Straight Man

arrange his wedding? It’s true she’s often consulted about putting on the various festivities at the university, and Dickie Pope purportedly conferred with her in the matter of books for his empty shelves. Still. The whole thing comes into focus a split second after I hear myself ask, “What’s Gracie got to do with it?”
    “Well, it’s her wedding too,” Jacob says. The bride chooses the bridesmaids, the groom his groomsmen, but neither chooses parties who are anathema to the other, is his point.
    Even though the penny has dropped, I’m still confused. “Gracie’s already married,” I feel compelled to point out.
    “Her divorce becomes final next month,” he says. This is the first I’ve heard about any divorce. True, Mike Law has been looking especially depressed lately, but I took this to be the result of his
union
to Gracie, not of the dissolution of that union. “We’re thinking maybe a June wedding.”
    I try to think of something to say.
    “That’s a very unnatural way for a man to hold his jaw,” Jacob remarks.
    Perhaps. “Did you get a good look at my nose last week?”
    He’s grinning again. “Admit it,” he says. “You had that coming. Besides. I know everything there is to know about her. Her flaws. Her insecurities. We’ve been fighting for twenty years. Also fucking. My wife kicked me out over Gracie, you recall. Gracie married Mike to piss me off when I wouldn’t marry her before.”
    “And these strike you as compelling reasons for matrimony?”
    “There
are
no compelling reasons for matrimony,” Jacob admits. “Getting married is something you do despite compelling reasons.”
    “Have you mentioned you’ll be taking her to Texas?”
    “If that’s what we decide, she’s okay with it. Actually, I doubt we’ll be going to Texas. This other offer looks better.”
    Again, I’m speechless.
    “Anyway. We’ll work things out. Marriage is about working things out.”
    “Have you ever noticed that it’s only divorced people who ever say that?”
    “Don’t be a smart ass, always,” Jacob advises me. “You and Lily always work things out. It’s time for me to make something work. Seriously. You live by yourself out in West Railton for eight or ten years, you look at things differently. I don’t look forward to dying alone.”
    I bite my tongue. Jacob was wise to leave the English department. The competition is stiff, but he’s a straight man extraordinaire. “Marrythis 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