Straight Man

I’d believe him.
    Rourke, I can tell, does not, though he goes back to doodling. “Sorry,” he says. “I always feel better after I’ve made you tell an outright lie.”
    “Why would I lie to you?” Jacob wants to know. The aggrieved innocent is one of his better roles.
    “Because that’s what deans do?” Rourke suggests. “Because you and Hank are friends?”
    “Hey,” Jacob says. “We’re all friends here, aren’t we?”
    Rourke lip-farts.
    “That’s a motion somebody
should
make.” Orshee’s voice. “In fact, I will. I move that we all try to be friends here.”
    Silence. This motion too dies for lack of a second, though it may not have been taken seriously. I hear June Barnes, somewhere below, mutter, “Grow up, friend.”
    And hearing these words I believe, perhaps for the first time, that there has been something between Teddy’s wife and Orshee. Maybe it’s just the silence that her muttered words engender, as if to acknowledge that somehow life—something real—has wormed its way into this living parliamentarian death, something no one quite knows how to deal with. How many meetings like this one have we sat through in the last twenty years? How many hours, weeks, months would they total if measured out in Prufrock’s coffee spoons? How many good books have gone unread, essays unwritten, research discontinued, in order to make room for brain-scalding meetings like this one? How many books might I myself have authored? I know what William of Occam would say. He’d say it doesn’t matter. Had I been meant to write books instead of sit in English department meetings, I’d have written them. I made my choice, the fact that I can’t remember making it, to the contrary, notwithstanding.
    I am now literally above all this, a posture I have long attempted to suggest from my seat at the table. For years Lily has been urging me to stand up and testify. Either I’m one of these people or I’m not. To her way of thinking I should either throw in my lot with them, live among them, my friends and colleagues, or take my respectful leave and find out where I
do
belong. Other people make their peace with who they are, what they’ve become. Why can’t I? Why live the life of a contortionist, scrunched in among the rafters? So that I can maintain the costly illusion that I am not what my father is? Is this pretense worth the effort? To this reasonable argument I offer my father’s own words. You bet your ass.
    Below, the procedural issue has been decided. The Finny-Rourke contingent, having seen through Jacob’s strategy, has forced a vote on the recall issue today and scheduled another meeting for Friday to enter nominations, the election itself to follow the Friday after. I’mgrateful things have speeded up. It has to be ninety degrees up here among the rafters. I’m sweating profusely, and when I lean forward, a drop of perspiration from the tip of my nose finds the crevice I’m peering down through and lands with an almost audible plink in the center of the long conference table. Finny is distributing the ballots, explaining that a yes will be construed as a vote
for
impeachment, a no as a vote of confidence in the chair. Several of my colleagues are confused by this. Billy Quigley is awakened to vote, though he cannot be made to comprehend the significance of the yes and no. When he marks the yes box, someone, June, I think, angrily snatches the ballot from him and fills in the no.
    “I’m
for
him,” Billy protests.
    “Then you vote no, against the recall,” she sighs.
    Billy shrugs and passes in the ballot.
    “How do you live with this bossy bitch?” he wants to know. Which means Teddy must be down there somewhere. I recall the way he looked returning from class earlier in the afternoon, head down, unwilling to meet his colleagues’ eyes. How long has he known? I try to put myself in his place, imagine what he must be feeling. His and June’s marriage has always appeared to be one of professional and political convenience, and what romantic yearnings Teddy allows himself are safely vested in Lily, a woman he knows he can’t have. Still it can’t be pleasant for any man to swallow the fact that his wife is consorting with the likes of Orshee. In the end it all comes down to horse trading, and being traded breaks, if not the heart, then some mechanism in the heart necessary to its proper functioning. You don’t believe me, ask my mother.
    The counting of ballots is under