not sure how, I suspect it makes a difference. To Herbert. To Dickie Pope. To me. “You said something about a favor, Herbert,” I remind him.

  He nods slowly. “We’d like to know your intentions, Hank. You decide you’d like to fight the good fight with your friends, we’d love to have you. You decide you want to make friends with Dickie, go. We just need to know who we can count on. Don’t be coy, Hank, is what I’m saying.”

  “What if I say a plague on both your houses?”

  This makes Herbert thoughtful again. “A rogue right to the bitter end, eh? You could try that, I suppose. Me? I wouldn’t want to be a friendless man right now, but maybe you’re different. Personally, I’d think of neutrality as a death wish.”

  I can’t help laughing at this, though apparently I’m the only one who sees the humor. Herbert is wearing an injured expression. “Just tell me one thing, and then I’ll go away,” he says, struggling to his feet. “What have we done that’s so wrong? Could you explain that to me, because I’d like to understand it. What’s wrong with decent pay raises every year? What’s wrong with demanding a decent standard of living? What’s wrong with good faith negotiation? What’s wrong with a little security in life? Do you really want those heartless bastards to run roughshod?”

  “That’s not one thing, Herbert,” I remind him. “That’s a lot of things.”

  “I agree,” he says, like he’s made his point. And maybe he has. “Could I ask you to think about all those things?”

  “Sure, Herbert,” I tell him, also getting to my feet.

  “And could I ask you not to think too long?”

  “You could ask.”

  And that’s where we leave it. When we quit the study, there’s nobody in the living room. Rourke and the second Mrs. R. are back out on the deck. Occam, the traitor, is lounging happily between them, allowing himself to be scratched by the second Mrs. R. We go out through the sliding glass door and join them. The sun has come out again, and it’s a warm spring afternoon.

  “The trees have leaves over here,” the second Mrs. R. observes, and she’s right, there’s more green today than yesterday. In another three or four days, the foliage will be full blown.

  “Not over on your side?” I ask in mock surprise.

  “Lucky Hank,” her husband says.

  Herbert says he’ll be along presently, so Rourke and the second Mrs. R. plod down the steps and get into Rourke’s Camaro. When both car doors close, Herbert says, “I’m hopeful, Hank. I mean it. I just don’t
see you playing ball with the likes of Dickie Pope. I don’t think you see it either.”

  I don’t know what makes me concede even this much to Herbert, but I do. “It’s true I’m not fond of Dickie.”

  Herbert offers to shake hands on that note, and while there may be reasons not to, they don’t seem sufficient at this moment in time.

  “Me?” Herbert says. “I got a year and a half till retirement. The worst they can do to me isn’t all that bad.”

  He sounds oddly sincere in this, sincere perhaps for the first time today.

  “This hasn’t been such a bad place for me,” he admits. “I’ve been decently paid. I’ve been treated well, all things considered. I wouldn’t mind giving something back to the institution. If I could piss on that little prick’s grave, I’d consider it my gift to higher education.”

  I can sympathize with this sentiment too, on several levels. I’d dearly love to take a good piss on someone’s grave, and I don’t really care whose. My groin is throbbing with pent-up desire.

  “You realize, don’t you, that all these grievances against you could just disappear?” Herbert says. Like his cynical blood brother, Dickie Pope, he has to offer an incentive. He knows better, but he can’t help himself.

  I can’t help myself either. I look him right in the eye. “What grievances?” I say.

  Herbert, who does not have a great sense of humor, laughs all the way down the steps. His car door closes on the sound, but I can see he’s still chuckling as he turns the key in the ignition and backs out around my car. He’s wedged in pretty good, so it takes him half a dozen tries before he’s able to extract himself. I offer to move the Lincoln, but Herbert declines. He wants to show me he can do this without my help. The symbolism is not lost on me. Even Occam, who watches nervously from the deck, where I’ve got him by the collar, seems to understand it.

  When Herbert and Paul Rourke and the second Mrs. R. have all disappeared among the trees, I feel pretty good. I know what they came for, and I know they left without it. Which means I’m still at large, still slippery.

  But for pure joy I can’t hold a candle to my dog, and when I let him go he does a dozen victory laps around the perimeter of the deck, the world’s smallest dog track, his nails clicking on the wood. It’s imagination, I know, that propels him. In Occam’s imagination he’s not the only dog doing laps on our deck. He’s just the fastest dog, the smartest dog, the bravest dog.

  “I know you are,” I assure him when his race is run and he sits panting before me, exhausted, pleased, optimistic about the future, about other races he will win.

  I am about to confide a few other things to my dog when I remember that Julie is inside. In fact, it may be her gaze upon me that causes my daughter to return so forcefully to my consciousness. When I look up at the window of the room Lily uses as her study, I see Julie framed there under the eaves. I give her an embarrassed wave and point to my car to let her know I’m leaving again. When she doesn’t respond, I realize she’s on the phone, perhaps not looking at me at all. Her expression is complex, not easily read, but in it I can imagine Lucky Hank’s luck heading south.

  CHAPTER

  19

  When I stop by the office on my way to class, I discover that Lily has called just minutes before and left a number for me to call her back. According to Rachel, who’s handed me a sheaf of pink message slips, half a dozen other people want to talk to me too. “And that red-haired boy’s been lurking outside your office again?” she informs me. In general, students are not encouraged to loiter inside the English department office, where they are likely to overhear things that will reveal how much their professors dislike each other, but Leo is the only student strictly prohibited from doing so. His intense presence particularly unnerves Rachel. “Every time I look up, he’s watching me with this look on his face? Like he’s got X-ray vision?” she confessed to me back in January. “I feel like I’m sitting here in my underwear?”

  “I’d be very surprised if you were wearing even that much in Leo’s imagination.”

  “Also, Finny’s been coming in every fifteen minutes to see if you’ve returned?”

  “This is the true nature of power in academe,” I tell Rachel sadly, having taken her warnings to heart and preparing to duck out again. “Those who have any at all have to use the back stairs.”

  It’s only ten minutes until my class, but I take the elevator down to the basement, where there’s a recreation room lit by a regiment of soda and juice machines lined up against the far wall. There’s also an old-fashioned telephone booth, the kind you can enter and close the folding door behind you. This I do, despite the robust bouquet of undergraduate urine inside. I use my calling card. Lily picks up on the first ring.

  “Hank,” she says, sounding so weary and melancholy that I wonder if her interview has gone badly, until it occurs to me that it must have been Lily that I saw Julie talking on the phone with as I left. “It feels like a week.”

  “My thought exactly,” I confess, and that’s not all I’m thinking. Because it’s both wonderful and oddly sad to hear the familiar voice of this woman who shares my life, to feel how much I’ve missed it. By what magic does she softly say my name and in so doing restore me to myself? More important, why am I so often ungrateful for this gift? Is it because her magic also dispels magic? Is it because her voice, even disembodied as it is now, renders lunatic the fantasies that have been visiting me of late? “Lily …,” I say, allowing my voice to trail off and wondering if, when I say her name, it has for my wife any of these same magical properties.

  “Where on earth are you?” Lily wants to know, apparently puzzling over a different vocal mystery altogether. “Your voice sounds funny.”

  I explain that I’m hiding from Finny in a phone booth in the basement of Modern Languages. It’s a measure of how long she’s been married to an academic that Lily sees nothing unusual about this.

  “Your cold is back,” she remarks.

  “Nah,” I say, though of course it is, as predicted, even though I took another twelve-hour antihistamine before leaving the house this morning.

  “I talked to Julie earlier,” she says. “I guess I picked a bad time to leave, didn’t I?”

  “I don’t know what to make of it yet,” I tell her. “I haven’t seen Russell.”

  “It’s been brewing for some time,” she says.

  “It has?”

  “Yes, Hank, it has,” she says, the remark trailing accusation.

  “Why didn’t I know it?”

  A pause. “I don’t know, Hank. Why don’t you know these things?”

  “Because I don’t want to? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “No,” my wife says gently, perhaps even affectionately. “Just that you depend on me to know them. Anyway. I’m less worried about Julie than about her father.”

  “I gather you saw me on television.”

  “Yes, this morning.”

  “I’ve become a hero in certain quarters,” I tell her. “Not to Dickie Pope. And of course Rourke still insists my whole act needs work.”

  “I wish …,” she says, but now it’s her turn to let her voice trail away.

  “What?” I say. “Go ahead.”

  “I wish you’d just request a leave of absence. Or even resign, if that’s what you want. You’ll have to do something worse before they’ll fire you, and I don’t want you to do anything worse.”

  “You think I’m trying to get myself fired?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  I consider the possibility. “What I want may be a moot point. Dickie told me this morning there’s likely to be a twenty percent reduction in staff in the fall.”

  “Then the rumors are true.”

  “My colleagues are eager to believe I’ve sold them out.”

  “Have you reassured them you didn’t?”

  “You know the English department. They’ll believe what they want.”

  “No, Hank. The majority will believe you
, if you tell them. If you tell them straight.”

  “I promised Dickie I wouldn’t decide anything until I’d talked the whole thing over with you. He insisted. The last thing he said to me was, ‘Talk it over with Lila.’ So tell me, Lila, when are you coming back?”

  “Tuesday, I think.”

  “I thought Monday.”

  “Me too. I had to postpone the interview.”

  “How come?”

  “Look, Hank, there’s … a problem here in Philly,” she says. And as soon as she says this, I know that it’s something real and serious, something she’s been sitting on while we talked about academic matters. “How about if we talk tonight?” she suggests. “Aren’t you supposed to be in class?”

  I consult my watch and see that class is, at this moment, starting without me.

  “Angelo?” I say, remembering that I’ve not been able to reach her father when I’ve called.

  “Yes.”

  “Is he okay?” Dumb question. It’s been a long time since Angelo could be described as okay. Most likely he’s tumbled hard off the wagon.

  “Yes and no.” Her voice is flat now. I’m to understand that it will do me no good to ask further questions. “Did you remember to visit my class this morning?”

  I tell her I did. “Guido wanted to know how much money I made from Off the Road.”

  “Poor Guido.”

  “Poor Guido extorts lunch money off skinny white kids,” I tell her, adding, for good measure, “Your husband was a skinny white kid once. Bullies used to take my lunch money, you know.”

  “God, I wish you were here, Hank. You just made me smile for the first time in twenty-four hours.”

  “I used to make you laugh,” I recall. “Out loud. Uncontrollably.”

  “Not uncontrollably,” she corrects me.

  “Well,” I concede. “Maybe not uncontrollably.”