Straight Man

that’s why you were thinking about coming back to the English department.”
    “This early-retirement golf package is even better.”
    The door opens then, and Jacob Rose emerges, to my surprise, in the company of Terence Watters, the university’s counsel, whose face is the same blank mask he was wearing when I saw him last week coming out of Dickie Pope’s office. Henry Kissinger was emotive by comparison. What he’s doing talking to Jacob Rose I can’t imagine.
    “You know Hank Devereaux?” Jacob asks.
    Terence Watters surrenders the slightest of nods, as if to suggest that it may be necessary to disavow all knowledge of me later. By tomorrow this whole meeting may not have taken place. It may be necessary to send someone to rub out Marjory, because she too is a witness. For now, it’s too soon to tell.
    “All right, get in there and drop your pants,” Jacob tells me when Terence Watters has taken his leave. “Marjory, bring the switch.”
    We go into Jacob’s office. He closes the door behind us.
    “Sit there,” he instructs me. “And keep your hands where I can see ’em.”
    This is some good mood he’s in. I can’t for the life of me figure out why, and I need to. A liberal arts dean in a good mood is a potentially dangerous thing. It suggests a world different from the one we know. One where any damn thing can happen. Which is exactly what this present circumstance feels like. I mean, this is a
really
good mood that Jacob Rose is in. Not just the kind of good mood that may descend upon a man when he’s gotten a couple of job offers and asked a woman to marry him and she’s said yes. A
really
good mood. He looks like a man convinced not just of his own inherent goodness but that virtue is destined to prevail, evil predestined to failure. In other words, he looks nothing like a liberal arts dean, especially one who’s just compiled, for the purposes of termination, a list of four names, one of which is that of his best man.
    “Let’s start small, shall we?” Jacob suggests. “How come you’re terrorizing my niece in class?”
    “Your niece?”
    “Blair,” he explains. “I’m her uncle.”
    “You are? I had no idea.”
    “She didn’t want any special treatment.”
    “She won’t stand up for her convictions,” I explain. “I didn’t realize the problem was genetic until now. I wouldn’t have been so hard on her.”
    This is one of my better jabs, but Jacob doesn’t even flinch. He just chuckles. “God, you are
such
an arrogant prick. You remember when we came here?”
    “Black September, 1971? Sure.”
    “Remember old Rudy Byers? Even twenty years ago people were saying what an arrogant prick you were. Rudy said, Don’t worry, he’ll grow up. Pups are supposed to mess themselves. Swat him on the ass with a rolled-up newspaper a couple times and he’ll get the message.”
    “Now
there
was a dean,” I say nostalgically.
    “The thing is, you’re worse now than you were then. And you think you’re just being frisky. Fifty years old and you’re still shitting on the carpet and thinking it’s clever.”
    “Well,” I say, “at least one of us got trained. Somebody says ‘heel’ and you heel. Somebody says make out a list, you make out a list.”
    I study him carefully, because this is where he’ll start denying, if he’s going to. I guess I’m surprised when he doesn’t. Jacob and I go back a long time, and it’s time that makes you think you know people. But instead of looking guilty, Jacob appears even more full of himself.
    “That other job offer was from right here, wasn’t it?” I say. “That’s why you didn’t have to worry about what Gracie would say about Texas.”
    “I think she would have gone with me,” Jacob says.
    “So now, finally, you’re a player,” I say. “And all you had to do was write down four names.”
    “Wrong again,” he says. “It wasn’t all I had to do. It was the easy part of what I had to do.”
    “That’s the first thing you’ve said I don’t believe,” I tell him. “I refuse to believe that writing down those names was easy.” What I don’t tell him is that I know how hard it must have been because I considered doing it.
    He raises his hands in the air like he’s going to surrender. “Dee-fee-cult for you, easy for me.” Still grinning.
    “Jacob,” I say.
    “It’s a rough break for Orshee,” he admits, “but he’ll be given a year to find something else. He’s publishing that trendy