Straight Man

say.”
    We’re grinning at each other now. “Somebody told me that English department floozy gigged you,” she says, studying my nose. “Everybody’s been telling me, in fact.”
    I try to imagine what kind of spin the story would have down here in Women’s Studies, where I’m a suspected chauvinist and Gracie is thought to be an aging, pitiful tramp, one of the very few female faculty members in the college not encouraged to teach a course in Bodie’s interdisciplinary program.
    “I’ve been much in the news lately,” I admit, then remember that Bodie, on principle, doesn’t own a television and therefore has probably seen neither the local news nor
Good Morning America
. Since nobody’s told her yet about my threat to start executing ducks, I give her the short version of these events while we drink our coffee. Bodie’s reaction to my account is annoyingly similar to Lily’s. This is exactly the sort of thing she’s come to expect from me, her tired acceptance seems to suggest. It was also Bodie who witnessed my descent of snowy Pleasant Street Hill last winter.
    As I tell her my story, she starts to light two more cigarettes, catches herself, and stops. “So,” she says, when I finish. “You’ve been to see Little Dick. Did you get the ‘big storm brewing’ speech?”
    “Tidal wave,” I inform her.
    “It’s a tidal wave now?”
    “Can’t be stopped,” I tell her. “Only thing we can do is move to high ground. Take our friends with us. You want to come with me? I may have room for one more.”
    “I hope his pee-pee falls off.”
    “Don’t perpetuate the stereotype,” I suggest.
    “So? How did you respond?” she wants to know, and I sense that the barometric pressure in the room has changed.
    “I said we’re too far inland to be affected by tidal waves. He insisted I take the weekend to rethink my position. He said I should talk the whole thing over with Lila.”
    Normally, this would get a chuckle out of Bodie, but today, nothing. “And you said there was no reason to think it over. You said it’d be a long, cold day in hell before you’d betray your colleagues. Youtold the little prick he could go fuck himself.” The way she’s looking at me, I get the impression that this same advice could well be coming my direction, depending upon my answer.
    “I’d have to rewind the tape,” I tell her.
    She ignores this completely. “Because that’s what the people who are loyal to the union are all telling him. That’s what
I
told him.”
    “I’m not sure I’m all that loyal to the union,” I confess, preparing as I admit this to go fuck myself.
    Bodie looks around her office, as if for someplace to spit. “I can’t believe you’d even consider siding with the administration.”
    “A plague on both their houses, is my feeling,” I tell her.
    This appeases Bodie somewhat, without exactly endearing me to her. “You may be called upon to testify though,” she warns. “In the fundamentalist sense. You won’t be allowed ironic distance. That I can guarantee.”
    I turn my empty Styrofoam cup upside down on her desk. “I have to tell you, Bodie. Once again you have failed to make me feel better about the world and my place in it.”
    Suddenly the tension is gone, and we’re friends again. “I’m a pretty constant source of disappointment to men,” she concedes, adding sadly, “and not a few women.”
    “Want to tell me about it?” She usually does.
    She studies me, as if she might be seriously contemplating whether to confide this latest heartbreak to me. And perhaps because in the past she always has, I’m surprised when she waves the issue away. “Just somebody,” she says. “Somebody who’s not supposed to be on my side of the fence even.”
    And she’s no sooner said it than the image has leapt, full blown, up onto my imaginative wide screen—in Technicolor and Dolby stereo—Bodie and Lily, wrestling, naked and sweaty, on top of Bodie’s desk. It’s happening right here, right now. The picture I’ve conjured up is so dramatically vivid that it’s not undermined even by its absurdity. I mean, after all. To be believable, the scene requires Lily, a woman I know, to become a woman I don’t know, a character violation of the sort I’m always warning my fiction writers against. True, I tell them, people have secrets. They have complex inner lives that resist simple interpretation, but what we do know about them cannot be ignored,forgotten, or