Straight Man

author. Except I know you helped her. I thought you’d be thrilled.”
    “I am, Wendy,” I assure her.
    “You sound funny about it, is why I mention it.”
    If I sound a little funny, the explanation isn’t one I’m sure I can share with her. In fact, her news has taken me back more than twenty years, to the afternoon this same woman called with the news that
Off the Road
had been bought by a trade publisher, news that ultimately resulted in Julie’s conception, our buying the land in Allegheny Wells that started the faculty stampede, my refusal to sell to Paul Rourke, my promotion to full professor, which deepened our roots in a place we never planned to live for very long. All from one phone call. What her call is going to mean to Rachel I don’t know, but I do know her life is about to change.
    “It’s not much money,” Wendy says, as if this will make me feel better. “It won’t be a big seller. There’s a lot of grunge fiction out there since Ray Carver.”
    “There’s a lot of grunge out there in real life,” I feel compelled to point out.
    “Is her husband like the guy in the stories?”
    “They’re separated, but yeah,” I say. “Call her now, okay?”
    “What time does she get in to work in the morning?”
    “Call her now, Wendy. You’ve no idea what this is going to mean to her.”
    “Okay, I’ll call until I reach her.”
    “Listen, while I’ve got you on the phone … do you suppose this has ever happened before?”
    “What?”
    “A guy gets a call from his agent, who informs him she’s just sold his secretary’s book?”
    There’s a beat, and then she says, “I can’t sell books you don’t write, Hank. Are you working on a book?”
    I have in my hand a sheet of Xerox paper I’ve been absently folding and refolding into half a dozen different shapes. When I unfold itagain and flatten it out on my new blotter with the palm of my hand, I realize it’s one of the thirty copies of the department’s operating paper detailing the rules governing my ouster. I have been hoping that my old agent and friend would ask this very question, so that I could tell her I was thinking of maybe having another go. If the piece of paper I’ve just been worrying into various shapes were the first page, however wretched, of a new book, I might be able to tell her that. But it’s not the first page of anything, and so I feel compelled to give her the simple truth, unadorned. “No,” I tell her. “Call Rachel.”
    When we’ve both hung up, I refold the sheet of paper in half, lengthwise, and slip it into the inside pocket of my coat. Outside the frosted glass of my office door, shadows are moving, migrating down the hall toward the English department conference room. Intellectually, I know the purpose of this shadow movement is to determine the immediate administrative future of one William Henry Devereaux, Jr., Department of English Interim Chair. But let’s be frank. It’s a future that doesn’t interest me much.

CHAPTER
28
    During my sophomore year in high school, I fell in love with a beautiful black-haired girl named Eliza, and on the night of our third date, at the homecoming dance, she broke up with me, offering not a word of explanation and leaving me to drown my sorrows in one cream soda after another in the dark, strangely unlocked school cafeteria. Having that big, dark, familiar room all to myself suited my sense of tragic loss, especially with the sound of the Everly Brothers leaking in from the gym next door. Whenever I want you all I have to do is dream. Dream, dream, dream. I couldn’t bring myself to leave the cafeteria until I heard the announcement for the last dance, whereupon I got up, collected my armload of Fanta bottles, deposited them in the rack next to the soda machine, and sloshed back into the gym to retrieve my coat where I’d left it on the bleachers. The lights were always turned down low for the last dance, and my plan was to get my coat and slip out into the tragic night unobserved, but suddenly she was there, my Eliza, and she wanted toknow if I would dance with her, even though she was terrible, would I dance with her, please. She touched my elbow bewitchingly.
    Well, I could and did dance with her, and when we came together on the dance floor, her small breasts on either side of my jutting, adolescent breastbone, explanation was unnecessary, though I listened to how she’d suddenly realized what she had in me, how she didn’t want to lose