Straight Man

sure Leo isn’t lurking nearby to hear this second conversation with a goose. “Qué pasa?”
    A noise issues forth from deep inside Finny, not a sound I’ve come to associate with this particular goose. It’s higher and thinner, a lament. Isn’t this a fine state of affairs? he seems to say. Who am I to disagree? There’s a bench nearby, so I sit for a few minutes and listen to Finny elaborate until I’m visited by a sneezing fit, the suddenness and violence of which frightens us both.
    When I return to the office, Teddy and June Barnes are hanging around the department, pretending to have business, an act I’m not buying this late on a Friday afternoon. Apparently I look suspicious too, at least to Teddy and June and Rachel, who are staring at me with alarm. “Have you been crying?” June wants to know.
    “Don’t be absurd,” I tell her. “I’ve been talking to a goose.”
    “Your eyes are slits,” Teddy says.
    “Maybe I’m allergic,” I say. The worst of my cold symptoms have, as predicted, come crashing down on me like Dickie’s tidal wave. It’snot an easy thing for a man like me to live for twenty-five years with a woman who unerringly predicts illness, whose favorite observation is that she knows me better than I know myself, and who never seems to want for ready evidence. A man like me, who gravitates so naturally to omniscient storytelling, probably should not be married to an oracle. He’ll spend all his time trying to prove the oracle wrong, an uphill battle. Ask Oedipus. Ask Macbeth. Ask Thurber. And this role can’t have been all that pleasant for Lily either. Oracles must grow tired of talking to people who never listen (Ask Cassandra. Ask Oprah), especially the ones who flirt with omniscience.
    When I let myself into my inner office, Teddy and June follow before I can close the door behind me. “We have to talk,” Teddy says when I finish blowing my nose and wiping my eyes. He takes a seat in the only chair, other than my own, that I keep in my office.
    “Monday,” I tell him. I can feel my eyes closing, blindness coming on. Oedipus at Colonus. Thurber in Manhattan. Already I’m watching Teddy and June in letterbox format.
    When Teddy notices that June has nowhere to sit, he leaps to his feet to offer her his chair. His reward for this anachronistic gesture is predictable contempt. How long have you been married to this woman? I’d like to ask him. I may be blind, but even I know better. I put my feet up.
    “This won’t wait till Monday,” June says. “You may not have noticed, but we’re in full-blown crisis mode here. Everybody knows about your conference with Herbert. Finny’s telling people you’ve cut a deal with the administration. By Monday, you’ll be recalled as chair.”
    There’s a knock, and Rachel pokes her head in. “Sorry?” she says, this lovely woman whose sense of timing could bring a man like me to dramatic climax. “Can I interrupt?”
    “Rachel?” I say, as if I can’t be sure it’s her I’m seeing through my slits. “Is that you?”
    “I just wanted to tell you I’m heading home?”
    “Already?” I say, my usual line. I consult my watch and see that she should have left half an hour ago. “Come sit on my lap. I want to hear all about your sexual harassment lunch.”
    This proves too much for June, as I hoped it would. “Talk to this asshole,” she tells her husband. “Tell him how few friends he has left.”
    Rachel, alarmed by the use of the word
asshole
among people who boast so many advanced degrees, steps back from the doorway to let June pass and jumps again when the outer door to the English department slams hard enough to rattle the glass.
    “I
really
have to go?” she pleads, placing mail and messages before me, apologetically.
    “I’m not worthy of you, Rachel,” I tell her, and halfway into a joke I find I haven’t the heart to finish.
    “I’ll see you Monday?” she says, glancing warily at Teddy and then back at me. “Could we have lunch, maybe? Talk about my stories?”
    “Make a reservation,” I tell her. “Someplace nice. There’s about a hundred dollars left in the department’s general fund. We’ll see if we can spend it.”
    When she’s gone, Teddy says, “You’re
trying
to get recalled, aren’t you?”
    “I’ve been trying all year, pal,” I say, thumbing through my mail. “It’s about time somebody noticed.”
    When I suffer another sneezing fit, Teddy takes pity on me. “Okay,”