Somebodys fool, p.3
Somebody's Fool, page 3
Peter pictured this in his mind’s eye. “Come on. There are concrete barriers.”
“They tell me I went over one of those.”
“You didn’t see it?”
“I was facing the other direction.”
Peter tried to make this work in his head. “That…would mean the vehicle was in reverse?”
“That’s how I figure it,” Sully admitted. “It would explain why the ass end of the truck was what hit the tree.”
Peter massaged his temples. “Jesus.”
“What? You’ve never made a mistake?”
How about right now? he wanted to say. Coming back here? Letting myself get sucked back into Sully World? Would these qualify as mistakes?
“Okay, so you’re here,” Sully continued. “What are you planning to do for work?”
“Teach.”
“Where?”
“SCCC.” He’d heard about the just-posted opening when he’d called a friend at Edison College to see if there was any chance of getting his old job back. This other position at the community college, being full-time and providing benefits, was better. “I’m the new chair of the English Department, actually.”
“That would’ve pleased your mother.”
“No,” Peter replied. “Being named chair of the English department at Yale would’ve pleased my mother.”
“How come you didn’t tell me about all this?”
“How come you didn’t tell me about the accident?”
Having no ready answer, Sully took out a couple additional dollars for Peter’s coffee and tossed them on top of his check. Janey came back down the counter. “Two Sullivans now?” she said. “God help us.”
Sully slid off his stool. “Tell your mother I’m going to want a word with her. Specifically about that big mouth of hers.”
“I’ll tell her, but I don’t see it ending well for you,” she said. She raised a questioning eyebrow at Peter, who agreed with her wholeheartedly.
Out front, Sully scanned the cars parked at the curb for one that might belong to his son. “This one here,” Peter told him, electronically unlocking the Audi A6 he’d paid too much for at a used-car lot in Schuyler a couple days earlier.
His father got in, surveyed the car’s interior, moved the passenger seat back so he could stretch out his bum knee. “I went to war with Germany, you know,” he said.
“Yeah?” Peter said, turning his key in the ignition. “Who won?”
“I did,” his father told him as the Audi’s engine sprung to throaty life. “It was nip and tuck there for a while, though.”
Eighteen months. Neither knew it, of course, but that was the amount of time remaining to them. Eighteen months before Peter would walk into Hattie’s one morning and Janey would inform him Sully had gotten tired of waiting for him and limped up the street to the OTB to bet his daily trifecta. Peter found him sitting on the bench outside, studying the racing form. Or that’s what he’d apparently been doing when his heart quit.
Eighteen months. Barely long enough for Sully to help Peter understand that it wasn’t just Miss Beryl’s house and his father’s savings account he would be inheriting.
Owning It
“SO, HOW DOES IT FEEL?” said Dr. Qadry, fixing Raymer with her pale blue eyes. “Yesterday was your last day, right?”
Right. In fact, his photo had made the front page of the paper, its headline reading: “The End of an Era.” He was pictured at his desk, surrounded by cardboard boxes. Behind him on the wall was a framed quotation that was, unfortunately, readable: WE’RE NOT HAPPY, it said, UNTIL YOU’RE NOT HAPPY. Attribution? Douglas Raymer, North Bath Chief of Police, 1989.
The stated sentiment, of course, had been the exact opposite of what he meant. He’d been told by Mayor Gus Moynihan that he needed a campaign slogan, something pithy and short enough to fit on a business card, and We’re not happy until you’re happy was the best he could come up with. He still had no idea where that extra not came from. The printer swore that what they put on the card was exactly what he’d written. It was his responsibility to say what he meant, not theirs to figure it out. That had been his eighth-grade English teacher’s position as well. (He’d been a well-intentioned but disorganized thinker and careless writer, a shortcoming that didn’t seem to bother his other teachers but did bother Beryl Peoples. Say what you mean! she wrote in his margins. Mean what you say! Don’t assume! Proofread!) As to the latter, the printer had given him the opportunity, though apparently he’d not taken full advantage. He remembered pausing briefly at the word you’re and thinking, Should it be your? But no, you’re was correct. (Miss Beryl again, correcting him over and over until he finally understood. You’re means You are. The apostrophe tells you that.) Somehow, he just hadn’t seen the extra not. Neither, alas, did the first fifty or so voters he’d handed cards to, but eventually someone did, and overnight, he was famous. People stopped him on the street, left messages on his home phone. There’d even been a small item about his gaffe on the editorial page of the paper. “Finally,” said the snarky columnist, “an honest cop.” Nor did people forget. Dr. Qadry herself remembered the incident a decade later when he started seeing her, and it was she who first suggested he get the quotation framed and hang it on his office wall. That way, she reasoned, he’d be owning it.
Dr. Qadry was big on “owning” things, actually. The word came up again and again in their sporadic therapy sessions. Everybody makes mistakes, she liked to say, but aren’t you better off owning them? Owning a mistake effectively neutralized it, she claimed, taking away its power to wound. Moreover, he’d be telling the whole world he could laugh at himself, thereby short-circuiting other people’s mockery. To Raymer’s way of thinking, there were several flaws in this reasoning. First, not everyone did make mistakes. Take Dr. Qadry herself. In the decade or so Raymer had been coming to see her, he’d never known her to do or say anything remotely foolish. She seemed to have the ability to proofread even spoken words before they left her mouth. Second, was it really true that laughing at yourself dissuaded other people from having fun at your expense? Certainly not in Raymer’s experience, which was considerable. Not that he’d ever do it, but if you really wanted people to stop laughing at you, wouldn’t you be better off punching them in the face? That they’d remember.
Still, what did he know? Maybe Dr. Qadry was right. She was definitely a smart woman, and he knew she meant well. It was hard to say why he almost never took her advice, if advice was even what she was offering him. (She never said, Here’s what you should do, or Try this.) Her suggestions were often highly theoretical. Not Take it from one who knows, which would have implied shared experience, a genuine understanding of folly. Rather, she seemed to be saying, Here’s something I read in a journal once. I’ve had no occasion to try it myself, but who knows? It could work? Was that why he rejected so many of her suggestions out of hand?
His real mistake, of course, had been sharing her advice about having We’re not happy until you’re not happy framed with Charice, who’d immediately gone out and done it without telling him. “Don’t you touch it, either,” she warned him after hanging the framed quotation on the wall. “It’s my gift to you.”
“But…,” Raymer had begun.
“But what?” Charice said, hands on her hips, daring him to say something dumb, a dare he could never resist.
“But…if it’s a gift, doesn’t that make it mine? Don’t I get to do what I want with it?”
Eyes narrowed now. “Like what?”
“Like…put it facedown in a locked desk drawer?” Because here was the problem in a nutshell. Most of what these two women wanted him to own, he himself would have preferred to disown completely. There were times, in fact, when he would’ve liked to disown his entire self, were such a thing possible. The fact that they were so often of one mind about what ailed him and what he should do about it made him wonder if they were somehow in cahoots. Was it possible that after his therapy sessions, Charice called Dr. Qadry to find out what all he was banging on about now? This would certainly have been a violation of a good therapist’s confidentiality rules, but the fact that they were so often in agreement did suggest they might be tag-teaming him.
“You know what I think?” Charice wanted to know one day when he expressed his conviction that most of Dr. Qadry’s opinions were of the oddball variety. “I think therapy is wasted on you.”
Nor did Raymer disagree. His sessions with Dr. Qadry were pleasant enough, but were they actually doing any good? The reason he kept going back was that he kind of liked her, and the town of North Bath picked up most of the tab. Also, it got him out of the office. Nor did he want to hurt her feelings by suggesting they weren’t getting anywhere, when she seemed to think they were. Often, when they came to the end of their hour, she’d regard him seriously and say, “I think we made some progress today,” to which he’d dutifully reply, “Me, too,” though what he really wanted to say was What progress, exactly? Was it possible they really were making headway he was totally unaware of? Why couldn’t she tell him what this supposed progress consisted of, so he could decide for himself?
“Instead of ignoring all her suggestions,” Charice said, predictably taking Dr. Qadry’s side, “why don’t you listen to the woman? You’ve got this problem,” she said, pointing at the framed quotation on the wall as evidence, “and she’s trying to help you with it, but you won’t let her.”
“What problem?” he said, not because he didn’t think he had any problems but because he was curious as to which one Charice was identifying with such confidence. That he needed to proofread more carefully? That he was, in general, his own worst enemy?
“Your problem,” she explained, “is you think you can control how other people see you. Can’t nobody do that.” She paused to let this wisdom sink in. Raymer knew Charice too well to suppose she was finished, though, so he waited for her to drop the hammer, which she did. “Least of all you.”
God, he missed her.
“Have you given any thought to next steps?” Dr. Qadry wanted to know. His future, she meant. Now that the end of an era had arrived.
“Not really,” Raymer said. A lie. He’d thought about little else for weeks. It used to worry him that he lied so often during these therapy sessions. After all, what was the point of going to a doctor if you weren’t going to be honest about your symptoms? Once he’d even raised the issue with Dr. Qadry herself, obliquely, by wondering how she was able to tell when her clients weren’t telling her the truth, and her response had been surprising. It probably didn’t matter, she explained, since untruthful answers could be as revealing as truthful ones, sometimes even more so. “It’s not really important for me to know if you’re telling me the truth,” she’d said, making the whole thing less hypothetical. “It’s important for you to.” Which made him wonder, and not for the first time, what exactly he (and the town of North Bath) was paying her for. He could lie to himself for free.
“But working for the Schuyler PD is out?” she said. “Explain to me again why you don’t want to do that?”
“Well, they already have an excellent chief of police,” he said, which elicited a knowing smile.
“And do you need to be the one in charge?”
“Not necessarily.” Though in this particular instance…
“Would you have trouble taking orders from a woman?”
“Of course not,” he said, as if insulted by the suggestion. Though, again, in this particular instance…
Dr. Qadry smiled. Said nothing. Her way of reminding him, he suspected, that she hadn’t been kidding. She really didn’t mind him lying to her.
Was he lying, though? Hadn’t he been equally resentful of Mayor Moynihan’s incessant recommendations and interference in police matters even before the business card fiasco? And what about Judge Flatt? Hadn’t Raymer chafed at every belittling comment offered by his old nemesis? “You know my thoughts on arming morons,” he’d once remarked from the bench after Raymer, then a young officer, had accidentally discharged his weapon, the wayward bullet narrowly missing an old woman seated on her commode half a block away. “If you arm one, you have to arm them all. Otherwise, it isn’t even good sport.” When it came to authority, Raymer liked to think he was gender neutral, equally resentful of both men and women.
Though, now that he thought about it, maybe she was onto something. It was true that he didn’t always recognize good advice when it came from a woman. In fact, he’d admitted as much when the subject of his mother had come up in one of their early sessions. (Of course it came up. Would therapy even exist without mothers?) Raymer’s own had been a perpetually frightened woman who as a child had witnessed her father, a thief, being arrested and taken away by the police. She made no secret of her fear that Raymer had inherited this thieving gene and would in the fullness of time suffer a similar fate. Even his decision to go into law enforcement hadn’t completely disabused the woman of the notion that he might be headed for a life of crime and end up cuffed in the back of a police cruiser like his grandfather. As a result, he’d learned from an early age never to trust his mother’s advice. Was it possible his relationship with her had somehow bled over into subsequent relationships with other women? He thought again about Miss Beryl, his eighth-grade teacher, who seemed to intuit his many struggles, both in school and at home. She’d tried to help by gifting him books she believed would speak to him and perhaps make him feel less alone in the world. At the time he hadn’t understood that she was simply being kind. Indeed, he’d been suspicious of every gift, convinced the old woman must have some ulterior motive, even though he couldn’t imagine what it might be. Maybe it was the books she chose. Why give him Great Expectations? Was she trying to terrify him? Because that’s what the book had done. The dark scenes on the marsh where the escaped convict Magwitch had so frightened young Pip? He’d had nightmares for a week. Convinced, even after Magwitch was taken away in irons, that he would return to menace Pip anew, maybe even turn him into a criminal as well, Raymer had quit reading and hidden the book in the back of his closet where his mother wouldn’t find it and accuse him of theft. It was as if Miss Beryl had peered deep into his soul and concluded his mother was right. He would end up a criminal, so here was a Dickensian primer to help him on his way. Had such formative experiences with women permanently messed him up? Was he still, even as a middle-aged man, suspicious of smart women like Charice and Dr. Qadry?
“So,” said the latter, “is going someplace new still on the table?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I guess. There’s nothing really keeping me here.” Though, truly, everything was.
Dr. Qadry, appearing puzzled, paused to consider this, then flipped back through her notes. “In our last session you said that it was probably time to move on, but I think you meant romantically.”
Okay, Raymer thought, here we go. These days, now that he and Charice were no longer living together, these sessions always came back to their relationship. It hadn’t been Charice but Raymer himself who’d suggested that a time-out might be in order. Even now he had a hard time explaining to himself—never mind to his therapist—what had possessed him. Charice had been offered the Schuyler job, and even though she’d claimed to be conflicted, he was pretty sure she wanted to take it. Until fairly recently her duties at the tiny North Bath police department had been mostly administrative, partly because she was so good at making the department run smoothly, but also because Raymer, even before he was able to admit his feelings for her, hadn’t wanted her on the street. It wasn’t that Bath was any more racist than the rest of America, but he couldn’t banish the idea that if he let her out from behind her desk, it would only be a matter of time before she knocked on the wrong door or pulled over the wrong car, and then she’d be dead and it would be his fault. But of course his trying to protect her had been both wrong and insulting, and she’d chipped away at him until he finally caved and put her on the street, where she’d quickly become his best officer, her judgment cool and impeccable.
Asked to explain why he’d suggested they take a time-out that Raymer himself didn’t want, he’d told Dr. Qadry that Charice needed some space to decide what she wanted to do. They weren’t breaking up, he explained. Not at all. They were just taking a breather. Breather. Time-out. These terms were a safe haven, especially the latter. Didn’t time-out imply that at some point play would resume? The problem was that with each passing week, it felt less like he was on the bench waiting for play to resume than in a locked penalty box. Not only had play not resumed, the other contestants had gone home, and the arena lights had been turned off. Sitting alone in the dark penalty box, it occurred to him that a time-out was also what you’d give a misbehaving child. Had he misbehaved? He had to admit that things between them hadn’t been great for some time, though he couldn’t quite put his finger on what was wrong. Maybe it was just that the first-blush excitement of their romance had begun to fade. His fear, though, was that Charice might be having second thoughts about him. That she was trying to figure out how to dump him without hurting his feelings. His having arrived so instinctively at such a conclusion was probably screwed up, but hadn’t pretty much the same thing happened with Becka? Hadn’t his wife, over time, come to see him more clearly and as a result fallen out of love with him? And then, when someone else—someone more appealing, whose interests and temperament aligned more closely with her own—came along, well, she’d moved on and left Raymer behind to wonder why. Could it be that to prevent this from happening again, he’d acted preemptively, leaving Charice before she could leave him? If so, stupid, but then again, maybe not. No sooner had he moved into his new studio apartment on the top floor in one of the big, subdivided old Victorians on Upper Main Street in Bath than Charice accepted the Schuyler job (apparently with Raymer gone the decision hadn’t proved so difficult after all), and he thought, Okay, that’s that, message received.
