Straight Man

disconnected. My mother’s thesis, if I read her correctly, is that elderly women should not have to bear witness to such tragic events. The mentally ill should have their own building to jump off unless they’re over sixty-five.
    I should probably have an opinion about this myself, but after reading my mother’s column I find myself conflicted by her logic, with which I’m always reluctant to agree, knowing her as I do. And I admit that a moral man wouldn’t get sidetracked pondering irrelevant details, like whether the boy also noticed the old woman as he passed her floor, whether seeing her there so unexpectedly provided him a lucid moment before he set off that horn. Back when I was a writer, I might have been able to justify such musings, since odd details and unexpected points of view are the stuff of which vivid stories are made, but now such thoughts seem more like evidence of an unbalanced mind, a warped sensibility.
    The student newspaper contains a lot more humor, though most of it is unintentional. Except for the front page (campus news) and the back page (sports), the campus rag contains little but letters to the editor, which I scan first for allusions to myself and next for unusual content, which in the current climate is any subject other than the unholy trinity of insensitivity, sexism, and bigotry, which the self-righteous, though not always literate, letter writers want their readers to know they’re against. As a group they seem to believe that high moral indignationoffsets and indeed outweighs all deficiencies of punctuation, spelling, grammar, logic, and style. In support of this notion there’s only the entire culture.
    The front page contains two big stories, one announcing the ground-breaking dedication this afternoon of the Technical Careers Complex, the second informing the community that the yearlong asbestos removal project is near completion, only the Modern Languages Building remaining. There’s a picture of one of the asbestos removal workers in his mask and special clothing, which I study for a moment, trying to decide why a man whose appearance has been completely disguised should remind me of my father, William Henry Devereaux, Sr., who begat not only me but American Literary Theory and is about to return to his son’s vicinity, if not his life, after a forty-year hiatus.
    Rather than contemplate the return of W.H.D., Sr., I pick up and begin to read Leo’s latest effort, with which I have to be at least marginally conversant by this afternoon’s workshop. His new story appears to be cinematically inspired—that is, uninspired. It’s about the ghost of a long dead murderer who returns at twenty-year intervals to terrorize the same small town, graphically executing the descendants of the original townsfolk who hanged him in the previous century. The final scene of the story is climactic merely in the sense that after slaughtering a young woman character whose only crime seems to have been cock-teasing, the ghost murderer rapes her corpse. The murder itself is accomplished in a single well-developed paragraph, the rape in the following single-spaced page and a half. In a handwritten note appended to the story and addressed to me, Leo expresses one or two slight misgivings. He wonders if the rape scene is overdone. And he wants to assure me that the narrative is not finished. Originally, he’d thought of it as a short story, but now he suspects it may be a novel. Next to his query concerning the rape scene, I write: “Always understate necrophilia.” Then at the bottom of the final page, “Let’s talk.”
    “Okay, let’s,” says a voice at my shoulder, and when I look up I see it’s Billy Quigley’s daughter Meg.
    “You’re a sight for sore eyes,” I say, motioning for her to join me. It’s true, too. Neither Billy Quigley nor his long-suffering wife would appear to have many genetic gifts to bequeath their offspring, but all of their girls are beautiful. Meg’s beauty is almost breathtaking, and, inthe manner of most truly beautiful women, she reminds you of no one but herself, whereas her other sisters all resemble each other, like young soap opera actresses. Meg has a face you wouldn’t expect to see again this century.
    She pulls out the chair opposite mine. She has a steaming cup of tea and a lumpy brown paper sack that looks like it may contain a tennis ball. “I didn’t know there were any hard and fast rules governing the aesthetics of