Nobody's Fool

confess that she didn’t know the answer to this question either when something occurred to her. “How did you know her name was Joyce?”
    Mrs. Gruber froze. Despite her intention to be careful, she’d spilled the beans. “I have to go,” she said. “My telephone’s ringing.”
    â€œYou’re
on
the telephone,” Miss Beryl pointed out. “It can’t be ringing.”
    â€œThe doorbell, I meant,” Mrs. Gruber said. And hung up.
    Miss Beryl hung up too but let her hand rest on the phone while shethought. At least now she was sure who the snitch was. Lately she’d begun to fear it might be Sully. Her advisers had been divided on this issue, just as they were on all issues. Clive Sr. subscribed to his son’s view that Sully had had her snookered for years, while Driver Ed assured her that Sully was loyal and even whispered suspicions about Clive Jr., suspicions Miss Beryl felt guilty about listening to. Now that she was sure, Miss Beryl couldn’t help smiling. “How do you like them apples?” she asked Clive Sr. Clive Sr. looked sheepish behind glass.
    Miss Beryl’s hand was still on the phone in its cradle when it rang again.
    â€œThere wasn’t a soul at the door,” Mrs. Gruber said, as if this were a great mystery. “I can’t understand it. I heard the bell.”
    â€œYou know what you are?” Miss Beryl said ominously, winking at Driver Ed across the room.
    Mrs. Gruber gulped. “What?” she asked a little fearfully.
    â€œYou’re all discombobulated.”
    Ruth was in a good mood and at a loss to explain why. Just yesterday, Thanksgiving, of all days, she’d hit some sort of new low. Things had been so rotten she’d telephoned Sully, hoping he’d cheer her up. Talk about desperation. After so many years the one thing she should have known about Sully was that he was better at prolonging the good mood you happened already to be in than getting you out of the doldrums. He was far too honest to cause anybody to feel better than they were inclined to feel on their own.
    And so, not surprisingly, Sully, who had failed dismally to cheer Ruth up yesterday, had been just the thing she needed today, when her own inclination was toward high spirits. Today Ruth felt fine, despite the tawdriness of the motel room, the grunginess of its shower and the fact that Sully had fallen dead asleep no more than a minute after they’d finished making love for the first time in many months. When she emerged from the shower, wrapped in a motel towel, he was snoring peacefully, his eyes half open but showing nothing but the whites. Though it was late November, he still hadn’t entirely lost his summer coloration, which always made Ruth smile, the way his face and neck and forearms were brown, almost gray, from exposure to sun and wind while the rest of him remained pale, almost translucent. Always a strangely shy man, he’d taken the trouble of pulling the sheet up to his waist before falling asleep. His head lay tilted upagainst the bed’s headboard, his hands locked behind his neck, a posture designed, in all probability, to ward off the sleep that had overtaken him anyway. That he should try to stay awake when he was so tired struck Ruth as sweet, the sort of small gesture Sully was capable of at times. She knew he needed the sleep a lot more than he had needed to make love.
    Ruth, on the other hand, had needed to make love. She no longer granted her husband conjugal privileges, a fact he seemed barely to have noticed. It was possible he had another woman, but Ruth doubted this. As far as she could tell, Zack was just one of those men who gravitated naturally toward abstinence, as if celibacy were an old La-Z-Boy recliner, comfortable and molded and requiring more effort to get out of than into. She doubted he cared much about her affair with Sully. He was capable of jealousy when properly instigated, but she understood that what really bothered him was being made a fool of. And Ruth suspected that what Zack really would have liked was for people to quit telling him about her and Sully so he could pretend ignorance. He pretended ignorance as convincingly as laziness, and his pretense of laziness was indistinguishable from the real thing.
    Nearly two and a half months of “being good” had left Ruth needy, and making love with Sully this afternoon had made her happy without, unfortunately,