Everybody's Fool

Complicity

READERS OF the North Bath Weekly Journal generally didn’t look to their hometown paper for real news about Bath. The odd, occasional news item, like this week’s story about the middle school being renamed in Beryl Peoples’s honor, occasionally crept in, but usually the Journal stuck to church socials and spaghetti suppers, weddings and funerals, Little League scores and who made the dean’s list at the community college. The Journal’s real mission, though, was to report the more exciting goings-on in Schuyler Springs, where the harness track offered exotic wagering on trotters and pacers, and new restaurants were launched almost weekly, offering striking, unusual cuisines (Eritrean!) that used colorful, mysterious ingredients (nettles! squid ink!) and wine was served in “flights.” In Schuyler the local bookstore cosponsored famous-author events with the college’s English department, after which you could go next door and dance to a live, punk klezmer (?!) band or catch a movie at the new twelve-screen Cineplex.

No, if you wanted news about Bath, you had to subscribe to the Schuyler Springs Democrat, a daily that prided itself on hard-hitting investigative journalism, at least where its neighbors were concerned. For example, the Great Bath Stench, unreported in the Journal, had been the Democrat’s front-page news all last summer, as were Hilldale’s ongoing problems (“Dead on the Move in Bath,” one headline read, as if a zombie movie were being reviewed). Considered newsworthy this year were the long delays and cost overruns out at the Old Mill Lofts, a project that grew sketchier by the day and to which Mayor Gus Moynihan, despite recent efforts to distance himself, was inextricably tied.

And of course all of these headaches were in addition to Gus’s wife, who was in yet another downward spiral. That evening Alice had gotten so agitated over dinner that he’d called the doctor, who agreed to Gus’s request and prescribed a sedative. Given her exhaustion and the strength of the drug, she was unlikely to awaken before noon.

There had always been an ebb and flow to Alice’s madness, whole weeks, even months, where she’d be, or at least seem, at peace. She’d read or paint or just stare out the window into the dark Sans Souci woods. Then, for no apparent reason, she’d be on the move again, manic, jittery, wandering from room to room in their big rambling house like somebody looking for a lost object. Gus had learned to read the signs: the nervous twitch at the corner of what had before been a perfectly placid smile; books she’d previously been engrossed in that suddenly no longer held her interest; the tiny, precise brushstrokes of her paintings becoming looser, more careless, less tied to the reality she’d been trying to capture, as if the link between brain and brush had been severed.

He knew Alice could feel the sea change as well, the poor woman, when her anxiety returned yet again. Small, familiar sounds, instead of soothing her, would startle the hell out of her. Whatever was in pursuit seemed always to be in her peripheral vision, vanishing the second she turned to face it. To Gus, it seemed like she was remembering, in stages, something best forgotten completely. When he asked if anything was troubling her, she usually offered him a blank look, as if he were speaking German. Once, when he inquired what she was looking for, she responded, “Me?” He couldn’t help wondering if she didn’t know what he was talking about or if she’d actually answered him: it was herself she was in search of. Eventually, when the house proved too confining, she’d fly the coop, and he’d start getting reports of her in town, seemingly everywhere at once, freaking everybody out with that damn phone.

Yesterday, she claimed to have seen someone who’d frightened her, but when he asked who it was, she again looked at him blankly, like he was supposed to know. “Kurt?” he asked. Because it was possible. The man had been gone for nearly a decade and had no reason that Gus could imagine to return. Alice shook her head. “Kurt went away,” she explained, as if this departure might be something that had escaped Gus’s attention. Who knew? Maybe it was Raymer she was alluding to. He was the one who’d found her in the park that morning and brought her home. Usually she recognized him as her friend Becka’s husband and understood that he represented no threat or danger, but men in uniform often scared her, and Raymer had been in his dress blues, so she might not’ve recognized him.

Nothing troubled Gus more than this spooky phone business. These days the phone was her constant companion, her link to something as necessary as her next breath. Sometimes, when they were having a quiet meal, the phone would “ring,” and she’d rise, cross the room, take it out of her bag and “answer” it. She seemed to remember their long-standing rule about no calls during dinner, so she’d lower her voice and say, “I can’t talk now,” and return it to her bag. Other times she would listen patiently to whoever she dreamed was speaking, her eyes welling with tears. “Oh, dear,” she’d finally say, “then it’s even worse than we thought.” Sometimes he wondered if he himself was the subject. “He doesn’t know,” she’d whisper before pausing to listen for a while. “Of course he has a right to, but what if it destroys him?” Sometimes her conversations were so compelling that Gus would get caught up in them, half believing there really was someone on the line and wanting very much to know what the other person was saying. It was all so profoundly unsettling that he was considering taking the phone away from her.

At least the inevitable crisis might be drawing near, and the next few days could reveal where they were headed. Sometimes — who knew why? — Alice’s inner turbulence would calm, and she’d return to her easel, her brushes, her tranquil blues and greens and yellows, but it was far more likely that they were now on that all-too-familiar downward trajectory that would end in Utica, at the state mental hospital. It was the waiting he hated most. It was like attending a child with a fever, watching it climb dangerously, praying for it to break, fearing it wouldn’t, knowing you were helpless to affect the outcome.

All of which was why Gus had spent a sleepless night. He’d gone to bed early in hopes of putting a merciful end to the god-awful day, but his thoughts were on a loop. It still boggled his mind that one whole side of the old mill could have collapsed into the street. And on the same day a lethal reptile whose natural habitat is India escapes from the Morrison Arms? Nor was he able to dispel from his mind the image of his damn fool of a police chief pitching forward into Judge Flatt’s open grave, sending up that plume of dust. No doubt all three of these stories would be prominently featured in the Schuyler paper. Dear God, they’d have a field day! Every time it seemed he might drift off, another thunderstorm rolled through, and Gus was wide awake again. He was the one in need of a sedative. Why hadn’t he asked for one? When one pile-driving clap of thunder shook the house, he rose and went to check on Alice, but she appeared to be sleeping soundly. Nor did the ringing telephone wake her later.

The calls started shortly after the last of the storms, and they kept on throughout the night, mostly from citizens wanting to know when the fuck they were going to get their power back. The biggest mistake Gus had made in running for mayor — what on earth had possessed him? — was to make his home phone number public. The idea, as best he could recall, had been to come across as a genuine public servant, open and accessible to his constituents. It quickly became apparent, however, that most of the people who wanted to talk to him, especially in the middle of the night, were drunk or insane or both, so once he was safely elected he got an answering machine to screen the loonies and used his unlisted cell phone for people he actually wanted to talk to. His recorded message for everyone else stated that each call was important to him (a lie) and that he would return the call at his first opportunity (another). It stunned him how long people would vent. Several callers reported strange otherworldly sightings: cows in the fields with their twitching tails brightly aglow, or a mystical blue orb perched atop the bayonet of the Union soldier statue on the library lawn, or stone crosses ablaze at their points out at Hilldale. Was something satanic afoot? one caller wanted to know. Sophomoric, in Gus’s opinion, was more like it. With less than two weeks of school left, they’d entered prime prank season. If stone crosses were burning, it was because some nitwit had doused them in lighter fluid and set a match to them. In the morning he’d have Raymer check with the hospital to see how many teenagers had been treated for burns.

There were other less spectral goings-on as well. The mother of a man known around town as Spinmatics Joe called to say that her son had gone out to the White Horse Tavern and not come home, leading her to suspect foul play. She gave Gus to understand that some rabid liberals had it in for her boy because he dared to speak the truth about the minorities and homosexuals and them who were taking over everything to the point where you couldn’t really even call this America anymore. The final lunatic had called shortly after five to report grave robbers digging up Judge Barton Flatt’s grave. Though the idea was ludicrous, just in case, he’d called the station, and an officer named Miller was dispatched to investigate. He found nobody at the crime scene, but a hundred yards from the Spring Street entrance he came upon something even more bizarre and disturbing. An enormous section of earth large enough to accommodate a mature tree and its vast, shriveled root system, as well as half-a-dozen caskets, some of them very old, had somehow detached itself from its surroundings, slid down the slope made muddy by the torrential rains and now sat like an island in the middle of the goddamn road.

Which was why, when the mayor looked out his bedroom window and saw the sky lightening in the east, he gave up on sleep. Better to rise and meet the day head-on. Rather than wait for the Democrat to be delivered midmorning, he’d drive into Schuyler, grab a hot-off-the-press copy and take his inevitable shellacking over an expensive cappuccino at the new Starbucks everybody was talking about. Three-fifty seemed like a lot to pay for coffee, but he heard they had nice leather chairs, and he could sink into one of those to read the bad news about his town in relative peace among hipper Schuyler folks who saw nothing so terribly wrong with small extravagances. By the time he returned to Bath and his own unhip constituents, the bad news would feel comfortably old hat. He dressed quietly and was halfway out the door before it occurred to him to check on Alice one more time, and it was then he discovered she was gone.

—

POOR, KIND, addled woman.

Who was to blame? It would’ve been nice to blame Kurt, and most of the time Gus did. Other times, like now, he gauged his own complicity. He knew, of course, that Alice’s difficulties predated him, and maybe even Kurt, who claimed she’d been a feral young woman in college, her mind splintered from dropping acid, but Gus doubted Alice had ever been truly wild. She might have experimented with drugs — it was the seventies, after all — but only at someone else’s instigation, and he suspected Kurt of being her personal Svengali. What a piece of work that man had turned out to be. Hiring him — Gus himself had cast the deciding vote — had been a tragic mistake. To make matters worse, he’d been warned. Two of his search committee colleagues had sensed something wrong, something didn’t add up, but it wasn’t anything they could put their finger on, so Gus had reminded them that vague misgivings were sometimes just prejudice in disguise. He’d certainly looked good on paper. True, he hadn’t published much, but he was professionally active, attending numerous conferences and giving papers, and he appeared to know the biggest names in political science personally. His letters of recommendation were among the strongest Gus had ever seen.

One night, though, shortly after Kurt’s campus visit, Gus had gotten a call at home. “You do not want to hire Professor Wright,” the caller said without preamble. Gus’s first thought was that this must be one of his search committee colleagues, but it sounded like a long-distance call. When Gus said, “Who is this?” the man said that wasn’t important. What mattered was that he understand that Kurt Wright was evil. Gus remembered actually chuckling at this. Who in the academy used such language? There, words like “evil” had long ago been replaced by others like “inappropriate.” The caller, whoever he was, must be unhinged. “Well,” Gus told him, “yours seems to be a minority view. His letters of recommendation—”

“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.”

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.

Who knew? Maybe Bath was bad luck. Out at Hilldale the dead were resurfacing after decades in the ground, a triumph of the past over the present. How could you expect people to imagine a better future when Great-Great-Grandma Rose launched herself out of the poisoned earth, seemingly in protest. In town the ground was so full of yellow pus that when it rained, the air became not just disgusting but probably toxic. On what basis could you tell people they were wrong to concede defeat? Or convince them that every problem has a solution when those you offer in good faith turn out to be so rickety and jerry-rigged that they tumble down in the street? How do you get a community to believe in itself, in its own fundamental goodness, when in its midst there are people who secretly fill apartments with illegal poisonous reptiles? How do you keep everyone else from peering into their own flawed hearts and seeing vipers stirring there?

The other thing that Kurt had understood was that Gus wouldn’t be able to resist the challenge of fixing Alice. Not only would he want to repair whatever was wrong with her, he’d confuse his compassion for a damaged soul with love. Okay, he’d tried. Give himself that much credit. Like Bath, however, there was more wrong with Alice than he’d realized, and nothing he’d tried had worked. Though he hated to admit it, he’d bitten off more than he could chew, and now he was gagging. This sin had a name: pride. Nothing now remained but what pride goeth before.

From somewhere outside the park came the squeal of brakes, and Gus winced, expecting the crashing sound of torn metal and shattered glass. When none came, he pictured Alice crumpled on the pavement. Would it be a blessing? The question was just there, shocking, vile. How could he think such a thing? What kind of man permits such a thought, even in passing?

The police scanner crackled, then was silent.

—

ONE AFTERNOON, not long after he’d called on Alice, Gus returned home to find a man seated back on the patio, staring off into the woods with his feet up on the table. It took him a moment to recognize Kurt without his beard. He watched him for a moment from behind the drape, trying to decide what the chances were that his visit here was related to his own next door. Pretty good, he concluded. Also pretty good that Kurt had heard him drive up and was only pretending to be lost in thought.

Hearing the patio door slide open, he looked up and offered Gus his unpleasant smile, though he neither rose nor lowered his feet.

“Glass of wine?” Gus offered.

“I thought you’d never ask.” His point being that it’d been nearly a year since he’d invited Gus over, an invitation that had never been returned.

He opened a bottle of white and brought it outside, along with three glasses. “Would Alice like to join us?”

“It would be better if she didn’t.”

Gus poured wine into two glasses and left the third sitting there on the table. He made sure one pour was slightly more than the other and handed that one to Kurt, who chuckled and said, “You noticed that.” A manila folder with Gus’s name on it sat in the center of the table. “People generally do notice things,” Kurt continued, “especially when you direct their attention, but they act on very little. Then they wonder why their lives are so full of regret.”

Gus took a sip of wine and winced. Was the bottle corked, or was he tasting the acid that was suddenly in the back of his throat? Probably the latter, since Kurt didn’t seem to notice.

“For instance, you knew right from the start that something was wrong with Alice, but did you bother to ask? Did you own your curiosity and say, Kurt, buddy, what’s wrong with that fucking woman? Did she get dropped on her head as a kid, or what?”

“What is wrong with Alice, Kurt?”

“The fuck should I know?” he said, picking up the third, unused glass and examining it closely, as if for smudges. “Something, though, wouldn’t you agree?”

Gus felt a surge of anger at this, followed by a welcome jolt of courage. “Okay, then, what’s wrong with you?”

At this Kurt tapped the empty glass against the edge of the table. It didn’t shatter, but a crack now zigzagged from rim to stem. “Kurt’s not a very nice man, is he,” said Kurt, and it was true, he did do Gus’s voice amazingly well.

And just that quickly Gus’s courage was all used up. “Please don’t do that,” he said weakly, meaning the mimicking, not breaking the glass.

The other man had leaned toward him confidentially. “If you need a friend,” he said, “I’m right next door.”

“I said don’t.”

Kurt shrugged and poured more wine into his own glass.

“What do you want, Kurt?”

He appeared to think about it. “What do I want? It might be hard for you to believe, but the truth is I never know for sure. I try to live in the moment. Right now, for instance? This little bit of time we’re sharing? Is very rewarding. Honestly, the look on your face when you heard your voice, your words, coming out of my mouth? Wonderful. You didn’t know whether to shit or go blind.”

“You really are evil, aren’t you.”

“Hey, don’t say I didn’t warn you.” When Gus blinked at this, Kurt continued, “You do not want to hire Kurt Wright…We want him out of here…”

Gus felt a wave of nausea wash over him. For a moment he thought he might faint. “That was you.”

“Well, I thought you deserved a heads-up.”

“How did you learn to do voices?”

“Same way you get to Carnegie Hall, pal. Practice, practice, practice. I record important phone calls. All I need is a sentence or two. Man or woman, doesn’t matter. Children are tougher.”

“Except my conversation with Alice wasn’t over the phone. I was in the room with her. You weren’t.”

“Yeah, pretty darned sneaky there, Gus. Waiting until I left? But I forgive you. Anyway, sometimes when I go out, I leave a tape running. Not that I distrust Alice. She’d never. But honestly? Some of the things that woman says when she’s alone are fucking priceless.”

“Why are you telling me all this?” Because a sane person wouldn’t, would he?

“Every artist wants to be appreciated, is part of it,” Kurt said, pouring again. “But also I’m easily bored. Take now. Rich though this experience has been — and I’m not just talking about you here, don’t flatter yourself about that, but also the college, this whole fucking upstate New York backwater — it can’t help getting old. The planning is always fun, but the execution? At some point the law of diminishing returns always kicks in, and things become rote. I’ve been bored with you and yours for a while now.”

“I’m sorry to be such a disappointment.”

“Hey, not your fault. You were way overmatched. Anyway,” he said, pushing the manila folder toward him. “I need a couple small favors, and then I’ll be out of your hair.”

Inside the folder was a preaddressed, stamped envelope, as well as a one-page letter of recommendation, marked SAMPLE.

“I warned you about this, too, if you recall,” Kurt said. “You can disregard that letter, if you want. I only include it for possible talking points. But by all means use your own — what’s the word I’m looking for? Voice, that’s it. However, as this new post I’m about to be offered is administrative, I’d take it as a personal favor if you stressed how well I play with others.”

“Should I really use that phrase? ‘Play with others’?”

“Knock yourself out. Nobody will hear the double meaning until it’s too late. And don’t trouble your conscience over all this. When I’m hired, which I will be, it won’t be because of your recommendation. As you know, these things are pretty pro forma, a hedge against regret — for which, it inevitably turns out, there is no hedge.”

Gus held up the envelope. “Aren’t you concerned I’ll call this Janet Applebaum and tell her all about you?”

Kurt waved this off. “No need. Already done. Trust me. The good woman has been forewarned, and in no uncertain terms. Unfortunately, I think she may have concluded that the person warning her was deranged, just as you did.”

“You are deranged.”

“Jeez,” he said, emptying the last of the bottle into his glass. “I’ve drunk the lion’s share of this, haven’t I?”

Gus took a sip from his glass. The wine tasted better now, the fear-induced nausea having pretty much passed, leaving in its place little but sadness. “What’s wrong with Alice, Kurt? What have you done to her?”

“You give me too much credit. It’s true I may have undermined her confidence from time to time, but I never told her anything about herself that she didn’t already know. Like most people, Alice was complicit every step of the way. But I doubt any permanent damage has been done. If she had a good man, she’d be right as rain.”

“Instead she’s got you.”

“Poor Alice,” he agreed. “I think she’s fond of you. She has no idea you’re gay, of course.”

“I’m not, Kurt.”

He shrugged, as if the point wasn’t worth arguing over. “Next you’ll be telling me you have no political ambitions.”

To this, Gus offered no response.

“Jesus,” Kurt said, rubbing his temples. “I can actually see your mind working. You’re thinking, Good guess — right? Every English professor has a novel in his desk drawer; every poli-sci prof wants to prove that those who teach can sometimes do?”

Which was pretty much what Gus had been thinking. But really, how could this psychopath know about his long-range plans? He’d never spoken about them to anyone.

“The house is a good idea,” Kurt said. “The one on Upper Main Street, by the Sans Souci? The one you keep going back to look at? Needs work but, as they say in the biz, it’s got good bones. And Bath prices can only go up.”

“You’ve been following me.”

Kurt snorted at this. “You think I’m behind you, Gus? Really? Because what should be coming into focus right about now is how far ahead of you I’ve been, right from the start. But getting back to the house? Good idea. Outsiders seldom fare well in small-town politics. Gotta sink those roots into the community, have some skin in the game. So yeah, make an offer. Use locals to renovate, even if they fuck everything up.”

Conclusions Gus had already come to. Why did it make him feel better to have a man he viscerally loathed confirm the wisdom of his strategy?

“Which leaves only the other thing you’ve been mulling over. Will people in a jerkwater town like Bath vote for a gay?”

“This again.”

“Hey, it’s not me you have to convince. Good-looking woman at your side just might do the trick, is all I’m saying.”

Gus put the letter back in the envelope. “You said you had a couple favors.”

“Right,” he said, sitting up straight and doing a little drum solo on the table with his thumbs. “Almost forgot. If it’s not too much to ask, I was hoping you might look in on Alice while I’m gone. Make sure she’s okay? Moving again so soon is kind of freaking her out. I’m flying out to California the day after tomorrow. I need to find us a place to live, meet my new staff, give them their marching orders, arrange for the movers, a hundred other things. I should be back by the middle of the month, though, and like I said, after that we’ll be out of your hair.”

Kurt rose, his glass empty now, along with the bottle, and extended his hand. When Gus hesitated, he actually looked hurt. “Come on,” he said, “nobody died. Why be a bad sport? I’d feel better if we parted as friends.”

Hating himself, Gus shook the man’s hand.

“I have your promise? You’ll look after Alice while I’m gone?”

“Yes, that I will do.”

“You know what,” Kurt said. “You play your cards right, you could come out of this with what you want.” He shrugged, again. “Or what you imagine you want.”

—

SO, GUS THOUGHT, in the end it had been a bargain, and Alice herself a plastic chip. Had he sensed this even from the start? Over the next few weeks the exact nature of the covenant took shape. Gus had looked in on Alice, as promised. Though she was even more fretful than usual, she didn’t seem to need him for much beyond a half gallon of milk or a dozen eggs if he happened to be going to the store. He didn’t wonder why their station wagon was absent from the driveway, since Kurt would’ve driven it to Albany to catch his flight and left it in long-term parking. Alice didn’t drive and had no use for it. One morning he asked her why, given that she was trying not to sleep so much, she always kept the place so dark, the drapes drawn tightly shut in the middle of the day. “He likes it like that,” she told him.

“But Kurt isn’t here,” he pointed out. “How do you like it?”

She seemed to consider this, her own preference, for the first time. With the drapes pulled back, the apartment flooded with natural light, Gus began to notice things were missing. He’d only been there once before and hadn’t been paying close attention, but hadn’t there been a laptop set up in the kitchen nook? A Bose radio?

“Has Kurt telephoned you?” he asked the following day. She responded, as if to a trick question, “I don’t think so.” He noticed the phalanx of pill bottles lined up along the kitchen windowsill, all prescription drugs: Paxil, Xanax, a few others.

“I’m not well,” she explained when he asked what they were for. “They help me to not be so frightened.”

When Kurt had been gone a week, Gus asked if he might have a look in their bedroom. If Alice saw anything strange in this request, she gave no sign. Some of Kurt’s clothes were hanging from the rod in the closet, but fewer than Gus would’ve expected. His dresser drawers contained underwear and some stray, unmatched socks, a few yellowing handkerchiefs — the sort of things Gus had crammed into the back of his own drawers — but where was the good stuff? Gradually it came to him that what he was looking at was a snake’s shed skin, which in turn caused him to recall something in their final conversation that had barely registered at the time. Twice Kurt had used the phrase “be out of your hair.” The second time he’d said we. The first time he’d used the pronoun I. The first had been a slip. Kurt wasn’t coming back.

Slowly, as if the thrown-back drapes were allowing for all manner of illumination, Alice began to show signs of similar understanding, though she continued to insist that Kurt would shortly return, after which they’d begin their new lives in California. To Gus, such statements felt like trial balloons. Would he contradict her? “Why don’t I cook us dinner tonight?” he suggested one morning before heading in to work. He’d prepare the food in his kitchen and bring it over. They could eat outside on the back patio with the sliding door open so Alice could hear the phone if it rang. “Should I?” she said, clearly tempted when he offered her a glass of wine, and he told her he thought one glass wouldn’t hurt. He also advised her to consult a local physician about how many of the medications she was taking were really necessary. After dessert, when he rose to go back next door, he said, as if the thought had just that moment occurred to him, “How would you like it if I looked after you from now on?”

She regarded him with an expression that he took to be midway between knowledge and innocence. “You’re a very nice man,” she said, “but what about Kurt?”

“I can talk to him about that when he comes back.”

That night he lay in bed thinking about the year he spent in Korea near the end of the conflict. He never lied to anyone about the nature of his service there, but unless asked he didn’t volunteer that he’d spent his time not in combat but in the quartermaster’s office. It was there he’d learned what things were worth, how to manage their flow, how to make friends and get things done for the common good. By the time he returned stateside he was prepared to take full advantage of the GI Bill, and at Albany State he’d learned the intricacies of another elaborate system and what it took to succeed in it. He’d had a rewarding academic life at the college and moved through it honestly, or at least not dishonestly. But when the phone rang he was remembering with great fondness the boy he’d worked with in the quartermaster’s office.

“So,” Kurt said, “how is the lovely Alice?”

“We had dinner on your patio. She still thinks you’re coming back for her.”

“But you know better.”

“Are you two even married?”

“Lord, no. What gave you that idea?”

“Your academic vitae, for one thing? For another, she refers to you as her husband?”

“Oh, right.”

“So you’re telling me we’ll never see you again.”

“I don’t intend to return to Schuyler Fucking Springs, if that’s what you mean.”

“Of course that’s what I mean.”

“Rest easy,” he said, and for some reason Gus trusted him. “And speaking of easy. Do you have any idea how easy I’m letting you off?”

Actually, he did have a pretty good idea. “Goodbye, Kurt,” Gus said, but he’d already hung up.

—

IN THE INTERVENING DECADE Gus had mostly managed to put Kurt out of his mind. The morning after he was elected mayor, though, he’d located the name of the dean, Janet Applebaum, to whom he’d sent Kurt’s letter of recommendation. It turned out she was no longer in administration, having returned to full-time teaching. “I know who you are,” she said, with thinly veiled hostility, when he identified himself. “Do you have any idea the misery that man caused here?” Careers ruined, apparently. Marriages wrecked. A suicide. “He’s gone, then?” Gus inquired, and the woman said yes, he had been for some time. Last she heard he was in Europe working for…NATO? The UN? She couldn’t remember.

Feeling slightly ill, he thanked her and was about to hang up when she said, “So…what kind of man does what you did? Knowing what you knew, how could you write that letter?” But there was something in her voice, something besides righteous indignation, that he recognized. “Didn’t you write one just like it yourself?” he asked. The resulting silence was his answer.

Well, he told himself at the time, if a life had been lost, another had been saved. Once off the majority of her medications, a new Alice had emerged that Gus hadn’t known existed. Not exactly extroverted but fully engaged with the world, not hiding from it in the dark. Before long, the years she’d spent with Kurt began to recede like a bad dream. Gus learned never to bring his name up in conversation, because it always rendered Alice mute, remorseful, he supposed, for the lost years. In the months leading up to their wedding, Alice’s spirits were so buoyant that he allowed himself to believe that Kurt was right, and no lasting harm had been done. All she needed was a good man.

They’d had a simple civil ceremony and departed immediately for a honeymoon in Italy. That winter he’d made an offer on the old Victorian on Upper Main and spent a small fortune renovating it. When they returned stateside it was to this house, the old duplexes now rented to other faculty. Alice professed to love the house, but he could tell it was so big that it intimidated and maybe even frightened her. She wasn’t sure she liked the idea of having separate bedrooms, though he’d explained there was no reason for both of them to be awakened by town business in the middle of the night. After a time, the old anxieties began to return. “I just get like this sometimes,” she said when he asked what was wrong, why she was so agitated. “But he’s gone,” he objected. After all, Kurt was the root cause of her problems, wasn’t he? If not him, then who?

That fall — he was in his final year of teaching — he got a call from the campus police. Alice was causing a disturbance at her old duplex where she seemed to believe she still lived. “You’re not my husband, are you?” she exclaimed when he arrived there to gather her in, her tone suggesting it wasn’t so much that she questioned being married to him as that he hadn’t measured up to her preconceived idea of what a husband was supposed to be.

—

THIS MORNING, sitting on their bench in Sans Souci Park, what troubled Gus most was what he’d never know. What was it Kurt had said? That if he played his cards right he could have what he wanted, or imagined he wanted? Well, had he played his cards right, or had Kurt played them for him? The choices had seemed to be his when he made them, but now he wasn’t so sure. To the other man’s credit, he’d kept his word and hadn’t returned to Schuyler, at least so far as Gus knew. He doubted it was him that Alice had seen today. It was possible she hadn’t seen anybody. When she was spiraling out of control, what his wife saw in her head was more real to her than the world that entered through her senses. Absent evidence to the contrary, he’d continue to believe they’d seen the last of Kurt Wright. The other thing he’d never know was whether a good man was all that Alice needed. Because he himself wasn’t a good man. He knew that now for a certainty. He’d meant not just to be good to Alice but also for her, but she’d been better for him and his career than he for her. Sensing her innate kindness and fragility, people were drawn to her, and they appreciated how protective he was of her. By some strange calculus, this had actually translated into votes. Kurt, of course, had foreseen that it would.

He’d played his cards right, he decided. He’d gotten what he imagined he wanted.

—

LONGMEADOW, a relatively new subdivision of mostly two-story town houses, was weirdly familiar to Gus. Had some young faculty member at the college won tenure years ago and, too poor to crack the Schuyler market, concluded that buying here was better than paying rent? The developer had planted trees and shrubs, but sales had been slow, and some of the plantings had shriveled and died of neglect. Though the units appeared to be fully occupied now, to Gus it looked like the kind of neighborhood that would never achieve what realtors liked to call maturity. It would segue directly from new to shabby.

He’d been afraid that Alice might be gone by the time he got there, but no, she was right where she’d been sighted on the stone bench outside the rundown community center, having one of her imaginary phone conversations. She was wearing the same long, flowing skirt she wore most days, along with one of her blousy tops, for which he was grateful. When she woke up agitated, she’d sometimes leave the house in just her robe and slippers or, worse, her nightgown. Pulling into the lot, he turned off the ignition and, since she was too wrapped up in her conversation to have noticed his arrival, just sat there, watching, trying to calculate how much of what he was witnessing was his fault. After a while, though, he got out and joined her on the bench. Seeing him, she said, “I’ll have to call you back,” and put the handset in her bag. “Is something wrong?” she asked him.

“No,” he said. “I’m just glad I found you.”

She blotted his wet cheeks with her sleeve. It was as much intimacy as they’d shared in a long time. They’d had little enough, God knew. His fault, not hers, though in the end maybe not his, either. Maybe God’s, or nature’s. How in the world were you supposed to know?

“Are you sad?” she said, taking his hand.

“Maybe a little,” he admitted.

“Why?”

“Because I want you to be well.”

“I am well.”

“Good.”

“Sometimes I get sad, too,” she admitted. She was studying the nearest town house, and suddenly it dawned on Gus why the street seemed so damned familiar. Raymer and his wife had lived here, perhaps in that very place — what the hell was her name, Becky? Jesus, his brain was turning to mush. No, Becka. She’d slipped on a rug at the top of the stairs and broken her neck when she fell, the poor woman. Raymer still blamed himself, you could tell. Maybe blaming yourself was just something men did.

“She told me things,” Alice said, still staring at the town house. Odd how she could sometimes read his thoughts.

“Like what?”

“What was in her heart.”

Now Gus studied her carefully. Was she criticizing him for keeping what was in his own heart a secret?

“Was it Kurt you saw earlier today? The man who scared you?”

“Kurt’s gone.”

Gus was crying again. He could feel the tears. “Poor duck,” he said. “You get so confused, don’t you.”

“Do I?”

They rose, and she followed him obediently to the car, but as he helped buckle her in, she kept looking past him at the Raymers’ former home. “You’re going to be okay,” he promised her.

When he turned the corner and the town house was no longer in sight, she began to calm down, but just then her phone rang, if only in her mind. It took her a moment to locate the handset in her bag. “Hello,” she said. “Oh, yes, hi.”

And something occurred to Gus for the first time. In the fiction of these conversations, Alice never called anyone. He never heard her say, Hi, it’s me. I hope I haven’t caught you at a bad time. I was just thinking how long it’d been since we last talked. No, it was always someone calling her. She was the needed one, the one who would listen without judging or arguing. The wise, trusted friend. The person you turn to when the chips are down. “You’re being too hard on yourself,” he heard her say now. “I know how difficult it is,” she continued, “but the important thing is to remember you’re not alone. I’m right here.”