Nobody's Fool

by Richard Russo

  If it was women these three grown men feared—and it was—they needn’t have worried, because when they entered, the kitchen was empty, not a woman in sight, though this struck all three as perhaps even more ominous. The sink was still piled high with scraped dinner plates and casserole dishes plus assorted pots and pans, including the roasting pan in which Vera had made the gravy. In the sink she’d drawn a yellow tubful of water that wore a round hat of suds. The house was preternaturally still except for the sound of the television on low in the living room. From where they stood, Sully could see Vera’s father asleep in his chair two rooms away. “Where’d your mother go?” Ralph wondered, surprised by her sudden disappearance.

  Peter was not. “I’d be careful in here today,” he warned Sully. “Mom’s all upset.”

  “What about?” Ralph said, since this was news to him.

  “Let me guess,” Sully said. “Nobody loves her.”

  “Close,” Peter admitted. “Nobody loves her enough.”

  “I’ll go talk to her,” Ralph said like a man volunteering for hazardous duty.

  “How long have you and Vera been married?” Sully said significantly.

  Ralph thought. “Thirty years. More.”

  “And you still don’t know any better than that?”

  “She probably still thinks you’re dead,” Ralph said.

  “Then don’t disappoint her,” Sully advised.

  From the direction of the bathroom came the sound of running water and Will’s whining voice. “Wacker. Quit.”

  Peter rolled his eyes. “I’ll be right back.”

  Since no one had told him not to, Sully sauntered into the living room, where Robert Halsey slept fitfully, hooked up to his oxygen, green plastic tubing forming a childish mustache on his upper lip. A plastic mask dangled from the portable oxygen rig. The football game was on, and Sully sat down at the end of the sofa just in time to see somebody kick a field goal and the score come up across the bottom of the screen before going to a commercial.

  “Hey,” Sully said to Vera’s father, who opened his eyes in response to this sound that was not television. “Wake up. You’ve got company.”

  The old man blinked, focused. “Sully,” he said, sitting up straighter, having slumped down during his nap.

  “How are you, Mr. Mayor?” Sully said. Vera’s father had run for mayor as a Democrat forty-some years ago and suffered the fate of all Democrats seeking elected office in Bath, only worse, suffering the worst defeat in memory. In Bath, where mayor was a part-time office and mayoral candidates tended to be the owners of automobile dealerships, the real contest was always the Republican primary. Once that was settled, the actual election was pretty much a foregone conclusion, the Democratic candidates leaning decidedly in the direction of masochism or, in Robert Halsey’s case, fatalism. He had run on an educational platform and had been rejected so overwhelmingly that no one had dared bring up the subject of education in a local campaign ever since.

  “What’s the score here?” Sully asked.

  “I don’t know,” Robert Halsey confessed.

  “They told me you were in charge here,” Sully said.

  “I am,” the old man admitted. “Dallas was ahead when I fell asleep.”

  “They still are,” Sully said. “Twenty to fourteen in case anybody asks you.”

  “Where are they?” Vera’s father wondered, looking around the room.

  “I think they saw me coming and ran for it,” Sully said.

  Mr. Halsey smiled. “And left me behind.”

  “It’s the law of the jungle, Mr. Mayor,” Sully said. “You feeling pretty well these days?”

  “Not too bad,” the old man wheezed. “It’s a struggle I won’t be sad to give up.”

  “Not much fun anymore?”

  “It’s no fun anymore.”

  “Well,” Sully said. “Just don’t let your daughter hear you say that. You may think things can’t get any worse, but they can.”

  “How’s my old friend Mrs. Peoples?” Robert Halsey wondered. Miss Beryl had been one of the few ardent supporters of his doomed mayoral campaign.

  “Just the same,” Sully assured him. “She hasn’t changed in twenty years.”

  “What makes people unhappy, do you suppose?” Robert Halsey wondered out loud, confusing Sully, who thought at first that they were still on the subject of his landlady, then realized that the old man was thinking about his daughter, who hadn’t changed in twenty years either.

  “I don’t know,” Sully confessed.

  “It’s either their own fault or it’s ours,” Robert Halsey said, as if he were a long way from deciding. They watched the game for a while. “It’s the trouble with getting old and sick,” he said when Sully’d just about concluded their conversation was over. “There isn’t much to do but think.”

  Since there didn’t seem to be much to say in response to this, Sully didn’t offer anything, and the next time he looked over at Robert Halsey, the old man was asleep again.

  In the bathroom the boys were fighting as they undressed to prepare for their baths. When Peter opened the door to check on them, he caught Wacker, hand raised ready to do something, and Will, the older and larger boy, flinching and pulling away. Wacker looked more inconvenienced than embarrassed to be caught in an act of aggression, Will only temporarily relieved. “Cut it out, Wacker,” Peter told the younger boy. “You aren’t funny.”

  Will studied his brother to see if these instructions would take. He didn’t look too hopeful.

  “Get undressed. Get in the bathtub. And don’t let it overflow or Grandma will skin you,” Peter said, another ineffectual warning, he realized. In fact, he thought he detected a sly smile cross Wacker’s lips.

  “Where’s Mom?” Will said, looking worried. It was usually their mother who supervised baths.

  Peter was studying the bathtub with dismay. The water had been on forever and it was only half full. The water pressure was bad almost everywhere in Bath but ridiculous in Ralph and Vera’s house, where you couldn’t even take a shower. You had to start the tub ten minutes before you planned to get in, and the temperature was almost impossible to gauge. Peter felt the water in the tub and turned on more hot on the theory that it would cool down before the boys got in. Bath. What a ridiculous name, Charlotte always maintained, for a town where you couldn’t take a decent one.

  “Where’s Mom?” Will repeated. He would repeat questions patiently until you answered them.

  “At the store,” Peter told him impatiently, wondering as he did so if the boys had overheard his and Charlotte’s quarrel before dinner. “She’ll be back in a few minutes. You’d better be finished with your baths too.”

  Another sly smile from Wacker. Or what? he seemed to be saying.

  Closing the door on them, Peter went quietly into the downstairs bedroom, the den really, that he and Charlotte used when they visited, while the boys were given the room upstairs that had been his when he was a boy. The bed had been folded back into the couch, which meant that his mother had been in and done it. Kicking his shoes off, he lay down on the sofa and stared at the ceiling. In truth, he had no idea where Charlotte had gone.

  When Andy snorted loudly in his playpen, Peter raised up on one elbow to study him, but the baby had not woken up and so Peter lay back down. Before making the trip, he and Charlotte had agreed to separate after the holidays, an eventuality he was looking forward to with mixed feelings. Liberation was what he’d expected to feel, but having reached this agreement with Charlotte, his spirits had declined. The fact that Charlotte was leaving him and not the other way around was not the comfort he’d imagined it would be, and as he lay in the den of the house he’d grown up in, he wondered whether it was a husband he wasn’t cut out to be, or a father. Or both. He wasn’t, in all honesty, much good at either. In the living room last week Will, who was prone to introspection, had been watching TV and picking his nose thoughtfully when he extracted a booger, the size of which had amazed
and startled him. Since it was not, however, the sort of thing he could share with his parents, he simply sat there in the middle of the floor and stared at his finger, full of pride, unaware that Wacker was sneaking up behind him. When Wacker snatched the booger and ran off with it, Will, outraged, gave chase, screaming, “Mine! Mine!”

  When the dispute erupted, Peter had been working in his cramped study, the utility room actually, which he shared with Charlotte’s washer and dryer, trying to finish an article he already knew no one would publish. Even when he finally discovered that this particular dispute was over ownership of a booger, his parental options seemed equally absurd. Possible responses ran through his mind, one after the other. He might, for instance, address the fairness principle. (“Wacker, give your brother back his booger. Get your own booger from your own nose.”) Or he could ignore the booger entirely. (“I thought I told you boys to be quiet so Daddy could work.”) Or even appeal to the older boy’s reason. (“Will, for heaven’s sake, you can’t really want that. Let the little jerk have it.”) In the end he’d said nothing, opting instead to collect his materials and retreat to the university library where there’d be peace and quiet. On the way out the door, he told Charlotte it was no great surprise he hadn’t gotten his tenure and promotion. People who lived in insane asylums never got tenure.

  And then after dropping this guilt bomb, he hadn’t even gone to the library, but rather to the house of a young woman colleague whose lover he’d been since September. Her tiny house was in a rundown section of town consisting of, for the most part, large old houses subdivided by their slumlord owners into rental units. It was as if, Peter sometimes thought, someone had announced a contest to see how many Malaysian students could be crammed into a five-bedroom house. Deirdre’s place was actually a guesthouse out back of one of these Malaysian dorms, and each time Peter made his way along the narrow, roller-coaster sidewalk, he took a deep breath, as if to acknowledge that it would be the last pure air he’d breathe for a while.

  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 h
anded, 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.

  This was how far Robert Halsey had gotten in solving the riddle of how long he’d been asleep when he was presented with another riddle. Down the hall, the bathroom door was flung open so hard that it banged against the wall like a gunshot. A small naked boy, Robert Halsey’s great-grandson, the one they called Wacker, the one he’d caught earlier that afternoon turning off the valve on his oxygen tank, bolted from the bathroom and ran hooting down the hall and clutching his tiny penis as if it were an emergency brake. In the kitchen doorway the boy skidded on the slick linoleum, where he paused, appearing to count the stunned house, taking in who was present, who absent, as well as the implications of these. Then he flung himself into the air, crashed down hard on his back and bounced along the floor like a tiny beached whale, his little stem spraying small blasts of urine into the air. Vera, who had been on her way over to the table with a pot of coffee, went into retreat, as if the spray her grandson were emitting might be sulfuric acid. “Ooooh!” she cried. “The little—” she searched here for the correct word, “—beast!”