Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

Wirf slid onto the stool Carl had vacated. “Good,” he said. “Let him. Why should I chase whales?”

“Beats me,” Carl said on his way to the door.

“I woke up in there and couldn’t remember where I was. It felt like New York City in the forties, staring up into that chandelier. I thought I’d died and gone to the Waldorf-Astoria.”

“You aren’t going to believe this,” Carl called from across the room. He was out through the beer sign in the window. “But it’s snowing again.”

“I believe it,” Sully said. In fact, it was perfect.

“Something stinks over here,” Carl said, then went outside and the door swung shut behind him.

Sully and Wirf considered Carl Roebuck’s departing statement. It was Wirf who came up with the solution. “Let’s stay over here, then,” he said.

Fish, Miss Beryl decided.

She’d been trying to place the odor that permeated Sully’s entire flat. It was a mystery. How did a man who never cooked, who didn’t even keep food in his refrigerator, manage to have an apartment that smelled like fish? By not opening his windows was one way, she speculated. Granted, he couldn’t very well open them now in the late November subfreezing weather, but she doubted Sully ever aired the place, even in summer. In fact, now that she thought about it, she knew he hadn’t done so for the simple reason that he never bothered to remove his storm windows. He’d dutifully replaced hers with screens every spring for the last twenty years, but he always maintained it was too much trouble to do his own.

“You’ll swelter,” Miss Beryl always warned, to which Sully responded with his usual shrug, as if to suggest that she was probably right, he would suffer. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Peoples,” he always added. “If it gets too hot up there I’ll come down and sleep with you.”

Miss Beryl wondered how oppressive it would have to get before the heat would register on Sully as discomfort. At the moment the flat was insufferable, as if all the heat it had stored up in August had not yet escaped the sealed rooms. The thermostat provided the explanation. Seventy-five degrees. No wonder the wallpaper was peeling.

Miss Beryl set the thermostat back to seventy and thought, as she often did whenever she considered her tenant’s odd existence, that Sully should have found a way to stay married. He needed a keeper. Somebody to take charge of the thermostat and rescue the lighted cigarettes (Clive Jr. was right; there were brown burns everywhere) he left burning on tables and counters. Also to flush the toilet, Miss Beryl noted when she peered into the bathroom and was greeted by the solemn pool of urine he’d left in the toilet that morning when he left for work.

Miss Beryl flushed and watched the bright yellow water become diluted until finally, with a gurgle, it was clear again. The cycle of the flush was the exact amount of time she needed to solve the riddle posed by Sully’s urine, for Miss Beryl remembered the timing of this morning’s dramatic flush that had coincided with Clive Jr.’s insistence that Sully be evicted. Was it possible that after that dramatic flush Sully had been able to dye the water in the bowl so deeply yellow with a second release of urine so soon after the first? Possible, she supposed, if he’d spent the evening drinking beer with his cronies at The Horse. A second, more satisfying explanation occurred to her though, and this was that Sully was the sort of man whose flushing was preparatory to elimination rather than its natural conclusion. His morning flush removed the previous evening’s offering. His morning release would be noticed for the first time this evening when he returned from work. Miss Beryl couldn’t help wondering whether discovering clear water in the commode when he returned would alert Sully to the fact that he’d had a visitor.

Men, she thought. Surely they were a different species. Only their essentially alien nature could account for any sane woman’s attraction to and affection for a male. Had any woman ever looked at a man and felt kinship? Miss Beryl doubted it. Ironically, though, only an alien would be so understandable. Compared to women’s, men’s needs were so simple. What’s more, men seemed unable to conceal them. Sully was an exaggeration, of course — a man with even fewer needs than most men, the male principle taken to some outlandish extreme — but Clive Sr. had not been so different. He’d liked thick, fleece-lined sweatshirts and soft chinos, considering these the greatest perk of his position as football coach since he was allowed to wander around the high school dressed pretty much the same way he dressed at home (except that at school he wore a whistle around his neck), while his colleagues suffered (he imagined, since he would have suffered) in jackets and ties and sharply creased dress pants. Keeping Clive Sr.’s sweatshirts soft and fluffy, replacing them when they got thin and scratchy, had been one of the few demands her husband had ever made upon her. When his sweatshirts felt good, so did he, and whenever Miss Beryl bought him a new one and slipped it into his dresser drawer, she could count upon his coming up behind her in the kitchen and giving her a big, affectionate hug. When she asked him what it was for, he’d always reply “Nothing,” and in fact she was never able to tell for sure whether Clive Sr. was able to trace his sudden affection to her love — the source of these simple gifts — or whether the fleecy sweatshirt itself fulfilled a basic need in him, his affection for her the mere by-product of his satisfaction. She was never quite sure how she was to feel about a man whose affection, whose inner contentment, could be purchased for the price of a sweatshirt and then maintained with fabric softener. What she felt for her husband was love, then and now, but she had her doubts she’d be able to justify this reaction to another woman. Or at least to another woman who’d known Clive Sr.

And it was even harder to imagine any woman being able to justify love for Sully, Miss Beryl had to admit as she returned to her tenant’s front room. He had, according to gossip, a longtime paramour, a married woman who apparently sustained her affection by never visiting his flat. Standing in the middle of Sully’s front room, Miss Beryl tried to think of what these surroundings reminded her of, and finally it dawned on her. Sully’s rooms looked like those of a man who had just gone through a ruinous divorce, whose wife had taken everything of value, leaving her ex-husband to furnish the place with the furniture they had long ago consigned to their damp cellar and forgotten. Maybe it was his sofa that was responsible for the fishy odor. Miss Beryl went over and sniffed a cushion tentatively. It was redolent of old, slept-in clothing, but not fish.

Maybe, Miss Beryl considered, what she was sniffing was the odor of her own perfidy. Driver Ed had advised her not to betray Sully with this sneak inspection. And it did no good to rationalize that Sully would not mind, that he trusted her with his affairs. He knew that she screened his mail, thrusting at him items she felt he should open. He probably was even aware that she retrieved and opened envelopes he’d consigned to her trash can that had contained disability checks and reimbursements for medication. He probably did not suspect that she kept a large manila envelope marked “SULLY” that contained important documents he might someday need, but she doubted he’d mind if he did, and besides, Miss Beryl never felt guilty about surreptitiously guarding her tenant’s interests. But this was a different kind of intrusion, and she knew it. She had not intended to follow up on Clive Jr.’s suggestion to inspect Sully’s flat for herself until she was actually on the stairs, and now that she was here, she wished that she had followed her usual rule of thumb and dismissed Clive Jr.’s advice on general principle. How had he managed to convince her to invade her longtime tenant’s privacy? Was Clive Jr. becoming more persuasive? Or was she becoming, in her advancing age, more uncertain and susceptible to persuasion? She feared it could well be the latter and wondered if it might be a good idea to make, for future reference, a list of things she should never agree to do at her son’s urging. That way, if she became more uncertain or weak-willed, if she woke up some morning and discovered that Clive Jr.’s advice suddenly made sense, she could consult her list, made when she was still in command of her faculties. Everything would be right there on paper: