Richard Russo - Everybody's Fool

When he asked her why, she grew embarrassed. “Does he make me sound gay?” he said.

“Well, yeah, but—”

“But what?”

“That’s how you sound.”

“I sound gay.”

“Not lilting or anything, just, you know…”

Later that week he ran into Charlie, the guy from the dean’s office who handled campus housing. “I’ve been wondering,” he said, “how Kurt Wright managed to land the other half of the duplex I’m in. Wasn’t there a waiting list?”

He looked surprised. “Well, your taking up his case like that certainly didn’t hurt.”

“Me?”

“And of course Alice’s medical condition allowed us to do an end run around the waiting list.”

“Charlie,” Gus said. “I never wrote Wright any recommendation.”

“Like I told you at the time, there was no need. The phone conversation was good enough for me.”

“But we never spoke on the phone.”

The guy’s expression changed. “That’s not funny, Gus. I bent all kinds of rules for you. If you and Kurt had some kind of falling-out, I’m sorry, but I’m not booting him and his wife out of their home. I’m surprised you’d want me to.”

“I don’t,” Gus assured him. “I’m just saying. If you talked to someone claiming to be me—”

“It was you, Gus. Don’t you think I know your voice after thirty years?”

“Charlie—”

“Besides, think about it. You can’t do Kurt dirt without harming your sister.”

“My sister?” Gus repeated.

“Well,” Charlie conceded. “Okay, your half sister.”

That weekend Gus waited at the front window for Kurt to leave, then went next door and rang the bell. He had to ring it several times before Alice came to the door, dressed in a thin robe. As always, she didn’t seem to quite recognize him.

“I hate to bother you, Alice,” he told her, “but would it be okay if I came in?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. Why was the woman always apologizing? “Kurt’s not here.”

“I know,” he said, and after an awkward moment she stepped back from the door.

It was dark inside, the shades drawn, only two small lamps turned on. Gus had heard she liked to paint, but how could you paint without light? He looked around for signs of artistic endeavor — sketch pads, colored pencils, an easel — but saw nothing. “I can only stay a minute,” he assured her, wondering why she always seemed so skittish. This visit was, he was starting to realize, a bad idea. He’d come over thinking she might be able to help him understand her husband, what was going on, why he was causing all this trouble and telling such outrageous lies. Did she know, for instance, that he was letting on that she and Gus were related? But all you had to do was look at Alice to know she’d be of little help.

“Is everything okay over here?” he asked, surprising himself. He hadn’t meant to be so direct.

She thought about it. “Kurt says I sleep too much,” she admitted.

He nodded, trying to think of what to ask next. Finally, though he knew the question was out of line, given that he hardly knew her, he said, “Are you happy, Alice?”

“Happy?”

“The walls are thin,” he explained.

She blinked at this, as if she’d taken the statement metaphorically.

“When Kurt raises his voice,” he said, “I can hear. When you cry, well, I can hear that, too.”

Her hand went to her mouth. “I make him angry sometimes. I don’t mean to.”

Gus nodded. “He’s not a very nice man, is he?”

She thought about it. “I probably do sleep too much,” she said. “I just…can’t seem to stay awake.”

“Alice?” he said. “If you need a friend, I’m right next door.”

She turned to stare at the wall that separated her home from his, as if trying to imagine him there on the other side, his ear pressed against the wall.

“Well,” he said, “I should go. I hope I haven’t upset you.”

“No,” she said, without much conviction, and followed him to the door. When he opened it, she said, “Gus?”

He turned back to face her, surprised that she’d used his given name. “Yes, Alice?”

“Are you ?”

What, gay? Had her husband told her that? “Am I what, Alice?”

“Happy?”

“Oh,” he said, feeling slow witted himself now. Well, was he? Because for a split second, when she said his name, his heart had leaped with the startling possibility that he loved her, impossible as that seemed. So, yes, there was a brief welling up of something that might’ve been happiness, before the facts — that he didn’t really know her, that she was another man’s wife, that he was a fool about women and always had been — put that emotion to flight. “No, Alice,” he confessed. “I don’t think so, no.”

“I’m sorry,” she said quickly, as if Gus’s unhappiness was yet another thing that could be traced to some personal failing of her own, one she’d turn her mind to once she’d solved the problem of sleeping so much.

—

AS MAYOR, Gus had a key to Sans Souci Park’s main gate. Since the hotel closed, the private estate was, except on special occasions, barred to vehicular traffic. Along the bike path that wound lazily through the grounds, there were cast-iron benches, and Alice liked to sit on the one Gus had donated years earlier that bore their names. He’d hoped to find her there this morning, as the park’s serenity and solitude sometimes had a calming effect on her. Why not just let her sit on their bench as the first rays of sunlight pierced the trees? Here she could talk to her heart’s content on her princess phone without bothering anyone. Unfortunately, she wasn’t there.

Feeling suddenly bereft, he pulled over, got out and took a seat on the bench himself, leaving the car running and the driver’s-side door open so he could listen to the scanner. Before leaving home, he’d called the police station so they’d be on the lookout. He felt he needed to do something, but what? It was pleasant here on the bench. Closing his eyes, he listened to the breeze in the upper branches of the pines. Just that quickly he was asleep — then he jolted awake again, jittery, wondering if it was the scanner that had awakened him. Had he missed an announcement? That Alice had been located? Through a break in the trees he could make out the old hotel, grand and sad, the rising sun’s rays reflecting off its upper-story windows. The Sans Souci. Without care. An idea sold to people with cares galore. Everybody, basically, with cares in desperate search of cures. People who wanted to believe in magical waters. Lourdes in upstate New York. Come to think of it, he could use a cure himself. Had he ever before felt so much like giving up?

One of the things Kurt had recognized in him was a buoyant, dim-witted optimism, his faith that anything broken could be fixed. Somehow he’d intuited that Gus meant to challenge the town’s self-defeating, dead-end pessimism, to free it from the imaginary shackles of its unfortunate history. So what if its springs had run dry and Schuyler’s hadn’t? The rest of what ailed the town could be remedied, couldn’t it? Yet he’d badly underestimated what that would require. Something in these people’s natures, he’d reluctantly concluded, was rigid, unalterable. They needed to believe that luck ruled the world and that theirs was bad and would remain so forever and ever, amen, a credo that let them off the hook and excused them from truly engaging in the present, much less the future.

Were they wrong? Gus was no longer so sure. Maybe they were simply realists. Not a week went by that he didn’t get a call from some downstate developer wanting to get the skinny on the Sans Souci. A potential gold mine, he told them, rich in history and style. People used to come from as far away as Atlanta to take the waters. “But says here it’s located in this Bath place? Not Schuyler Springs?” “We’re sister cities,” Gus would assure them, but he could tell they’d concluded that Bath was the ugly sister, the one who never got asked out and made her own clothes, though all the other girls loved her.