Straight Man

“Finny,” I say to the angry goose. “Qué pasa?”
    When the goose hisses again, I take my hands out of my pockets to show the troops I have no popcorn, no stale bread, no candy. Some of the smaller ducks shove off the bank again and begin their slow return, offering a parting, disillusioned quack or two. Eventually the others follow, leaving me with the goose I’ve dubbed Finny.
    “Don’t blame me,” I tell him. “You knew better.”
    “Professor Devereaux?” says a voice behind me. It belongs to Leo, a student in my writing workshop. Leo is tall and gangly, with red hair and a long, pimply neck. A couple of months ago he told me, as if he suspected that I alone might understand, that he despises all his other courses, not so much because they are taught by fools as because he laments any time spent not writing. He even regrets the necessity to eat and sleep. He lives to write.
    “There are lots of other reasons to live,” I assured him. “Especially at your age.”
    “Not for me,” he declared adamantly, as if he suspected that this was what I really wanted to hear, unequivocal testimony to his commitment. “They all say it’s a compulsion,” he explained, his red face aflame. He subscribed to several magazines for writers, and read all the author interviews. “You write because you have to. Because you have no choice.”
    “Of course you have a choice,” I insisted, not wanting to reinforce such a romantic view of writing for a young man with talent as modest as Leo’s.
    “Not me,” he repeated. “For me it’s writing or nothing.”
    Since we had this conversation back in February, spring has arrived, and everything is in bloom but Leo’s talent. In workshop his stories have been routinely eviscerated. He has another up for discussion today, and my guess is he’s in for a long afternoon. I’m also afraid he’ll ask me now what I thought of his story, though I’ve forbidden such inquiries prior to workshop. Fortunately, that’s not the question he wants to ask at this moment. “Who are you talking to?”
    “This goose,” I assure him.
    And in fact he looks relieved. “I was afraid you were talking to yourself.”
    The cafeteria of the student center is divided into a large student dining hall and a much smaller room for faculty and staff. The separation is strictly convention. There are no signs to designate it officially, but students steer clear of the faculty/staff area. In the beginning of the fall semester, a disoriented freshman may wander in, see all the tweed, pivot, and beat a hasty retreat, like a clergyman who finds himself in the foyer of a brothel. A couple weeks into the term and everyone knows. The students are great respecters of our space. I, however, am no great respecter of theirs. Often as not, I take a small table in the student section.
    In the bookstore across from the cafeteria I’ve purchased a
Railton Mirror
and also picked up a copy of the student newspaper, fully aware that these have never once cheered me up. I scan
The Rear View
, hoping for a follow-up story on William Cherry, the man who, earlier this month, lay down on the railroad tracks one night and was decapitated. The original story had hinted that there was more to the circumstance than met the eye, but it may be that despair is the simplest of tales. In lieu of what I’m looking for, I’m offered on the opinions page an article written by my mother, who, like her son, is a frequent contributor. Her column today is on the Department of Housing and Urban Development,which maintains and operates the senior citizen tower at which she volunteers, though she is herself older than half of the residents. What she is taking issue with today is HUD’s policy of mainstreaming mental patients into HUD facilities that were once exclusively the domain of senior citizens. A boy in Bellemonde, the next town over, is her object lesson on the failure of HUD policy. Two weeks after leaving the institution that had been in charge of his care, the boy took the elevator to the top of the Bellemonde Tower, then the stairs leading up to the roof. From there he climbed onto the wall, surveyed the world, and leapt from it. An eighty-year-old woman sitting on her balcony saw him go by and heard him land on the hood of a car in the parking lot with such force that he set off the horn, which continued to blow for another twenty minutes, until the locked door could be broken into with the Jaws of Life and the horn