Straight Man

by Richard Russo

  There’s also a late-entry, boxed story on the bottom of the front page announcing the strike vote meeting set for late afternoon, urging all faculty to attend.

  Just when I’ve concluded that no one’s going to speak today, one of my seniors says, “I know this is kind of off the subject, but is it true we may not graduate?”

  “Is it true you’ve been fired for killing ducks?” asks another student, who seems to have concluded that if off-the-subject stuff is allowed, then there’s plenty to talk about. I can’t quite tell from her tone whether my being fired for killing ducks would be a good or a bad thing.

  “I heard the donkey basketball game’s been canceled,” observes another student. Now, this I hadn’t heard.

  Suddenly the whole class is talking at once. We’re alive and on the move, albeit in the wrong direction.

  “The subject of today’s workshop is Solange’s story,” I remind them, causing everyone, even Solange, to sulk. The events of the real world, dramatically ratcheted up as they happen to be at this moment, seem infinitely more interesting to my novice writers than a bad made-up story. I’d like to remind them that it doesn’t have to be this way, that we’ve come together so that they might learn how to make up stories that are more compelling than real life. The fact that this particular work of fiction makes reality look enchanting does not prove that life is inherently more fascinating than art.

  Solange’s story is titled “The Clouds of August,” and it’s as full of vapor as Leo’s was of misogyny. Every time something threatens to happen in the story, the sky clouds over and the young woman protagonist stops whatever she’s doing to contemplate the clouds. These become progressively darker and more ominous, until by the end of the story they positively rain significance.

  “I like the clouds,” somebody offers. If we’re going to have to talk about the story, this is as good a place as any to begin. “They’re, like, a metaphor.”

  This comment deeply satisfies Solange, everyone can tell.

  “They are a metaphor,” I point out. “If they were like a metaphor, they’d be, like, a simile.”

  “I liked the clouds too,” somebody else offers. “Good writing.”

  “Are metaphors good?” I ask.

  “Sure. Yeah.” General agreement on this point. “You said so yourself.”

  I decide to take a different tack. “Okay, but what are all these clouds obscuring? And don’t say the sky.”

  “I don’t understand your question,” someone makes the mistake of admitting.

  “What happens in this story?” I ask this person. “Give me a plot summary. You remember plot. A causes B causes C causes D. Start with A.”

  Lots of frowns, and not just on the face of the person I’ve asked the question. There is no B, they’ve come to realize. Maybe not even an A. I give them a while, but nobody can find anything that causes anything else. Finally, I turn to Solange. “Okay, kiddo,” I tell her. “It’s your story. Tell us what happens. Literally. Leave out the metaphors.”

  Solange runs her long, artistic fingers through her streaked hair, then tosses it back. “She falls in love. Then she falls out of love. It’s like what happens in real life.”

  The other students have all turned to look at Solange now. This is clearly news to them.

  “Who does she fall in love with?” somebody wants to know.

  “Am I allowed to answer?” Solange inquires, since I normally don’t encourage authorial participation in workshop discussion, except for points of clarification.

  “I insist.”

  “It’s unspecified,” she says. “Love doesn’t require an object. It’s like clouds. When you’re flying through them. You’re just in them, and then you’re not.”

  I’ve just about come to the conclusion that this class can’t get any worse when I look out our ground-level window and see how it can. Leo, head down, is cutting across the lawn, making for the door of the building we’re in, his red hair all aflame.

  “Can this be true?” I ask the others. “Does this square with your experience of love?”

  No one wants to testify on this subject, and who can blame them? They’re all afraid that their experience of love may be too narrow, too limited, and that their testimony will reveal this. Love is one of the many things they’re confused about, and they’re not even talking about being half in love. About finding themselves 61 percent in love, or 77 percent or higher, as Tony Coniglia calibrates these things.

  “Is good fiction more likely to be about clouds or stones?” I ask.

  “I still like the clouds,” one student who senses where I’m headed insists.

  “Is good fiction more likely to be about the air we breathe or the nose we breathe it through?” I ask.

  “What?”

  “Last week I had a nose the size of two noses,” I remind them. “I was breathing air through it. Which are you tempted to make use of in a story?”

  “I’ve already used your nose,” one student admits. “It’s in my next story.”

  “You used my nose?”

  “Sorry,” the student shrugs.

  “Don’t be,” I say.

  As Leo enters the building, I see a campus security car pull up. Lou Steinmetz and an officer I’ve seen around campus quickly get out and trot across the lawn. Which would make a better starting place for a story, I’d like to ask, a frustrated old cop or the need for a safe campus community?

  Leo enters, and by the time he’s apologized and taken a seat, the penny has dropped and my heart along with it. He seems to know that everybody in the class is looking at him, a sad, shunned, pimple-encrusted, red-haired boy, more real than you could possibly make any allegorical figure designed to represent low self-esteem.

  “We’re discussing Solange’s story,” I tell him.

  It takes him a minute to find the story in his backpack, to catch his breath. “I liked the clouds,” he says, having located the manuscript. I see that he’s tugged another hangnail back from its cuticle and that he leaves a bead of bright red blood on the title page. Seeing this, he quickly smudges it with his wrist, then blots the offending finger on his jeans. “I think that’s the sort of thing my story needed.”

  This is Leo’s conclusion. He needs to cloud his necrophilia.

  Solange is not one to recognize an offered olive branch. Her mean streak hangs down in front of her nose, and she’s examining several long, silver strands through crossed eyes. “What you need is counseling,” she observes.

  The classroom door opens at this moment to reveal Lou Steinmetz and the uniformed officer. Another campus cop, I see, has stationed himself outside our classroom windows. “I’m conducting a class here, Lou,” I tell him.

  “I just need to speak to one of your students, Professor,” he says. “That one there.”

  Leo starts to gather his things.

  “You can wait until we’re finished though,” I say. “I’m sure of it.”

  Apparently Lou Steinmetz can hear the warning in my voice, because he stands quietly, for a moment, calculating. He knows he has no business in my classroom, no business opening the door, no business even knocking on it, which he hasn’t done. He’s got the mentality of all bad cops. Exceed your authority until you’re questioned, then back off, regroup, attack again from a different angle.

  “Okay, Professor,” he says. “I guess we can wait out here in the hall. We get paid the same either way. Mind if we take a couple chairs?”

  “Yes, I do mind.”

  He nods. “Thanks for your cooperation.”

  When the door closes again, I realize that, having marked my territory, I have no further use for it. If there’s a way to return to Solange’s story now, I don’t know it. Perhaps sensing this, Leo has resumed gathering his things. “May I be excused?” he wants to know. He seems aware only of the immediate application of his question.

  I should say no. I should keep him, on principle, right where he is. But Leo wants to get on with things. I know th
e feeling. We all watch him shoulder his backpack and make his way to the door. In a story he’d pause there, turn, and leave us with a memorable line, some honest observation, something truer than anything he’s managed to write all year, but this isn’t a story, and he exits our company quietly, undramatically. A moment later we see him again, hands cuffed behind his back, being led across the lawn to the waiting cruiser.

  “Could we all go now?” asks the student who says he’s already used my nose.

  “Solange?” I ask, since it’s her story we’re discussing.

  “Please,” she says, wearily.

  The others file out. Solange is last, and she stops at my desk. “I know the clouds were bullshit,” she informs me. “I’m not, like, stupid.”

  “Nobody said you were, Solange.”

  “Professor Rourke says I should forget fiction writing and concentrate on literature,” she says. “Go for my Ph.D. He says I’m smart and mean-spirited.”

  “I’m sure he meant it as a compliment.”

  “It’s not that I want to be mean,” she shrugs. “It’s just that I’m good at it. My dad always says you should do what you’re good at. He’s mean too.”

  “Come by during office hours tomorrow,” I suggest. “You got cheated today.”

  “I didn’t deserve anything,” she says. “It was shit.”

  “Maybe we can get you started on something that isn’t.”

  “The story started out to be about this boy? This shit-heel, beautiful boy I have no chance with. Then I thought, why should I give him the satisfaction?”

  “I guess you showed him.”

  “Yeah, well,” she says, watching out the window as the police car pulls away from the curb. “What will they do to him?”

  “Kick him out, probably.”

  “First interesting thing he’s done all year and he gets tossed out of school for it.”

  The police car is out of sight now.

  “What do you think he was trying to prove?” She’s remembering, I suspect, that she called him a wimp last Friday, called his manhood into question. Could she have caused all this? is what she’d like to know.

  I half-expect Lou Steinmetz to be waiting for me out in the hall, but he isn’t. He’s got his perp. He’s restored order, put things right. If there were something he could do about me, he would, but there isn’t.

  CHAPTER

  35

  By letting my class out early, I have a half hour to kill before my appointment with the dean, someone who can do something about me and apparently has. What I should do is go back to my office and call Phil Watson, as I promised I would. But the halls of the English department will be bedlam with the most recent political news, and the truth is I’m up to meeting neither friend nor foe. If Rourke is right and there’s an English list, half of my colleagues will be anxious to berate me for composing it, and the other half will want me to explain to them who composed it if I didn’t. I could find a pay phone somewhere, but the more I think about it, the more I want to do things in their proper dramatic order. If I’m to be told I have a malignant tumor, I want to learn of it after I’ve been fired, not before.

  It’s turned out to be a stunningly beautiful day, the sun high in a sky of robin’s egg blue, so I make my leisurely way over to the dean’s office, find a park bench with a view of the back parking lot, take off my jacket, roll up my sleeves, and let the warmth rain down upon my bare forearms. Today, I realize, is the end bracket to a now recognizable segment of my life. This winter, when I attempted to climb Pleasant Street Hill and ended up slaloming, out of control, from top to bottom, I lost my faith in consequence. Fearing I was forever tenured on drab “Pleasant,” where nothing dramatically good or bad could happen, where I was fully insured against catastrophe, I began to doubt the power of either “unpleasantness” or ecstasy to touch me. What remained to William Henry Devereaux, Jr., was the gradual day, the inevitable transition from left field to first base, and finally to designated hitter, that misbegotten invention designed to convince the washed up that they’re still in the game. Today is the day I’m to learn how wrong I was. Today, I learn the lesson of those who live on Pleasant Street and grouse at being moved out of left field. Those who complain don’t even get to play first. I wanted consequence? Here it is. How do I like them apples? That’ll teach me.

  The problem is, I’m not sure I’ve learned my lesson. Right now, unless I’m mistaken, Lou Steinmetz is explaining to young Leo where he went wrong, explaining the terrible thing he’s done, how foolish he was to do it, how inevitable that he’d get caught. As a result, he’ll be kicked out of school, Lou will explain, and it will be nobody’s fault but Leo’s own. Let this be a lesson to you, the chief of campus security will conclude. And then he’ll study Leo to see if the lesson has sunk in. And be disappointed. I’ve seen that look on Leo’s face more than once, and it expresses, more eloquently than Leo himself could ever express in words, his conviction that he was not put here in this world to learn other people’s lessons. He’ll accept his punishment because he has no choice, but he’ll pass when it comes to the education, thanks just the same. Leo has only to look at Lou Steinmetz to know that Lou is not God. The problem is that if Leo were privileged to look directly at the face of God, he’d probably arrive at the same conclusion, and I suspect that, in this respect, he and I are the same. If we were capable of learning our lessons, we’d become obedient. Sensing this, we’re dead set against moral instruction.

  In the center of the parking lot stands a trailer with slatted sides from which a long line of tethered donkeys are being led down a makeshift ramp. They are the scrawniest, saddest-looking animals I’ve ever seen, and that includes geese in neck braces. Lethargic and docile, they appear blind as they descend the ramp, though this may be a temporary condition caused by their removal from the dark, comfortable trailer into the bright afternoon sunlight. Pathetic as they appear, consider this: their dignity has not yet been assaulted. Tonight their hooves will be bound in cloth and foam, their hindquarters diapered to protect the floor of the women’s gym. (They would never be permitted near the men’s gym.) I can’t imagine anyone would want to pit faculty against administration, even in a humorous fashion, in the current political context, but if tonight’s game has been canceled, nobody’s told the men in charge of these docile beasts.

  “Every time I see you, you look worse,” Marjory observes when I limp in.

  “I should come over more often,” I tell her. “That way my decline wouldn’t seem so pronounced.”

  “See this?” she says, indicating her large blotter calendar. She turns April over so I can see May. The fifteenth is circled in bold red. On the sixteenth a small note in Marjory’s neat hand: “Happy days are here again.”

  “You’re taking your retirement?”

  “With a vengeance. Thanks to Jacob, I was made a nice offer. Harold and I are looking at condos in the Chapel Hill area.”

  “Harold really enjoys golf, doesn’t he?”

  “More than sex. It’s one of the things we have in common. I like it more than sex too.” She’s been studying me all this time. And it occurs to me to wonder if this is Marjory’s way of suggesting that after I’m fired my life may actually improve. Surely I would prefer golf to academe, if not to sex.

  “You’ve known about all this shit for a long time, haven’t you?”

  Her guilty expression makes me regret pinning her down this way. “Since last fall when Jacob was fired.”

  “And that’s why you were thinking about coming back to the English department.”

  “This early-retirement golf package is even better.”

  The door opens then, and Jacob Rose emerges, to my surprise, in the company of Terence Watters, the university’s counsel, whose face is the same blank mask he was wearing when I saw him last week coming out of Dickie Pope’s office. Henry Kissinger was emotive by comparison. What he’s doing talking to Jacob Rose I can’t imagine.

  “You know Hank
Devereaux?” Jacob asks.

  Terence Watters surrenders the slightest of nods, as if to suggest that it may be necessary to disavow all knowledge of me later. By tomorrow this whole meeting may not have taken place. It may be necessary to send someone to rub out Marjory, because she too is a witness. For now, it’s too soon to tell.

  “All right, get in there and drop your pants,” Jacob tells me when Terence Watters has taken his leave. “Marjory, bring the switch.”

  We go into Jacob’s office. He closes the door behind us.

  “Sit there,” he instructs me. “And keep your hands where I can see ’em.”

  This is some good mood he’s in. I can’t for the life of me figure out why, and I need to. A liberal arts dean in a good mood is a potentially dangerous thing. It suggests a world different from the one we know. One where any damn thing can happen. Which is exactly what this present circumstance feels like. I mean, this is a really good mood that Jacob Rose is in. Not just the kind of good mood that may descend upon a man when he’s gotten a couple of job offers and asked a woman to marry him and she’s said yes. A really good mood. He looks like a man convinced not just of his own inherent goodness but that virtue is destined to prevail, evil predestined to failure. In other words, he looks nothing like a liberal arts dean, especially one who’s just compiled, for the purposes of termination, a list of four names, one of which is that of his best man.