Richard Russo - Everybody's Fool

“I wrote one of those,” he was told.

“You—”

“We want him out of here,” the man said. “In a year or two you will, as well. In fact, you’ll be writing a letter just like mine.” And with that the line went dead. Gus had immediately dialed the number displayed on the caller ID, but it just rang and rang.

Gus, who had only a few more years before retirement, was living at the time in one of the college-owned duplexes on campus. He was visiting friends in San Francisco when Kurt and Alice arrived in Schuyler, and by the time he returned they’d moved into the other half of his unit. He met Alice when he pulled in. Unaware that mail typically didn’t come until late in the afternoon, she was out at the curb checking the box. Gus was immediately enchanted; she was so tall and graceful and loose limbed. He’d always liked women, even older women, who wore their hair long. His own mother had done so, well into her seventies. He introduced himself as one of her husband’s new colleagues in the poli-sci department and welcomed her to the neighborhood, which was mostly faculty. She seemed a tad skittish but listened intently to everything he said, and she had one of the most beautiful smiles he’d ever encountered, though its timing felt slightly off, its trigger more internal than connected to unfolding, real-time events.

The next morning her husband called to invite Gus over for a glass of wine on their back patio later that afternoon. “Thanks for picking up the phone, by the way,” Kurt said after they shook hands. Though a good twenty years younger than Gus, he had a black beard so uniformly thick that it looked fake, like a cheap disguise, and made him appear middle aged. While they chatted, he poured two glasses — why only two? Gus wondered — and handed him the one that had slightly less in it.

“I’m sorry?” he said, confused. “For picking up the phone?”

“I think your advocacy helped us jump the line,” Kurt said, gesturing to their half of the duplex.

Actually, Gus had been puzzled about that. The duplexes, though nothing all that special, were much in demand because of their campus location. Also, they were relatively cheap compared with housing in Schuyler’s open market. How had these newcomers landed one? He was about to say he hadn’t made any calls on their behalf, but then, for some reason, he didn’t. Was it because of that warning? Did some cowardly part of him want to be on evil’s good side, if that’s what this man turned out to be? The patio door opened just then, and Alice — how lovely she looked, Gus recalled thinking — appeared with a tray containing fruit and cheese and crackers. “And you’ve already met my Alice,” Kurt said, which for some reason seemed to confuse her. Had she forgotten Gus so quickly? Setting the tray down, she managed to nudge the wine bottle, which teetered and was about to fall when Kurt caught it. Half the crackers went onto the deck. “I’m sorry,” she said, more to her husband than to Gus, who squatted to help her pick them up. “I’m such a klutz,” she confided. “Someone should shoot me.”

“That seems a tad extreme,” Gus said, expecting a smile at the understatement, but she was anxiously looking up at Kurt, perhaps to see if he shared Gus’s view. There was no telling and she nipped back into the kitchen.

When they finished the bottle, a nice chardonnay, Kurt went inside. Alice hadn’t returned, and Gus wasn’t sure what to think. Right from the start, there’d only been two glasses. Was she unwell? Why didn’t Kurt feel the need to explain her absence?

“So, you’ve been here how long?” Kurt asked when he returned with another bottle. There was just a hint of accusation in the question, so Gus answered cautiously as his host expertly uncorked the new bottle.

“Almost thirty years,” he admitted. “I didn’t intend to stay so long.”

Kurt poured him a glass, his third, then another for himself. As with the first two, he gave Gus slightly less. Had someone told him that Gus couldn’t handle his liquor, or were the pours purely coincidental? Gus decided they must be. After all, inviting him over in the first place was an act of generosity, and this wasn’t a cheap chardonnay.

“Thirty years here ?” Kurt said, incredulously. “In Schuyler Springs ?”

Okay, Gus thought, maybe this wasn’t Ann Arbor or Madison, but still. Had the man already weighed Schuyler’s merits and found them wanting? “It’s become home, I guess,” he offered weakly, deciding then that when he finished this glass, there would be no fourth.

“Still, it can’t have been easy, right?”

Why was the man smiling in such a peculiar way? “I’m sorry, I don’t follow.”

Kurt shrugged. “I wouldn’t have thought there’d be much of a gay community here.”

Gus’s profound surprise slowed his reaction. “There isn’t,” he said finally. “But then I wouldn’t really know because I’m not gay.”

“Oh.” He shrugged again, without the slightest hint of apology. “I guess I just assumed.”

Why? Because he was unmarried? Because he’d just returned from San Francisco? Gus found the unwarranted assumption particularly galling, since when he’d first arrived here one or two of his new colleagues had leaped to the same conclusion, based on what, Gus couldn’t imagine, then or now. Were there still people at the college who doubted his sexual orientation? He felt himself flushing.

The man’s wife was still nowhere in evidence. “I hope Alice is okay,” he ventured. Yes, he was eager for a change of subject, but her continued absence was strange, wasn’t it? Had Kurt brought out only two wineglasses because he never intended for her to join them? Perhaps even instructed her not to?

“With her one never knows,” her husband said, the lack of concern in his voice sending a chill up Gus’s spine. “As you’ll discover, neighbor.”

Gus set his wine down. To whom it may concern, he thought. I cannot recommend my esteemed colleague Kurt Wright highly enough. The short time he’s spent at our college has been utterly transformative.

—

NOT LONG AFTER the Wrights appeared in Schuyler, the social fabric of Gus’s department began to fray. Longtime friends started falling out over misunderstandings that would eventually be traced back to something Kurt had said. Rumors began to circulate. The one about Gus being gay, for instance, suddenly seemed to attain new currency. Nor were such untruths the worst of it. Gus’s best friend on the faculty appeared in his office one day, her eyes nearly swollen shut from crying, wanting to know why he’d betrayed her confidence. A decade earlier she’d explained to him that she and her husband had a brain-damaged child they’d finally decided to institutionalize, a decision that had nearly destroyed them and their marriage. When Gus assured her that he’d never repeated this to a soul, she refused to believe him, claiming that he was the only person she had ever told. By Thanksgiving, everyone in the department seemed to know something horrible about everyone else, and Gus’s once-sociable colleagues had begun to teach their classes and go home, skipping committee meetings and begging off their usual Friday afternoon happy hour at a tavern near campus. “What’s going on over in poli-sci,” a friend in the history department asked him. “You guys used to be the life of the party.”

Kurt turned out to be a man of numerous interdisciplinary interests, and he quickly got to know faculty from several other departments, where he was surprisingly popular. Apparently he was a gifted mimic who did spot-on impressions of his colleagues in political science. “You’ve never heard him do you?” said an old friend of Gus’s from the English department. “You should get him to,” she enthused. “It’s truly hilarious.”