Straight Man

I’ll share a short one with Billy, but not in the morning. Not after a night like last night. “I’m on my way to my own execution.”
    “Be late then,” he says. “What can they do? Kill you twice?”
    “Yes,” I say. “That’s the beauty of academic life. You get to die over and over.”
    Billy downs a short shot of Irish whiskey. “I want to talk to you about Meg,” he says.
    I study him. Billy looks completely sober, for him an unnatural state. I shove my hands in my jacket pockets, find in one of them a tender peach, quickly remove them again. The spasm of guilt I feel suggests that my father was right. You may as well eat the peach if you’re going to feel guilty anyway. According to the signals my cross-wired conscience is sending me, by flirting with Billy’s beloved daughter, I’ve betrayed him and my wife and my secretary.
    “I want you to do me a favor,” he says. He’s got me fixed with a liquid, bloodshot eye, and I can’t look away. “Tell her you can’t rehire her for the fall.”
    “That’s a hell of a favor, Billy,” I tell him.
    “Hank,” he says, his voice low now, embarrassed. “I always try to do what I can for my kids. The rest of them … I wouldn’t say this to anybody but you … the rest of them take the money and run. They’re not bad kids. It’s not that. But Meg, she’s the one that’s got the best shot. I talked to a guy I know at Marquette, and he can get her an assistantship next fall.”
    “And how much will the assistantship cover?”
    “A big part.”
    “And you’ll pay for the other big part?”
    “I gotta get her away from here.”
    “They’ve got bars in Milwaukee, too,” I point out, since I know Billy’s concerned that Meg spends too much time in Railton dives.
    But I don’t think he even hears me. “If I can just get her out of this town.”
    When his voice falls, I let silence fall with it. But in the end, he’s more comfortable with the silence than I am. “Look,” I say, “why not cross the bridge when we come to it? You know I don’t have a budget anyway.”
    “You will,” he smiles crookedly, showing me his bad teeth, teeth he might have fixed if he were willing to spend money on anything buttuition, room, and board. “You’ll kill a duck, like the good terrorist you are, and they’ll give it to you.”
    I can’t help but smile at him. “It doesn’t work that way,” I remind him. “You can’t humiliate these people. Not really. You can embarrass them momentarily, but that’s about it.”
    “Well, let me put it this way,” Billy says, his eyes turning mean. “If you don’t do this for me, I’ll never forgive you. Finny and that damn Jesuit are planning to recall you, and I’ll vote with them. I don’t give a shit.”
    That’s the first lie he’s told me, though. His voice leaks conviction as plainly as Gracie’s leaks insincerity. Billy, I’d like to tell him, if you didn’t give a shit you could throw away the bottle, skip town, head south with Finny, and sink your ass in butter.
    Finny the man, not Finny the goose.

CHAPTER
15
    Thanks to Billy Quigley, I’m ten minutes late for my appointment with the campus executive officer, and thanks again to Billy, this means that I have only fifteen minutes to cool my heels in the outer office instead of the twenty-five I’d have had to wait if I’d been on time. Dickie Pope—he wants us all to call him Dickie, and most of us come pretty close—provides no reading matter in his waiting room, the walls of which are turquoise fabric upholstered. But then they don’t provide Catholics with magazines outside the confessional either, and those who visit Dickie’s Vatican are either penitents or supplicants. Apparently we’re to use the time contemplating our sins and desires.
    Still, I’m not without entertainment. I’ve got a perfectly good peach in my pocket, so I take a seat on the sofa and see how close to the ceiling I can toss it without its actually touching the acoustic tiles. I’m doing pretty well until I have to lunge for one and brush a lamp. The door to Dickie’s office opens just as I grab the lamp by its shade and thepeach plops onto the rug. Three men emerge, and they all stare first at the lamp, then at me, then finally at the peach. What’s wrong with this picture?
    There with Dickie Pope is Lou Steinmetz, chief of campus security, who’s taken a dim view of me since I came to the university over twenty years ago, in the