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all the way up into my forehead, only then did I realize that the barbed end of the spiral ring had hooked and punctured my right nostril, that I was gigged like a frog and leaning across the table toward Gracie like a bumbling suitor begging a kiss.
    The next moment I was surrounded, though I couldn’t see anyone through the tears. “Oh my Gawd,” I heard Gracie say, and she let go of the notebook, as if to suggest that by doing so she could end her involvement with me. I could just go ahead and keep her notebook if I wanted.
    “This is crazy,” Orshee kept repeating, as if he were being forced to witness the sort of thing he would have preferred not to see happen, even to a white male.
    Finally, at my own suggestion, Teddy was dispatched in search of a custodian, and by the time the two men returned with a set of needle nose pliers with wire-cutting capabilities, the other members of the personnel committee had all clustered safely behind me because I had sneezed twice, spraying blood the length of the seminar table and flecking Finny’s white suit with pink.
    All of this Teddy now reports to my wife, and to his credit he doesn’t end the story there. He’s not an English teacher for nothing, and he understands a thing or two about dramatic movement.
    “So here we are, all back in our seats at the table.” He grins at Lily. “Your husband is honking blood into a swatch of brown paper towels from the men’s room. Gracie is blubbering how sorry she is. Finny is daubing his white suit with his handkerchief. And you’ll never guess what your husband does next.”
    From the look on his face, I can tell that Teddy is confident that nobody in a million years could guess what William Henry Devereaux, Jr., did or said next, but he’s forgotten who he’s talking to, namely the woman who’s been living with William Henry Devereaux, Jr., for thirty years and who claims to know him better than he knows himself.
    “I bet he called the question,” my wife replies, apparently without having to give the matter much thought, and looking right at me when she speaks, as if challenging me to deny it.
    Teddy’s face falls. He looks like he’s been groined a second time. “Right,” he admits, his voice saturated with profound disappointment. “He said, ‘Let’s vote.’ ”
    My wife looks disappointed as well, as if there’s no particular glory to be garnered in predicting what a man like me will do next. “You know how sensitive Gracie is about her poetry. What’s wrong with you?”
    In truth, I don’t know. I had not intended to belittle Gracie. At least not until I got started, after which it felt like the natural thing to do, though I no longer remember why. I don’t dislike Gracie. At least I don’t dislike her when I think about her. When I’m in one place and she’s in another. It’s when she’s near enough to backhand that back-handing her always seems like a good idea. This is true of several of my colleagues, actually, though they don’t bother me in the abstract.
    “Anyway,” Teddy is saying. “I thought I better bring him home. So far he hasn’t even said thank you.” Part of Teddy’s camaraderie with Lily has always been based on their shared belief that I am an ingrate.
    In my view, I am not an ingrate, but I can play that role. “Thank you for what?” I ask him. “Thanks to you my car is still in the faculty lot. Lily will have to take me to campus before she leaves for Philadelphia. All so you can come out here and flirt with her.”
    Teddy goes so scarlet at this that Lily leans over and gives him a kiss on the cheek, which makes him redder still. “It’s nice to be flirted with occasionally,” she tells him, though if I’m not mistaken this remark is aimed at me.
    “Philadelphia?” it occurs to Teddy to inquire.
    “A job interview,” she explains.
    And now he blanches, all the blood of embarrassment draining out of his face. He looks first at Lily, then at me. “You guys