Which was why, when the mayor looked out his bedroom window and saw the sky lightening in the east, he gave up on sleep. Better to rise and meet the day head-on. Rather than wait for the Democrat to be delivered midmorning, he’d drive into Schuyler, grab a hot-off-the-press copy and take his inevitable shellacking over an expensive cappuccino at the new Starbucks everybody was talking about. Three-fifty seemed like a lot to pay for coffee, but he heard they had nice leather chairs, and he could sink into one of those to read the bad news about his town in relative peace among hipper Schuyler folks who saw nothing so terribly wrong with small extravagances. By the time he returned to Bath and his own unhip constituents, the bad news would feel comfortably old hat. He dressed quietly and was halfway out the door before it occurred to him to check on Alice one more time, and it was then he discovered she was gone.
—
POOR, KIND, addled woman.
Who was to blame? It would’ve been nice to blame Kurt, and most of the time Gus did. Other times, like now, he gauged his own complicity. He knew, of course, that Alice’s difficulties predated him, and maybe even Kurt, who claimed she’d been a feral young woman in college, her mind splintered from dropping acid, but Gus doubted Alice had ever been truly wild. She might have experimented with drugs — it was the seventies, after all — but only at someone else’s instigation, and he suspected Kurt of being her personal Svengali. What a piece of work that man had turned out to be. Hiring him — Gus himself had cast the deciding vote — had been a tragic mistake. To make matters worse, he’d been warned. Two of his search committee colleagues had sensed something wrong, something didn’t add up, but it wasn’t anything they could put their finger on, so Gus had reminded them that vague misgivings were sometimes just prejudice in disguise. He’d certainly looked good on paper. True, he hadn’t published much, but he was professionally active, attending numerous conferences and giving papers, and he appeared to know the biggest names in political science personally. His letters of recommendation were among the strongest Gus had ever seen.
One night, though, shortly after Kurt’s campus visit, Gus had gotten a call at home. “You do not want to hire Professor Wright,” the caller said without preamble. Gus’s first thought was that this must be one of his search committee colleagues, but it sounded like a long-distance call. When Gus said, “Who is this?” the man said that wasn’t important. What mattered was that he understand that Kurt Wright was evil. Gus remembered actually chuckling at this. Who in the academy used such language? There, words like “evil” had long ago been replaced by others like “inappropriate.” The caller, whoever he was, must be unhinged. “Well,” Gus told him, “yours seems to be a minority view. His letters of recommendation—”
“I wrote one of those,” he was told.
“You—”
“We want him out of here,” the man said. “In a year or two you will, as well. In fact, you’ll be writing a letter just like mine.” And with that the line went dead. Gus had immediately dialed the number displayed on the caller ID, but it just rang and rang.
Gus, who had only a few more years before retirement, was living at the time in one of the college-owned duplexes on campus. He was visiting friends in San Francisco when Kurt and Alice arrived in Schuyler, and by the time he returned they’d moved into the other half of his unit. He met Alice when he pulled in. Unaware that mail typically didn’t come until late in the afternoon, she was out at the curb checking the box. Gus was immediately enchanted; she was so tall and graceful and loose limbed. He’d always liked women, even older women, who wore their hair long. His own mother had done so, well into her seventies. He introduced himself as one of her husband’s new colleagues in the poli-sci department and welcomed her to the neighborhood, which was mostly faculty. She seemed a tad skittish but listened intently to everything he said, and she had one of the most beautiful smiles he’d ever encountered, though its timing felt slightly off, its trigger more internal than connected to unfolding, real-time events.
The next morning her husband called to invite Gus over for a glass of wine on their back patio later that afternoon. “Thanks for picking up the phone, by the way,” Kurt said after they shook hands. Though a good twenty years younger than Gus, he had a black beard so uniformly thick that it looked fake, like a cheap disguise, and made him appear middle aged. While they chatted, he poured two glasses — why only two? Gus wondered — and handed him the one that had slightly less in it.
“I’m sorry?” he said, confused. “For picking up the phone?”
“I think your advocacy helped us jump the line,” Kurt said, gesturing to their half of the duplex.
Actually, Gus had been puzzled about that. The duplexes, though nothing all that special, were much in demand because of their campus location. Also, they were relatively cheap compared with housing in Schuyler’s open market. How had these newcomers landed one? He was about to say he hadn’t made any calls on their behalf, but then, for some reason, he didn’t. Was it because of that warning? Did some cowardly part of him want to be on evil’s good side, if that’s what this man turned out to be? The patio door opened just then, and Alice — how lovely she looked, Gus recalled thinking — appeared with a tray containing fruit and cheese and crackers. “And you’ve already met my Alice,” Kurt said, which for some reason seemed to confuse her. Had she forgotten Gus so quickly? Setting the tray down, she managed to nudge the wine bottle, which teetered and was about to fall when Kurt caught it. Half the crackers went onto the deck. “I’m sorry,” she said, more to her husband than to Gus, who squatted to help her pick them up. “I’m such a klutz,” she confided. “Someone should shoot me.”
“That seems a tad extreme,” Gus said, expecting a smile at the understatement, but she was anxiously looking up at Kurt, perhaps to see if he shared Gus’s view. There was no telling and she nipped back into the kitchen.
When they finished the bottle, a nice chardonnay, Kurt went inside. Alice hadn’t returned, and Gus wasn’t sure what to think. Right from the start, there’d only been two glasses. Was she unwell? Why didn’t Kurt feel the need to explain her absence?
“So, you’ve been here how long?” Kurt asked when he returned with another bottle. There was just a hint of accusation in the question, so Gus answered cautiously as his host expertly uncorked the new bottle.
“Almost thirty years,” he admitted. “I didn’t intend to stay so long.”
Kurt poured him a glass, his third, then another for himself. As with the first two, he gave Gus slightly less. Had someone told him that Gus couldn’t handle his liquor, or were the pours purely coincidental? Gus decided they must be. After all, inviting him over in the first place was an act of generosity, and this wasn’t a cheap chardonnay.
“Thirty years here?” Kurt said, incredulously. “In Schuyler Springs?”
Okay, Gus thought, maybe this wasn’t Ann Arbor or Madison, but still. Had the man already weighed Schuyler’s merits and found them wanting? “It’s become home, I guess,” he offered weakly, deciding then that when he finished this glass, there would be no fourth.