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.”
Electricity
THE SHORT DRIVE to Hattie’s was the best part of Ruth’s day, twelve selfish, quiet minutes to herself. This was true even when she had her granddaughter with her, like today. After all, being with Tina was a lot like being alone. How such a still, silent child could have come from a long line of mouthy women was a mystery. But then life was full of such puzzles.
Including electricity. Last night Zack’s shed had been struck by lightning with such force that it had ruptured a seam in the roof. The sound of the accompanying thunder had been apocalyptic, levitating all three of the house’s occupants off their separate beds. A moment later Tina, blinking sleepily, had appeared at Ruth’s bedroom door, looking for all the world like her mother at that age. Ruth had never seen a kid so terrified of thunderstorms.
“It’s okay, Two-Shoes,” Ruth said, using her pet name from when she was little. “You can come in.” And so she’d crawled into bed next to her and was instantly asleep again. A moment later, it was Zack in the doorway. “Come see this,” he said, and so she went into his room, whose rear window overlooked the shed. At the apex of the roof where the lightning had struck, a strip of corrugated tin now stood up like a sentinel, and at its tip was an eerie blue flame that was somehow burning steadily in the gale. When the skies opened and the rain came down in sheets, they expected the flame to be doused, but it continued to burn like a mirage, rain leaping off the metal roof all around it, until gradually the flame faded and disappeared, at which point Ruth realized that she and Zack were holding hands, something they hadn’t done in years. What they did next they hadn’t done in even longer.