Nobody's Fool

“I should never have mentioned marriage,” he conceded.
    â€œThat’s right,” Sully said, recalling that he himself had proposed marriage within the last twenty-four hours. “Women tend to take that kind of talk seriously, even when they know better.”
    Carl sighed. “Ruby deserves marriage,” he reflected. “That’s the trouble, though. They all do. They spread their beautiful legs, and I hear myself saying why don’t you and I get married, and right then I mean it, too. Every time.”
    Sully couldn’t help grinning, Carl looked so genuinely lost. “You’re a piece of work.”
    â€œIt seems wrong not to offer them something,” Carl said. “I’d marry them all if I could.”
    â€œI believe it,” Sully assured him. “You wouldn’t leave a single one for the rest of us, either.”
    â€œI’d leave Bootsie for Rub,” Carl said, then nodded in the direction of the big dining room where they’d been playing poker. “I see Ahab woke up.”
    Wirf was standing in the doorway, trying to shake the cobwebs. “What happened to the game?” he wondered, stumping over to the bar.
    â€œThe white whale went that way,” Carl Roebuck said, pointing up Main Street.
    Wirf slid onto the stool Carl had vacated. “Good,” he said. “Let him. Why should I chase whales?”
    â€œBeats me,” Carl said on his way to the door.
    â€œI woke up in there and couldn’t remember where I was. It felt like New York City in the forties, staring up into that chandelier. I thought I’d died and gone to the Waldorf-Astoria.”
    â€œYou aren’t going to believe this,” Carl called from across the room. He was out through the beer sign in the window. “But it’s snowing again.”
    â€œI believe it,” Sully said. In fact, it was perfect.
    â€œSomething stinks over here,” Carl said, then went outside and the door swung shut behind him.
    Sully and Wirf considered Carl Roebuck’s departing statement. It was Wirf who came up with the solution. “Let’s stay over here, then,” he said.
    Fish, Miss Beryl decided.
    She’d been trying to place the odor that permeated Sully’s entire flat. It was a mystery. How did a man who never cooked, who didn’t even keep food in his refrigerator, manage to have an apartment that smelled like fish? By not opening his windows was one way, she speculated. Granted, he couldn’t very well open them now in the late November subfreezing weather, but she doubted Sully ever aired the place, even in summer. In fact, now that she thought about it, she knew he hadn’t done so for the simple reason that he never bothered to remove his storm windows. He’d dutifully replaced hers with screens every spring for the last twenty years, but he always maintained it was too much trouble to do his own.
    â€œYou’ll swelter,” Miss Beryl always warned, to which Sully responded with his usual shrug, as if to suggest that she was probably right, he
would
suffer. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Peoples,” he always added. “If it gets too hot up there I’ll come down and sleep with you.”
    Miss Beryl wondered how oppressive it would have to get before the heat would register on Sully as discomfort. At the moment the flat wasinsufferable, as if all the heat it had stored up in August had not yet escaped the sealed rooms. The thermostat provided the explanation. Seventy-five degrees. No wonder the wallpaper was peeling.
    Miss Beryl set the thermostat back to seventy and thought, as she often did whenever she considered her tenant’s odd existence, that Sully should have found a way to stay married. He needed a keeper. Somebody to take charge of the thermostat and rescue the lighted cigarettes (Clive Jr. was right; there were brown burns everywhere) he left burning on tables and counters. Also to flush the toilet, Miss Beryl noted when she peered into the bathroom and was greeted by the solemn pool of urine he’d left in the toilet that morning when he left for work.
    Miss Beryl flushed and watched the bright yellow water become diluted until finally, with a gurgle, it was clear again. The cycle of the flush was the exact amount of time she needed to solve the riddle posed by Sully’s urine, for Miss Beryl remembered the timing of this morning’s dramatic flush that had coincided with