III. Academy Awards

      1. Chicken Cacciatore

      Professor J. Melongaster Druse had married badly. In fact, his wife was a bowler. Every Wednesday she donned her crimson polyester shirt (blazoned in gold on the back with “Happy’s Hamburger Haven,” her team’s sponsor), lugged her ball and shoes (in a tooled leather bag) to the ungainly red Buick parked in the driveway of the Druse residence, and made her lumbering way to the lanes.

      Druse had watched his neighbor, Cynthia Golden, depart for her sets at the Newport Racquet Club, golden Cynthia in her tennis whites (the decorously provocative short skirt revealing just a callipygian glimpse beneath the lacy line of immaculate panties), skipping to her Mercedes convertible, waving gaily at her neighbors, and gliding off for a morning of sociable recreation, followed, no doubt, by lunch at the club.

      Tanned, manicured, and perfumed, fastidious, meticulous, and chic, lithe graceful and girlish, Cynthia was overtaking middle age with purring, dignified equanimity, and when Mel Druse saw her, he warmed, not with lust, but with envy of Dr. Greg Golden, who had not only Cynthia, but also the cachet of being an enormously successful neurosurgeon (tooling about in a silver Porsche with the personalized license plate “Brain 1”). Inevitably, Greg was imperially slim and crowned with a glorious, wavy, carefully tended silver mane. Mel, of course, was short, pudgy, and bald. Greg and Cynthia were, naturally, the social lions of the neighborhood, much sought after as guests; the annual Halloween brunch at the Goldens’ was the neighborhood’s most festive and eagerly awaited occasion. Whether hosting or guesting, Greg and Cynthia were unfailingly considerate and witty, paying alert attention during conversations, listening patiently to accounts of lawns, pool filter systems, golf games, and children gone awry or aright.

      In short, Greg and Cynthia Golden were everything that residents of their very upper-middle-class neighborhood ought to be. Greg even played bassoon in the Orange County Doctor’s Symphony, and Cynthia was, as might be expected, an active member of the Museum of Art board.

      All of this glowing perfection gnawed persistently at Mel’s peace of mind. So much glamour and romance created insuperable odds against a literary scholar married to a bowler. Who, after all, would not snicker if Mel recounted his adventures in putting together his book on the fop in Restoration drama: poking about dusty libraries and pecking out ideas on a Dell laptop hardly compared with the tense hum and beepbeepbeeping of the operating room; being mentioned in the Times Literary Supplement hardly ranked, among the laity, with being featured in the “Modern Living” section of the Sunday paper, as the Goldens had been. And then there was the vibrant tennis player versus the bowler.

      The neighborhood was eclectically expensive, Elizabethan bungalows elbow to elbow with French chateaux, and ranch styles rambling about oversize yards, with split rail fences and wagon wheel motifs. Palm trees and pines cohabited peacefully, but had not gone quite so far as miscegenation.

      It was a residential area in which the few churches resembled medical complexes, the medical complexes looked like groupings of expensive cottages, the lawns were as uniformly pruned and verdant as Astro Turf.

      The dogs were standard poodles, Irish wolfhounds, Weimaraners, and Dobermans; the cars were Cadillacs, Mercedes, Jaguars, and Porsches. (One neighbor who drove a Rolls Royce was the object of general scorn. Such conspicuous consumption was vulgar and violated the unspoken norms of the neighborhood. Rolls Royces belonged in Beverly Hills, not Huntington Beach.)

      It goes without saying that the Druses had a source of income other than Mel’s salary; the neighborhood, with its houses ranging upwards of two million dollars, was for bankers, auto dealers, corporation lawyers, proprietors of chain dentistry enterprises, and neurosurgeons, not college professors. In fact, had they chosen to do so, Mel and Bobby could have lived in a much tonier neighborhood than this one, could, in fact, have afforded the very ritziest, for she was the heiress of a very large fortune inherited from her late husband, Bert Redd, the magnate who had owned a great portion of the casino business and less savory enterprises in Nevada. When he was well into his seventies and had divested himself of his fourth wife, Bert saw Bobby, in ostrich feathers and sequins, on the stage at the Xanadu, Bert’s most opulent casino, where she was dancing to support herself while she worked on a master’s in computer science at UNLV. It was love at first sight on both sides. After a mad weekend of dining and dancing, and after Bert slipped a ten-carat diamond ring on Bobby’s finger and draped her with a diamond and emerald necklace, they were married on Monday in The Little Chapel of Eternal Bliss, serenaded before and after the ceremony by an Elvis impersonator. After one year of rapidly waning marital bliss, Bert went to that Big Casino in the Sky, and Bobby was left with all of the loot.

      The tale of how Mel and Bobby got together is the stuff of romance novels or TV soap operas.

      Mel, a bachelor, had just been promoted to associate professor with tenure, having cleared the hurdle at which at least three-fourths of assistant professors fall. He was elated, and his whole demeanor changed, from unctuous pliability to smug aloofness. As Professor Pottle Tinker put it, “Hrumph . . . Mel seems to be . . . hrumph . . . practicing to become . . . hrumph . . . a dean.”

      As a reward for tenure well-won, Mel pointed his Toyota Corolla northward on I-15, toward Las Vegas, where he planned a weekend of madcap diversion, release from the serious business of studying and professing Restoration literature.

      On Saturday evening, he