Straight Man

He offered Finny a seat and a generous belt from his flask. “I’ve drunk with uglier broads than you,” he informed his colleague, adding, “Not much uglier though.”
    But Finny’s freedom and happiness were short-lived. By the time the last marine was choppered off the roof of the American embassy in Saigon, his soon-to-be ex-wife had Finny hospitalized and drugged back into disheartened heterosexuality and male attire. After a month-long convalescence he returned to the classroom in Modern Languages with half a dozen new exercises illustrating the difference betweenrestrictive and nonrestrictive clauses, and since then he’s caused no problems, unless you considered his arrogant incompetence and brain-scalding classroom tedium problematic.
    I stop outside Finny’s classroom and peer in through the small window in the door. Finny’s soft monotone makes it impossible to hear what he’s saying. His students have the grim look of death camp dwellers, and in a sixty-second timed test, six of the eleven consult their watches. Four yawn. One starts violently awake. And they’re only fifteen minutes into class. By the time I’ve completed the timed test, one or two students have noticed my face framed in the small window. Pretty soon, everybody but Finny is aware of me. A couple of these students are also taking a class with me, and these roll their eyes, as if to say, “Can you believe this? Why doesn’t somebody
do
something? Why don’t
you
do something?” I roll my eyes back at them. Because.
    I make what I think is a clean getaway, but then I hear the classroom door open behind me and feel pursuit. “This,” Finny hisses at my retreating form, “is harassment.”
    I turn to face him. Finny is resplendent, as always these days, in a white suit, pink tie, white shoes. “Finny,” I say. “Qué pasa?”
    His rich tan deepens. “And so is that,” he points out, quite rightly. Within the last year Finny, an ABD from Penn, has become the proud recipient of a Ph.D. from American Sonora University, an institution that exists, so far as we’ve been able to determine, only on letterhead and in the form of a post office box in Del Rio, Texas, the onetime home, if I am not mistaken, of Wolfman Jack.
    In truth I shouldn’t goad him. I know this. It was my malicious goading of Gracie in yesterday’s personnel committee meeting that resulted in my mutilated nose, which is at this very moment throbbing like a guilty conscience.
    “I know you don’t respect me, or anybody else in the department,” he tells me. “But that doesn’t mean you get to ridicule me in front of my students.”
    I hold up my hands in surrender. “Finny—”
    “Stay away from my classroom, or I’ll file a grievance,” he warns me. “I’ll get a restraining order if I have to.”
    “I teach in that room too,” I point out, since it’s true. “I don’t think I can be restrained from a room I teach in.”
    This stops him momentarily.
    “When
I’m
in it,” he explains seriously.
    “Oh. Well. That. Sure,” I agree, as if I couldn’t be more delighted to have the whole misunderstanding cleared up. “Just one question.”
    He pauses at his classroom door, hand on the knob. “What?”
    “How did you get the bloodstains out of that?”
    “The suit you’re referring to is at the dry cleaner’s, thanks to you.”
    Thanks to me? “You have two identical white linen suits?”
    “Is there any law against that?”
    “Well, there’s natural law, of course.”
    “It’s only fair to warn you,” he warns me, “that I spent part of last night on the phone. There’s considerable sentiment among our colleagues for a recall of the chair.”
    I can’t help but chuckle at this. “Name one time in the last twenty years when that wasn’t true.”
    Rachel, our department secretary, is at her computer terminal when I enter. Like Finny, she dresses up for work. Unlike him, she doesn’t wear cologne. Rachel is one of the half dozen women on campus with whom I have to work at not falling in love. The majority of these women are in their midthirties to midforties and married to men who don’t deserve them. (I regard these men the way Teddy regards me.) Rachel’s husband, from whom she is recently separated, is an enormously self-satisfied local man who is frequently employed by Conrail (and just as frequently laid off), a man whose inner emotional equilibrium is not easily tilted. Only a wife with aspirations of her own could