“Happy?”
“Oh,” he said, feeling slow witted himself now. Well, was he? Because for a split second, when she said his name, his heart had leaped with the startling possibility that he loved her, impossible as that seemed. So, yes, there was a brief welling up of something that might’ve been happiness, before the facts — that he didn’t really know her, that she was another man’s wife, that he was a fool about women and always had been — put that emotion to flight. “No, Alice,” he confessed. “I don’t think so, no.”
“I’m sorry,” she said quickly, as if Gus’s unhappiness was yet another thing that could be traced to some personal failing of her own, one she’d turn her mind to once she’d solved the problem of sleeping so much.
—
AS MAYOR, Gus had a key to Sans Souci Park’s main gate. Since the hotel closed, the private estate was, except on special occasions, barred to vehicular traffic. Along the bike path that wound lazily through the grounds, there were cast-iron benches, and Alice liked to sit on the one Gus had donated years earlier that bore their names. He’d hoped to find her there this morning, as the park’s serenity and solitude sometimes had a calming effect on her. Why not just let her sit on their bench as the first rays of sunlight pierced the trees? Here she could talk to her heart’s content on her princess phone without bothering anyone. Unfortunately, she wasn’t there.
Feeling suddenly bereft, he pulled over, got out and took a seat on the bench himself, leaving the car running and the driver’s-side door open so he could listen to the scanner. Before leaving home, he’d called the police station so they’d be on the lookout. He felt he needed to do something, but what? It was pleasant here on the bench. Closing his eyes, he listened to the breeze in the upper branches of the pines. Just that quickly he was asleep — then he jolted awake again, jittery, wondering if it was the scanner that had awakened him. Had he missed an announcement? That Alice had been located? Through a break in the trees he could make out the old hotel, grand and sad, the rising sun’s rays reflecting off its upper-story windows. The Sans Souci. Without care. An idea sold to people with cares galore. Everybody, basically, with cares in desperate search of cures. People who wanted to believe in magical waters. Lourdes in upstate New York. Come to think of it, he could use a cure himself. Had he ever before felt so much like giving up?
One of the things Kurt had recognized in him was a buoyant, dim-witted optimism, his faith that anything broken could be fixed. Somehow he’d intuited that Gus meant to challenge the town’s self-defeating, dead-end pessimism, to free it from the imaginary shackles of its unfortunate history. So what if its springs had run dry and Schuyler’s hadn’t? The rest of what ailed the town could be remedied, couldn’t it? Yet he’d badly underestimated what that would require. Something in these people’s natures, he’d reluctantly concluded, was rigid, unalterable. They needed to believe that luck ruled the world and that theirs was bad and would remain so forever and ever, amen, a credo that let them off the hook and excused them from truly engaging in the present, much less the future.
Were they wrong? Gus was no longer so sure. Maybe they were simply realists. Not a week went by that he didn’t get a call from some downstate developer wanting to get the skinny on the Sans Souci. A potential gold mine, he told them, rich in history and style. People used to come from as far away as Atlanta to take the waters. “But says here it’s located in this Bath place? Not Schuyler Springs?” “We’re sister cities,” Gus would assure them, but he could tell they’d concluded that Bath was the ugly sister, the one who never got asked out and made her own clothes, though all the other girls loved her.
Who knew? Maybe Bath was bad luck. Out at Hilldale the dead were resurfacing after decades in the ground, a triumph of the past over the present. How could you expect people to imagine a better future when Great-Great-Grandma Rose launched herself out of the poisoned earth, seemingly in protest. In town the ground was so full of yellow pus that when it rained, the air became not just disgusting but probably toxic. On what basis could you tell people they were wrong to concede defeat? Or convince them that every problem has a solution when those you offer in good faith turn out to be so rickety and jerry-rigged that they tumble down in the street? How do you get a community to believe in itself, in its own fundamental goodness, when in its midst there are people who secretly fill apartments with illegal poisonous reptiles? How do you keep everyone else from peering into their own flawed hearts and seeing vipers stirring there?
The other thing that Kurt had understood was that Gus wouldn’t be able to resist the challenge of fixing Alice. Not only would he want to repair whatever was wrong with her, he’d confuse his compassion for a damaged soul with love. Okay, he’d tried. Give himself that much credit. Like Bath, however, there was more wrong with Alice than he’d realized, and nothing he’d tried had worked. Though he hated to admit it, he’d bitten off more than he could chew, and now he was gagging. This sin had a name: pride. Nothing now remained but what pride goeth before.
From somewhere outside the park came the squeal of brakes, and Gus winced, expecting the crashing sound of torn metal and shattered glass. When none came, he pictured Alice crumpled on the pavement. Would it be a blessing? The question was just there, shocking, vile. How could he think such a thing? What kind of man permits such a thought, even in passing?
The police scanner crackled, then was silent.
—
ONE AFTERNOON, not long after he’d called on Alice, Gus returned home to find a man seated back on the patio, staring off into the woods with his feet up on the table. It took him a moment to recognize Kurt without his beard. He watched him for a moment from behind the drape, trying to decide what the chances were that his visit here was related to his own next door. Pretty good, he concluded. Also pretty good that Kurt had heard him drive up and was only pretending to be lost in thought.
Hearing the patio door slide open, he looked up and offered Gus his unpleasant smile, though he neither rose nor lowered his feet.
“Glass of wine?” Gus offered.
“I thought you’d never ask.” His point being that it’d been nearly a year since he’d invited Gus over, an invitation that had never been returned.
He opened a bottle of white and brought it outside, along with three glasses. “Would Alice like to join us?”
“It would be better if she didn’t.”
Gus poured wine into two glasses and left the third sitting there on the table. He made sure one pour was slightly more than the other and handed that one to Kurt, who chuckled and said, “You noticed that.” A manila folder with Gus’s name on it sat in the center of the table. “People generally do notice things,” Kurt continued, “especially when you direct their attention, but they act on very little. Then they wonder why their lives are so full of regret.”
Gus took a sip of wine and winced. Was the bottle corked, or was he tasting the acid that was suddenly in the back of his throat? Probably the latter, since Kurt didn’t seem to notice.
“For instance, you knew right from the start that something was wrong with Alice, but did you bother to ask? Did you own your curiosity and say, Kurt, buddy, what’s wrong with that fucking woman? Did she get dropped on her head as a kid, or what?”
“What is wrong with Alice, Kurt?”
“The fuck should I know?” he said, picking up the third, unused glass and examining it closely, as if for smudges. “Something, though, wouldn’t you agree?”
Gus felt a surge of anger at this, followed by a welcome jolt of courage. “Okay, then, what’s wrong with you?”