Affliction

by Russell Banks

  No wonder he lost everything. Wade was lucky the judge did not send him to jail, and the judge told him so.

  Wade sat back in the green leather chair, crossed his legs and lit another cigarette and began explaining to his new attorney why he wanted to gain custody of his child. Lillian was turning Jill against him, he said, and, more and more, the woman was making it difficult for Wade to see Jill or for Jill to visit him. First she had moved to Concord, and now she was talking about moving even farther south, or out west, maybe, as soon as her new husband got himself transferred, and if that was tough for Wade, well, too bad. This was not exactly true, but Wade figured it soon would be. She could move to Florida if she wanted to, and there was nothing he could do about it.

  The lawyer said nothing and seemed to be waiting for Wade to continue.

  But on the other hand, maybe he did not really need custody, Wade offered. Maybe all he needed were guarantees of regular visits with Jill during the school year and then summers and holidays. Maybe that would be enough. All he really wanted was to be a good father. He wanted to have a daughter, and he had one, by God, but the girl’s mother was doing everything she could to deny that fact. Wade figured that if he asked for custody and offered Lillian regular visits and summers and holidays with Jill, the judge might be willing to do the opposite, to let Lillian keep custody and give him the regular visits and summers and holidays. What did Mr. Hand think of that strategy? he wondered.

  “Not all that bad,” Hand said. “If you have a sympathetic judge. It’s risky, though. You don’t want to ask for the moon and then lose everything because of the asking. Sometimes you’re better off asking for exactly what you want, instead of what you think you deserve. If you know what I mean. You’re still unmarried, I take it. It would help if you were married and there were someone at home while you’re at work.”

  “Well, yeah. Now I am. Unmarried, I mean. But that’s going to change,” Wade said. “Soon.”

  “How soon?”

  “Oh, by this spring anyhow. Probably before. There’s this woman, she and I been talking about getting married for a long time. Nice woman,” he added.

  “Good,” Hand said, and he wrote on his pad for a few seconds, using only his fingertips, the weight of his hand holding the pad flat against his leg.

  Then he asked Wade about Lillian’s character. Did she and her husband provide a good life for Jill? Did they have any alcohol or drug problems that he knew of? Any sexual problems or habits that might be upsetting to the child? “That sort of thing would help,” he said to Wade. “Especially if we’re going for custody. In fact, without hard evidence of sexual misconduct or drug or alcohol abuse, we probably should not even ask for custody in this state. And even then, it would be an uphill fight. You understand,” he said.

  Wade understood. In fact, he was starting to feel foolish in this quest of his. What was it that kept him from making his anger and frustration understood? What kept him from finding the words and then the legal means to articulate the pain he felt at the loss of his child? That was all he really wanted. He wanted to be a good father; and he wanted everyone to know it.

  No, he said, Lillian did not have any alcohol or drug problems that he knew of, and neither did her husband. And they took good care of Jill. He had to admit that. And he could not imagine any sexual misconduct that Lillian or her husband would be guilty of, at least nothing that would be harmful to a child. “It looks pretty hopeless, don’t it?” he said.

  “Well, no, not exactly. I need to see your divorce decree. We surely can try to have the father’s visitation rights redrawn so that you can be assured of ample and regular access to your daughter. Jill is her name?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fine, then.” He bent his chest toward his hand and shoved the pen into his shirt pocket, then slid the legal pad into the carrier on the side of the chair, flicked a button on the box with the fingertips of his left hand and moved his chair back a few feet. The motor made a quiet humming sound as the chair moved and a click when it stopped. “You’ll send me a copy of the divorce decree as soon as you get home?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “And I’ll need a five-hundred-dollar retainer. You might enclose that,” he said.

  “Jesus,” Wade said, and he knew he had begun to sweat. “How much,” he began, “how much will the whole thing cost?”

  “Hard to say, exactly. If we go for custody, we’ll have to take depositions, maybe even subpoena a few people as witnesses, hire a social worker and a child psychiatrist to examine Jill and visit your home and your ex-wife’s home, and so on. It could add up. Ten or twelve thousand dollars. It could drag on. And then, even if we win, she might appeal. But you must understand that we can’t go looking for custody without acting serious about it, even if what we expect is something much less. On the other hand, if we just want to get your visitation rights redrawn, assuming they’re unduly restrictive at present, which the divorce decree will tell me, then it probably won’t cost more than twenty-five hundred dollars.”

  “Oh.” Wade felt dizzy and hot; his hands were trembling again, and he knew his toothache was about to return in full force.

  “You’re a workingman. A well driller, you mentioned.”

  “And a police officer,” Wade interrupted him. “I’m the town police officer.”

  “Ah. That’ll help,” he said. “Say, didn’t you have a shooting up your way yesterday? Some kind of hunting accident? A man from Massachusetts. Some kind of union official, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know much about it? Sounded a little… unlikely to me.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Big-time union official out hunting with his guide, and somehow he shoots himself. You always wonder a little about these stories. Who was the guide? Local man, I suppose.”

  “Yeah. Kid named Jack Hewitt. Used to be a ballplayer, got drafted by the Red Sox a few years back, then ruined his arm. You might’ve read about him in the papers. Nice kid. It was an accident, though. No doubt about it. Kid like Jack wouldn’t have any reason to kill a guy like Twombley anyhow.”

  “Money,” the lawyer said, smiling. “There’s always money.”

  “Yeah. Money. Yeah, there’s always that. But it’s hard to imagine,” Wade said.

  “Yes, well, speaking of which,” the lawyer said, “my point in asking about your job is, can you manage the costs of a custody suit? Because you might be better off legally, as well as financially, just to go for the…”

  “I know, I know,” Wade said, standing up and pulling on his coat. “I guess… I guess the custody suit business is just my way of showing how pissed off I am at my ex-wife. I’m not as dumb as I probably look. I’ll do whatever you recommend,” he said. “And it looks like you’re recommending me to forget the whole goddamned custody business.”

  He made for the door, opened it and over his shoulder said to the lawyer, “I’ll send you the divorce decree on Monday. And the five hundred.”

  The lawyer looked impassively at him and said nothing.

  Wade walked through the outer office, then stopped in the doorway and peered back for a second and watched the lawyer’s chair scoot out the door opposite him, as if rushing him off to another meeting. The lawyer’s swift and purposeful mobility in his chair frightened Wade somehow. He tried to smile at the receptionist or secretary or whatever she was, but she was busily typing; she wore a headset and showed no sign of knowing Wade was even in the room. He closed the door carefully and moved on.

  At the end of the hall, he almost bumped into two girls coming out of the women’s health center. They were giggling teenagers, kids, only a few years older than Jill, in scarlet lipstick and powder-blue eye shadow. They wore jeans, half-unbuttoned blouses and quilted down vests.

  They probably just got fitted for diaphragms, Wade thought, and it was an embarrassing thought for him, although he did not know why and did not go any further with it than that. He res
trained himself from judging the girls, though for a second he wanted to scold them, and he merely said, “‘Scuse me,” and stood back a second and watched them leave, switching their behinds, heads held high, hands patting their healthy hair in anticipation of the cold wind outside. As he got into his car, he thought, Those girls probably just had abortions! Jesus H. Christ. What a world.

  12

  WADE DROVE THE LENGTH of Main Street, halfway to the prison north of Concord, then turned around and drove all the way back. Specks of snow were coming down. It was two forty-five, and Wade felt himself drifting swiftly toward a familiar form of hysteria: a tangible panic. His particular desire, to conduct a successful custody suit against Lillian, now looked like a naive delusion, and his more general and long-lived desire, to be a good father, was starting to feel like a simpleminded obsession. There was a waxing and waning connection between the two desires, he knew, a hydraulic connection, so that when one was strong, the other weakened. When both weakened, however, as now, Wade dropped through the floor of depression into panic.

  To fight off the panic, he decided that he wanted to see Jill. What the hell, it was a Saturday afternoon, he was coincidentally in Concord, and he needed to explain some things to the child. Why not call up and arrange to spend the rest of the afternoon with her? He also hoped that, after the fiasco at the Halloween party, she would be able to reassure him somewhat. Surely, his company was not so bad, so boring, that she could not enjoy herself with him. It was more or less a communication problem. They had missed each other’s signals the other night; that was all. He could apologize, and she could apologize, and everything would be swell.

  Besides, it was his right, goddammit, especially after Lillian and her husband had driven up to Lawford Thursday night and taken her away from him. When you take a man’s child from him, you take much more than the child, so that the man tends to forget about regaining the child and instead focuses on regaining the other—self-respect, pride, sense of autonomy, that sort of thing. The child becomes emblematic. This was happening to Wade, of course; and he dimly perceived it. But he was powerless to stop it.

  He called from a phone booth in the parking lot of the K mart in the shopping mall east of Main Street. The snow was coming down harder now and might amount to something, he observed, thinking warily of the drive home. The afternoon sky had darkened and lowered, and the day seemed to be easing into evening already. Shoppers, mostly women and children, occasionally a man, hurried back and forth between their cars and the store.

  He let the phone ring an even dozen times before giving up. Hell, it’s barely three, he thought: too early to head back to Lawford and see Margie, but still early enough to wait around awhile and then take Jill out for supper at a Pizza Hut. She would like that. Meanwhile, he decided, he would go someplace for a beer, maybe try one of those fancy new bars in the renovated old warehouses behind the Eagle Hotel he had heard about, where there were supposed to be lots of single men and women hanging out, swingers or yuppies or whatever the hell they call them these days. He would not mind a look at that. Then he would try to call Jill again.

  He parked on North Main Street in front of the hotel and, passing under phony gas lanterns, strolled through the bricked-over alley to The Stone Warehouse in back, walked in without hesitation or a preliminary look around the place—as if, though not exactly a regular, he came here frequently—and, using tunnel vision, zeroed in on the bar. He ordered a draft from a tall good-looking youth with slicked-back hair and then turned, glass in hand, and slowly perused the place.

  The room was large, with mostly empty booths and rough tables covered with red-and-white-checked tablecloths. Large potted ferns, ornate brass coatracks and spittoons cluttered the aisles, and on the walls old-fashioned farm tools had been hung, scythes and sickles, hay rakes, even horse collars, and elaborately framed pictures of New England couples dead a hundred years, dour and disapproving. Who would have thought junk like that could look good? But it did.

  The place smelled of raw wood, beer and roasted peanuts, a downright pleasant smell, he thought. Not like Toby’s Inn. Wade looked down the bar, where a pair of young large-bellied men were watching the Celtics on TV and munching peanuts, and then he noticed that the floor by the bar was covered with peanut shells. A waitress approached the bar, and the shells crackled under her feet like insects.

  Next to him on his right, three young women were seated and talking intently, smoking cigarettes with a kind of fury and every few seconds sipping in unison at their large beige drinks. Wade studied them, slyly, he thought, and tried to overhear their conversation, which he soon discovered concerned a man whom one or all three of them worked for. They were in their early thirties, he guessed. Two of the women wore jeans and plaid flannel shirts and cowboy boots; the third also wore jeans, but with tennis shoes and a washed-out yellow tee shirt with GANJA UNIVERSITY printed across the front. When Wade saw that she was not wearing a bra, he tried not to look at her anymore. She was a long-haired blond; the other two were brunettes and had short hair. Wade thought that maybe those two were sisters.

  He ordered another beer. The Celtics were leading the Detroit Pistons by twelve at the half. Maybe he ought to try calling Jill again. He pulled his coat off and hung it on the brass rack behind him and went looking for a pay phone, which he found at the bottom of the stairs leading to the rest rooms.

  Again, he let the phone ring a dozen times, in case she was just coming in the front door, he thought, and then realized he had visualized not Jill but Lillian, visualized her unlocking the front door, her arms wrapped around grocery bags, key in hand, the phone ringing. He hung up and came back to the bar.

  He cast a glance at the breasts of the young woman in the yellow tee shirt, then asked the bartender for a basket of peanuts and started to concentrate on cracking them open and popping the nuts into his mouth. The women, he realized, were talking about the size of a man’s penis. He listened closely: there was no doubt about it: three attractive young women were laughing about some man’s small penis! He did not dare look over; he just bore down on the shells, splitting them open between his thumbs and sweeping them onto the floor, faster and faster, as if he were ravenous.

  Two of the women, the blond and one of the brunettes, had slept with the man, whoever he was, and they were regaling the third woman by comparing his organ to a thumb, a mouse, a clothespin—a peanut, for God’s sake! “I mean, you could’ve knocked me over with a feather when I got a look at it!” the blond said. Wade pushed the basket of peanuts away and ordered another beer.

  “He’s sort of amazing, though,” the brunette said. “I mean, he gets a whole lot of mileage out of that thing. Wouldn’t you say?” she asked the blond.

  “Oh, jeez, yes.” She laughed. “Miles and miles,” she added, and then she shrieked, “Except that you think you’re never going to get there!” They all laughed loudly, and then one of the brunettes noticed Wade and hushed the others. Wade turned on his stool and tried to see what was happening with the Celtics.

  “How’s Bird doing?” he called down the bar.

  One of the big-bellied pair at the end turned slowly and said, “Oh-for-seven, three fouls.”

  Wade said, “Shit,” as if he cared, got up and took his beer to the end of the bar and sat down. “Whatsascore?”

  Without turning around, the man said, “I dunno. Seventy-something-sixty-something. Celts by six or seven.”

  “Aw right!” Wade said, and he checked into the game with the same intensity he had devoted to shelling the peanuts. He lit a cigarette and tried to concentrate on the game, but his tooth was starting in again, a low throb that threatened to build quickly, and he was feeling once again like a double exposure: everything the other people said and did was half a beat off the rhythm of everything he said and did, so that the others seemed almost to be members of a different species than he, as if their species had a slightly different metabolism than his and relied on a related but different means of commu
nication than his, so that everyone else in the room seemed to be sharing everyday knowledge and secrets that he was biologically incapable of experiencing. Knowledge and secrets: everyone had them; and Wade Whitehouse had neither.

  He looked into the mirror behind the bar and tried to watch himself, as if he were a stranger, look strangely back, and then he saw over his shoulder and behind, coming into the bar from outside, where it was snowing hard now, his ex-wife, Lillian! She brushed snow off her shoulder in that quick impatient way of hers, as if taking the snow personally. He kept her in view in the mirror, saw her ask something of the woman at the cash register and then disappear down the stairs toward the rest rooms.

  She must have come in to pee, Wade thought. Maybe Jill was waiting outside in the car. He checked his watch: four-twenty: still plenty of time to take Jill out for pizza. Wade slid off his stool and walked to the cash register and started down the stairs after Lillian, when he saw the back of her long lavender coat and realized that she was using the phone. He halted several steps above her; he moved out of her line of sight and listened.