Affliction

by Russell Banks

  The bright light of the sun against the snow blinded him, and he stood for a few seconds on the porch and struggled to see: he heard the wind sigh in the pines across the road, heard the crow call from the barn out back, heard gunfire from a distant clearing in the woods. Soon the blaze of light started to crack and crumble, and at last it fell apart in chunks of white that floated across Wade’s field of vision. He stepped from the porch to the ground and walked around the porch to the woodshed attached to the end of the house, a three-sided lean-to open to the driveway, where Pop split, stacked and stored his firewood, and tools were kept on a rough workbench.

  Wade entered the woodshed and once again could not see, blinded this time by darkness instead of light. He set the bottle on the bench and felt along the length of it, touching a hammer, tin cans filled with nails and screws, a rasp, a small monkey wrench, a gas can and parts of a chainsaw, a file, a splitting wedge, and finally, as the darkness softened to a gray haze, he reached the pair of channel-lock pliers that he knew were there—he had seen them the other night, Sunday, when he had come out here with a flashlight looking for tools to repair the furnace: Pop’s tools, scattered and rusting, a drunk’s tools, Wade had thought then.

  He uncapped the bottle of whiskey and opened his mouth—it hurt just to open it—and took a bite of whiskey the size of a tea bag and sloshed it around inside his mouth and swallowed: but he felt and tasted nothing, no grainy burn in his mouth or chest; nothing except the cold steel ripsaw of pain emanating from his jaw. He opened his mouth wider and touched the beak of the long-handled pliers to his front teeth, pulled his lip away with his fingers, forcing a cadaverous grin onto his mouth, and moved the pliers toward the dark star of pain back there. The jaws of the pliers angled away from the handles, like the head of a long-necked bird, and he managed for a second to lock them onto one of his molars, then released it and clamped them on the adjacent tooth. He withdrew the pliers and set them back down on the bench. The pain roared in his ears, like a train in a tunnel, and he felt tears on his cheeks.

  He took another bite of whiskey, grabbed up the pliers and the bottle and walked quickly from the shed into the white wall of light outside, weeping and stumbling as he crossed the driveway and made his way to the porch without seeing, going on memory now—until he was back inside the house and could see his way through the gloom of the kitchen into the living room, where Pop sat in front of the television: the grunting huge men slammed their pink bodies against each other and the crowd shrieked with pleasure; Wade hurried past Pop, up the stairs and into the bathroom.

  He set the bottle down on the toilet tank and looked into the mirror and saw a disheveled gray-faced stranger with tears streaming down his cheeks look back at him. He opened the stranger’s mouth and with his left hand yanked back the lips on the right side, then took the pliers and reached in. He turned the face slightly to the side, so that he could see into it, pried the mouth open still further, and locked the pliers onto the largest molar in the back, squeezed and pulled. He heard the tooth grind against the cold steel of the pliers, as if the tooth were grabbing onto the bone, and he dug further into the gum with the mouth of the pliers and squeezed tightly again and pulled harder, steadily. It shifted in its bed, and he moved his left hand into place behind his right, and with both hands, one keeping the pressure on the tooth, the other lifting and guiding the pliers straight up against the jaw, he pulled, and the tooth came out, wet, bloody, rotted, clattering in the sink. He put the pliers down and reached for the whiskey.

  When he passed Pop, he set the whiskey bottle down with pointed emphasis on the table beside him. Pop looked at the bottle for a second and up at Wade, and their eyes met and suddenly flared with hatred.

  Neither man said a word. Abruptly, as if dismissing him, Pop looked back at the television. Wade grabbed his coat and hat from the hook in the kitchen, put them on and went outside, moving quickly through the sheets of bright light to the woodshed, where he picked up the gas can and headed on to the barn. His face felt aflame to him, burning from the inside out, as if the hole in his jaw were the chimney of a volcano about to erupt. Removing the tooth had opened a shaft, a dark tunnel, and sparks, cinders, hot gases flew up and scorched his mouth: he opened his mouth and spat a clot of hot blood into the snow and imagined it hissing behind him.

  Inside the barn, it was dark and sepulchral. Wade emptied the gas from the can into Pop’s truck and tossed the can aside. He stepped up on the running board and got into the driver’s seat, took the key from his coat pocket, where it had remained since Wednesday, and after a few tries, got the motor running. The old truck shuddered and shook, and Wade backed it slowly out the huge barn door and along the narrow snowbanked lane that he and I had shoveled clear only two nights before, until he had it out on the road, where he aimed it toward town, worked the stickshift into first gear, and drove off.

  21

  ASA BROWN WORKED OUT of the Clinton County state police headquarters, a low concrete-and-yellow-brick building on the interstate a few miles north of Lawford. By the time Wade parked Pop’s shaky old stake-body truck between a pair of cruisers in the lot, it was midafternoon and nearly dark. The sky was like gray suede, and a light breeze brushed snow off the banks onto the pavement, where it swirled and curled into low white berms.

  Wade got out and for a few seconds stood by the open door of the truck and studied the large dark green Fords next to it and remembered that once long ago he had considered becoming a state trooper. It was after he had returned from his hitch in the army, after Korea, and it had seemed logical to him, since he had been an MP in the army, to take the exam and study at the trooper academy down in Concord and become a statie, by God, ride around all day in one of those cruisers wearing reflector shades and a trooper hat and busting heads down in Laconia when all the bikers came in for the motorcycle races every summer, driving the governor home from the statehouse for lunch, chasing coked-out Massachusetts drivers on the interstate speeding south after a long weekend on the ski slopes. It would have been better than what he had done instead.

  He had not even tried to become a state trooper. He had come home to Lawford from Korea obsessed with what he called “unfinished business,” by which he meant his love for Lillian, from whom he was then legally divorced. A year later, he was married to her a second time, his unfinished business finished, as it were, but by then he was working for LaRiviere again and building the little yellow house out on Lebanon Road for him and Lillian to live in, and he could not figure out how to become a state trooper and still hold down a full-time job and build a house nights and weekends. So he did not take the exam, which he knew he could easily pass. He remained a well driller and became the town cop instead and built the house for himself and Lillian and the family they wanted to raise.

  When they got married the first time, right after graduating high school, they were both technically still virgins. A cynic might say they got married in order to sleep with each other and got divorced when they had gotten used to sleeping with each other and never should have remarried, and that would be part of the truth. But things are never as simple as cynics believe, especially with regard to bright adolescents in love. Wade Whitehouse and Lillian Pittman, through their openness and intimacy with one another, had separated themselves, by the age of sixteen, from the kids and adults around them and had protected each other while they made themselves more sensitive and passionate than those kids, until they came to depend on one another for an essential recognition of their more tender qualities and their intelligence.

  Without Lillian, without her recognition and protection, Wade would have been forced to regard himself as no different from the boys and men who surrounded him, boys his age like Jimmy Dame and Hector Eastman and grown men like Pop and Gordon LaRiviere—deliberately roughened and coarse, cultivating their violence for one another to admire and shrink from, growing up with a defensive willed stupidity and then encouraging their sons to follow. Without Lillian’s recognit
ion and protection, Wade, who was very good at being male in this world, a hearty bluff athletic sort of guy with a mean streak, would have been unable to resist the influence of the males who surrounded him. The loneliness would have been too much to bear.

  It was the same with Lillian: she did not want to become like her mother and all the women she knew in town, a sad oppressed lot whose only humor was self-deprecating, whose greatest fear was of the men they lived with, whose children were their ballast but weighed down their lives like stones in a shroud. Wade recognized the young thing in her, the bright delicacy of feeling and thought that every other girl her age she knew was intent on snuffing out, and she treasured him for that. She married him for that.

  They married also for sex, naturally, but they never did grow used to sleeping with each other, as the cynic would have us believe. Before they were married, they made love passionately every chance they had and became sweetly familiar with each other’s bodies, knew the other’s response to the touch of hands and fingertips, lips, tongue and teeth as well as they knew their own. But true consummation, the act itself, did not take place until after they were married and lived in one of the small apartments over Golden’s General Store, and when it did, to their great surprise, pleasure and gratitude, it was a simple continuation and extension of what they had been doing all along. It was not different; it was more. And they never stopped loving to touch each other with their hands and tongues and mouths, so that, in bed in the dark, when Wade finally rose up and covered Lillian’s smooth and lively body and entered it, the pleasure of his entry and the force of it, the long sweet swing of it, was for both of them an irresistible crescendo that never failed to surprise and thrill them with its ability, like gravity, to control them.

  No, he did not leave her because he had grown used to sleeping with her. When Wade left Lillian and joined the army—hoping to follow Elbourne and Charlie to Vietnam but getting sent instead to Korea—it was because at the age of twenty-one he had come to believe that by marrying so young, he had ended his life prematurely. It was the last, perhaps the only, chance he had to start over. His knowledge of himself, of his golden interior, thanks to Lillian, was of a boy whose life was not yet defined, whose potential was large but had in no way been realized. He possessed this knowledge because Lillian’s love had kept the young thing in him alive long after it had died in everyone else he knew, just as his love for her hadkept the young thing in her alive too. But despite that, here he was, living like a trapped adult, a man much older than he, a man whose life was already determined in every important way—by the job at LaRiviere’s, by the small dark apartment filled with other people’s castoffs, by the village of Lawford itself, all of it hemmed in by the dark hills and forests. This was adult life, and he was not ready to accept it.

  He had started to drink heavily, usually at Toby’s after work, and had grown confused and angry. And he quickly lost his connection to that lovely young thing, the fragile humorous affection for the world that he had nurtured and kept alive all through adolescence, and he grew increasingly angry at the loss and began to blame Lillian for it. The more he blamed her, the further he flew from it, until, indeed, he was like the men who surrounded him, and one night he lashed out at her with his fists and afterwards wept in her lap, begging forgiveness, promising to be different, new, clean, loving, gentle, funny.

  But within weeks, he found himself breaking his promise, horrifying himself, and he began to blame the context of his madness, his life with Lillian, confusing it with the cause of his madness, and so he left her. He drove to Littleton and enlisted in the army and went to Fort Dix, New Jersey, for basic training, and wrote Lillian a long letter from there, asking her to divorce him, saying she could use any grounds she wanted, physical cruelty, even, and they could both start over again.

  They tried, both of them, to do just that. Wade got shipped out to Korea—two Whitehouse brothers in Vietnam was evidently as much as the army was willing to risk that early in the war—and Lillian went to secretarial school in Littleton and worked nights as a waitress at Toby’s Inn. They slept with other people—for Wade, there was the young woman in Seoul, Kim Chul Hee, and no one else; for Lillian, there were several men during the two years she and Wade were apart.

  Two of the men she told Wade about; one she did not. I was only eleven years old then, but I knew that Lillian, briefly, was meeting Gordon LaRiviere, who was married and was thin then and attractive, and who from time to time stopped by Lillian’s apartment in town, the apartment over Golden’s store, where she had lived with Wade. LaRiviere usually came to visit her very early in the morning, and on several of these occasions I myself saw him arrive before six and leave by seven-thirty, for I had my first job that summer, working at Golden’s General Store as a stockboy, and pedaled my bike all the way into town to sweep out the store and clean the counters before it opened at seven. I was shocked by what I saw, and felt betrayed, as if I and not my brother Wade were off defending our country against the Asian Communists, and I suspect that I have not even today forgiven Lillian for her affair with Gordon LaRiviere, although she was of course quite entitled to it: LaRiviere was the married one, not she.

  The other two men Lillian went out with and slept with during those years that she and Wade were divorced the first time, the men she told Wade about, were Lugene Brooks, then the sixth-grade teacher at the school, single and fresh out of Plymouth State, still single twenty years later but now the middle-aged principal of the school, and Nick Wickham, who made it a point in those days to bed all the unmarried and most of the married women in town at least once. Now the compulsion seems to have weakened, and although he still goes through the motions, it is mostly for effect. Twenty years ago, however, Nick had good looks and a brilliant smile and a sense of humor that was superior to that of most of the men in town, in that his was flirtatious and affectionate, and theirs was misogynous and violent.

  Within a week of Wade’s return to Lawford, he and Lillian were sleeping together in the bedroom of the apartment over Golden’s store again and were talking about remarrying, so she confessed her affairs with Lugene Brooks and Nick Wickham. Wade accepted the news mildly, because she insisted that neither man had been able to please her the way Wade could, a comparison that may well have eroticized her for him.

  As it happens, what Lillian told Wade about sleeping with Lugene Brooks and Nick Wickham was essentially true: compared to sex with him, it was boring and even a little embarrassing. He did not press her for further details, although he admitted to himself that he was curious—not about her but about the men.

  When he confessed to her that he had indulged in a three-month love affair with the woman in Seoul, he lied: he said that she had meant nothing to him, except occasional mechanical sex. “She wasn’t a hooker or anything, a prostitute,” he assured her. “Just a woman who was there.” In fact, however, she had meant a great deal to him, for she had renewed that sense of himself as a child that he had obtained with Lillian when they were first together. She spoke almost no English and he no Korean, and she tried with diligence and imagination, when he was with her, which was nearly every weekend and day off he could take, to be exactly what he wanted her to be—protective but dependent, bossy but unthreatening, sexually provocative and skilled yet innocent as a child and as personal as a sister. Impossible needs for any mere mortal to meet; she failed him, eventually. He contracted a mild case of gonorrhea, and when he went for treatment, Wade learned from the doctor—a young wise guy recently graduated from Harvard Medical School who insisted that Wade provide him with the name of the woman or women he had been sleeping with: his sexual contacts, was the phrase—that she was sleeping with at least three other GI’s, two of them guys in his outfit, and was supporting her parents, younger sisters and several children of her own with the money he and the other GI’s gave her. Wade never saw her again. But he felt guilty for that: he remembered her laughter, her black hair, her sad small beautiful breasts—her very
tangibility; and he knew that he had not been wrong when, during those three months, he had believed that she was as real as he and as frightened. He spoke of her only casually and with disrespect after that, however—with the guys in his outfit and, when he got home, at work and around the bar at Toby’s and at first, late at night, with Lillian.

  And although Lillian felt a slight chill go down her back when Wade talked that way about his one sexual liaison during their two years apart, the only other woman he had dealt with intimately, she was nonetheless relieved: the Korean woman was different from her in a way that made the woman less than she. Just as Wade believed that Lugene Brooks and Nick Wickham were different from him in ways that made them less than he. Their bargain struck, Wade and Lillian had resumed sleeping together, and a month later, they were remarried and Wade was working for Gordon LaRiviere again and arranging to buy from him a three-acre plot of land out on Lebanon Road to build a house on. Lillian quit waitressing at Toby’s, used her new secretarial skills as a part-time assistant clerk at the town hall, and stopped taking birth control pills. They tried for a long time to get Lillian pregnant, but it was not until after several miscarriages and the passage of eight years that Jill was born, to Wade’s great relief, for he had long believed that his capacity to father a child had been damaged by his having briefly loved a Korean woman. And after Jill was born, Wade almost never thought of the woman again and was sure that he could not even remember her name. Kim Chul Hee.