Straight Man

dean as more pushed against than pushing,” I reported.
    “He’s a wimp,” June agreed, though she and Teddy are also friends with Jacob.
    “Or she,” I added, apropos of nothing.
    Orshee looked up, confused. This was his line. Had he missed an opportunity to say it?
    “Why are we here?” Teddy wondered, not at all philosophically. “Why not wait until the position has been approved before ranking the candidates? This is liable to take hours, and we have no guarantee that the position won’t be rescinded tomorrow, in which case we will have wasted our time.”
    “The dean has requested that we rank the remaining candidates,” Finny intoned, “and so rank them we shall.”
    Common sense efficiently disposed of, endless discussion of the three remaining candidates ensued. Twice I had to be requested to stop gurgling. Three times I beat Campbell Wheemer to his “or she” line. No one seemed able to recall what had attracted us to these three candidatesto begin with. I doubted, in fact, that we ever
were
attracted to them. They represented what was left after we’d winnowed out the applications that were personally threatening. To hire someone distinguished would be to invite comparison with ourselves, who were undistinguished. Not that this particular logic ever got voiced openly. Rather, we reminded each other how difficult it was to retain candidates with excellent qualifications. To make matters worse, we were suspicious of any good candidate who expressed interest in us. We suspected that he (or she!) might be involved in salary negotiations with the institution that currently employed him (or her!) and trying to attract other offers to be used as leverage with their own deans.
    Gracie was anxious to whittle the final three applicants down to two, having discovered something alarming about the third. “Professor Threlkind is an untenable candidate given our present scheme,” she pointed out. As she spoke, she referred to notes on the untenable Threlkind that she’d written down in her large spiral notebook. During the course of our personnel committee meetings, she’d worried the spiral out of its coil, so that its hooked, lethal end was exposed, using it to chip flecks of lacquer from her raspberry thumbnail. “We’re already overstaffed in Twentieth Century,” she reminded us. “Also, we have no demonstrated need for a second poet,” she added, since the candidate had listed several poetry publications in little magazines.
    The reason the untenable Threlkind was still part of our deliberations was that Gracie had come down with the flu last November and missed the meeting at which she might have had him dismissed from further consideration. Her own field was Twentieth-Century British, and she’d desktop-published, just last year, a second volume of her poetry. If the untenable Threlkind were hired, Gracie would have to share courses in these areas, courses that she had long considered her own private stock.
    “And I’d also like to point out that the candidate is yet another white male,” she concluded, closing her notebook in a gesture of finality.
    “Do we already have a poet?” I heard William Henry Devereaux, Jr., inquire innocently. Teddy and June stared at their hands, traces of smiles curling their lips. They had a long list of political enemies, and Gracie was near the top, having been part of the coalition that had brought Teddy down off his chairmanship.
    “That’s an out-of-order remark,” Finny declared without conviction, and I caught a whiff of his minty breath mixing dangerously with Gracie’s perfume.
    “I think we should eliminate both male candidates,” Orshee offered.
    “Are you suggesting that we not consider male candidates?” Teddy wondered. “Simply on the basis of gender?”
    “Exactly,” Orshee replied.
    “That would be illegal,” Teddy said, but his voice didn’t fall quite right, leaving an implied “wouldn’t it?” hanging in the air.
    “It’d be moral,” Orshee insisted. “It’d be right.”
    “Still, it’s not the procedure we followed when we hired you,” Finny reminded him. Finny, who’d come out of the closet several years ago and then gone back in again, had even more reason than the rest of us to be disappointed in our young colleague. He’d been Orshee’s most vocal advocate, having apparently concluded on the basis of several remarks made during his interview that Campbell Wheemer was gay, whereas it turned out that all