Straight Man

moment of your time, Professor?”
    “Not now, Lou. I’m busy.”
    “I could insist.”
    “You could try.”
    “Yes, I could.”
    “Except I’m connected all the way to the governor,” I tell him. “You could bust me and throw me in the slammer, but I’d be back on the streets with all the other scum before you completed the paperwork.”
    Lou studies me seriously. He’s almost sure I’m joking, but not quite.
    “How about I come by and see you this afternoon after my class?”
    When he’s gone, Missy comes over. “I still have to talk to you about that friend of yours,” she tells me.
    Actually, I don’t like the fact that Missy wants to talk to me about Tony Coniglia. I left them, two happily naked, consenting adults in Tony’s hot tub. If Missy Blaylock has regrets—and I can’t imagine she wouldn’t—I hope she doesn’t express them to me, especially if she’s trolling for sympathy. “This really weird thing happened after you left?”
    “It was all pretty weird before I left, thanks.”
    But she’s too serious to be diverted. “Get him to tell you about it,” she says. “If he doesn’t, I will.”
    “Okay,” I say, though I have no intention of following through. Tony and I are scheduled for another of our racquetball matches this afternoon. If he brings up the subject of what transpired, or didn’t transpire, after I left, fine. Otherwise, I don’t want to know.
    “Between us,” Missy says, her voice lowered, “did you off this duck?”
    “Goose,” I remind her.
    “Goose.”
    “No comment.”

CHAPTER
24
    It’s almost noon before I can kick free and pay a visit to Jacob Rose. In the interim, half the department has traipsed through my office. Finny has stopped to determine my intentions with regard to this afternoon’s meeting. I’ve asked him to remind me what meeting we’re talking about just to watch him flinch. The meeting that will remove me from this office and from the chairmanship of the department, he wants me to understand. Will I be attending, is what he’d like to know. Of course, I have every
right
to attend. Charges will be leveled and discussed, and of course I’ll have the
opportunity
to respond, perhaps even the
obligation
. Still, I’m to understand that, in this present circumstance, even my staunch political allies have aligned themselves against me. It is unlikely that I will get much support, and I may be uncomfortable listening to so many low opinions of my performance as chair, the detailing of so many grievances. If I attend, I should expect to be charged with giving aid and comfort to the administration, of misinforming and betraying the department I’m charged with notifying and nurturing. Finny wouldalso like me to understand that while he hopes, officially, that I’ll attend the meeting, he privately would prefer I didn’t. He’s anxious that I not reduce the proceedings to farce. In Finny’s opinion today’s meeting is serious business, and English has been a joke department in the eyes of the university community long enough. He actually says this. I repeat: in an English department the serious competition is for the role of straight man. We leave it that I will not attend the meeting. I will be permitted to vote by proxy, assuming I can find someone to bear one.
    I have also been visited by Teddy and June, separately, each wanting to urge me one last time not to take this lying down. It chills their blood to vote with Rourke and Finny, and they see my behavior as perverse. All I have to do is attend the meeting, announce that I’ve not provided Dickie Pope with a list, assure my colleagues that I would never do such a thing, and once again our house will divide against itself, return to the gridlock we’ve lived with so long it’s begun to seem natural. Teddy reminds me that the last time our department ever agreed on anything we hired Gracie. Consensus is unnatural for us, is his argument. We’re an English department. Let’s act like one.
    Just before heading over to see the dean, I’m visited by Orshee. He’s been thinking about our department all weekend, he confesses, and the more he’s thought about it, the less reason he can see for the sorry state we’re in. “I mean, we’re all reasonable people,” he says. (“Who?” I can’t help responding. “Name one reasonable person in our department.”) What’s really troubling Orshee, of course, is not so much the sad state of our department as his own place