Nobody's Fool

He would repeat questions patiently until you answered them.
    â€œAt the store,” Peter told him impatiently, wondering as he did so if the boys had overheard his and Charlotte’s quarrel before dinner. “She’ll be back in a few minutes. You’d better be finished with your baths too.”
    Another sly smile from Wacker. Or what? he seemed to be saying.
    Closing the door on them, Peter went quietly into the downstairs bedroom, the den really, that he and Charlotte used when they visited, while the boys were given the room upstairs that had been his when he wasa boy. The bed had been folded back into the couch, which meant that his mother had been in and done it. Kicking his shoes off, he lay down on the sofa and stared at the ceiling. In truth, he had no idea where Charlotte had gone.
    When Andy snorted loudly in his playpen, Peter raised up on one elbow to study him, but the baby had not woken up and so Peter lay back down. Before making the trip, he and Charlotte had agreed to separate after the holidays, an eventuality he was looking forward to with mixed feelings. Liberation was what he’d expected to feel, but having reached this agreement with Charlotte, his spirits had declined. The fact that Charlotte was leaving him and not the other way around was not the comfort he’d imagined it would be, and as he lay in the den of the house he’d grown up in, he wondered whether it was a husband he wasn’t cut out to be, or a father. Or both. He wasn’t, in all honesty, much good at either. In the living room last week Will, who was prone to introspection, had been watching TV and picking his nose thoughtfully when he extracted a booger, the size of which had amazed and startled him. Since it was not, however, the sort of thing he could share with his parents, he simply sat there in the middle of the floor and stared at his finger, full of pride, unaware that Wacker was sneaking up behind him. When Wacker snatched the booger and ran off with it, Will, outraged, gave chase, screaming, “Mine! Mine!”
    When the dispute erupted, Peter had been working in his cramped study, the utility room actually, which he shared with Charlotte’s washer and dryer, trying to finish an article he already knew no one would publish. Even when he finally discovered that this particular dispute was over ownership of a booger, his parental options seemed equally absurd. Possible responses ran through his mind, one after the other. He might, for instance, address the fairness principle. (“Wacker, give your brother back his booger. Get your own booger from your own nose.”) Or he could ignore the booger entirely. (“I thought I told you boys to be quiet so Daddy could work.”) Or even appeal to the older boy’s reason. (“Will, for heaven’s sake, you can’t really
want
that. Let the little jerk
have
it.”) In the end he’d said nothing, opting instead to collect his materials and retreat to the university library where there’d be peace and quiet. On the way out the door, he told Charlotte it was no great surprise he hadn’t gotten his tenure and promotion. People who lived in insane asylums never got tenure.
    And then after dropping this guilt bomb, he hadn’t even gone to the library, but rather to the house of a young woman colleague whose loverhe’d been since September. Her tiny house was in a rundown section of town consisting of, for the most part, large old houses subdivided by their slumlord owners into rental units. It was as if, Peter sometimes thought, someone had announced a contest to see how many Malaysian students could be crammed into a five-bedroom house. Deirdre’s place was actually a guesthouse out back of one of these Malaysian dorms, and each time Peter made his way along the narrow, roller-coaster sidewalk, he took a deep breath, as if to acknowledge that it would be the last pure air he’d breathe for a while.
    Deirdre liked heat, and she especially liked wandering around the house in her underthings, a habit that had excited Peter at first, like everything about Deirdre. In the beginning he’d thought it was just the September weather and the fact that the cottage wasn’t air-conditioned, until later in the month the temperatures began to fall everywhere except at Deirdre’s place. One night after making sticky love he’d searched for another explanation and found it. She had her