Richard Russo - Everybody's Fool

“Really?” he said. “Why not?” Because everybody seemed to love her.

“Because Becka was all about Becka,” she said, her expression now hard. Raymer started to object, but she didn’t let him. “Didn’t you ever notice how she always charmed people one at a time?”

Her custom, at a party or restaurant, of culling one person from the group, of getting him to turn his back on someone else, of enticing him to follow her into the kitchen or out onto the patio, where it would be just the two of them? Yes, of course. Who knew this habit better than Raymer? Hadn’t it stoked the jealousy that was always present in the back of his mind? Though, really, he’d reason with himself, was there anything so wrong about making every one of the people she singled out feel special?

“Remember,” Charice was saying, “how important it was for her to be able to touch people? How if you moved just out of physical range, something happened behind her eyes? It was almost like she couldn’t be sure you were still you.”

The night of that hateful dinner, every time Raymer looked down that table, his wife was placing a lovely hand on old Barton’s mottled one. Here again, though, he’d blamed himself, assuming that he must’ve disappointed her somehow, or in a thousand ways, and made her ravenous for the company of other, more interesting people.

“That was her great talent. Making everybody love her. She couldn’t help herself. She was as compulsive about that as Jerome had been about cleaning his bathroom. Men, women, old, young? None of that really mattered to her. It was seduction, yes, but I don’t think it had much to do with sex. It was about adoration. The more obsessively people loved her, the more alive she felt. Jerome, being Jerome, was the mother lode.”

Not the mother lode, Raymer thought. Because before Jerome there’d been Douglas Raymer. Not to mention poor Alice Moynihan, who used to stake out their town house, waiting for Raymer to leave in the morning so she’d have Becka all to herself. And it was Becka, to this day, she was talking to on her phone, Becka that her husband had taken away from her when he demanded she surrender that handset.

“I warned Jerome the day would come when she’d replace him just like she was replacing you.”

“But he didn’t believe you.”

Her eyes had filled. “He said I was just jealous of his happiness. Because if they were together, then I’d be alone. He told me to go on back home. He didn’t need me anymore. So much for him and me against the world.”

“Did you ever think about telling me?” Which of course was a less pathetic version of the question he really wanted to ask: So you’re saying I didn’t factor in at all?

“You haven’t been listening. I always keep Jerome’s secrets,” she said, her features hardening again. “Besides, he was going to tell you himself.”

“When?”

“The day she died, actually. The plan had been for him to pick Becka up at your place, then drive down to the station. She was going to wait in the car while Jerome came in and told you they were going away together.”

“But I went home early.”

“You must’ve beat him there by fifteen or twenty minutes, because when he turned onto your street the ambulance was out front, along with two or three cruisers.”

“What did he do?”

“What do you think? He called me.”

“And you said?”

“What could I say? I told him to go back home. To let me handle things. By the time I got there, he was like what you saw today.”

Raymer tried to square these revelations with his own memories of that awful day and those that followed, but it was all a dreamlike haze. Until now, Jerome’s absence during that period hadn’t really registered as significant, just a vague recollection that he hadn’t been around for a while. He’d had more important things to worry himself sick about.

“So just like that, he needed you again.”

“He took a leave of absence. We told people he was down in North Carolina finishing up his master’s, but in fact he was in a facility in Albany trying to put himself back together. I visited him there on weekends and days off.”

“And he got better?”

“More like the old Jerome,” she said, “which was hardly better. With Becka gone, all his obsessions returned with a vengeance. But yeah, we patched things up between us. Things got back to being almost normal. Not that anybody else would call it normal. Still, I was proud of him. Inside he was still a mess, but at least he could function again. You finally seemed to be coming out of your funk, too, and I was thinking maybe we’d all dodged a bullet. But then you had to get ahold of that garage-door remote. I never should’ve told Jerome about that. Overnight he was batshit again. Imagining you knew.” She met his gaze now. “Imagining I told you.”

“Why would he think you’d do that? You always kept his secrets.”

“Well, he knew I…”

“Knew you what?” Raymer said, his heart suddenly in his throat.

“Doesn’t matter,” she said, getting to her feet.

When he, dispirited, rose as well, she seemed to really take in his massively bandaged hand. “Will it heal right?” she said. At Jerome’s she’d caught a glimpse of the grotesque excavation he’d made of his palm.

“There’s evidently some nerve damage. They say I dug right through, almost. Speaking of batshit.”

He expected her to chide him, but she didn’t. “I read about this guy once?” she said. “He had an itch on his scalp, and he scratched straight through his skull and into his brain.”

“That’s supposed to make me feel better?” he said. “That you’ve heard of somebody dumber than me?”

She ignored this. They were standing there facing each other, the desk still in between them. “And this other guy,” she continued, “had the hiccups for a whole year. Tried everything but just couldn’t get rid of them. Finally he couldn’t take it anymore and jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. Which kills just about everybody, but somehow he survived. And guess what?”

“He still had the hiccups?”

She offered him a sad smile. “See, that right there is what we need to work on. No, the hiccups were gone. Turns out, jumping off the Golden Gate’s a hundred percent effective as a cure for hiccups.”

Feeling a smile on his own face, Raymer allowed himself to imagine what it would be like to spend the rest of his life with this woman, having conversations like this all the time. Now that he thought about it, every single conversation they’d ever had, even the ones that were exercises in pure exasperation, always left him feeling less alone. What would happen, he wondered, if he came out from behind the desk? “What we need to work on?” he said. “We? As in—”

“Us.”

“There’s an us?”

“If you want.”

“I do,” Raymer said, at once aware and not really caring very much that these same words had, when last uttered, caused him no end of grief.

“A couple things we’d have to agree on first,” she told him.

“Like?”

“Like you’d have to figure out how to forgive Jerome. He’s my brother.”

“I think I can do that.” In fact, he was pretty sure he already had.

“I’d ask you to forgive me, too, if I’d done anything wrong, but I didn’t — unless you’d say keeping Jerome’s secret was wrong. Is that something you’d count?”

“Not if you don’t.”

“And you’d have to let me out from behind my desk. Allow me to do the job I was trained for.”

“Sorry, I can’t do that,” he said. And when she again narrowed her eyes dangerously, he added, “You forget. I’m not your boss anymore. I resigned.”