Straight Man

manage it, but unfortunately that’s what he had in Rachel, who, in addition to serving as department secretary and raising their son, Jory, has been, for the last ten years of their depressing marriage, quietly writing short stories and working up the courage to show them to me. This year I’ve been helping her rewrite them, teaching her the little tricks of the craft she needs to know. That’s about all I have to teach her, since the requisite heart, voice, vision, and sense of narrative are already there, learned intuitively.
    Last fall, buoyed and excited by my enthusiastic response to a new story, she made the mistake of sharing my comments with her husband and inviting him to read one of her stories. It took him most of theevening, she said, sitting there in his armchair, laboring over her sentences, his brow darkening, phrase by phrase, pausing every so often to glance at her. When he finished, he got up, scratched himself thoughtfully, and said I must be trying to get her in the sack. Where literary criticism is concerned, he’s a minimalist.
    Rachel is surprised to see me so early. It’s only eight-twenty, and I’m not due for another two hours by conservative estimate. Rachel’s hours are seven-thirty to three-thirty, so she can pick up her son at the elementary school. I had no idea she actually came in so early, but here she is, so she must. When she gets a gander at my nose, which is even uglier this morning than last night, Rachel starts visibly, and the look on her face remains frightened, as if she fears the explanation will only intensify my injury’s horrific aspect. “Rachel,” I say, pouring myself a cup of coffee, “you’re on the job.”
    She is speechless, looking at me, and her reaction, I realize, is what I’d secretly been hoping for from Lily, who over the years has learned to take me in stride. There’s no reason a wife shouldn’t take her husband in stride, of course, yet it’s disappointing to be so taken, especially for a man like me, so intent on breaking people’s gait.
    “I stayed up reading a good book last night,” I tell her.
    “Really?” she says. I can tell she’d like to think I’m alluding to her revised story collection, given to me a couple weeks ago, but she’s afraid to presume. The hope in her voice is excruciating.
    “Let’s have lunch,” I suggest. “I’ll tell you all about it.” I’m not trying to get Rachel in the sack, as her husband, the minimalist, fears, but I did spend the evening with her, in a manner of speaking, so I consider lunch with Rachel a platonic reward.
    “You’re having lunch with the dean?” she says, holding up a pink message slip. Most of Rachel’s statements sound like questions. Her inability to let her voice fall is related to her own terrible insecurity and lack of self-esteem. She’s been working in the department for nearly five years now, and it’s only recently that she’s stopped excusing herself to go to the women’s room to vomit when someone is cross with her. According to Rachel, only Paul Rourke causes her gag reflex to kick in anymore, and I assure her that this is perfectly normal.
    I take the memo, glance at its scant information. The time noted in the upper-left-hand corner is seven-thirty.
    “What’s Jacob doing in so early?” I wonder out loud. An academic dean in his office before midmorning cannot be good news. Jacob and I are friends, and I know he never buys lunch except to mitigate bad news. “Anything else?”
    Rachel reluctantly hands me two more messages, as if she would have spared me if she could. I take them into my office, close the door. The first memo is from Gracie, who would like me to set aside some time this afternoon to meet with her. Her message contains neither apology nor suggestion of regret at having mutilated her chairman. The second is from the faculty union representative, Herbert Schonberg, who has been begging an audience for weeks, probably in order to discuss my continuing misconduct as interim chair, a position I’ve been elected to precisely because my lack of administrative skill is legend.
    No one for an instant considered the possibility that I would do anything. No one imagined I could locate the necessary forms to do anything. I am regarded throughout the university as a militant procedural incompetent. This is partly due to the fact that I have maintained loudly, publicly, for twenty years that not policy but rather epic failures of imagination