Bodie Pie

Bodie Pie is the director of Women’s Studies and one of the most embattled program chairs on campus. An old friend of William Henry Devereaux, Jr., she is both a source of candid counsel and a person whose own troubles weigh heavily on her. Her appearances place institutional indignity beside personal strain: she works in a basement office with a view of passing feet, smokes in moments of tension, and sees through Devereaux’s self-dramatizing stories even when he cannot keep pace with hers.

Identity and Working Conditions

Bodie runs Women’s Studies, a program whose difficult circumstances mirror her own vulnerability within the university. The narrator describes her as close behind him among the campus’s most embattled program chairs, but says that she takes her situation more deeply to heart than he does. She often needs cheering up, a description that makes her neither merely a comic observer nor simply a representative of institutional grievance: her work troubles her, and the shabby conditions surrounding it give those troubles a daily, physical setting.

That setting is a dismal office in the basement, almost entirely below ground. Its long horizontal window offers little more than a narrow view of the sidewalk and the feet and ankles of people walking past. When Devereaux arrives, he remarks that he could not work under such conditions and asks whether she at least has a secretary. Bodie answers, “Girls don’t need secretaries. They are secretaries.” The line turns his apparently sympathetic question into a diagnosis of the gendered labor built into the institution: the people who might be expected to receive clerical support are instead made to perform it themselves. Her dry reply is a flash of anger and wit, not evidence that the conditions are acceptable.

Bodie’s workplace sits within Social Sciences, a building whose maze-like design compounds the sense of institutional absurdity. The newest campus building, constructed in the mid-1970s, is described as a succession of pods, zigzagging corridors, and abrupt mezzanines. A person can see an office nearby yet have to climb two floors, cross over, and descend—or leave the building and re-enter—to reach it. The joke that nobody knows where Lou Steinmetz’s office is makes disorientation part of the building’s campus mythology. Bodie’s nearly subterranean office is a particularly stark endpoint in that labyrinth: visible only by its narrow strip of daylight, it is a place where even ordinary work seems hidden away.

Friendship and Candor

Devereaux’s friendship with Bodie is marked by his expectation that she will hear him out and by her ability to answer without flattering him. When he tells her about the attention he has received in the news, he remembers that she does not own a television on principle and gives her a condensed account, including his threat to execute ducks. Her reaction resembles his wife Lily’s: Bodie seems to regard his behavior as entirely characteristic. The calmness of that response is its own rebuke. His dramatic account does not astonish her; it confirms what she already expects of him.

The exchange also connects their present conversation to an earlier shared episode. Bodie witnessed Devereaux’s descent down snowy Pleasant Street Hill the previous winter, so her familiarity with his latest spectacle rests on a history of seeing him in action, not merely hearing his version afterward. When she asks whether he received the “big storm brewing” speech, he corrects her: “Tidal wave.” Her quick adjustment—“It’s a tidal wave now?”—makes the escalation funny while underscoring how readily Devereaux’s crises acquire a larger, more theatrical scale. Bodie listens, but she does not mistake performance for novelty.

Her bluntness is especially useful when Devereaux’s attention fails. As she explains that she had left a message for him and tells him to warn Tony Coniglia, a brief interval disappears from Devereaux’s awareness. He suddenly finds himself looking at Bodie in her office, unable to account for the missing stretch of time or understand who she means. When she identifies Tony as the person they have been discussing, Devereaux nods as if the explanation has restored his bearings. Bodie notices the mismatch and asks where he went just then. The moment reverses their usual arrangement: the man accustomed to narrating events cannot supply the continuity of his own conversation, while Bodie recognizes the lapse and names it plainly.

Warning and Comic Judgment

Bodie’s concern about Tony is not a passing remark. At dinner, she asks whether the scene unfolding around Tony is going to improve or deteriorate, then recalls that she had warned Devereaux about him the previous Friday. She offers a ride if Devereaux needs one and sees Tony returning toward the table after an alarming episode. Her warning gives her a practical role amid the restaurant’s confusion: she watches what is happening, anticipates that it may continue, and makes help available rather than treating the disturbance as entertainment.

When Tony approaches, Bodie greets him with formal politeness: “Professor Coniglia,” she says, calling it lovely to see him that evening. Tony responds by taking her hand gallantly, kissing it, and asking whether he may call her Sweetie. Bodie withdraws her hand as soon as she decently can. Her composure lets her meet his mock charm without accepting its terms. Tony says it is his night to offend everyone; Bodie then privately agrees with his assessment of June Barnes, warning that June will not forget the offense. The exchange is complicity edged with caution: Bodie can share a sharp judgment, but she does not pretend that hurt can simply be laughed away.

When the waiters return and the meals arrive, Bodie takes her leave. Tony calls her “one classy lesbian,” after she has addressed him as a fellow professor and handled his behavior with controlled irony. His remark reduces her to a label even as it recognizes her poise. Earlier, he had identified her as a lesbian while Devereaux answered that this meant Bodie could not be half in love with him, not that he could not be half in love with her. The exchange belongs to Devereaux’s teasing account of attraction; it does not establish reciprocal desire. Its comic asymmetry instead reveals how he can turn another person’s identity into material for his own self-description.

Personal Life and the Limits of What Is Seen

At another dinner, Bodie sits with a young woman whom Devereaux finds vaguely familiar. He speculates that she might coach a women’s team, but does not identify her. When she gets up to leave, something in Bodie’s expression suggests to him that the dinner is a goodbye. Bodie takes out her cigarettes, begins to light one, then remembers that the restaurant is nonsmoking and puts them away. The small interrupted gesture echoes her earlier smoking in the office: the cigarette appears at moments of unease, but the circumstances repeatedly make her stop.

Devereaux gives Bodie a loopy smile intended to express understanding and sympathy. The look she returns makes him think that she may be confusing him with her ex-husband, whom he describes as the man who convinced her to be a lesbian. This is the narrator’s interpretation of her expression, not a confirmed explanation from Bodie. The scene leaves her private history partly opaque: the possible farewell, her relationship with the young woman, and the force of the memory attached to her ex-husband are conveyed through Devereaux’s uncertain reading rather than through her own account. That uncertainty matters. Bodie is repeatedly perceptive about him, but he does not thereby become an equally reliable interpreter of her.

Narrative Role

Bodie functions as a witness who can puncture Devereaux’s comic self-presentation without ceasing to care about him. She receives his account of the duck threat, recognizes the familiar pattern, remembers their shared winter episode, warns him about Tony, and notices when he has mentally lost the thread. Her presence gives the novel a counterweight to his first-person narration: where he turns trouble into a story, she can identify its practical consequences and the parts he has missed.

Yet she is not only an instrument of correction. The basement office, the absent secretary, the cigarettes she repeatedly puts out or puts away, and the uncertain dinner goodbye sketch a working and personal life that Devereaux can glimpse but not fully know. Bodie’s dry humor makes her difficult to sentimentalize, while the narrative’s gaps in his understanding prevent her from being reduced to a confidante who exists only to explain him. She remains a colleague under pressure, an old friend capable of warning him, and a person whose own story is visible in fragments.