Straight Man (46 page)

“Thank heaven we’re almost to the end of the term.”

“That’ll keep her off campus,” Tony concedes, “but she shows up at the house now too. If you’d stayed twenty minutes longer the other night, you’d have met her. One minute the local press and I were alone,
and the next there she was, taking off her clothes, about to get in the tub with us. Naturally, the press freaked.”

“Take a long vacation,” I suggest. “Rent the house to a graduate student for the summer and go somewhere.”

“I’d probably be better off to sell it and just go. This is going to put me right at the top of Dickie’s list. Everybody in bio has tenure, and what I’m hearing is that one of us is going to have to go anyway.”

“You really think they can just start sacking people with tenure?”

“I think
they
think they can.”

“I’m not so sure.”

“Well, here’s an interesting item,” he says. “Remember how all of us who were coming up on our sixtieth birthdays this year were offered early retirement incentives last summer?”

I do vaguely recall. If memory serves, Billy Quigley had briefly considered the offer.

“Well, last week I called personnel to say I might be interested. Guess what I found out?”

“The offer’s been withdrawn?”

He nods.

“For everyone in that situation?”

“I don’t know. But for me, the offer is no longer on the table.”

“So you think they’re considering even more economical methods now?”

“That’s what I think. Also, I’m not sure I have the unqualified support of my dean. He’s wished for a long time that I didn’t have quite so much to offer women.”

Which makes me wonder if Tony would have my unqualified support if I were dean. “And you think your department has a list?”

He’s looking me in the eye now. “I think every department has a list. I think English has a list. I’ve heard for a fact that English has a list.”

“And you heard I drew up this list?”

“I heard there was a list.”

At the register I pay for my dinner and Tony’s. He pays for June’s and Teddy’s. I tell him I’m going to make a stop at the men’s room. He offers to wait, but he looks exhausted, bottomed out, and since I may be a while, I tell him to go on home. On a night like this, a man like me fears the truth before he knows it. After my soul-cleansing, chino-soiling
pee this afternoon, I’ve returned to dribble mode. I had hoped, of course, that a man who could fill an office swivel chair with urine at five o’clock in the afternoon might be able to relieve himself sensibly at midnight, but I find that I am again backed up, painfully, angrily.

Outside, snow. As predicted. Even so, amazing.

It has only just started when I emerge from the restaurant, but it’s coming down heavy in wet, thick flakes. The spot where Tony’s car was parked is already white. Chances are, if it’s snowing like this here in Railton, it’s coming down even harder in Allegheny Wells, which is higher up.

At the bottom of Pleasant Street Hill I pull off to the side at the gravel entrance to the railyard and watch another car, the only one I’ve seen since leaving the restaurant, make the long, steep ascent. Halfway up, the car begins to lose traction and the rear end drifts sideways as the wheels spin, but it makes the first plateau, where it stops, as if to summon courage and steel resolve, its brake lights glowing anxious red. It remains there too long though, and I begin to suspect that the car’s driver and I are soul mates. “Now what?” I say out loud, and only when I hear the words spoken does the left blinker come on. Then the car turns into the intersection, inching slowly away from further confrontation. My soul mate gone, I turn my attention to the dark railyard, its flat landscape interrupted here and there by the black silhouettes of boxcars. What they remind me of, strangely, is an urban skyline, except that would mean that the entire city was belowground, only the very tops of its rectangular buildings poking up through the snow. Seen so fancifully, the world tilts and with it my stomach. I close my eyes, and my mother’s words find me across the long decades. “We will forget this,” she assures me.

Somehow we, or at least I, have managed to remain faithful to that promise. How long was it after my father left before it became clear to me, if not to my mother, that he wasn’t coming back? A year or so in my memory, but it may have been far less. We were still in the same rented university house, which means the year’s lease had not run out. So, perhaps only a few months. With him gone, the house had become engulfed in silence. Strange, since my father was a reader and a writer,
and the house was always kept quiet for these sensible pursuits. My mother was a reader too, but I always had the impression that it was my father we were keeping quiet for. But apparently not, because now, with no William Henry Devereaux, Sr., to consider, the house was more deeply, eerily silent than before. After school I became the denizen of its dark, dank cellar, from which my mother always had to call me for dinner. What did I do down there? she always wanted to know. I remember there was no way to explain.

The house, situated at the outer edge of the campus, had recently been purchased by the university, which was buying adjacent property to ensure the possibility of future expansion. In fact, the house we lived in then would be leveled a few years after we moved out, along with all the others on that block, to make room for a medical school annex. The house’s previous owner, also a professor, had apparently been a different order of being from William Henry Devereaux, Sr., because his basement was full of tools. There was a huge workbench, complete with a heavy, cast-iron vice at one end and a jigsaw I discovered how to turn on at the other. There were also a sander and several drills and a special tin case containing dozens of drill bits. One whole wall sported hooks from which hung hammers, planers, handsaws and hacksaws, and the grips on all of these were worn smooth with use. Off in an unlit corner stood a cluster of yard tools: two or three rakes, a snow shovel, a hoe, a spade. I remember thinking when I discovered the spade that there’d been no reason to borrow one from our neighbor when my father dug the hole to bury Red. To my knowledge, my father never ventured down into the dark cellar, so he never knew what tools were at his disposal. When the furnace went out, he called for help, and when the repairman arrived my father showed him to what he understood to be the door to the cellar where the furnace was located. That was about as much information as he could furnish.

His tools were nearly all I knew about the man who’d occupied the house before it became ours, except that he had lived there for many years. We’d heard he never married, and therefore had no children. Which seemed to me a shame, because when I handled his tools, I always pictured a man who wouldn’t have minded the company of a boy like me as he worked. I’d concluded he might even have enjoyed it.

The afternoon my mother crept noiselessly down the cellar stairs instead of calling to me as she usually did, I had taken a coil of rope, climbed onto a chair, and tied a knot onto one of the pipes that formed a complex grid running along the ceiling of the cellar. The moment before I turned around and saw her, I had been testing the rope by yanking on it with both hands, to see if the knot would stay tied, if the pipe would hold my weight. To another kid, I would have looked like I was about to swing, Tarzan-like, from one imaginary tree to another, but at the moment our eyes met, I knew this was not the conclusion my mother had come to, and I let loose an explosion of violent grief I had not known until that very moment I possessed.

How did I get from the chair I was standing on and into her arms? How did I know to go there, know that she would not be angry? There was no way to explain to my mother what I didn’t fully comprehend myself—that I didn’t want my life to end, rather just to know that the pipe would hold me if I needed it to later, if things got worse, if they became unbearable.

And how did she know the right words to whisper as she clutched me to her, her fingers digging in beneath my jutting boyish shoulder blades? How did she know to say that we—she and I—were going to forget this? How did she know to whisper these words so fiercely that I would have no choice but to believe her? Did she recognize the ambiguity of her message to me? Was it the pain of his abandonment we would eventually forget? Was that what she meant? Or was it the fact that she had come down into the cellar and found me standing on a chair? Both, I felt certain. What I didn’t know was how we’d manage to do this necessary thing.
How
would we forget? Was it time we would put our faith in? God’s grace? Each other? It didn’t matter. Only her certainty mattered. It simply would be done. I had her word. I was to trust her, and I did.

By the time I open my eyes, the world has tilted back again, and the boxcars are merely boxcars, not the skyline of some lost, submerged city. Not even squinting at them, blurring the edges of my vision, can make them into anything but what they are. Which is just as well. It is a mistake, I feel certain, to be sentimental about a boy visited by a fleeting thought, a passing sorrow. After all, not far from where I sit, a man
my age, a man named William Cherry, has recently surrendered his life by lying down on the track and allowing something larger and more powerful than himself to bear away and out of the world some pain I will never know. What I wonder is this: Did this world tilt for William Cherry, as it just did momentarily for me? Had he forgotten that the world could do such a thing? Did the visible world become infinitely alien just before his leaving it? Or did the world
fail
to tilt? Did it remain mundane and true to his trained, melancholy expectation right to the end, its boxcars merely boxcars, all lined up along the seemingly endless track, as far as William Cherry’s eye could see?

I do not want to die. I’m as sure of this, I think, as a man can reasonably be. I do not want to learn, when I speak to Phil Watson tomorrow, that the asymmetry he thought he felt in my prostate is a tumor, and yet, there is a part of me that would thrill to receive such news. Why that should be I cannot imagine. Nor do I want the woman that I’m married to and that I love to leave me, but the thought of her doing so moves me in a way that our growing old together and contentedly slipping, in affectionate tandem, toward the grave does not. The thought of Lily’s having found someone to replace me is not welcome, but an urgent new love—and what makes the world stranger than love?—is a thing that I could half-wish for her. For me.

Half. I can hear Tony Coniglia whispering to me that I’m permitted half.

The more immediate question is what I’ll be permitted by the young uniformed officer I see approaching through the snow on foot in my rearview mirror. How long has the revolving blue and red light of his cruiser been flashing back there? When the cop taps on my window, I roll it down and provide my license. He studies this with his flashlight, then shines the light in my face to see if I’m the same guy. Would I mind stepping out of the vehicle? he wonders. Hell, no. Have I been drinking? Hell, yes. Where am I headed? Good question. Would I mind answering it? Allegheny Wells, I tell him. That’s what you think, he replies. Where I’m headed is the backseat of his cruiser. He takes me by the elbow, the big, helpful lug.

On the short drive to the station I notice him studying me in the rearview mirror. “Tell the truth,” he grins when we pull into the lot,
and for a second I think he’s going to accuse me of indulging suicidal thoughts out there in the dark railyard. “You’re that duck guy, aren’t you?”

With my one phone call, I try Tony Coniglia. He’s responsible for this mess, is my reasoning. But there’s no answer at Tony’s. He was drunker than I, though. If he’s passed out, it’ll take more than a ringing phone to rouse him. I consider calling Teddy. Getting me out of jail in the middle of the night is the kind of duty that would appeal to him. He’s always on the lookout for a new Hank story for his repertoire. But he’ll tell this one badly, just like all the others, and besides, I’ve been too mean to him at the restaurant to call him now.

“Your wife ain’t home?” the old cop says, eyebrow raised, when I hang up. I can read his thoughts. Going on two o’clock and this poor bastard’s wife isn’t home. No wonder he’s drinking. “I tell you what,” he says. “We have lovely accommodations right here.”

Fine with me, at this point. “There are lots of other people I could call,” I tell my escort as he leads me down a corridor to the drunk tank. I don’t want him to think I’m alone in the world, a man without friends or colleagues. I mean, hell, there are academic deans I could call who’d come and get me if I asked. The only reason I’m here is to fulfill a prophecy.

“Monday night. You got the place practically to yourself,” I’m told, and it’s true. The cell’s got a half dozen cots, only one of which is occupied. “You’ll like your roommate too. We’re pretty upscale tonight.”

Truth underlies all reality. I believe this. Often there are several explanations for observable phenomena that make varying degrees of sense, but the correct interpretation of the facts is always recognizable for its beauty, its simplicity. Tony Coniglia did not answer his telephone for the simple reason that he wasn’t there to answer it. He wasn’t there to answer it because he can’t be in two places at once. If he’s here, he can’t be there. And he’s here. I see this.

I decide not to wake him to say hello, though I’m tempted. I don’t because it would rob him of tomorrow morning’s mystical moment when he awakes and finds me in the same cell and cannot for the life of him account for my being there, with or without the application of
Occam’s Razor. He will not rest easy until everything is explained to him, until the rich possibility of a world different from the one we know is thoroughly dispelled, though it is this
other
world we yearn for.

I lie down on a cot across the cell from Tony’s and consider the future. By the time William of Occam was my age, he’d been excommunicated and was on the run, ecclesiastically speaking, from a vengeful pope, whose authority he continued to question in a series of inflammatory pamphlets, sort of op-ed pieces, with a distribution smaller than that of the Railton
Rear View
. There was, of course, no middle class to write for, and William, long banished from the university, would in any case have perceived a different academic mission from mine at West Central Pennsylvania University. He’d probably have felt a greater kinship with William Henry Devereaux, Sr., who always imagined himself speaking to an elite few colleagues and graduate students, the modern-day equivalent of the medieval scholastics, bearers of learning and arbiters of secular taste. At my age, fifty, William of Occam still had fourteen more years to live, and sixty-four was a ripe old age in the fourteenth century. Best of all, his life didn’t leak out of him gradually, like a tire with a tiny puncture. He died of the Black Death, and he never saw it coming until it was upon him, a dirty, brutish, democratic foe who argued with William in precise, elegant syllogisms, defeating all the philosopher’s logic and unifying in swift death, as life never could, the conflicting impulses of reason and faith that had shaped his life.