Straight Man

sneakers, a T-shirt, and a thrift shop sport coat, sort of academic grunge. The look isn’t all that different from the one sported by people like Jacob Rose and William Henry Devereaux, Jr., back when we were ourselves young campus radicals. The resemblance, I’m always relieved to note, ends there. There are very few books in my young colleague’s office, but he’s rigged up a small TV with a built-in VCR. His bookshelves are stacked with videotapes, each one full of recorded, decade-old sitcoms, which he plays throughout the day, even when he’s consulting with students. Hisresearch on these same shows he publishes, for environmental reasons, in electronic magazines, thereby sparing himself the criticism that his essays are not worth the paper they’re printed on. At the moment he’s researching an episode of a sitcom that, if I remember correctly, was called
Diff’rent Strokes
. I angle the chair I’ve been offered so that my back is to the screen.
    “This was a seminal show,” Orshee informs me, with what appears to be genuine excitement.
    “A seminal sitcom?” I say. “High praise.”
    If he knows I’m tweaking him, he doesn’t rise to the bait.
    “Conservative white America’s great race fantasy. Young black males, nonthreatening and loving. Old white guys who care about the black community. It’s great stuff.”
    As I listen to him, it occurs to me that Orshee was probably the kid who got his lunch money extorted in high school by some demographic relative of Guido’s. Here at the college he’s safe at last. Nobody’s even allowed to make fun of his ponytail.
    “I’m thinking about doing a special topics course next year, maybe compare a couple of episodes of
Diff’rent Strokes
with
Huckleberry Finn
. You know, like, the great American racist novel? Show how white attitudes haven’t changed, how the basic fantasy’s still intact today? June thinks it’s a good idea.”
    Something about the sound of June Barnes’s name in Orshee’s mouth reminds me of the rumor I keep hearing about my young colleague and Teddy’s wife.
    “I thought you didn’t want them reading books,” I say. “Writing being a phallocentric activity and all that.”
    He locates a remote among his papers and presses pause, freeze-framing the cherublike face of the little black kid who starred in the show. “I’m not against books. You can get in a rut with them though.”
    “I know. I’ve been in that rut since I was thirteen.”
    He blinks. “You didn’t learn to read till you were thirteen?”
    “I didn’t love to read until about then. It’s the love that makes the rut.”
    “Right,” he nods seriously. “Hey, what’s it like living out in Allegheny Wells?”
    “There’s cable,” I assure him. “Some people have satellite dishes.”
    “Paul’s got one,” he says. “Professor Rourke?” he adds, so I’ll know who he’s talking about.
    I decide there must be no significance to his having mentioned June a moment ago. He’s just dropping names. He’s up for tenure next year and wants me to understand, in case I’m still chair, how well he’s fitting in. He’s on a first-name basis with all factions. I nod to show I’m with him. “Big guy. Surly.”
    Orshee ignores this. “I like his house, except I think it may be sliding down the hill.”
    I suppress a grin.
    “June thinks so too.”
    The article they’ve been working on all year, I recall, is on clitoral imagery in Emily Dickinson. The way Teddy explained it to me, June, being herself in possession of a clitoris and therefore more sensitive to its encoded appearances in the Dickinson poems, was going to draft the article, which she and Orshee would then revise, making use of his up-to-date critical theory vocabulary. “It’s weird,” Teddy confessed to me one day back in the fall semester when June’s notes were strewn all over the house. “Back when I was fifteen, I was obsessed with pussy. Now I’m fifty and
my wife’s
the one obsessed with it.”
    “We’ve looked at a couple houses out there, but I don’t know,” Orshee says. I must look puzzled, because he quickly clarifies his meaning. “Sally and I.”
    “Right,” I say. Sally is the seldom seen young woman who accompanied him to Railton four years ago who has reportedly been “finishing her dissertation.”
    “I mean, it’s really nice out there, and I wouldn’t mind being among the trees. But we’d, like, have to give up our dream of living in an