Straight Man

competent. Since Rachel damn near made
you
look competent, I’m going to have to steal her. I figure we get our department colleagues to elect Paul Rourke chair, then we take turns abusing him. What do you say?”
    What does William Henry Devereaux, Jr., say? Nothing for a long moment, then, “Listen, Jacob. Thanks anyway.”
    Jacob just stares at me for several beats before exploding. “I knew it.” He’s gotten up from his desk now and is pacing behind it. “I knew you’d do this. What’s
wrong
with you?” he wants to know, and he’s notthe only one. Another wave of nausea has crashed over me. I have all I can do not to double over. “What kind of man goes through life content to be a fly in other people’s ointment? What kind of pleasure do you derive from that? How old are you?”
    All these questions mix dangerously with my nausea, and I have to sit down, certain that I will pass out if I don’t. I try to remember if I’ve ever felt worse in my life. The tips of my fingers are tingling, the edges of my vision blurring. Jacob appears blissfully unaware of my plight.
    “You know who I feel sorry for?” he’s saying. “Your wife. Women are always telling me I can’t see anything from a woman’s point of view. But I’ll tell you, my heart fucking bleeds for any woman—much less a woman as bright and kind as Lily—who has to spend a lifetime with a bonehead like you.”
    At the mention of Lily I break into a cold sweat. I can feel four distinct tracks of perspiration moving down my trunk and into the waistband of my shorts. Waves of nausea are rolling over me like contractions. Like Jacob—like every man our age—I have been accused of not being able to imagine anything from a woman’s point of view, but sitting here, paralyzed with something very much like fear, I feel like I’ve just crossed into the final stage of labor. Transition!—the term for it suddenly returns to me. I feel fully dilated, like it’s now okay for me to push. Except that this is not the place. I know the place. It’s just outside the dean’s office and down the hall a couple of doors. Time? At a dead run, ten seconds, if I were capable of a dead run. In my current cramped condition, limping tenderly, grabbing onto the backs of chairs and door-frames, three times that, at least. I wait for a monster contraction to subside and struggle to my feet.
    “You know what you are?” Jacob asks me. He’s got a good, righteous head of steam up, and I envy him this. He’s saying things that friendship has kept him from saying for twenty years, and their release at this late date is orgasmic. Asking him to stop would be like asking him to pull out. “You are the physical embodiment of the perversity principle,” he gives me to understand. “Fake left, go right. Fake right, go left. Keep everybody in suspense, right? What’s Hank going to do? If you have to fuck yourself over to surprise them, so be it.”
    Somehow, I’ve made it out into Marjory’s office, and Marjory, who prefers golf to sex, and who is not, like Jacob, in the throes of an intenserhetorical orgasm, is looking at me with such alarm that it’s clear she’s intuited my distress. I’m tempted to tell her I’m in labor, the contractions are coming one right after the other. Instead I fix her with a homicidal glare and say, “Get him away from me!”
    But this merely encourages Jacob. “There he is, Marjory,” he addresses her. “Hank Devereaux. The man who fucked himself and claimed it was the best lay he ever had.”
    “Jacob,” Marjory says sharply. “I think Hank is sick.”
    I’ve made it as far as the door that leads to the outer office where the students who have come to petition the dean are required to wait. They too look alarmed when they see me.
    “They don’t come much sicker,” Jacob agrees.
    My palm is so slick with sweat that I can’t get a grip on the stainless steel doorknob. It keeps slipping. I wipe off my palm on my tweed coat and try again.
    “Just answer me one thing before you go,” Jacob says, leaning against the door so it stays shut. “I’ll ask you the simplest question I know, and I bet it stumps you.”
    I try to bring him into focus, but I can’t. I swear to God if I had a forty-five I’d blow him across the room and into eternity.
    “Just answer me this,” he insists, blind, apparently to the fact that perspiration is now pouring off me. There’s a bead of ice cold sweat on the tip of my nose.