Straight Man

by Richard Russo

  “We had more energy then,” my wife reminds me. “For laughter. For most things. Plus everything was newer.”

  “Do you ever wish things were new again?”

  “Sometimes,” she admits. “Not often.”

  “Sweet-talker.”

  When I hang up, I notice a shadowy human movement on the glass of the phone booth door. I see it’s Leo, who’s apparently observed me sneaking out of the department and followed me into the basement.

  For all I know he’s been standing next to the phone booth for the whole conversation. Right now, he’s so close that he has to step back when I open the door. I study him and wonder if it can really be youth I’ve been regretting the loss of. Leo’s got a manuscript in hand, and there’s a tremor in his voice that’s part excitement and, more strangely, part rage. He can’t quite keep his hands still. The way he’s holding the pages out to me suggests that one end is on fire, the end he wants me to grab. What I’d like to grab and ring is Leo’s long, gooselike neck.

  “Great news,” he tells me, and I half-expect him to report that Solange, the young woman who eviscerated him in workshop, has been hit by a truck. But the truth, as always, is even stranger. “I’ve had a story accepted,” he says. “For publication.”

  CHAPTER

  20

  Attendance is always sparse on Friday afternoons, especially so near the end of the term when the topic is persuasion. So far, I haven’t persuaded my freshmen that the ability to persuade is an important skill. Even Blair, my best student, a pale young woman I’ve been trying all term to coax into confident utterance, seems to doubt the whole enterprise. This particular group of students, like so many these days, seems divided, unequally, between the vocal clueless and the quietly pensive. Somehow, Blair and others like her have concluded that what’s most important in all educational settings is to avoid the ridicule of the less gifted. Silence is one way of avoiding it. If I could teach Blair how to become invisible, she’d be interested, but she doesn’t want to argue with anybody, and who can blame her? Students like Blair have learned from their professors that persuasion—reasoned argument—no longer holds a favored position in university life. If their professors—feminists, Marxists, historicists, assorted other theorists—belong to suspicious, gated intellectual communities that are less interested in talking to each other than in staking out territory and furthering agendas, then why learn to debate? Despite having endured endless faculty meetings, I can’t remember the last time anyone changed his (or her!) mind as a result of reasoned discourse. Anyone who observed us would conclude the purpose of all academic discussion was to provide the grounds for becoming further entrenched in our original positions.

  Or perhaps I’m just the wrong person for the job of teaching persuasive techniques. After all, the list of people I myself have failed to persuade recently is pretty impressive. It contains Dickie Pope, Herbert Schonberg, Paul Rourke, Gracie, and Finny (both the man and the goose). I haven’t even been able to persuade Leo to temper his excitement at having had a story accepted for publication by a “prestigious anthology” of new American student writing. It’s an old scam. Accept the student story or poem for publication, convince the writer to pay production costs, then sell the anthology to proud relatives at extortionary cost. Leo’s eyes narrowed suspiciously when I explained how the scam worked, his angry validation morphing to indignant suspicion. Of me. Neither have I been able to convince Leo that he should write a story with no violence in it, a suggestion that’s got him plotting, I suspect, the next chapter of his novel, the one where his murderous ghost pays a visit to his old writing teacher. I’ve read this chapter before, though Leo hasn’t written it yet.

  With ten minutes left in class, which (thanks to Leo) started fifteen minutes late, my worst student, who’s only present today because I threatened to flunk him for the term if he missed another class, leans back in his chair and says, apropos of nothing, “So. Like, are you going to kill a duck, or what?”

  Bad students are almost always inspiring students. Most often they inspire despair, but occasionally they’ll inspire an assignment. “You tell me, Bobo,” I say. Bobo is not the student’s name but rather my name for him. “By Monday, in fact. I want from each of you a cogent, persuasive essay. There are two possible theses. Either I should or I should not kill a duck. Don’t straddle the fence by suggesting that I maim a duck or pluck a duck.”

  As I explain the assignment, there’s a communal groan, but I’m cheered by the fact that more hostile glances are thrown in Bobo’s direction than in my own. Bobo has assumed the posture of a man who should have known better, who did know better, in fact, and was the victim of a spasm. His fellow students all seem to understand that they were minutes away from a rare weekend without a writing assignment.

  “By Monday?” Bobo says, incredulous.

  “I’ve threatened to kill a duck by Monday, Bobo,” I remind him. “By Tuesday I won’t need your advice.”

  “Typed?” someone wants to know.

  On the way back to the office I skirt the pond, which has returned to its placid aspect, the demonstrators who earlier linked arms against me having all gone home with the TV crews, leaving the fowl unguarded for the weekend. A single STOP THE SLAUGHTER placard has been planted in the bank to ward off evil. Ineffectually, for here I am, able if not ready to wreak mayhem. I notice Finny (the goose, not the man) some fifty yards farther along the bank, and something about his appearance strikes me as curious. When I get a little closer I see what it is. Finny has been fitted with a foam neck brace, like a whiplash victim. He eyes me curiously as I approach, as if he fears I’ll make a bad joke at his expense. Animals, I am convinced, are as adamant as humans about maintaining their dignity, and Finny seems to be struggling to maintain his. A cartoon goose in a turtleneck, he cannot quite meet my eye. “Finny,” I say, checking to make sure Leo isn’t lurking nearby to hear this second conversation with a goose. “Qué pasa?”

  A noise issues forth from deep inside Finny, not a sound I’ve come to associate with this particular goose. It’s higher and thinner, a lament. Isn’t this a fine state of affairs? he seems to say. Who am I to disagree? There’s a bench nearby, so I sit for a few minutes and listen to Finny elaborate until I’m visited by a sneezing fit, the suddenness and violence of which frightens us both.

  When I return to the office, Teddy and June Barnes are hanging around the department, pretending to have business, an act I’m not buying this late on a Friday afternoon. Apparently I look suspicious too, at least to Teddy and June and Rachel, who are staring at me with alarm. “Have you been crying?” June wants to know.

  “Don’t be absurd,” I tell her. “I’ve been talking to a goose.”

  “Your eyes are slits,” Teddy says.

  “Maybe I’m allergic,” I say. The worst of my cold symptoms have, as predicted, come crashing down on me like Dickie’s tidal wave. It’s not an easy thing for a man like me to live for twenty-five years with a woman who unerringly predicts illness, whose favorite observation is that she knows me better than I know myself, and who never seems to want for ready evidence. A man like me, who gravitates so naturally to omniscient storytelling, probably should not be married to an oracle. He’ll spend all his time trying to prove the oracle wrong, an uphill battle. Ask Oedipus. Ask Macbeth. Ask Thurber. And this role can’t have been all that pleasant for Lily either. Oracles must grow tired of talking to people who never listen (Ask Cassandra. Ask Oprah), especially the ones who flirt with omniscience.

  When I let myself into my inner office, Teddy and June follow before I can close the door behind me. “We have to talk,” Teddy says when I finish blowing my nose and wiping my eyes. He takes a seat in the only chair, other than my own, that I keep in my office.

  “Monday,” I tell him. I can feel my eyes closing, blindness coming on. Oedipus at Colonus. Thurber in Manhattan. Already I’m watching Teddy and June in letterbox format.

  When Teddy notices that June has nowher
e to sit, he leaps to his feet to offer her his chair. His reward for this anachronistic gesture is predictable contempt. How long have you been married to this woman? I’d like to ask him. I may be blind, but even I know better. I put my feet up.

  “This won’t wait till Monday,” June says. “You may not have noticed, but we’re in full-blown crisis mode here. Everybody knows about your conference with Herbert. Finny’s telling people you’ve cut a deal with the administration. By Monday, you’ll be recalled as chair.”

  There’s a knock, and Rachel pokes her head in. “Sorry?” she says, this lovely woman whose sense of timing could bring a man like me to dramatic climax. “Can I interrupt?”

  “Rachel?” I say, as if I can’t be sure it’s her I’m seeing through my slits. “Is that you?”

  “I just wanted to tell you I’m heading home?”

  “Already?” I say, my usual line. I consult my watch and see that she should have left half an hour ago. “Come sit on my lap. I want to hear all about your sexual harassment lunch.”

  This proves too much for June, as I hoped it would. “Talk to this asshole,” she tells her husband. “Tell him how few friends he has left.”

  Rachel, alarmed by the use of the word asshole among people who boast so many advanced degrees, steps back from the doorway to let June pass and jumps again when the outer door to the English department slams hard enough to rattle the glass.

  “I really have to go?” she pleads, placing mail and messages before me, apologetically.

  “I’m not worthy of you, Rachel,” I tell her, and halfway into a joke I find I haven’t the heart to finish.

  “I’ll see you Monday?” she says, glancing warily at Teddy and then back at me. “Could we have lunch, maybe? Talk about my stories?”

  “Make a reservation,” I tell her. “Someplace nice. There’s about a hundred dollars left in the department’s general fund. We’ll see if we can spend it.”

  When she’s gone, Teddy says, “You’re trying to get recalled, aren’t you?”

  “I’ve been trying all year, pal,” I say, thumbing through my mail. “It’s about time somebody noticed.”

  When I suffer another sneezing fit, Teddy takes pity on me. “Okay,” he says. “Sunday afternoon. Council of war. And we’re going to be way behind. Finny’s been on the phone all afternoon. He’s got everybody all worked up.”

  “They believe Finny?” I say. It’s a silly question, of course. My colleagues are academics. They indulge paranoid fantasies for the same reason dogs lick their own testicles. “They believe a man who’d kill a duck for them would turn around and sell them out?”

  “They don’t believe you’d kill a duck, Hank,” Teddy says. “You’re going to have to get on the phone and convince the few that will listen. The department operating paper requires a two-thirds majority, and Finny thinks he’s got several votes to spare. June thinks he’s right.”

  “Then he is,” I concede. After all, nobody in the department counts better than June, who predicted her own husband’s fall from grace by one vote a year ago. “Let’s save ourselves the effort.”

  “This is crazy,” Teddy says. “We’ve come up with eleventh-hour strategies before. We’ve made careers out of thwarting Finny.”

  “True, but it’s not much of an ambition,” I feel compelled to point out.

  “Losing to him would be better?”

  “The sad, fucking truth, Teddy, is that it probably matters far less than either of us imagines.”

  Even as I say this, however, I know it makes a difference. If Finny can manage my ouster as chair, he could well end up advising Dickie Pope, as Dickie himself warned me. And I know I’d be on Finny’s list.

  I glance around my office to ascertain whether there is anything within these walls that I might miss. The man sitting across from me has missed this office, is missing it still, even though it’s now occupied by a friend, so I suppose it’s possible that I could miss it too, especially if it were occupied by an enemy. In truth I have enjoyed making mischief from this chair, and while I remain confident of my ability to stir things up from any position on the game board, I’m not sure I’d be able to goad Gracie into mutilating me on a more level playing field. No, if I lose this chair, I will have peaked. My short tenure as chair—I smile to think of it—will be remembered as rule by exasperation. A decade from now, our young colleagues yet to be hired will be stunned to learn that William Henry Devereaux, Jr., was ever chair, however briefly. Teddy, who can’t tell a story, will be the historian who tells mine. Remember the day Hank Devereaux got Gracie to gig him through the nose with her spiral notebook ring? Or. Remember the day Hank went on TV and threatened to kill a duck a day until he got a budget? Ineptly as he’ll tell these stories, everyone will laugh except Paul Rourke, true to his promise. And me. If I’m still unlucky enough to be wandering these halls, I suspect I won’t be laughing.

  Back home, I find Julie is asleep on the bed in the guest room, and I’m glad, because in truth I look like hell, both eyes swollen almost completely shut. In the kitchen I take a couple antihistamines and decide to go to bed myself. I’m too exhausted even to stop in the bathroom to pee. The message light on the answering machine is blinking. I’m pretty sure I don’t want my messages, but I hit play anyway and am rewarded by a split-second rewind, probably a hang-up. But then I hear a voice I recognize as Billy Quigley’s. “You Judas Peckerwood” is his message in its entirety.

  Upstairs, I lie down, allow my eyes to close. Judas Peckerwood, I say aloud. In my head I’ve been composing mental lists ever since I left Dickie Pope’s office, so maybe it’s not unfair for Billy Quigley and the others to have leapt to the conclusion that I have betrayed them. Getting rid of the worst of our teachers isn’t such a bad idea. There’s no excuse for Finny, and his name belongs right at the top of the first mental list I composed. The trouble is that using bad teaching as a criterion would require that I follow Finny’s name on the list rather closely with Teddy Barnes’s and those of one or two other people I’m fond of. Other criteria are similarly problematic. We could ax those people who have never published a word or given a paper or attended a conference. Who have, as it were, no academic pulse. Such a net would again gather up Finny but also Billy Quigley and several other exhausted ex-high school teachers with M.A.’s, recruited thirty years ago, when the campus expanded. Try as I might, I can’t come up with a single criterion, or even a cluster of two or three criteria, that would sacrifice the right people.

  Which no doubt suggests something about the task itself. That I’ve allowed myself to engage in the exercise, even as an exercise, must mean something, though I’m too tired and sick to feel guilty. So here’s the question. If it’s not guilt, why does the name Judas Peckerwood keep appearing on list after mental list?

  Part Two

  JUDAS PECKERWOOD

  What I had not foreseen

  Was the gradual day

  Weakening the will

  Leaking the brightness away

  —Stephen Spender

  Since this newspaper printed the story of Lucky Hank’s first dog some weeks ago, its author has received three or four times the usual amount of mail (the exact numbers I leave to the reader’s imagination), most of it wanting to know more about my father, William Henry Devereaux, Sr., whom I left with blistered hands, standing knee deep in a just-dug grave, wearing ruined chinos and loafers, about to bury a dog I’d managed to kill about two minutes after my father brought him home. My mother, who is well-known to readers of this newspaper (her columns generate far more mail than mine), objected to the story as I told it, claiming that the portrait of my father was unflattering, unfair, and unkind, but the response of other readers suggests the opposite. Their hearts went out instinctively to the father in the story. Several readers shared with me stories of their own valiant attempts to please their own stubborn, ungrateful children. They felt bad for my father and wondered if there was any news of him. They wondered if I had any more stor
ies I could tell about William Henry Devereaux, Sr., stories that would be more about him and less about me. And so, I pick up my father’s story where I left off.

  Not long after the dog was buried, my father was made two attractive offers. The first was a full professorship from Columbia University, which he accepted. As I mentioned before, by this time my father was already a very famous scholar, and he was apparently weary of all the distinguished visiting professor gigs that were the texture of my childhood and early adolescence. He may have felt it was time to settle down, as my mother had for some time been suggesting. The second attractive offer came from a young woman graduate student from his D. H. Lawrence seminar, and it was with her that he settled down in New York.

  The Columbia deal was sweet. The university offered him a luxurious apartment within easy walking distance of the campus and partially subsidized it for him. His salary, for the late sixties, was unheard of, and in return for it, he was required to do relatively little in the classroom. He was the nominal editor of a prestigious scholarly magazine, as well as director of a special collection in the library, but he was also assigned a research assistant, who attended to many of his duties, including the grading of papers in the one undergraduate class he taught each year. Papers from the tiny graduate seminar he graded himself. That is, he placed a letter grade on them and for all anyone knew may even have read them. He had written five distinguished books of literary criticism, one of which, dealing with politics and the novel, had become wildly popular in the way that an occasional scholarly book on a fashionable subject will catch on. Everyone buys it, displays it, discusses it, without finding the time to actually read it. His real job at Columbia was to continue writing such books, to thank the university profusely for its encouragement, and to ensure that all subsequent editions of books he had written elsewhere would make mention of the fact that he now held a prestigious named chair at Columbia.