“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?