Straight Man

  I bite my tongue. Jacob was wise to leave the English department. The competition is stiff, but he’s a straight man extraordinaire. “Marry this woman and you’ll learn to,” is the punch line I bite off the tip of my tongue. “Marry Gracie and you’ll look back on your terrible loneliness as the good old days.”

  But these are not things for me to say to an old friend, even one who’s been keeping secrets. I know that. No, my role in this is the offered one. I’ll be best man and make a toast. It looks like I’ve got a couple months to come up with one.

  “Well, I’ll mark June on my calendar then,” I tell him.

  We’re standing now, facing each other. Suddenly, Jacob looks inexpressibly sad, and to my way of thinking, he’s got his reasons. Another baser thought tracks warily across the nether regions of my consciousness, stopping to gnaw, like a rat through a rope. I could be dean. A phone call to Dickie Pope. A verbal list of the most egregiously incompetent and burnt-out members of the English department, a promise to cease and desist killing geese (an easy pledge, given my innocence in the matter of the first goose). As Dickie Pope himself has said, those who are fired will deserve to be fired, and everyone else—the institution and its students—comes out a winner. And I would come out a winner. I do not, I think, covet Jacob Rose’s job or his office, but there is the matter of karma, and I’m greatly attracted to the idea of my English department colleagues impeaching me as their chair today, only to discover me reborn as their dean tomorrow.

  Still. I would trade it all for a good pee.

  “Anyway, thanks,” Jacob is saying as we shake hands. He seems to think this a particularly poignant moment, and perhaps it is.

  “What for?”

  “For not ridiculing my decision. For not telling me I’m a fool.”

  “Would I do that?”

  He gives me a look. We let our hands drop.

  “You’re sure the wedding can’t happen before June?” I ask.

  “I don’t see how,” he says seriously, our poignant moment clouding his vision. “Why?”

  “I was just thinking that maybe you could do it during halftime of the donkey basketball game,” I tell him.

  Suddenly there’s such a braying behind me that I half-believe a donkey has materialized to complete the joke. But it’s only Marjory, who returned while I was inside. It takes her a moment to compose herself, and when she does, she looks like a woman who’d willingly slit her own throat if someone would only loan her a knife. There are tears of sheer mortification in her eyes. “Oh, Jacob,” she says. “I’m so sorry.”

  Truth be told, I’m almost as ashamed as she is, and I can’t look at Jacob, who hasn’t moved. I should have looked at him, though, because then I wouldn’t be looking at Marjory, who has started braying all over again.

  CHAPTER

  25

  “Then where is it?” Phil Watson wants to know.

  We’re studying the hanging X ray, looking for the stone I’m convinced is there for the simple reason that it has to be. Phil has tried his best to cover his reaction upon seeing me, but without much success. He’s also seen no reason to order this X ray. He’s done it to humor me, I know. I’m the one who wanted the X ray, and I wanted it to prove him wrong, to prove that there is a stone. Something’s got me all backed up, and I’ve been both imagining and dreading this stone for a week. It’s become too real to give up without a fight. Phil Watson, who has the advantage of not being tormented by an imagination, and whose father is not William Henry Devereaux, Sr., stone former extraordinaire, has not jumped to my conclusions but rather retreated lamely into standard medical procedure. Before agreeing to X-ray me, he’s done a urinalysis and, despite my protest that he’s going about things ass backwards, given me a rectal examination that was remarkable, it seemed to me, for its thoroughness. He’s also done something called an IVP, results available tomorrow, and ordered blood work, results due by the end of the week. Meanwhile, if there’s a stone, it’s invisible, and Watson, to his credit, has not said I told you so, at least not in those words. If there had been a stone, he’s explained, there’d be blood in my urine. Calculi are not like beach pebbles, worn smooth by tidal motion. They’re sharp, jagged, ugly little monsters. He’s shown me photographs. No, the problem, I’m told, is that my prostate is enlarged, my bladder slightly distended, though neither quite enough to cause the extreme symptoms I’m claiming. And I do, Phil admits, look like hell. What the hell’s wrong with me? is what he’d like to know. At least we agree about the question.

  “Maybe it’s hiding somewhere?” I suggest, still unwilling to surrender the stone. “Maybe it’s behind something.”

  Phil makes a face to let me know that this isn’t much of an explanation. “Calculi don’t hide. One large enough to cause an obstruction will show up every time.”

  I study the X ray. “According to this I don’t even have a dick,” I point out, though this is not precisely true. It’s kind of an outline, a shadow, a ghost dick.

  “Look,” Phil explains again. “There are two kinds of calculi that are germane to the urinary tract. A kidney stone, here, could obstruct the ureter. They’re tiny and very painful. Could conceivably not show up on the X ray even. Problem is that kidney stones don’t restrict the flow of urine. What you’d have would be lower back pain. And you’d be peeing like a racehorse.”

  In fact, now that he says this, I do have a distant memory of my father doubled over in pain, getting my mother to massage his back. And he was always in the bathroom. “Not with that dick,” I point out. “I’ve seen racehorses.”

  Watson ignores this. “Now a bladder stone, up here, can shut you right down. Back the urine right up to your eyeballs. Unless they’re removed or broken up, the kidneys fail, then the patient fails. Trouble is, a stone large enough to do that is huge. It’d show up like a Susan B. Anthony dollar.”

  “So there’s no stone.”

  “Other scenarios make more sense. Three I can think of.” He shuts off the screen with an air of finality. I and my ghost dick disappear in a beat. “Enlarged prostate, as I said. You’re the right age, unfortunately. Maybe a little young, but it happens.”

  “What do we do about that?”

  “Long term? Possible removal of prostate gland. Short term? Catheterization to relieve the pressure may be warranted. Let’s wait for the results of the IVP on that though.”

  I try not to wince. “What’s scenario two?”

  He hesitates. “We won’t worry about that until we get the blood work back.”

  “Cancer?”

  More hesitation. “A tumor is a possibility. Remember though. Not all tumors are cancerous.”

  “Wouldn’t a tumor show up on the X ray?” I say, suddenly aware that Phil has turned off the screen before beginning this discussion of scenarios.

  “Not always.”

  “Let’s look again,” I suggest.

  He shakes his head. “We’ll wait for the blood work.”

  “Just flip it on.” I lean forward to do it myself.

  “No,” he says, preventing me. “In the rectal exam I felt an asymmetry that concerns me. Not large. Probably nothing.”

  How to explain this? How to describe the strange exhilaration at this information? Fear? Surely. But more than this, and it’s the “more” that I can’t explain. Because surely fear, given the circumstance, would be a perfectly adequate emotion. Unalloyed fear of death would satisfy William of Occam, and it should satisfy me. It’s my mortality we’re discussing. There’s no need for complexity, no need to multiply entities, no need to court anticipation. But there it is, regardless. I can feel the exhilaration where it begins in my groin and radiates outward and upward like my backed-up urine. “What’s scenario three?” I wonder. “I’m already dead, and this is all your dream?”

  “The third scenario is more remote, more rare,” he admits. “There have been cases where anxiety and tension have resulted in the symptoms you describe.”

  “This doesn’t
feel psychological to me,” I tell him.

  “Frankly, you don’t seem like the type, Hank,” Phil admits. “You aren’t experiencing big money problems right now?”

  I shake my head. “Not that I know of. Lily writes the checks.”

  “She and the girls okay?”

  I’ve anticipated this question, so I don’t hesitate. “Fine.”

  “You haven’t taken up with some young graduate student or something?”

  I blink at him. I’ve told Phil Watson about my father’s propensity for forming stones but not, unless I’ve suffered another ellipsis, about his penchant for bedding female graduate students. How has he intuited that I may possess this infidelity gene? “No,” I say, trying to sound convincing, which should be easy. I have, after all, declined to share a peach with Meg Quigley. “Should I?”

  He ignores this. “Any other symptoms?”

  “Of what?”

  “Of anything.”

  I figure what the hell. “Time is slipping.”

  He blinks. “You mean it’s slipping away?”

  “Not exactly.” I explain the phenomenon of what I’ve come to think of as my ellipses. How suddenly I’ll be aware that a small chunk of time has passed without my being able to account for it. I explain what happened in Bodie Pie’s office last Friday, how one second she was sitting there trying not to light a cigarette, and a second later she was asking me where I’d been, a half-smoked cigarette dangling from her lips.

  “Sounds like simple abstraction to me.” Phil shrugs when I finish. “But it’s interesting. How old are you?”

  “Fifty this summer,” I confess.

  He nods, studying me. “Rough age.”

  “I’m having a ball,” I tell him, vaguely pissed off at the direction the conversation has taken. The thrilling glow of anticipation I felt while we were discussing the hypothetical tumor has dissipated.

  “The fifties make first basemen of us all, Hank.”

  “Let me understand this,” I say. “You think I can’t pee because I don’t want to play first base? That’s your diagnosis?”

  At this he surrenders a reluctant grin. “I haven’t made a diagnosis. For that we await the blood work.”

  There’s a knock on the door then, and a nurse appears. Phil follows her into the corridor, leaving me to dress. When I hear their voices receding down the hallway, I find the switch on the X-ray screen and flip it on. The screen is full of shapes and shadows, and I can’t be sure which is the asymmetry that troubles Phil Watson. As I study the image, I can feel the warm glow of anticipation return and radiate all the way to my fingertips. I confront the question: Is it even remotely possible that I want to die?

  When Phil Watson returns, he looks like he suspects what I’ve been up to. “I’ll call you tomorrow with results of the IVP,” he says. “Meantime, try not to worry.”

  “Can’t help it,” I say, though it’s not precisely worry I’m feeling. “This is my favorite organ we’re talking about. And I’m an intellectual.”

  Phil snorts at this. “It’s the favorite organ of all intellectuals,” he assures me. And he’s never even met my father.

  When I drive back out to Allegheny Wells to help Mr. Purty, I find he’s ignored my advice to walk away. The U-Haul trailer itself is nowhere in evidence, and when I hit the remote for the garage door opener, I see that the boxes containing my father’s books have been neatly stacked along the back wall of the garage. There must be a hundred of them. Can Mr. Purty have done this job all by himself? It’s possible that Julie helped, I suppose, but I’ve worked with Julie before, and I know that having her help you do something is a lot like doing it alone. The boxes are stacked three deep, six feet high, and they completely block the door from the garage into the kitchen. Which is okay, I guess, since there’s no longer room in the garage for my Lincoln, a car that barely fits when I inch it right up against the wall. I try not to think about the symbolism of all this—that my father’s books, the physical manifestation of his intellect—have cut me off from my own house.

  Julie is off somewhere, which leaves me alone with Occam, who is strangely subdued, as if he too were present during my visit to Phil Watson and is now contemplating the meaning of the “asymmetry” discovered during my rectal exam. When I let him out onto the back deck, instead of doing his usual frantic laps he goes over to the railing, gives the external world a leery sniff, returns to the sliding glass door, lies down with his head on his paws, and sighs. I pour myself a small glass of iced tea, hit the play button on the answering machine, and settle onto a barstool at the kitchen island, sipping the tea cautiously, aware that any liquid I ingest will have to be expelled.

  When the machine stops rewinding I’m treated to my mother’s voice, vexed as always when she speaks to our machine, an experience she so detests that she will usually hang up rather than utter a syllable. “Henry?” she says. “Are you there?” A pause, five full beats. “Are you there? If you’re there, pick up. It’s me.” Another pause, then a muttered, “Damnation …” Followed by the sound of irritated hanging up. Then she’s back. This time no hello. “Once again you disappoint me, Henry. If you’re well enough to leave home, you’re well enough to stop and say hello to your father. Don’t call back. I’ll be out most of the afternoon and I don’t want your father disturbed. He’s not well …” Again, a hang-up. Then back again. “He’s not ill, just exhausted from the move.… I can’t do all of this myself, you know.…” There’s more to say, I can tell, but not to a damn machine.

  I try to imagine William Henry Devereaux, Sr., left alone in her flat. Will it occur to him there, or has it already, that he’s been delivered at last to retribution? He’s too keen an observer of life to believe in anything like earthly justice, but it must look like something pretty close to that. All morning I’ve been haunted by Mr. Purty’s description of my father bursting into tears. It may be that he has lost his mind, which would mean that destiny has played another cruel trick on my mother, allowing her to reclaim the mere shell of the man she’d been married to.

  When the telephone rings, I stay right where I am, empty iced tea glass in hand, numbed by a melancholy that’s easier understood than dispelled, a sadness that my daughter’s voice deepens instead of lifting. “I’m out at the house,” she informs me, “waiting for the fucking locksmith. Nobody can, like, tell you what time they’re coming anymore. You get a morning appointment or an afternoon appointment.…”

  Her voice falls tentatively, like she knows I’m here in the kitchen and is offering me the opportunity to pick up, to admit my own presence. “I thought that funny little man in the cowboy boots was going to have a stroke unloading those cartons. I figured he was a mover, but he said he was just a friend of Grandma’s. Anyway, he was too old to do all that work by himself.”

  The answering machine has heard enough. It cuts her off and dutifully goes through its series of clicks and whirs, finishing up just as the phone rings again.

  “Rude machine,” my daughter continues. “I’ll be back later, after the locksmith. Maybe we … well, I’ll talk to you then, I guess.”

  But she’s not finished. Her voice feels nearer now, more intimate, than when she was talking about Mr. Purty. “There’s something you should know about Russell, Daddy,” she says. “This isn’t all his fault. He didn’t … shove me, exactly. You probably already know that. Like, who am I kidding, right? There’s something not … right with me … I’ve known it forever. I just get so …”

  I’m standing at the counter now with my hand on the phone. I don’t remember getting up or crossing the room, but I must have, because here I am.

  “I thought it was a secret, but I guess it’s not …”

  “Julie,” I say, my throat so constricted I can barely choke out the word. I still have not picked up the receiver, and I know I won’t.

  “Anyhow, don’t blame Russell, okay?”

  Again the machine hangs up, and while it whirs and clicks, I stand, hand still o
n the receiver, staring out the kitchen window. Occam has slunk off somewhere, as if listening to Julie’s voice was more than he could bear. Besides, it’s spring and there are new gardens to root in. Over the weekend, the trees have come into full leaf, insulating us once again. From where I stand, it’s no longer possible to see Allegheny Estates II on the other side of the road, not even Paul Rourke’s satellite dish. In fact, even Finny’s ex-wife, our closest neighbor, has all but disappeared into the lush green foliage. Still, this feels, right now, like the blighted side of the road.

  CHAPTER

  26

  For twenty-five years I’ve driven through the university’s main gate and parked in the faculty lot nearest Modern Languages, but apparently I’m becoming a sneak, because for the fourth time in as many trips, I head over the mountain to campus, so that I may slip in unobserved through the rear gate. Judas Peckerwood, Back Door Man. Earlier today, if only for a fleeting moment, I entertained the idea of becoming dean via a back door phone call to Dickie Pope. What next? As I approach the campus’s rear gate, it begins raining gently, and the surface of the road becomes slippery. Just how slippery I realize only when some lunatic woman in a car with a Century 21 logo on its side panel, parked facing the wrong way, opens the passenger side door without warning and steps out into the street in front of me.

  This is, however, no ordinary lunatic, it turns out when I get a good look. It’s my mother, and I slide to a stop a foot in front of her. The look of horror on the face of the realtor, her companion, testifies that she would hate like hell to lose this client. My mother, unimpressed by my screeching tires, remains unimpressed when she looks up and sees who made them screech. She’s waited forty years for William Henry Devereaux, Sr.’s return, and she knows that God lacks the temerity to claim her in the very midst of her triumph. He’s just toying with her, through me, and she’s having no part of it. She slams the car door shut and opens her umbrella with a defiant flourish. Then she points at the two-story, gabled Victorian she’s about to enter.