Straight Man

Orshee was trying to imply was that gay people were fine with him, as were black people and Asian people and Latino people and Native American people. In fact, Orshee would have preferred to be one of these people himself, politically and morally speaking, had the choice been his. Bad luck.
    “You
should
have hired a woman,” Orshee continued. He seemed on the verge of tears, so deep were his convictions in this matter of his having been hired over a qualified womaṇ. “And when I come up for tenure, you should vote against me. If we in the English department don’t take a stand against sexism, who will?”
    This time even I was aware of my gurgling.
    “I’m not in favor of eliminating both male candidates,” Gracie clarified her position. “Just Professor Threlkind. Because we don’t need another white male. Because we don’t need another person in Twentieth Century. Because we don’t need another poet. That’s three strong reasons, not one.”
    As she spoke I could see Teddy shaking his head out of the corner of my eye, probably because he knew me, and because he knew Gracie, and because he knew Gracie was going to tee it up for me one more time, and because he knew I’d yank the driver out of the bag and let her rip.
    “Who’s our first poet?” I asked of no one in particular. “Somebody remind me.”
    The spiral notebook caught me full in the face with enough force to bring tears to my eyes. Everyone, including Finny, who brought to meetings he chaired the emotional equilibrium of a cork in high seas, looked on, bug-eyed. But what confused me was the fact that the notebook Gracie used remained, unaccountably, right in front of my face. For an irrational moment I actually thought she had written something on the cover that she was inviting me to read. Cross-eyed, I tried to examine what was before my nose. Only when I realized that Gracie was in fact trying to retrieve her notebook, and that each tentative tug sent a sharp pain all the way up into my forehead, only then did I realize that the barbed end of the spiral ring had hooked and punctured my right nostril, that I was gigged like a frog and leaning across the table toward Gracie like a bumbling suitor begging a kiss.
    The next moment I was surrounded, though I couldn’t see anyone through the tears. “Oh my Gawd,” I heard Gracie say, and she let go of the notebook, as if to suggest that by doing so she could end her involvement with me. I could just go ahead and keep her notebook if I wanted.
    “This is crazy,” Orshee kept repeating, as if he were being forced to witness the sort of thing he would have preferred not to see happen, even to a white male.
    Finally, at my own suggestion, Teddy was dispatched in search of a custodian, and by the time the two men returned with a set of needle nose pliers with wire-cutting capabilities, the other members of the personnel committee had all clustered safely behind me because I had sneezed twice, spraying blood the length of the seminar table and flecking Finny’s white suit with pink.
    All of this Teddy now reports to my wife, and to his credit he doesn’t end the story there. He’s not an English teacher for nothing, and he understands a thing or two about dramatic movement.
    “So here we are, all back in our seats at the table.” He grins at Lily. “Your husband is honking blood into a swatch of brown paper towels from the men’s room. Gracie is blubbering how sorry she is. Finny is daubing his white suit with his handkerchief. And you’ll never guess what your husband does next.”
    From the look on his face, I can tell that Teddy is confident that nobody in a million years could guess what William Henry Devereaux, Jr., did or said next, but he’s forgotten who he’s talking to, namely the woman who’s been living with William Henry Devereaux, Jr., for thirty years and who claims to know him better than he knows himself.
    “I bet he called the question,” my wife replies, apparently without having to give the matter much thought, and looking right at me when she speaks, as if challenging me to deny it.
    Teddy’s face falls. He looks like he’s been groined a second time. “Right,” he admits, his voice saturated with profound disappointment. “He said, ‘Let’s vote.’ ”
    My wife looks disappointed as well, as if there’s no particular glory to be garnered in predicting what a man like me will do next. “You know how sensitive Gracie is about her poetry. What’s