Straight Man

her support group, for all I know.
    I know without looking that the large suitcase she’s brought with her, which contains what she imagined she’d need to survive a weekend at her parents’ house, does not contain a single book. My daughter has never found a moment’s comfort in a book, and this provokes in me a complex reaction. She has done, without apparent thought or effort, what I myself once intended to do. The offspring of two bookish parents, I made up my mind as a boy that I would be as unlike them as I could. I was determined not, as an adult, to look up from a book with that confused, abstracted, disappointed expression that my parents shared when jolted out of book life into real life. I may even have thought that becoming a
writer
of books would be a kind of ironic revenge on people like my parents.
They’d
be taken in by my tale spinning, whereas I would not. I’d know how the dream was made, how the trick was done, and so it would have no power over me. The joke, of course, was on me. For three years during the writing of
Off the Road
I lived between worlds, not really in either, perhaps to the detriment of both. My father read the book in the hospital the night before he was to have a kidney stone surgically removed, and he confessed afterward that my novel had not distracted him as thoroughly as he might have wished. He kept noting how it was put together, he said. At the time I was wounded, although now, at nearly fifty, I realize how a stone can focus a man’s attention, how it may even diminish the power of literature.
    This morning, like every morning for a week, I have awakened needing urgently to pee. There’s no use denying it. I have inherited from my father most of what I had hoped to avoid. When all is said and done, I’m an English professor, like my father. The most striking difference between him and me is that he’s been a successful one. Karen, our older daughter, is another apple that hasn’t fallen far from the tree of academic knowledge. She tried a few nonacademic things after college, but thensuddenly she decided to go back to graduate school, where she’s recently concluded both her dissertation, on Matthew Arnold, and an unwise affair with her dissertation director, though I learned of this only recently, the same way I learn so many things. From Lily. After the fact.
    No, it’s Julie who’s the wonder. A child who’s made good on her childhood oath not to become a fool of books.
People
magazine perhaps, but not
Moby-Dick
. Her ambition I understand, but how has she been able to pull it off? Also, why isn’t she picking up the ringing phone?
    I almost recognize the voice on the other end of the line when it asks for Dr. Devereaux. It’s thick and slow and dogged sounding, the voice of a man who thinks he knows something you don’t. It sounds a little like Lou Steinmetz, of campus security. Since I can’t imagine why Lou Steinmetz would be calling me at—I peer over at the alarm clock on the nightstand—six-thirty on a Monday morning, I try to think who else I know who sounds like Lou Steinmetz that might have a reason for calling me.
    “This is Lou Steinmetz,” the voice says. “I was wondering if you’d be willing to come in to campus.”
    Something about the way he says this makes it sound as if I’m being asked to surrender to the authorities. Like he wants to know whether I’m going to give myself up peacefully or whether he’s going to have to come get me. I can almost imagine him saying we can do this the easy way or the hard way, it’s all up to me. “Lou,” I say. “I come in every morning, just like you.” This is not precisely true, of course, but pretty close, since I took up the reins of abusive power in the English department.
    “We’ve got ourselves a little campus incident is why,” Lou explains.
    “An incident?”
    “I’m not authorized to say more at this time.”
    “I’ll be in.”
    “When would that be?”
    “I’m not authorized to say, but soon.”
    The phone rings again before I’ve even had a chance to put my feet into my slippers. This time it’s Teddy. “I can’t believe it,” he says. “You really did it. I can’t believe it.”
    “It’s six-thirty in the morning,” I remind him. “I haven’t even had my coffee. What have I done?”
    “Are you saying it wasn’t you?”
    I hang up on him and sit there on the edge of the bed trying to clear the NyQuil cobwebs. I’ve spent the entire weekend in