Richard Russo - Everybody's Fool

She waited.

He swallowed hard, aware that whatever he said next would probably be a mistake, yet another opportunity for his favorite cocktail: two parts humiliation, one part bitter regret, blend until smooth. Drink up. After all, it had been that kind of day. About as bad as any he could remember since the one when Becka came downstairs like a Slinky. He felt his eyes fill with tears. “I wish,” he stumbled, thinking as much about his dead wife as the woman he was now speaking to, “that where women are concerned I didn’t feel like a complete fool every minute of my life.”

He half expected Charice to tell him, as Becka surely would have, that the solution to that problem was simple: stop behaving like one. Instead, she just held his gaze for a long moment and said, “Lamb chops. Jerome’s favorite. And salad. You like lamb chops?”

“I do.”

“You know how to light a fire?”

“If you mean charcoal, sure.”

“Chief?” she said. “Could I say something?”

“Have I ever prevented you from speaking your mind?”

“This is kind of personal.”

“It’s all been kind of personal, Charice.”

“You gotta stop worrying so much about being wrong.”

This was true, of course. He’d known that much for a very long time. Back when he was a boy, he’d imagined the remedy was to stop being wrong. Being right would lead to the kind of self-confidence that other people seemed to achieve so effortlessly. The better solution, according to his mother, was to quit caring so much. But how? Neither she nor anybody else had been able to help him with that part.

“I mean, being wrong isn’t such a big deal,” Charice was saying. “We’re all wrong about a hundred times a day.”

“I’m wrong a hundred times before breakfast.”

“For instance, I’ve been wrong about you from the start.” Then, when he didn’t respond, she said, “Aren’t you going to ask how?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Are you even listening to me?”

No, he hadn’t been. Not really. He’d been listening to himself. Trapped, as usual, in the maze of Douglas Raymer’s thoughts, with no exit. He scrolled back.

“How were you wrong about me, Charice?”

“Now I don’t know if I should even tell you.”

“But you’re going to. We both know that. You’ve never not told me something you wanted me to know.”

“That’s true, but I could tell you tomorrow instead of now.” Her hand was on the door and she was smiling again, even more broadly this time.

“Tell me, Charice. I’m sure it’s something I need to know.”

She lowered her gaze to belt level. “Those shorts. Something very wrong there. I never would’ve pegged you for a boxers man.”

—

HER AGED CIVIC wasn’t spacious, but at least the passenger seat had been pushed back as far as it would go. Until now, Raymer hadn’t given much thought to Charice’s private life, though it was suggestive, surely, that the seat’s default mode had apparently been determined by her long-legged brother and not some boyfriend. And Friday nights, when another young woman might have been going out on a date or drinking happy-hour margaritas with girlfriends, she’d been planning on cooking dinner for Jerome. It stood to reason, he supposed. It couldn’t be easy for a young black woman here. Who would she go out with in conservative, lily-white Bath? Her brother — tall, handsome, well dressed and well spoken — wouldn’t lack for social opportunity in Schuyler Springs. A college town, its demographic downstate, liberal, hip, urban. Charice might’ve had an easier time of it over there, though Raymer doubted it. White men, at least in his experience, might be attracted to a good-looking black woman but were much less likely to date her than a black man was to date a white woman. Would Raymer himself have asked Charice out if he hadn’t been married when they met, and if he hadn’t been her boss, and if she wasn’t always busting his balls and threatening to sue him for job-related offenses? Okay, that was too many “ifs” to work through with any confidence. He had been married and he was her boss and she did bust his balls morning, noon and night, and most of the time she seemed at least half serious about suing him.

And anyway, maybe this was all a crock. What did he really know about her? She lived in Bath, but maybe she partied in Schuyler. Maybe she had a date every night. Maybe half the eligible men in town had seen her butterfly tattoo. What did it say about him that he assumed she had no social life? That supper at home with her brother on Friday nights was something she looked forward to, the high point of her week? Did the fact that she’d invited her middle-aged, depressed honky boss over to eat Jerome’s lamb chops suggest that despondency had set in? Possibly. But wasn’t it also possible that, while he was busy pitying her, she was already pitying him? If he wasn’t careful, he’d find out.

“There’s a flashlight in the glove compartment,” she said when they pulled into the empty parking lot at the Morrison Arms. Except for a single streetlight farther up the block and Gert’s, which must’ve had a backup generator, the street was pitch black. On a normal Friday night, that dive would’ve been packed, its raucous crowd spilling out onto the sidewalk, but not tonight. Further testimony, apparently, to just how much power an escaped cobra could bring to bear on the collective human imagination.

Opening the Honda’s glove box, Raymer couldn’t help smiling at the contrast between Charice’s reassuring clutter and her brother’s obsessive neatness. “Did you know Jerome actually special ordered an owner’s manual to his thirty-five-year-old car?”

Charice sighed and said, “Poor Jerome,” her voice rich with what sounded like genuine pity, though Raymer couldn’t quite gauge its extent. Did she pity her brother generally, because he was Jerome, or just today, undone as he was by the attack on his pride and joy.

“What’s wrong with him, anyway?”

“Wrong?” Suspicious now. Protective, too. He reminded himself that they were twins.

“Why would he think I’d key his car? Can you explain that to me?”

“I could try,” she said, “but the only real explanation for Jerome is Jerome. Don’t be long,” she added when he got out.

He didn’t blame her for being nervous. In broad daylight this parking lot was no place for a woman alone. Tonight, the lot empty, the two-story building encircled by police tape, a lethal serpent slithering somewhere in the vicinity, was enough to give anybody the willies. Aware that Charice was watching him, he did his best to imitate nonchalance as he ducked under the yellow tape and entered the building. In the black stairwell that led up to his second-floor apartment, he shivered despite the still-oppressive heat. Though every apartment here had been carefully searched only hours ago, the fact that they hadn’t found it didn’t mean the snake wasn’t in here somewhere. Or so it seemed just then. Sweeping the flashlight’s beam over the stairs, he nevertheless paused every few steps to listen for hissing. In the dark his other senses were magnified, including, unfortunately, his sense of smell. Who, he asked himself, would urinate in an unventilated stairwell in the middle of a heat wave?

Unlocking his apartment, he pushed the door open slowly, directing the flashlight beam along the perimeter of the floor, looking for movement, half surprised when there wasn’t any. The Arms had a serious roach problem, and despite Raymer’s repeated, aggressive spraying of his apartment’s every recess, the silverfish, centipedes and assorted creepy-crawlies that lived in them all continued to thrive and multiply. When he got up to pee in the middle of the night, the bathroom light sent them scurrying into drains and behind cracked tiles. Normally enough to make your skin crawl, this actually would’ve been welcome now, a signal that the status quo, while disgusting, was still in force. Did exotic reptiles eat cockroaches, he wondered. Had the cobra managed to accomplish in a matter of hours what his dogged spraying had not? This put him in mind of Justin’s story — almost certainly apocryphal — of the woman who came home to find a suspiciously fat boa constrictor in her baby’s crib. Would Raymer find the cobra curled up in the middle of his bed, too cockroach engorged to rear up and hood? From the bedroom doorway, he shined the flashlight first on the bed, then the floor. Both snakeless.