Affliction

by Russell Banks

  “That doesn’t matter,” she snapped. “I’ve only got a couple of hours and that’s it. So please, ” she said, and her voice had shifted into a tone that Wade recognized and swelled to: it was intimate and soft, almost sexual. “I’ll be in the lot behind The Stone Warehouse. In the Audi,” she said. And then she said, “Hurry,” and Wade spun and moved quickly up the stairs, crossed back to the bar and resumed watching the mirror.

  A second later, he saw Lillian emerge from the stairwell, nod and smile quickly to the woman at the cash register and leave. Wade grabbed his coat and hat and signaled to the bartender that he wanted to pay. The bartender flipped over the check—$8.25! Jesus H. Christ!—and Wade gave the man his ten-dollar bill and made for the door. It took him a moment to determine where the parking lot was and how to get there from the front of the Eagle Hotel, and then he jogged back to his car.

  The traffic was light—a few cars sloshed past, windshield wipers clacking and headlights on. Wade made a U-turn on North Main and drove back to Depot Street, turned left and left again and drove past the parking lot, where he spotted the silver Audi in the far corner.

  He did not think she could recognize his car in the snow, but even so, he went beyond the lot a ways and parked it out of sight beside a big green Dempster Dumpster about fifty yards away. He was on a slope above the lot now and facing the backside of the Audi. The rear window was covered with wet sticky snow, and he could not see inside, but he was sure she was there, waiting. For what, goddammit? For whom?

  With the motor and wipers off, his own windshield was quickly covered over, and he felt suddenly as if he were inside a cave, looking at the walls. He opened the door and stepped out, moved to the other side of the Dumpster, lit a cigarette and waited. Like a cop, he thought. Well, why not? He was a cop, was he not? Damn straight. And Lillian, was she a suspected criminal, or was she just his ex-wife meeting some guy on the sly, and if that was all, then was Wade merely perversely curious, a kind of Peeping Tom?

  He knew it was a man she was meeting, no doubt about it: he had heard it in her voice: “Please, ” she had said, and “Hurry.”

  The pain from his tooth was cutting like a bandsaw up the side of his face, and he placed the palm of his hand against it, as if to shush it, keep the noise down, while he moved carefully away from the Dumpster and then down the shallow embankment to the parking lot, where he slipped along the side of the building to a darkened doorway, the back door to the restaurant upstairs, and stepped in out of the snow. He had a good angle on the Audi from there and could not be observed from the car without some effort: he was still behind the vehicle, but to the side now and only thirty feet away; he could easily see Lillian sitting behind the wheel, smoking.

  Was she smoking? But Lillian did not smoke anymore, he remembered. In fact, she made a big deal of it, told him repeatedly and with disgust that she could smell it in Jill’s clothing and hair whenever she came back from being with him. He looked closer. She was smoking, all right, but it was not a regular cigarette; no, sir, it was not tobacco. He could tell from the way she held it between thumb and forefinger and then examined it after she had inhaled that she was smoking marijuana.

  He was shocked. And suddenly he was panting, and his legs were watery with an eroticized rage that confused him. There was nothing wrong with smoking a joint; hell, he did it himself now and then. Whenever someone offered it to him, actually. But the sight of her doing it now, combined as it was with her waiting in a parking lot to meet someone he knew must be her boyfriend, her lover, made him feel sexually betrayed in a very peculiar way. It was peculiar, Wade knew, that he felt betrayed at all, as if she were stepping out on him, her ex-husband, and not the man she was married to (a decent enough guy, Wade thought for the first time, though still a bit of a jerk), but it also turned Wade on sexually. It was as if he had inadvertently come upon her secret stash of pornography. Manacles, dildos, whips. He was thrilled, erotically charged, and he was enraged, and he was ashamed.

  He closed his eyes for a few seconds and leaned against the cut-stone wall behind him, and when he opened them he saw a car ease through the falling snow into the parking lot. It was a dark-green Mercedes sedan driven by a man who, Wade knew at once, was here to meet Lillian. The car drew up next to Lillian’s Audi, and she instantly got out, walked purposefully around the front and got in.

  The headlights reflected off the wall of the warehouse and cast light back into the car, and Wade could see Lillian and the man clearly, as if they were up on a stage, while they kissed. It was a long serious kiss, but slightly formal too, done without their arms around one another: they were a man and a woman who had been lovers for a long time and who knew that their kiss was only a preliminary and did not have to stand for everything else. Then, when they drew apart, Lillian handed what was left of her joint to the man, and he relit it and inhaled deeply, and Wade realized that he knew him.

  The man backed the Mercedes away from the wall, and his face disappeared into darkness again, but Wade had seen him; he knew absolutely who he was. There could be no doubt. The face was one Wade would never forget: it had shamed him, and then it had haunted him, and Wade had come to despise it. The face was smooth and symmetrical, as large as an actor’s, with square chin, wide brow, long straight nose. The man’s hair was dark, with distinguished flecks of gray, combed straight back. And he was taller than Wade by six inches, at least, and appeared to be in good condition, the kind of condition you buy from a health club, Wade had once observed. His name was Cotter, Jackson Cotter, of Cotter, Wilcox and Browne, and he was from an old Concord political family, and no doubt he was married, had three beautiful children and lived in a big Victorian house up on the west end. And here he was having an affair with Lillian, who three years before had been his client in what he no doubt regarded as a simple but slightly unpleasant upstate divorce case.

  Jackson Cotter turned his big green Mercedes around and headed out of the parking lot to the street, turned left and disappeared. Wade realized that his mouth was open, and he closed it. He felt wonderful. Jesus, he felt great! He was standing alone in a darkened doorway next to a restaurant parking lot in downtown Concord in a snowstorm, and he felt more purely cheerful than he had felt in years. Maybe ever. He clapped his hands together as if applauding, stepped from the doorway and strode into the falling snow.

  A minute later, he was back in The Stone Warehouse shoving a quarter into the pay phone at the bottom of the stairs. This time, after three rings, someone answered: it was Lillian’s husband, Bob Horner; he caught Wade by surprise. Wade pictured the man with an apron tied around his waist and almost laughed, but he quickly recovered and said in what he felt was his normal manner of speaking to Horner on such occasions, “This’s Wade. Is Jill around?”

  Horner was silent for a few seconds. Then he said, “Ah… no. No, Wade, she’s not here.”

  “Jeez, that’s too bad. She out with her mom someplace?”

  “No. No, Jill’s with a friend.”

  “You expect her back soon? I’m in town, you see. In Concord. And I was hoping maybe I could scoot by and take her out for a pizza or something.”

  Horner hesitated, then said, “It’s kind of late, Wade… and she’s… Jill’s staying overnight with a friend tonight.”

  “Oh-h.” Wade hoped he sounded disappointed.

  “Yeah, well, maybe if she’d known you were going to be in town…”

  “I didn’t know myself,” Wade said. “But next time I’ll call ahead,” he offered.

  Horner said that was a good idea and he would tell Jill that he had called. Then he said, “Wade, maybe I shouldn’t mention this, but I was wondering…”

  “What?”

  “Well, I don’t want to stir things up again, but… look, I lost my hat the other night up there. In Lawford. I was wondering if maybe somebody picked it up. You didn’t see it, did you? After we left.”

  Wade said, “Your hat? You had a hat?”

  “Yes.” His vo
ice had turned cold; he knew Wade was lying. “A green felt hat.”

  “Jeez, Bob, I don’t remember any hat. But I’ll keep an eye out for it. Maybe somebody else snagged it. You never know.”

  Horner said thanks and then hurriedly got off the phone.

  Smiling broadly, Wade hung up, mounted the stairs and stood at the cash register for a second. He noticed that the three young women and the two guys at the bar had left; the place was almost empty now. There were only a few diners sitting at the tables, and the waitresses were standing around in the back, talking to one another.

  The cashier, a stout middle-aged woman filing her nails, said to him, “How much snow out there?”

  “Oh, inch or two, I guess. Not much.”

  “Enough to keep everybody home, though,” she said.

  “Yeah. Which is where I ought to be getting,” Wade said.

  “It’s too early for winter,” the woman observed.

  “Yeah. Yeah, it is,” Wade said, and he pulled his watch cap down over his ears. “But I like it,” he said, and he waved and went out the door.

  “Drive careful,” the woman called after him, but he didn’t hear her.

  Making love with Margie that night was especially easy for Wade. Not that it was ever difficult; it was just that sometimes Wade would rather be left alone to think his own thoughts, to use his skull as a wall that kept him in and other people out.

  But being in bed with Margie made Wade feel safe and free in ways that he rarely felt—not at work, certainly, thanks to LaRiviere, and not when he was at home alone, either, and not when he was with Jill, and not once with Lillian in all those years of being married to her. When he was drinking late at Toby’s he sometimes got to feeling safe, but never free.

  No, it was only with Margie, and only in bed with her, that he felt the way he imagined he should have as a child but could not, because of his father, mostly, but also his mother, who could not protect him. And thus, when he lay down beside Margie and they began to make love to one another, he often hesitated, held back slightly, as if loitering, while she plunged on ahead. Then she would grow impatient and would urge him to hurry up, for God’s sake, let us not hang around here any longer than we have to, my friend, and he would come forward toward her, and that would be that.

  Tonight, though, he loitered not at all. He had arrived at Margie’s house around eight-thirty, his drive north from Concord slowed somewhat by the snow. All the way up, he had pictured Margie naked and turning softly in her bed beneath him, her arms flung back, mouth open, legs wrapped tightly around his hips, her sweet soft skin smooth and pliant, her large slow body suddenly vulnerable, swift and intrepidly intimate, the way Wade believed only women could be, and when he walked across her back porch into the warm kitchen, he was already tumescent, oh boy, ready to go; and she was ready too, perhaps having numerous times that afternoon and evening imagined him naked and in bed as well, his tough thick body arched intently over her at that exquisite moment when he first entered her, so mysteriously male and powerful in that precise way, in the way of his maleness, that to give herself over to the power, to succumb willingly to the sheer physical force of his body, was to enter deeply into the mystery, which she did instantly, for that was where she wanted to be.

  They had talked awhile in the kitchen: she served him a bowl of beef stew and chunks of the homemade bread she was so proud of and that Wade loved; and while he ate and she sat opposite him at the table, watching, he told her what had happened in Concord, his disappointing meeting with the lawyer (he neglected to mention the wheelchair) and his exhilarating discovery later. He did not tell her about his phone conversation with Lillian’s husband.

  And then they went straight to her darkened bedroom. He lit the candle by the side of the bed, as he always did, and in seconds they both had their clothes off, the covers kicked back, and were wordlessly wrapped in one another’s warm skin. She came quickly, and then a minute later came a second time, more powerfully, gulping and crying out several times, until he, too, was inundated by the orgasm, and he suddenly found himself coming and heard himself moan along with her and then sigh.

  They lay on their backs—feet, hips and shoulders touching—in silence for a long while. Finally, in a low flat voice, as if talking to himself, Wade said, “I’ve been thinking a lot about Jack Hewitt. I’m worried about him,” he went on. “About that business yesterday, with him and that guy Twombley.”

  Her voice, too, came from a distance, from another room in the large old house. “Jack’s sort of sensitive, I guess. More than most. But he’ll be okay in a few weeks. Maybe even sooner.”

  “There’s something funny about that shooting. There’s lots funny about it, actually.”

  “I heard he was drunk as a coot last night and got into a big fight at Toby’s with Hettie when she wanted to drive him home. He got mad and drove off without her. Left her standing in the parking lot.”

  “I’m sure, I’m positive, that it didn’t happen the way Jack says it did. It could have, of course, but it didn’t. I know he’s lying.”

  She went on as if she hadn’t heard him. “Jack’s turned into one of those men who are permanently angry, I think. He used to be a sweet kid, but it’s like, when he found out that he couldn’t play baseball anymore, he changed. He used to be so sweet,” she said. “Now he’s like everyone else.”

  “I’ve been wondering if maybe Jack shot Twombley, instead of Twombley shooting himself. I’ve even been wondering if maybe Jack shot him on purpose.”

  Now she heard him. “Wade! How can you even think such a thing? Why would Jack Hewitt do that, shoot Twombley on purpose?”

  “Money.”

  “Jack doesn’t need money.”

  “Everybody needs money,” he said. “Except guys like Twombley and that sonofabitch son-in-law of his. People like that.”

  “Still, Jack wouldn’t kill somebody for it. Besides, who would pay him to do such a terrible thing?”

  “I don’t know. Lots of people, probably. Guy like Evan Twombley, big-time union official and all, he’s probably got lots of people want him dead. Believe me, those construction unions are full of mean motherfuckers. Down in Massachusetts all those unions do business with the Mafia, you know. My brother told me some stuff.”

  She gave a laugh. “The Mafia wouldn’t hire a kid like Jack Hewitt to do their business for them.”

  “No. I guess not. Still… I just know Jack’s lying about how it happened. I can tell. He just seemed too… too tight or something, too slick, when he told it. I know that kid, I know what he’s like inside. He’s a lot like I was when I was his age, you know.”

  “Yes. I suppose he is. But you never would’ve done something like that, shot somebody for money.”

  “No, I guess not. Not for money. But there were times back then, when I was a kid, when I might’ve shot somebody if I’d been given half a damned excuse. I used to be pretty fucked up, you know.”

  “But you’re not now,” she said, and she smiled in the darkness.

  Wade lapsed into silence and for a moment thought about his recent days and nights, wondering how to characterize them. Fucked up? Not fucked up? What kind of life did he lead, anyhow? What kind of man had he become in his forties?

  He rolled over onto his side and, propped on one elbow, rested his head in the flat of his hand and studied Margie’s broad face. Her eyes were closed. She breathed lightly through her mouth, which curved into the residue of an ironic smile. To him, her face was wide open, bravely unprotected; her mouth was relaxed, and her lips parted, so that her upper front teeth protruded slightly and looked like a schoolgirl’s new teeth to Wade; the two vertical lines that usually creased her forehead were gone, as if erased, and she might have been a mischievous child pretending to be asleep: her skin seemed to glisten in the half light of the room, and Wade reached over and brushed away a moist strand of her hair, then leaned down and kissed her on the exact center of her forehead.

  “I can
see what you looked like when you were a kid. Exactly,” he whispered.

  She kept her eyes closed and said, “You knew me when I was a kid.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I did, but I never knew what you looked like. Not really. I mean, I never really studied your face, like now. So I never was able to see you as a kid, a little girl, when you actually were a little kid. Until now, this way.”

  “What way?”

  “After making love. I like it. It’s nice to be able to see that in a grown-up person. And strange,” he said, and added, “It’s scary, sort of.”

  “Yes. It is nice. And strange,” she said. After a few seconds, she added, “I don’t think it’s the same for women, though.” She opened her eyes, and the vertical creases in her brow reappeared, and Wade’s view of her as a child got blocked. “I mean, women can see the little boy in the man pretty easily, you know. But I think we see it mostly when the man doesn’t know we’re watching. It happens when he’s paying attention to something else. Like watching sports on TV or fixing his car or something.”

  “What about after making love?”

  “Well … I think mostly men try to hide the boy in themselves. They think it’s a sign of weakness or something, so they try to hide it. Maybe especially when they’re making love. You, for instance,” she said, and punched him lightly on the shoulder. “After we make love, you look like you just climbed a mountain or something. Triumphant. The conquering hero! Tarzan beating his chest.” She laughed, and he laughed with her, but hesitantly.

  “Oh, you try to be cool about it,” she went on, “but you’re proud of yourself. I can tell. And you should be,” she added, and she punched him again. “Frankly, though,” she said, and she peered out from under her eyelashes, “frankly, though, you needn’t be proud. Because I’m easy. Real easy.”