Straight Man

to gather his things.
    “You can wait until we’re finished though,” I say. “I’m sure of it.”
    Apparently Lou Steinmetz can hear the warning in my voice, because he stands quietly, for a moment, calculating. He knows he has no business in my classroom, no business opening the door, no business even knocking on it, which he hasn’t done. He’s got the mentality of all bad cops. Exceed your authority until you’re questioned, then back off, regroup, attack again from a different angle.
    “Okay, Professor,” he says. “I guess we can wait out here in the hall. We get paid the same either way. Mind if we take a couple chairs?”
    “Yes, I do mind.”
    He nods. “Thanks for your cooperation.”
    When the door closes again, I realize that, having marked my territory, I have no further use for it. If there’s a way to return to Solange’s story now, I don’t know it. Perhaps sensing this, Leo has resumed gathering his things. “May I be excused?” he wants to know. He seems aware only of the immediate application of his question.
    I should say no. I should keep him, on principle, right where he is. But Leo wants to get on with things. I know the feeling. We all watch him shoulder his backpack and make his way to the door. In a story he’d pause there, turn, and leave us with a memorable line, some honest observation, something truer than anything he’s managed to writeall year, but this isn’t a story, and he exits our company quietly, undramatically. A moment later we see him again, hands cuffed behind his back, being led across the lawn to the waiting cruiser.
    “Could we all go now?” asks the student who says he’s already used my nose.
    “Solange?” I ask, since it’s her story we’re discussing.
    “Please,” she says, wearily.
    The others file out. Solange is last, and she stops at my desk. “I know the clouds were bullshit,” she informs me. “I’m not, like, stupid.”
    “Nobody said you were, Solange.”
    “Professor Rourke says I should forget fiction writing and concentrate on literature,” she says. “Go for my Ph.D. He says I’m smart and mean-spirited.”
    “I’m sure he meant it as a compliment.”
    “It’s not that I
want
to be mean,” she shrugs. “It’s just that I’m good at it. My dad always says you should do what you’re good at. He’s mean too.”
    “Come by during office hours tomorrow,” I suggest. “You got cheated today.”
    “I didn’t deserve anything,” she says. “It was shit.”
    “Maybe we can get you started on something that isn’t.”
    “The story started out to be about this boy? This shit-heel, beautiful boy I have no chance with. Then I thought, why should I give him the satisfaction?”
    “I guess you showed him.”
    “Yeah, well,” she says, watching out the window as the police car pulls away from the curb. “What will they do to him?”
    “Kick him out, probably.”
    “First interesting thing he’s done all year and he gets tossed out of school for it.”
    The police car is out of sight now.
    “What do you think he was trying to prove?” She’s remembering, I suspect, that she called him a wimp last Friday, called his manhood into question. Could she have caused all this? is what she’d like to know.
    I half-expect Lou Steinmetz to be waiting for me out in the hall, but he isn’t. He’s got his perp. He’s restored order, put things right. If there were something he could do about me, he would, but there isn’t.

CHAPTER
35
    By letting my class out early, I have a half hour to kill before my appointment with the dean, someone who
can
do something about me and apparently has. What I should do is go back to my office and call Phil Watson, as I promised I would. But the halls of the English department will be bedlam with the most recent political news, and the truth is I’m up to meeting neither friend nor foe. If Rourke is right and there’s an English list, half of my colleagues will be anxious to berate me for composing it, and the other half will want me to explain to them who composed it if I didn’t. I could find a pay phone somewhere, but the more I think about it, the more I want to do things in their proper dramatic order. If I’m to be told I have a malignant tumor, I want to learn of it after I’ve been fired, not before.
    It’s turned out to be a stunningly beautiful day, the sun high in a sky of robin’s egg blue, so I make my leisurely way over to the dean’s office, find a park bench