Straight Man

noisily down the steps. It’s his plan to do several furious laps around the house to dispel the humiliation. I know and understand my dog well. We share many deep feelings.
    Back inside, the blood is returning to Teddy’s face. “Lily taught him that trick,” I explain, adding, “I thought he’d never learn it either.”
    “It’s a good thing you’re already injured,” Lily says, as if she means it. She’s both flustered and embarrassed by Teddy’s have been groined this way. She’s a woman who naturally tends to injuries, and she’s trying to think of a way to tend to this one of Teddy’s.
    “I want you to know that a good-looking woman did this to me,” I tell her.
    Teddy quickly fills her in. “Gracie,” he explains.
    “Gracie is no longer a good-looking woman,” my wife reminds us. “I’m much better looking than she is since she got fat.” She’s gone to the counter and returned with a carafe of steaming coffee.
    Teddy is considering telling her that she was always better-looking. I can tell by the pitiful, lost look on his face. He actually opens his mouth and then closes it again. In fact, Lily does look wonderful, it occurs to me. Slim, athletic, aglow, she runs a couple miles a day, and if her muscles ache like mine do after a run, she keeps those aches a secret, feeling perhaps, that complaining about aches derived from athletic endeavor is male behavior. She does not have a high opinion of male behavior in general.
    “What did she use on you,” she says, now that she’s had a chance to examine my schnoz close up, “a shrimp fork?”
    When Teddy tells her it was the ragged end of Gracie’s spiral notebook that she used to gig me, Lily winces, testimony, I’d like to think, to her continued tender feeling for me. Teddy launches into an enthusiastic but imaginatively pedestrian account of the personnel committee meeting that has resulted in my maiming. His entire emphasis is on my goading of Gracie. He misses all the details that even an out-of-practice storyteller like me would not only mention but place in the foreground. He’s like a tone-deaf man trying to sing, sliding between notes, tapping his foot arhythmically, hoping his exuberance will make up for not bothering to establish a key. It makes for painful listening, and I privately edit his account—restructuring the elements, making marginal notes, subordinating, joining, cleaving, reemphasizing. I even consider writing up my own version for the
Railton Daily Mirror
(known affectionately to the locals as
The Rear View
). Last year I did a series of op-ed satires under the heading “The Soul of the University,” deadpan accounts of academic lunacy under the pseudonym Lucky Hank. A narrative of today’s personnel committee meeting might resurrect the series.
    Whether it should be resurrected is another issue. Past installments have raised the ire of university administrators and my colleagues, both of whom have accused me of a lack of high seriousness, of underminingwhat little support there is in the general population for higher education, and of biting the very hand that feeds me. A well-written account of my maiming today would not even require exaggeration to achieve the desired absurdist effect, as Teddy’s pedestrian telling proves, but his account lacks something vital. As I tell my students, all good stories begin with character, and Teddy’s rendering of the events fails entirely to render what it felt like to be William Henry Devereaux, Jr., as the events were taking place.
    William Henry Devereaux, Jr., had, in fact, been suffocating. Phineas (Finny) Coomb, as chair of the personnel committee, had chosen a small, windowless seminar room for us to meet in. Understandable, since there were only six of us. Except that two of the six—Finny himself and Gracie DuBois—were heavily perfumed, and William Henry Devereaux, Jr., had gotten up three times to open a door that was already open. Teddy, his wife, June, and Campbell Wheemer (the only untenured member of our graying department) all seemed to be in complete control of their gag reflexes, but William Henry Devereaux, Jr., was not.
    “Are you all right?” Wheemer interrupted the proceedings to inquire. He was only four years out of graduate school at Brown, and he wore what remained of his thinning hair in a ponytail secured by a rubber band. After being hired he had startled his colleagues by announcing at the first department gathering of the year