Straight Man

ago, perhaps because I’d heard he was going through a divorce, it occurred to me that Lily might be involved with a man she worked with at the high school, a man named Vince with whom we’d both been casually friendly for years. Sad, serious, decent, socially awkward, he’d always seemed the sort of man Lily would be attracted to if a frivolous, wisecracking, smooth, long-legged fellow like me weren’t in the picture, and for some reason it felt oddly thrilling to contemplate a new love for Lily, the sort of thing a man could almost wish for his wife if it didn’t involve a betrayal of himself. For a week or so I’d imagined signs of infatuation in Lily, but finally they were impossible to sustain, though for some reason I tried.
    Since then they’ve been replaced by increasingly ridiculous yet vivid fantasies of Lily and other men in the throes of passion, and I can’t help wondering what they mean. Because in a sense, they aren’t ridiculous at all. My wife is an attractive woman, and it’s not just Teddy’s enduring devotion I offer in evidence here. There is, in addition, my own. There’s no question of her ability to attract a lover. Is it arrogant of me to assume that, married as she is to William Henry Devereaux, Jr., she’s immune to falling in love with another? Well, yes, it is arrogant, and yet for reasons I could not articulate (I know there are times, like tonight, when Lily is not all that pleased with me), I simply know that she loves me and that she loves no other. Which certainty makes the strange, unsought fantasies that much more unsettling. Many of my male colleagues—married and divorced—regularly confess to sexual longings. They all want to get laid. But, to my knowledge, I’m the only one who regularly envisions my
wife
getting laid.
    Yet as I survey these wooded houses it occurs to me that they are probably home to stranger imaginings than mine. Disappointment and betrayal and emotional confusion dwell in most of them. Many are forsale and have been since the divorces that spoiled them. Jacob Rose’s ex-wife, for instance, still lives in the house nearest ours. Finny’s ex lives at the bottom of the hill. The completion of their house had coincided almost to the day with Finny’s discovery of his true sexual identity, though he later reneged, returning, he claims, to the heterosexual fold, though not to his wife. I doubt my imaginings are more bizarre than those of Finny’s ex, who ventures out of the house they built together only when it’s absolutely necessary.
    No doubt we all should have been suspicious of what these new houses represented, built as they were at the crossroads of our careers—a year or two after promotion to associate or full professor, in unspoken acknowledgment of the second or third child that made the house in town too small, an admission that promotion in an institution like West Central Pennsylvania University was a little bit like being proclaimed the winner of a shit-eating contest. Certainly such success did not reflect greater worth on the open academic market. To move to a better college, we’d have to give up something—tenure or rank or salary, or some combination of the three. A few did. Lily and I probably should have. After I published “the book” we might have used the advance to move. But we’d quickly learned how much more expensive it was to live in places where people wanted to live. The advance and promotion that got a bulldozer knocking down trees at the top of our hill in Allegheny Wells wouldn’t have started a Homelite chain saw in Ithaca or Berkeley or Cambridge.
    And who knows? Maybe we were wise to stay put. In a little over a month I will be fifty, and the book I published at twenty-nine remains, as Paul Rourke likes to point out, the collected works of William Henry Devereaux, Jr. The bearded, shaggy-haired author who stares down the camera so piercingly from the jacket of
Off the Road
no longer greatly resembles the clean-shaven, thinning-haired, proboscis-punctured full professor who reflected back at me earlier from my kitchen window. I sometimes tell myself that I might have found another book in me if I’d been in a different, more demanding environment, one with better students, more ambitious colleagues, a shared sense of artistic urgency, the proper reverence for the life of the mind. But then I remember Occam’s Razor, which strongly suggests that I am a one-book author. Had I been more, I’d be