Straight Man (12 page)

A good deal, as it’s turned out, thanks to Rachel. Nobody imagined what might happen if ever I were aided and abetted by a competent secretary, someone who knew where the forms were and how to fill them out and who to send them to and when. Teddy’s fall from grace after six years as chair was occasioned by what was generally and correctly seen to be his abuse of power, this despite his constant and cloying diplomacy. The rules set forth explicitly in the department’s operating paper, if taken literally, are egalitarian in nature, and render the chair an impotent facilitator, should he or she be foolish enough to obey them. Teddy hadn’t the slightest intention of obeying them, of course, only of appearing
to, and the fact that it took six years for this to become manifest was ample testimony to his administrative expertise, as well as to the fact that he desperately wanted to keep the job and its reduced teaching load.

Not
wanting the job, on the other hand, has freed me to dispense entirely with subterfuge. Whereas the conventional wisdom had been that a year would be too little time for me to wreak much havoc, I have demonstrated that a great deal of havoc can be wrought in two semesters by anyone so inclined, at least if that person is sufficiently insensitive to ridicule, personal invective, and threat. Who could have guessed that I’d take it upon myself to undermine seriously the very principles of egalitarian democracy that have kept us all in a state of suspended animation for over a decade?

Well, anyone who knew me might have guessed, but no one did, and now, nearly a full academic year after having taken up the reins of abusive power, I am still at large, the subject of vitriolic letters to the dean, the campus executive officer, and the school newspaper, as well as anonymous memos distributed late at night in department mailboxes and the regular appearance of official documents arriving via registered mail, many of which threaten litigation if I do not immediately and with all haste cease and desist. Taken all around, as Huck Finn was fond of saying, it’s been fun.

When I hear the phone ring in the outer office, I tell Rachel over the intercom that I have just stepped out, and, to keep her from becoming a liar at my behest, I do just that. There’s nobody I want to talk to this early.

That includes Billy Quigley, who finds me in the corridor trying to locate the right key to lock the private door to my office. He’s on his way to his office prior to his nine o’clock class. He looks like he sucked the bottle dry about three in the morning and then stayed awake another hour or two to whistle into it. “Are you coming or going?” he inquires.

“I never know anymore,” I tell him. “Come join me for a cup of coffee in the student center.”

He makes a face. Apparently the idea of coffee offends him. “Am I getting my extra section next fall or what?”

“I’m having lunch with the dean today,” I tell him. “Who knows? Maybe I’ll get a budget.”

“Screw the budget,” Billy says, genuinely pissed off that I’d use such a cheap ploy to avoid the issue. “We’re talking a crummy three grand, not thirty. Don’t give me budget.”

I’m on his side, of course. This budgetary danse macabre, a semester-by-semester ritual, is ridiculous. There’s no valid reason why we can’t be told the semester before if the soft money to cover all necessary sections of freshman composition will in fact be made available. To expect reason is where the fallacy lies.

“Like I told you last night,” I explain, “I’ll do what I can.”

“What do you mean, ‘last night’?”

Billy Quigley often doesn’t remember that he’s called me, and I can tell by the puzzled, belligerent look on his swollen face that he has no recollection of our conversation, or of the fact that we concluded it amicably, indeed sentimentally.

“Billy,” I say. “You have a nice day.”

“Hank,” Billy Quigley says. “You have a rotten one.”

The student center is normally a short walk, now a somewhat longer one, thanks to the massive excavation out of which will grow, this summer, the new College of Technical Careers building. Ground-breaking ceremonies were scheduled earlier in the month until one of the dignitaries, our local congressman, waving enthusiastically to imaginary constituents for the benefit of TV cameras, missed the first step getting off his charter plane and broke his ankle on the second, making it necessary to conduct the ground-breaking ceremonies later this afternoon, after the excavation has been dug. They’ll have to find a camera angle for that first symbolic shovelful of earth that does not include the enormous pit.

In truth, this hole fills me with misgivings, and not because a Pennsylvania congressman has fallen in the line of duty trying to dedicate it. Perhaps, I tell myself, it’s that a surprise—a replica of my own house—grew out of the last such excavation I inspected. Seeing this new hole suggests that more surprises may be in store for me. On the
other hand, all logic dictates that I should be reassured by this hole in the ground. It was competed for by the other campuses in the university system and awarded to ours, a sign of favor in these straitened academic times. Soon concrete footers will be poured and walls will climb out of the hole, and the summer air will be full of the sound of jackhammers and drills, the raised voices of men with real, urgent information to communicate (“Watch your fucking head there!”) as steel girders swing through the dusty air.

All of this will proceed quite naturally from this still undedicated but undeniable hole in the ground, and what it all suggests is that these rumors about an impending purge of our professorial ranks simply cannot be true. Even university administrators are not foolish enough to spend millions on a new facility in the same year they intend to fire tenured faculty and claim financial hardship as justification. Unless they have no intention of building anything here. Unless the faculty are going to be invited to drink Jim Jones Kool-Aid after the donkey basketball game and then buried in a mass grave. This scenario also accounts for the facts as we know them, and although I can hear William of Occam snickering across the centuries, the sound does not dispel my misgivings. Right this instant, the hole does more closely resemble a mass grave site for dull-witted faculty than a new, state-of-the-art, technical careers center, and I can’t help offering up a nervous smile at the idea that the administration might put the lot of us so beyond further grievance with one deft, efficient stroke.

Huddled on the far side of the campus pond, where the tall trees offer better protection from the wind, are thirty or forty ducks and geese. There was a time when these birds migrated, but anymore they’re year-round residents, tenured and content, squatting motionless on the bank, like abandoned decoys, subsisting on popcorn and other student junk food, too fat to fly and, as the saying goes, too ugly to love.

They are easily faked out, too, as if they’ve been too long separated from their better instincts, too often seduced by baser ones. Their heads rotate on their otherwise motionless bodies, and when I take my hands out of my pockets and make a flicking motion, tossing imaginary popcorn along the bank, the birds start toward me, trailing V’s on the
placid surface of the pond. I’d like to think they know better, that they are capable of perceiving from across the pond that I have nothing for them. I’ve been told by hunters that ducks are smart, that they have remarkable vision, that from high in the sky they can detect subtle movements on the ground, see the whites of hunters’ eyes.

If true, these particular ducks are the village idiots of their species, waddling up out of the water and quacking around on the brown grass in search of what I’ve pretended to throw them. They can see it isn’t there, but they search for it anyway. Their protests reach a remarkable crescendo. Among the mallards are three tough-looking white geese, and the tallest and most elegant of these comes over and hisses at me, its bill wide open, its dark, toothless maw surprisingly menacing. Its white breast is dappled with smatterings of rust color, which remind me of the blood I sneezed the length of the seminar table yesterday afternoon. “Finny,” I say to the angry goose. “Qué pasa?”

When the goose hisses again, I take my hands out of my pockets to show the troops I have no popcorn, no stale bread, no candy. Some of the smaller ducks shove off the bank again and begin their slow return, offering a parting, disillusioned quack or two. Eventually the others follow, leaving me with the goose I’ve dubbed Finny.

“Don’t blame me,” I tell him. “You knew better.”

“Professor Devereaux?” says a voice behind me. It belongs to Leo, a student in my writing workshop. Leo is tall and gangly, with red hair and a long, pimply neck. A couple of months ago he told me, as if he suspected that I alone might understand, that he despises all his other courses, not so much because they are taught by fools as because he laments any time spent not writing. He even regrets the necessity to eat and sleep. He lives to write.

“There are lots of other reasons to live,” I assured him. “Especially at your age.”

“Not for me,” he declared adamantly, as if he suspected that this was what I really wanted to hear, unequivocal testimony to his commitment. “They all say it’s a compulsion,” he explained, his red face aflame. He subscribed to several magazines for writers, and read all the author interviews. “You write because you have to. Because you have no choice.”

“Of course you have a choice,” I insisted, not wanting to reinforce such a romantic view of writing for a young man with talent as modest as Leo’s.

“Not me,” he repeated. “For me it’s writing or nothing.”

Since we had this conversation back in February, spring has arrived, and everything is in bloom but Leo’s talent. In workshop his stories have been routinely eviscerated. He has another up for discussion today, and my guess is he’s in for a long afternoon. I’m also afraid he’ll ask me now what I thought of his story, though I’ve forbidden such inquiries prior to workshop. Fortunately, that’s not the question he wants to ask at this moment. “Who are you talking to?”

“This goose,” I assure him.

And in fact he looks relieved. “I was afraid you were talking to yourself.”

The cafeteria of the student center is divided into a large student dining hall and a much smaller room for faculty and staff. The separation is strictly convention. There are no signs to designate it officially, but students steer clear of the faculty/staff area. In the beginning of the fall semester, a disoriented freshman may wander in, see all the tweed, pivot, and beat a hasty retreat, like a clergyman who finds himself in the foyer of a brothel. A couple weeks into the term and everyone knows. The students are great respecters of our space. I, however, am no great respecter of theirs. Often as not, I take a small table in the student section.

In the bookstore across from the cafeteria I’ve purchased a
Railton Mirror
and also picked up a copy of the student newspaper, fully aware that these have never once cheered me up. I scan
The Rear View
, hoping for a follow-up story on William Cherry, the man who, earlier this month, lay down on the railroad tracks one night and was decapitated. The original story had hinted that there was more to the circumstance than met the eye, but it may be that despair is the simplest of tales. In lieu of what I’m looking for, I’m offered on the opinions page an article written by my mother, who, like her son, is a frequent contributor. Her column today is on the Department of Housing and Urban Development,
which maintains and operates the senior citizen tower at which she volunteers, though she is herself older than half of the residents. What she is taking issue with today is HUD’s policy of mainstreaming mental patients into HUD facilities that were once exclusively the domain of senior citizens. A boy in Bellemonde, the next town over, is her object lesson on the failure of HUD policy. Two weeks after leaving the institution that had been in charge of his care, the boy took the elevator to the top of the Bellemonde Tower, then the stairs leading up to the roof. From there he climbed onto the wall, surveyed the world, and leapt from it. An eighty-year-old woman sitting on her balcony saw him go by and heard him land on the hood of a car in the parking lot with such force that he set off the horn, which continued to blow for another twenty minutes, until the locked door could be broken into with the Jaws of Life and the horn disconnected. My mother’s thesis, if I read her correctly, is that elderly women should not have to bear witness to such tragic events. The mentally ill should have their own building to jump off unless they’re over sixty-five.

I should probably have an opinion about this myself, but after reading my mother’s column I find myself conflicted by her logic, with which I’m always reluctant to agree, knowing her as I do. And I admit that a moral man wouldn’t get sidetracked pondering irrelevant details, like whether the boy also noticed the old woman as he passed her floor, whether seeing her there so unexpectedly provided him a lucid moment before he set off that horn. Back when I was a writer, I might have been able to justify such musings, since odd details and unexpected points of view are the stuff of which vivid stories are made, but now such thoughts seem more like evidence of an unbalanced mind, a warped sensibility.

The student newspaper contains a lot more humor, though most of it is unintentional. Except for the front page (campus news) and the back page (sports), the campus rag contains little but letters to the editor, which I scan first for allusions to myself and next for unusual content, which in the current climate is any subject other than the unholy trinity of insensitivity, sexism, and bigotry, which the self-righteous, though not always literate, letter writers want their readers to know they’re against. As a group they seem to believe that high moral indignation
offsets and indeed outweighs all deficiencies of punctuation, spelling, grammar, logic, and style. In support of this notion there’s only the entire culture.

The front page contains two big stories, one announcing the ground-breaking dedication this afternoon of the Technical Careers Complex, the second informing the community that the yearlong asbestos removal project is near completion, only the Modern Languages Building remaining. There’s a picture of one of the asbestos removal workers in his mask and special clothing, which I study for a moment, trying to decide why a man whose appearance has been completely disguised should remind me of my father, William Henry Devereaux, Sr., who begat not only me but American Literary Theory and is about to return to his son’s vicinity, if not his life, after a forty-year hiatus.