Straight Man

  By the third week of August I notice the leaves beginning to turn on the doomed side of the macadam in Allegheny Wells. Lily and I, without ever speaking of the matter, have taken to jogging in the early morning to avoid the worst of the summer’s heat. Sometimes we run toward Railton, other times out toward the village of Allegheny Wells, though we avoid the right turn at the Presbyterian church that would lead us past the house that used to be Julie and Russell’s. A new family moved in last week, renting with an option to buy, a flexible arrangement for all concerned. Last month Julie joined Russell in Atlanta, where, I have it on excellent authority, they are doing well. Julie has found work, and Russell has been promoted already, and I’m told they are thinking about buying a house. What they are planning to use for money I don’t know. From little things Lily says I gather that she and Julie speak almost every day. I’m not allowed to see the phone bills.

  But the leaves. Yesterday, returning from our morning run, we encountered Paul Rourke pulling out from between the tilting stone pillars of Allegheny Estates II, on his way in to campus, which is gearing up for fall semester. Since being made dean, Rourke is working longer hours, which, according to him, is fine under the circumstances. He and his wife have separated, and the second Mrs. R. disappeared clean, like her predecessor, taking with her little more than the clothes on her back. A large contingent of divorced academic men in Railton would love to know how Rourke always manages this. Some have joked that somebody should sneak into his house some night when he’s away and dig in the basement. Personally, I don’t find the disappearance of the second Mrs. R. all that mysterious. The wife of a dean of liberal arts has few responsibilities, but there are occasions upon which she cannot be stoned and barefoot. My own best guess was the second Mrs. R. liked being stoned and barefoot. She liked wearing jeans and being braless beneath her thick sweatshirts. She liked to smoke a joint and hold her breath and wiggle her toes and stare at them, none of which you can do when you’re entertaining the chancellor.

  In any event their house is for sale along with half the others in the two Allegheny Estates, though I heard Rourke has rented it for the upcoming school year and himself plans to move over Labor Day into Jacob Rose’s town house in West Railton, which has also been on the market since his wedding. Jacob and Gracie have begun building on the lot I sold them in May. The house is going up fast, and sometimes when Lily and I are deck sitting, I catch a whiff of Gracie’s cloying perfume born upwards on a breeze. Lily, of course, insists that I’m imagining this.

  I feared that selling to Jacob what I refused to sell to Paul Rourke might enrage my old enemy further, but, strange as it seems, I’m apparently no longer on his shit list. Jacob says that this is because the job always makes the man, a line I’ve often used on Jacob himself when he’s done what struck me as a cowardly thing. According to Jacob, Rourke has simply realized that as dean he cannot afford to have personal animosities, and so he’s had to give me up. My own feeling is—and I’ve always maintained this—that most people have a finite amount of meanness in them, and Rourke used his up with me back in June when a group of us (Jacob, Teddy, Rourke, a couple guys from biology, and me) started playing basketball again on Sunday afternoons. I may have suggested it. Basketball is a beautiful game for a tall, graceful man like me. At times I’m so overwhelmed by its beauty that I lose touch with reality. When my shot is falling, when I’m moving across the lane and back out to the perimeter for my jumper, I forget my age and position in life. I feel like my dream self in the donkey basketball game, and in the throes of such emotion I’m prone to acts of foolishness. One Sunday afternoon in late June I made the mistake after a missed shot of crashing the boards, where I caught one of Paul Rourke’s big, churning elbows. The fractured cheekbone and black eye that resulted seem to have satisfied my old enemy. Also he seems cheered to be driving the Camaro again, his fainting spells having ceased now that he no longer has to breathe the second Mrs. R.’s secondhand smoke. At any rate, yesterday, when Lily and I encountered him at the end of our run and I pointed up at the sickly yellowing leaves on his side of the road, he merely rolled down the window, nodded at me knowingly, and said, almost affectionately, “Lucky Hank.”

  He’s right, of course, I am lucky. As a result of the series of events that landed me first in jail and then in the hospital, I’ve followed my mother’s somber advice, taken stock, and made a list of things a man like me might be thankful for if he were so inclined, and here they are:

  1. I have my health. My dick (or rather my prostate gland and my entire urinary tract) has been put through the metaphorical wringer of what Phil Watson referred to as a full battery of tests. In fact, I think he would have hooked me up to a battery if I’d let him. There is nothing wrong, I am reassured to know, with either me or it. Certainly, there is no tumor. Subsequent rectal searches by several educated and lubricated index fingers have found neither asymmetry nor enlargement of my prostate gland. More important, to me at least, I am again peeing freely, regularly, and without discomfort. I am, in all respects penile, as other men. Which leaves only the mystery of my temporary affliction. According to Phil I most likely suffered from a condition known as hysterical prostate, a phrase itself calculated to induce hysteria, at least in a man like me. According to Watson, who I suspect may have invented this condition to entertain me and explain my otherwise inexplicable symptoms, it’s a rare circumstance that is in part physical and in part psychological, induced by stress, aided and abetted by antihistamines, which I’d been overusing all spring to combat allergies and colds.

  Anyway, this explanation accounted for all the known facts of my case. What the diagnosis lacked, I decided when Phil Watson shared it with me, was poetry, and for that reason I told him why it was that Jacob Rose found me laughing like a madman before the commode when he followed me into the men’s room. For with the first blast of urine against porcelain I’d heard a distinct plink, as of a small pebble on china, evidence, it seemed to me, that I had been right all along. I had just passed a stone. Watson, a man not easily taken in by poetry, merely smiled and reminded me that this simply could not be, that it would be impossible to pass through a human ureter a stone large enough to make an audible plink. Further, a stone that large would have caused considerable bleeding before, during, and after the event, and I had experienced none. He did have enough poetry in him to concede that my decision to turn down the position of dean and relinquish my tenure at the university may have been the symbolic equivalent of passing a stone, but he maintained that the worlds of symbol and matter, of meaning and substance, remain discrete. This from a Roman Catholic who extends his tongue every Sunday morning to receive the Body and Blood of Christ.

  2. I am still married. Here I must be circumspect. Forgive me. You may believe that a man willing to share candidly the intimacies of his urinary tract has waived his right to circumspection, but I claim it, nevertheless. I will report little more than the facts. The first is that I’m no longer pestered by fantasies of my wife making love to my friends. Affection-wise, I find myself hovering in the high nineties regarding Lily, and though Angelo’s presence may be a factor, I believe she has been fonder of me this summer than in some time, though she resists representing her affection for me in percentiles. I get the distinct impression that despite managing to fulfill all of my wife’s dire prophecies about how I would fare in her absence last April, I passed some sort of test, though I have no idea how, nor is she telling. Perhaps no man should possess the key to his wife’s affections, what makes and keeps him worthy in her eyes. That would be like gaining unauthorized access to God’s grace. We would not use such knowledge wisely.

  What is it that we want from women? To be understood? I’ve heard men say this—I may even have said it myself—but I have my doubts. Not long after Lily returned with Angelo, she took some things to the dry cleaner’s, including my tweed jacket. In one of its pockets she found the Polaroid Tony had taken of Missy Blaylock and me in his hot tub, which I’d f
orgotten. This she presented to me for explanation, and who could blame her? Except that she seemed less troubled than puzzled by the fact that her husband had been photographed in a hot tub with a naked woman. “Isn’t that the girl from ‘The People Beat’?” she wanted to know.

  3. I have friends and loved ones. In fact, our house has been full to overflowing most of the summer. Angelo spent over two months, returning to Philadelphia in early August for his trial, which ended, as expected, with his conviction, though it now appears he may get a suspended sentence if he agrees to sell his house and move out of the neighborhood, which the judge seems to have concluded directly impacts his ability to cope. He will pay LeBrother’s reasonable medical expenses.

  Julie moved in with us temporarily after their house rented, before joining Russell in Atlanta, and Russell visited twice during that period. Our daughter Karen also paid a visit, bringing with her a young music professor and the news that she will be having their child around Christmas. They hope to marry in the spring. (“You hope,” her father remarked.) On Memorial Day weekend it required two Weber kettles to barbecue for the crowd, which included my mother, my father, Mr. Purty, Angelo, Julie and Russell, Karen and her young music professor, Tony Coniglia and an ex-student now in her late thirties, Jacob and Gracie (who bickered), and Teddy and June (just back from their cruise). June got drunk, followed me out back to my stand beside the two Weber kettles, and confided she wasn’t sure how much longer she could do it, how much longer she could stay married to Teddy, how much longer she could allow all the brightness to leak out of her life. Her sordid affair with “that little turd” Orshee, she now understood, was nothing but a measure of her growing desperation. The good news was that their pussy research (my term, not hers) was beginning to pay dividends. The Emily Dickinson article had been accepted for publication by a good academic journal, and the Virginia Woolf had gone to its third reader at an even better one. If that got accepted as well, and if I would write her a letter of recommendation, she might go on the job market in the fall. The week after that I had a beer with Teddy to celebrate his winning by one vote a runoff election for a three-year term as department chair. Though he was clearly elated, he played down the election, reminding me that he was going to have it a lot tougher than I ever did. In Paul Rourke he’d be dealing with a hostile dean, and the election gave him a less clear mandate than I had enjoyed as chair (I’d won by three votes). The best news was that he felt his marriage was back on track. The cruise had cost a hell of a lot of money, he admitted, but the chair’s salary would make up for it. He also announced his intention to surrender his crush on Lily, which he’d begun to see as unhealthy, though he admitted he’d probably always be a little in love with her. There were tears in his eyes.

  But the summer’s nearly over now, and the crowds have pretty much departed. At night, when it’s too warm to sleep, Lily and I are often drawn out onto the deck. There we watch the night sky and listen to the distant sound of our neighbors’ nocturnal voices. Not words, just sounds. Old husbands and wives. Old husbands and new wives. Old wives and new husbands. By the time the sound of their lives reaches us, there is only tone and texture, no meaning, but at the end of a long summer day it’s mostly affection, though I have no idea what percentile.

  4. I have enough money.

  I don’t understand how this can be so, but Lily promises to explain it to me. Since there’s no reason to be circumspect about money, I’ll share what little I do know. First, the money Lily used to make Angelo’s bail was returned when her father went back to Philadelphia to stand trial. We have loaned Julie and Russell what Lily refers to as substantial sums but not, she maintains, dramatically more than she’s told me about, and certainly no more than we spent on Karen’s education. Our portfolio, I’m to understand, is intact. This is good news. That we have a portfolio, I mean.

  Nor have I severed all ties with the university as I originally intended. True, I tendered my resignation to Jacob Rose, but the letter got lost somehow, and now I find myself on some sort of half-year sabbatical, something I’d forgotten was owed me when I agreed to take on the position of temporary chair. I’ll be teaching in the fall, on leave in the spring. I have more advisees than anyone in the department, and this fall they will include Blair and Bobo, who came in together to announce their decision to become English majors. I explained to Bobo, whose name is John and who had in his possession, incredibly, a García Márquez novel, the corner of a page turned down about halfway through, that “English Major” was not a military designation, but he was undeterred. I saw them together on campus once or twice after that, and Bobo was holding her hand tenderly and stroking the blue veins in her pale wrist that I had myself often admired. I don’t get to count Leo among my advisees, but I got a letter from him a few weeks after the end of the term. He decided to take Hem’s advice and go it alone. Well, not completely alone. His letter was accompanied by the first hundred pages of a new novel he’d written since moving into a cabin in the mountains. It appears to be the story of a young novelist who moves into the mountains after a disastrous semester at the university, where no one, not even his writing teacher, understood how revolutionary his writing was.

  Also, Jacob Rose went into his files, resurrected a grant proposal Lily and I had written up nearly a decade ago, and without our permission pitched it to the chancellor. The idea had been that we’d track bright, disadvantaged high school kids in and around Railton, starting in their sophomore year, and guarantee them tuition and books at the Railton Campus for as long as they kept their grades up. Now that Lily’s been promoted to principal at the high school, the proposal makes even more sense, we’re told. Rourke got wind of the whole deal, including the fact that during the pilot program I’d be teaching part-time (number of classes to be negotiated) at the campus, part-time at the high school (ditto), and promptly labeled it a typical Devereaux boondoggle, but he didn’t seem interested in opposing it.

  Better still, Wendy, Rachel’s agent, formerly and now again my agent, parlayed my fifteen minutes of media fame into a book sale. Later this fall my “Soul of the University” Rear View satires will be collected and issued by a trade publisher, which will offer them to an unsuspecting public under the title The Goose Slayer. The cover will be a still of me brandishing Finny (the goose, not the man) aloft for the television cameras, and I will provide a foreword explaining the event, as well as a personal essay on William Henry Devereaux, Sr., part of which I’ve already written and which Wendy claims is the best work she’s ever seen from me. It’s the only piece that isn’t a satire, the only piece that doesn’t contain, as far as I can tell, a single yuk, though I’m convinced it belongs in the collection. There can be little doubt that William Henry Devereaux, Sr., his life and works, embody the spirit of our increasingly demoralized profession. Which brings me to—

  5. I am, as the last surviving William Henry Devereaux, my own man at last, though I must confess that my father’s death in mid-July affected me more powerfully than I dreamed it would. William Henry Devereaux, Sr., died quietly and painlessly, sitting upright in his favorite reading chair, dressed as if for a faculty meeting in a tweed jacket, corduroy slacks, and button-down oxford shirt, reading Our Mutual Friend, his chin resting on his chest. My mother thought he was napping and went about her own business quietly, not wanting to disturb him. That was no longer possible, if indeed it ever had been.

  We had little enough to say to each other, my father and I, before he died. His confidence to me on the day we visited the old midway—that he feared he might have once wronged Dickens—was as close to intimacy as we ever got, and I doubt we’d have improved upon that moment had he lived longer. That afternoon I came to understand that one of the deepest purposes of intellectual sophistication is to provide distance between us and our most disturbing personal truths and gnawing fears. The William Henry Devereaux, Sr., who returned to Railton with my mother and Mr. Purty still had access to the full range of human emotions, but aft
er a lifetime of sophisticated manipulation they were no longer connected to anything real. They fired randomly, unexpectedly, like the passions of a newborn, urgent but without context or, in my father’s case, appropriate context.

  I suspect that my mother suffers from a similar affliction, though in a minor key, because my father’s death, so soon after his return, did not shake her as I would have predicted. At some level she must have felt not only cheated but also the butt of some cosmic joke. However, instead of being devastated by losing him all over again, she seemed almost released from some weighty obligation by his passing. As if, having said before family and friends “till death do us part,” she could now say with a clear conscience that she’d been good to her word. Shortly after the funeral I heard from her that she’d begun the task of going through his papers. She sounded almost excited, and I guess that would make a kind of sense. My father was probably more interesting and alive, more the man she knew, on the page than in life, and going through his notes must have represented some small recompense for all the actual conversations missed. She’d always claimed that she was my father’s ideal companion and that, in betraying her, he’d betrayed his own best self, and reading through all his drafts and research notes and letters to famous colleagues must have made her feel vindicated in this belief.

  A couple days after she’d begun the task, she called me, all excited, to say that she’d discovered two hundred pages of a novel in manuscript, dating back nearly twenty-five years. “Isn’t it amazing?” she wanted to know, and I didn’t have the heart to tell her that it would have been much more amazing if there hadn’t been two hundred pages of a novel. He was an English professor. What did she expect? Well, what she expected was that I’d want to read it as soon as she finished, and I know I hurt her feelings when I politely declined, explaining to her that I’d already read it, that it had already been thrust into my hands by my English department colleagues. “You’re comparing your father to the likes of William Quigley?” she wanted to know. She’d met Billy at some gathering earlier in the year. “Not at all,” I truthfully assured her. I’d have much preferred to read two hundred pages of Billy’s book.