Straight Man

the spare refrigerator at all times, and it’s a measure of his isolation that despite such enticements very few of his colleagues will provide company for a man so seriously depressed. “I’ve got my own entrance now,” he explains, another sad enticement. I can visit him without running into his wife,is what he wants me to understand. I
should
visit him, I know. I was an usher at his wedding—what—fifteen years ago? Longer? Black Saturday, he calls it.
    “How are things downstairs?” I ask him. French, Spanish, German, Italian, and Classics occupy the floor below ours.
    “Silly, small, mean-spirited, lame,” he explains. “Same as English.”
    “Have you been over to the Vatican?” it occurs to me to wonder, since Mike is the senior person in Spanish. “Asked to make out a list?”
    He shakes his head. “There’s just the three of us in Spanish. I heard Sergei had a private meeting, but he denies it, the prick.”
    Sergei Braja, I remember, chairs Languages, which comprises a single department. “What’s your best guess?”
    “Wouldn’t surprise me,” he admits. “Gracie’s convinced, of course. She may even know, the way she sucks up to Little Dick.”
    “Thank God you and I remain pure,” I say, holding the door for him.
    “We end up stalling in front of doors and talking to ourselves though.”
    This early, the English department corridor is empty, its offices dark, except for those who have been punished with eight o’clock classes. Those plus Finny, who requests eight o’clock classes, five days a week, every term. These requests are viewed by Teddy and June as further evidence of serious perversity in Finny, but I know they are nothing of the kind. In many ways Finny is the most rational member of our ragtag band, at least if you grant him the one or two assumptions he proceeds from. By requesting early morning and late afternoon classes, by enforcing a strict attendance policy, and by devoting the first three weeks of class to differentiating between restrictive and nonrestrictive noun clauses, Finny halves his teaching load each term. Students start dropping out by the second week of classes, and by the end of the term he has a seminar of seven or eight where once there were the regulation twenty-three. This, he maintains when challenged, is the result of genuine university standards, evenly applied.
    Between ten in the morning and four in the afternoon Finny’s days stretch out, long and languorous, and he takes a two-hour lunch at the Railton Sheraton on the other side of town in the company of a favored male student or two, it is rumored. I have my doubts about this rumor,just as I have about all academic rumors. Since returning to his medication and the closet, Finny has maintained strict appearances, often arriving at department functions with a female companion, as if she were capable of dispelling the communal recollection of his two-week career as a transvestite.
    This occurred during the final days of the Vietnam War. Our bugging out of Southeast Asia may even have influenced Finny to flee his marriage, and his logic apparently was that if he could do without his wife, there was a good chance that he could do without his medication as well. In this latter he was apparently mistaken. The first day off his meds, he became garrulous and good-natured, which was bizarre enough, but he also appeared to be wearing eyeliner and mascara. The second day, residual medication flushed from his system, he appeared in full regalia. Black satin dress. Pearls. High heels. Bellowing down the long hallways of Modern Languages: “Blessings, my good people, on this glorious day that God has made! Throw open your windows!” Teddy, then chair, locked himself in the office I now occupy and refused to come out. Otherwise, Finny managed to visit just about everyone.
    Never was a man dressed as a woman more full of joie de vivre than Finny off his meds. “We have to let out the dragon,” he insisted to one and all. “Just let him out! Let him fly off and lay waste to other kingdoms. Let him
be gone
!” he thundered, from atop his unsteady high heels, his rapture bringing tears to his eyes and causing his mascara to run. “If you don’t get out of my office,” Paul Rourke told him, “I’m going to rip your nylons off and strangle you with them.” June Barnes merely counseled him against pearls before five. Only Billy Quigley, who normally had no use for Finny, seemed glad to see him.