Straight Man

more. Simple.
    And Lily likes to remind me that it wasn’t building the house that proved problematic but rather purchasing the two adjacent lots to prevent neighbors. It was this, she argues, that marked the beginning of the English Department Wars that have raged ever since and that show no signs of abating. Lily would argue that when we purchased those lots, we set in motion the events that would inevitably lead to Gracie DuBois snagging my nose with her spiral notebook. And since the long chain of cause and effect can hardly be played out with so many of the players still alive, there’s every reason to expect further consequence, even from such an increasingly remote cause. Were it not for Occam’s Razor, which always demands simplicity, I’d be tempted to believe that human beings are more influenced by distant causes than immediate ones. This would be especially true of overeducated people, who are capable of thinking past the immediate, of becoming obsessed by the remote. It’s the old stuff, the conflicts we’ve never come to terms with, that sneaks up on us, half forgotten, insisting upon action. Nothing I said in today’s meeting could have provoked Gracie’s attack, though it might provoke another attack, provided we’re both still alive, in another decade or two, after my goading has had a chance to incubate. And if Paul Rourke ever finds a way to murder me and make it look like an accident, it won’t be the result of any recent, half-reasonable grievance he has against me but rather because I refused to sell him a lot almost twenty years ago when he wanted me to. Perhaps that’s the simplicity of it, the way Occam’s Razor might apply to old animosities in general and to Rourke and me in particular—that all things grow from the same seed, planted long ago.
    Actually, Rourke’s was the first of many offers we received and continue to receive on our two adjacent lots. What happened was that clearing a service road up through the trees on our hill caused a stampede. The man who owned the land had been promoting its development for years, without success. Everybody thought it was a good place to build houses, but nobody wanted to be first. Before the foundation of our place had been completed, three more lots had been sold halfway down the hill. That fall Jacob Rose was made dean, and he purchased the largest of the remaining lots, two full acres, and began construction on a house twice the size of ours, as befit a dean, even a dean of liberal arts. In November Finny and his wife bought a lot at the bottom of thehill. When I heard that, I went to the credit union for a loan. “We came out here to escape these people,” I explained to Lily, who hated to go further into debt for such a purpose.
    For some reason Lily did not share my sense of impending doom at the Sold signs that kept appearing, nailed to the trees along the service road. I couldn’t understand her failure to grasp what was happening. It was my opinion (then and now) that two people who love each other need not necessarily have the same dreams and aspirations, but they damn well ought to share the same nightmares. “Don’t you get it?” I told her. “The English department is moving to Allegheny Wells.”
    She stared at me for a long time, feigning incomprehension, then said my name in that way she has when she wants to suggest that I’m being more than usually unreasonable. “Hank,” she said. “Jacob Rose is your friend. There’s nothing wrong with Finny and Marie.”
    “There’s nothing wrong with Finny?” I exclaimed, pretending incredulity. Not quite pretending, actually. “My God, where will it end? Today Finny, tomorrow who?”
    Paul Rourke was who. He called me that December, three months after we purchased the adjacent lots with credit union money. “Not for sale,” I told him.
    “Everything’s for sale,” he said, pissing me off right away. He’d apparently concluded that I was being greedy. The price of the few remaining lots had doubled in the year since I’d purchased the first, and Rourke reminded me that if I sold both adjacent lots at the price he was offering, my own land would have been free. “Don’t be a prick,” he added. “I hear they’re going to start a new development on the other side of the road. Once they do that, who’s going to bend over for
you
?”
    “You’ll always bend over for me,” I recall saying. “And don’t think I don’t appreciate it.”
    He’d heard