Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

Deirdre liked heat, and she especially liked wandering around the house in her underthings, a habit that had excited Peter at first, like everything about Deirdre. In the beginning he’d thought it was just the September weather and the fact that the cottage wasn’t air-conditioned, until later in the month the temperatures began to fall everywhere except at Deirdre’s place. One night after making sticky love he’d searched for another explanation and found it. She had her thermometer set at eighty. Her office at the college was the same. Mechanically gifted, Deirdre had managed to disassemble the thermostat, disengage the device that prevented individual tampering, and boost the temperature there too, although she did not, so far as Peter knew, run around the office in her bra and panties. “I like it hot,” she explained the night he discovered that she had the heat set at eighty. “I like to be hot,” she purred, taking his hand and slipping it into her panties by way of illustration.

It had taken Peter nearly three months to discover he could do with a little less heat. What had been exciting back in September — stopping by Deirdre’s little cottage on his way home from the library and finding her seated on her broken-down sofa, cross-legged in nothing but her bikini panties, sucking noisily on a peach and watching television in the dark — now seemed to Peter just a little unhealthy. In September he’d felt his dick rise in anticipation of this heartwarming spectacle as he hurried up the crooked little walkway, dodging the low-hanging tree branches. Now, in mid-November, it was his stomach that threatened to rise when he visited Deirdre and inhaled that first breath of fetid, tropical air. Both the atmosphere of the cottage and Deirdre herself seemed to be deep in the process of fermentation.

Also, her behavior seemed to be getting progressively more decadent, a circumstance that no longer thrilled him. Her eating habits in particular revolted him. She liked to share food with him while she was eating it. Overly ripe peaches were her favorite, and she liked to masticate a mouthful of peach partway, then kiss Peter, so that he got to share. “I want us to have identical sensations,” she explained. Peter doubted they were having identical sensations. The fact that Deirdre was apparently enjoying herself in all of this suggested to him that they couldn’t be.

Deirdre was, in fact, the reason he had insisted on visiting Bath over Thanksgiving, a trip they could not afford and which was certain to infuriate Charlotte, who dreaded such visits and who made clear that she considered it cruel and unfair to expect her to make the journey at Thanksgiving and then again at Christmas. Deirdre too had pouted, pleading with him not to go, not to leave her alone for the long, four-day weekend. In fact, she’d made him several explicit erotic promises if he’d agree to stay in town, promises that made him all the more determined to get away from her long enough to clear his head. He wondered if it was clear enough to call her now and found he was dialing the phone on the end table before he could decide.

“Hi,” he said softly when she’d answered the phone and accepted the charges. “Sorry to have to call collect. I don’t want this to appear on my mother’s bill.”

“I knew you’d call,” she said, as if she’d just been arguing the matter with someone and was saying I told you so. In fact, it occurred to him that she might have someone with her. He wasn’t sure someone as constantly horny as Deirdre would be able to go the distance of a long, chaste holiday weekend. Maybe she’d invited half a dozen little Malaysian neighbors over to take turns until he got back. They’d discovered that she seldom wore clothes when she walked around the cottage, and they’d taken to hanging around on their back patio, grinning and clucking and waiting for a glimpse.

“How could you know I’d call when I told you I wouldn’t?” Peter said.

“I know you, ” she said. “I know what a dirty little boy you are, and I knew you wouldn’t get laid in your mommy’s nice clean house.”

“Clean doesn’t begin to describe it,” Peter told her.

“I said you should have stayed with me.”

“According to Charlotte, my mother’s the reason I hate women.”

“The cow had an idea?”

Peter let this go. He didn’t like for Deirdre to say nasty things about Charlotte, but in this business of infidelity it wasn’t easy to draw lines. He wasn’t sure he was in any position to criticize his lover for being unkind to the wife he was cheating on. “Do you think I hate women?”

“As long as you love me, I don’t care.”

Peter considered this. “Don’t they make you surrender your membership in NOW when you say things like that? How can you write a dissertation on Virginia Woolf and say such things?”

“I bet she didn’t give great head like I do.”

“Lord,” Peter said, hoping his mother wasn’t listening on the extension. He was pretty sure she wasn’t. He’d heard what sounded like two people — his mother and Ralph — coming down the stairs, and now there were the sounds of voices coming from the kitchen, which meant that his mother had pulled herself together enough to come down and offer Sully a cup of coffee.

Across the room Andy rolled over in his playpen, snorted again, momentarily opened his eyes, then closed them again. “Didi,” Peter said, after a moment.

“I’m here.”

“You need to start preparing for the end. Of us, I mean.”

“I’m not listening,” she said.

“I have children. I’m a father.”

“So?”

“So I need to be a better one.”

“You need me.”

“I know,” he admitted. Outside, he thought he heard a car pull up. “But I can’t keep on like this. We’ll talk when I get back. Finish your dissertation chapter. I’ll proof it for you.”

“You’re so full of bullshit, Peter.”

“I’m going to have to hang up now,” he said, and he did, but not before he heard her say, “You’re mine, buddy boy.”

He stood then and looked out the window. The Gremlin was again parked at the curb, behind his father’s truck. Charlotte, empty handed, was halfway up the walk. Peter watched her from behind the curtain. Since he’d admitted there was someone else, Charlotte had rediscovered her interest in him. She’d known for several weeks, and they’d made angry love every night, the unhappy sex punctuating their discussions about the logistics of their separation, planned now for the first of the year, after the holidays.

In the bathroom next door Peter could hear the water still running, and he felt his anger rise at his sons, who were still squabbling, probably not even in the tub yet. But before he could move, he heard a loud bang, followed almost immediately by a startled cry, and he stopped where he was in the middle of the den, counting five in his head, allowing Charlotte enough time to arrive at the back door, share the responsibility of this most recent crisis, whatever it turned out to be, in this wreck of their married lives.

Robert Halsey, who had been dozing in the living room, pure oxygen tunneling up his nostrils and down the back of his throat and into what remained of his lungs, also heard the loud bang and cry in the bathroom, and he started awake, faced as he always was when suddenly awakened from one of his naps with determining how long he’d been asleep. Anymore, it was hard to tell. Sometimes a five-minute nap felt like hours, whereas hours of sleep sometimes felt like minutes. At least a little time had elapsed, because when he’d dozed off, he’d been talking to Sully, who’d been seated at the end of the sofa. Now Sully was in the kitchen with Vera and Ralph, neither of whom had been around when he’d fallen asleep.