Nobody's Fool

Clive Jr.’s insistence that Sully be evicted. Was it possible that after that dramatic flush Sully had been able to dye the water in the bowl so deeply yellow with a second release of urine so soon after the first? Possible, she supposed, if he’d spent the evening drinking beer with his cronies at The Horse. A second, more satisfying explanation occurred to her though, and this was that Sully was the sort of man whose flushing was preparatory to elimination rather than its natural conclusion. His morning flush removed the previous evening’s offering. His morning release would be noticed for the first time this evening when he returned from work. Miss Beryl couldn’t help wondering whether discovering clear water in the commode when he returned would alert Sully to the fact that he’d had a visitor.
    Men, she thought. Surely they were a different species. Only their essentially alien nature could account for any sane woman’s attraction to and affection for a male. Had any woman ever looked at a man and felt kinship? Miss Beryl doubted it. Ironically, though, only an alien would be so understandable. Compared to women’s, men’s needs were so simple. What’s more, men seemed unable to conceal them. Sully was an exaggeration, of course—a man with even fewer needs than most men, the male principle taken to some outlandish extreme—but Clive Sr. had not been so different. He’d liked thick, fleece-lined sweatshirts and soft chinos, considering these the greatest perk of his position as football coach since he was allowed to wander around the high school dressed pretty much the same way he dressed at home (except that at school he wore a whistle aroundhis neck), while his colleagues suffered (he imagined, since
he
would have suffered) in jackets and ties and sharply creased dress pants. Keeping Clive Sr.’s sweatshirts soft and fluffy, replacing them when they got thin and scratchy, had been one of the few demands her husband had ever made upon her. When his sweatshirts felt good, so did he, and whenever Miss Beryl bought him a new one and slipped it into his dresser drawer, she could count upon his coming up behind her in the kitchen and giving her a big, affectionate hug. When she asked him what it was for, he’d always reply “Nothing,” and in fact she was never able to tell for sure whether Clive Sr. was able to trace his sudden affection to her love—the source of these simple gifts—or whether the fleecy sweatshirt itself fulfilled a basic need in him, his affection for her the mere by-product of his satisfaction. She was never quite sure how she was to feel about a man whose affection, whose inner contentment, could be purchased for the price of a sweatshirt and then maintained with fabric softener. What she felt for her husband was love, then and now, but she had her doubts she’d be able to justify this reaction to another woman. Or at least to another woman who’d known Clive Sr.
    And it was even harder to imagine any woman being able to justify love for Sully, Miss Beryl had to admit as she returned to her tenant’s front room. He had, according to gossip, a longtime paramour, a married woman who apparently sustained her affection by never visiting his flat. Standing in the middle of Sully’s front room, Miss Beryl tried to think of what these surroundings reminded her of, and finally it dawned on her. Sully’s rooms looked like those of a man who had just gone through a ruinous divorce, whose wife had taken everything of value, leaving her ex-husband to furnish the place with the furniture they had long ago consigned to their damp cellar and forgotten. Maybe it was his sofa that was responsible for the fishy odor. Miss Beryl went over and sniffed a cushion tentatively. It was redolent of old, slept-in clothing, but not fish.
    Maybe, Miss Beryl considered, what she was sniffing was the odor of her own perfidy. Driver Ed had advised her not to betray Sully with this sneak inspection. And it did no good to rationalize that Sully would not mind, that he trusted her with his affairs. He knew that she screened his mail, thrusting at him items she felt he should open. He probably was even aware that she retrieved and opened envelopes he’d consigned to her trash can that had contained disability checks and reimbursements for medication. He probably did not suspect that she kept a large manila envelope marked “