Affliction

by Russell Banks

  “Wade Whitehouse. You look like shit. What happened to your mouth—somebody clip you?” Asa Brown smiled, as if amused. He swung his feet up onto his desk and lolled back in his chair and studied Wade for a moment, as if the disheveled man with the shifting eyes and swollen jaw were an odd museum exhibit, then waved with one hand to the chair beside the desk and said, “Sit. Take a load off.”

  The room was brightly lit by a bank of overhead fluorescent lights. There were several other desks, but Brown and Wade were alone in the office, which eased Wade somewhat, for he preferred to say what he had to say to Brown alone and not have to endure Brown’s tendency to play Wade against an audience.

  “I’ve got some information. I’ve got something you ought to know.” Wade took his hat off and sat down and placed it in his lap. He felt like a schoolboy going to the principal’s office for questioning. He was hot inside the office with his coat still on, and he began to sweat. He fumbled with the zipper of his coat but it jammed, and he finally gave it up and twirled his trooper cap on his finger, trying to look at ease and comfortable here in Asa Brown’s territory, trying not to look the way he felt—trapped, hot, guilty, angry. This was Rolfe’s idea, he probably thought. That goddamned smartass little brother of mine who believes that all you have to do when somebody does something wrong is tell it to the cops.

  “The fuck happened to your mouth, Wade? Tell me that. What’s the other guy look like? Not as bad as you, I hope. Somebody did that to me, I’d want him to look a hell of a lot worse than me.” Brown straightened one crease on his trousers with his thumb and forefinger, yanked it taut and performed the same act on the other, then gazed at both creases with admiration.

  Wade shifted uncomfortably in his chair and pulled a cigarette from a crumpled pack and with trembling hands lit it. Brown shoved an ashtray across the desk to him and smiled, waiting. Months later, on a bright spring morning, when I sat in the same chair as Wade, and Captain Asa Brown sat across from me with his feet up on his desk, he told me that Wade had looked like a man about to break down and confess a crime. Wade’s shoulders were slumped, his feet drawn up under the chair, knees together, his hands fidgeting with the cigarette and lighter, while he looked off slightly to the right of Brown, refusing eye contact—like a guilt-driven man who had found the burden too great to bear and had finally decided to reveal the nature of his crime and accept his punishment. Not a man come to accuse others.

  Wade suddenly sat up straight in his chair, looked at Brown and said, “What I was wondering is about taking the state trooper’s test, maybe. I was wondering if I was too old for that. You know, to join the state police.”

  Brown said, “You kidding me, Wade? You want to be a trooper?”

  “Well, yeah. I mean, I was thinking about it. I was just wondering about the test, if I was too old or something.”

  Brown looked at him thoughtfully, as if considering how Wade, in his present state, would look in a trooper’s uniform. Like a man impersonating a cop, he thought, a man in costume, a drunk masquerading in a stolen uniform. “Well, Wade, I’d have to look into that for you. I think there is an age limit, but I’d have to check. What’re you, forty-something?”

  “Forty-one.” Wade stood up and jammed his cap back on and put out his cigarette. “I was only wondering.”

  “Well, I’ll check on that, okay? You give me a call in a day or two, Wade, and I’ll let you know.”

  Wade mumbled thanks and backed toward the door. “Yeah, I’ll call you,” he said, and he turned and went out, walked quickly down the long hallway to the exit and was gone, leaving Brown at his desk, smiling and shaking his head. What an asshole, that guy. Drunk, probably, and pissed off at somebody he got in a fight with. And now he’s got it into his head that he can be a state trooper so he can bust the guy who whacked him on the jaw. He used to be a decent town cop, Brown thought, but it looks like the booze has got to him. Young for that. Too bad.

  Some time later, Wade pulled off the road in front of Golden’s store. He put gas into the truck from the pump out front, went into the store and paid Buddy Golden at the register. Buddy, a thin sallow-faced man with a permanently soured expression on his face, said, “Wade,” and handed him his change.

  Wade said nothing, turned and left the store.

  “Friendly,” Buddy said. “Real friendly.” He stood by the register and watched Wade out the window and saw him walk around to the side of the store and heard him clump up the wooden stairs there to the landing that led to the pair of small apartments upstairs. Buddy heard Wade knock on one of the doors and heard it open, which meant that it was Hettie Rodgers’s apartment, since the other was rented by Frankie LaCoy, who Buddy knew was up in Littleton, probably buying more marijuana to sell here in town. He did not care how the goddamned LaCoy kid made his living, so long as he paid his rent on time and did not trash the apartment.

  Buddy finished closing the store, flicked off the lights, locked up and went out, passing the old red truck as he walked around back toward his own car. As he strolled under the landing, he looked up and saw that, yep, he was right: no lights on in Frankie LaCoy’s apartment and several lights burning in Hettie’s. That goddamned Wade Whitehouse, he better be careful, coming around to visit Jack Hewitt’s girlfriend. If Jack catches him, Wade will have some serious explaining to do.

  None of my business, he thought, just so long as they don’t trash the apartment. I’ve got to stop renting these places to kids, he decided, walking on. It was nothing but trouble. Of course, there was no one else in town to rent to, except single kids who could not afford a trailer or a house of their own and did not want to live with their parents anymore because they needed to screw each other and drink and smoke marijuana and God knows what else, and newlyweds, who never stayed long.

  Hettie was surprised to see Wade. She invited him in and waited for him to tell her why he had come knocking on her door. He peered slowly around the small crowded room and tiny kitchen by the door and said nothing.

  She fluffed her new short haircut at the nape of her neck and said, “What do you think, Wade? You like it short?” She spun around to show him all sides. She was wearing an aqua V-neck tee shirt and tight jeans with zippers at the ankles and rubber thongs on her feet. Just home from work, she explained, and out of that uniform they made her wear at Ken’s Kutters in Littleton. “It’s like a damned nurse’s uniform or something they make you wear,” she said. “Ridiculous. They want, like, to call you a beautician, right? So I guess they figure you have to look like you work in a hospital. It’s nice, though.” She sighed. “The job, I mean.” She chattered on nervously, feigning good cheer, while Wade prowled in silence through the apartment, looking out the window in the living room to the road below, where Pop’s truck was parked beside the gas pump.

  “You all right, Wade?” Hettie asked, suddenly serious. “What happened to your face there? It’s all swollen.”

  He sat down heavily on the tattered old couch, still wearing his hat and coat, and drummed his fingers on the armrest. “You know, I lived in this apartment. Twice.”

  “No kidding. Twice. You want a beer, Wade?” Hettie moved toward the refrigerator. “I was just going to get myself a beer. It’s what I like to do when I first get home, change out of that nurse’s uniform they make me wear and have a beer before I start supper.” She smiled eagerly at the refrigerator door, her face a question mark. “Beer?”

  “When I first got married I lived here. And then I lived here alone a few years ago. When I got divorced.” He pulled his hat off and flipped it to the end of the couch and smoothly unzipped his coat and wriggled out of it, tossing it on top of the hat.

  “I know,” she said. “About after the divorce, I mean. But not about when you were married. Before my time,” she said, opening the refrigerator.

  Wade agreed, it was before her time, and said maybe he would take that beer. He stood up again, moving from the living room toward the single bedroom in back, where he halted at the
door for a moment and peered in. She had left the light on, and her white uniform lay rumpled on the unmade double bed. There was a three-legged dresser with a pair of bricks for the fourth leg, and several blue plastic boxes under the window were filled with record albums, and female clothing was everywhere, spilling from the dresser drawers, in piles on the floor, drooping off the ironing board in the corner. On the wall she had tacked up a poster of David Bowie in concert.

  “Don’t mind the mess,” she said, handing him a bottle of Michelob. “It’s Friday, like TGIF, and I do housecleaning on Saturday. Cheers,” she said, and clinked his bottle with her own.

  Wade walked back toward the kitchen at the far side of the living room, looked into it and took a long pull from the bottle. “Looks like the same furniture that was here when I lived here,” he said in a metallic voice. He looked strange, Hettie told me, when I asked her about that night, and he was acting and talking oddly, she said, right from the start, when he first came in, and she was a little afraid of him, even though they were old friends and Wade had always behaved decently toward her.

  “I used to like baby-sit Jill, you know,” she explained, “so I was used to Wade and his moods, and I had seen him get pretty ugly when he was drinking. But this was different. He wasn’t ugly or anything, just strange. Like, he was all caught up remembering when he once lived in the same apartment, back when he and Lillian were first married and then later, when they got divorced. Like, it must have been hard on him, having to come back to the same apartment years later, where the marriage had first started out. I guess I told him that, about how hard it must have been for him, being his age and all, to live in a furnished little dump like this, and he must have been glad to get out of it and get his own trailer out there by the lake.”

  “I’m living in my father’s house now,” he said. “Up on Parker Mountain.”

  “Yeah, right. I guess I knew that. I heard Margie—your Margie, Margie Fogg—I heard she moved in with you. Nice?” Hettie dropped into a director’s chair opposite the couch, crossed her legs and swung one ankle back and forth in a circular motion, stirring the air. She was nervous, a little frightened of Wade, not trying to be provocative—although, thinking back on it, she told me, she could see how Wade might have thought differently. The truth is, she wanted him to leave and wished that she had not let him in and offered him a beer. He was looking at her as if he did not know who she was, as if he thought she was Lillian, maybe, and they were newly-weds living in this apartment together. Or he may not have known who he himself was: it was as if he thought he was Jack—he was acting the way Jack did sometimes when he was drunk, especially lately: morose, inward, cryptic. These were not exactly Hettie Rodgers’s words, of course, but they are her perceptions, essentially, as she remembered them six months later.

  He moved closer to her, and she stopped twirling her leg in the air and looked up at him. Reaching out with one hand, he brushed her chin with his fingertips, then lowered himself down next to her and laid his head on her lap, facing away from her toward the shabby couch and across the cluttered room to the darkened window beyond. The room looked to him exactly as it had when he had lived here with Lillian twenty years before, and he had knelt beside her and had placed his head in her lap, and looking away from her, so that she could not see the tears in his eyes, he had begged her to forgive him. Hettie stroked his head, as if he were a troubled child, and he set the bottle of beer on the floor and reached around her legs with his arms and held her tightly.

  “Wade,” she said. “No.”

  “When we lived here,” he said in a low voice, “it was mostly good. There were some bad times, but it was mostly good. Wasn’t it?”

  “Wade, that was a long time ago. Like, things change, Wade.”

  “No. Some things stay the same your whole life. The best things that happened to you, and the worst, they stay with you your whole life. When we lived here, when we were kids just starting out, that was the best thing. I know that. I can still feel that, in spite of everything else that has happened to us.”

  “Wade,” Hettie said, her voice almost a whisper. “Why did you come over here tonight?”

  He was silent for a few seconds, and then he said, “Will you let me make love to you?” He released her and sat back on his heels and looked up at her face, which was filled with confusion and fear, although he did not see that. He said, “Just this one time, here, in this place. In the dark, with the lights out, and you can be Lillian, and I’ll be whoever you want. I’ll be Jack, if you want. Just this one time.”

  “I can’t, Wade. I’m scared. No kidding, really. I’m scared of this. You should go.”

  “In the dark I can call you Lillian, and you can call me Jack. And it will only happen this one time. I need to do that. Lillian.”

  “Please. Please don’t call me Lillian.” Her eyes welled up, and tears broke across her cheeks. “You’re scaring me.”

  Wade reached up and touched her hair at the bottom of her long slender neck. “You look nice with your hair cut short like that,” he said, and he reached beyond her to the light switch on the wall and doused the overhead light, a bulb hidden in a Chinese paper shade, dropping the room into darkness, with only the lamp in the bedroom showing now, casting a long plank of light into the room, so that they could see the shape of each other’s bodies but could not make out the face. And he did look like Jack to her at that moment, kneeling next to her, one hand on her thigh, the other on her shoulder, his fingertips brushing her throat. He said, “I wonder what your hair smells like now. If it smells the same as it used to when I kissed you and we made love.”

  She was shaking; her heart was pounding and the blood roared in her ears.

  “Lillian,” he said. “Say my name. Say it.”

  “This scares me. Don’t.”

  “I want you to say my name. Jack. Say it.”

  “I’m afraid. I really am.”

  “Lillian.”

  She whispered his name. “Jack.”

  He touched her lips with the tips of his fingers. “Say it again.”

  “Jack.”

  He took her hand and placed her fingers across his lips, and he said, “Lillian.”

  He stood slowly and said, “Wait here,” and he walked into the bedroom, crossed to the bedside table and put out the light. Then he quickly returned through the darkness to stand behind her.

  She said, “This scares me a whole lot. We shouldn’t do this.”

  “It’s all right. We’re not who we are. I’m Jack, and you’re Lillian.” He reached down and placed his hands on her shoulders. He let his hands slide to her breasts and gently hold them, and she laid her head back against him, her breath coming rapidly now, as he moved his hands over her breasts, her nipples hardening, her hands on his, pressing them against her. Then he was kissing her neck, her ears, her cheeks and her lips, and she was kissing him back, and they were standing in the room holding tightly to one another, and in seconds they were moving through the darkness to the bedroom.

  She said to me, “I knew it was wrong, but it isn’t like I was married to Jack or anything. And things had been pretty bad between him and me lately anyway, Jack and me, since that hunting accident he was involved with. I guess I was mad at him. And I liked Wade, you know, he was like an old friend, ever since I was a kid, and he had always been real sweet to me, and he seemed so sad and all. I really felt sorry for him. And it was like just this one time. I had never been what you’d call attracted to Wade, but this one night, it was different. And making me call him Jack like that, and him calling me Lillian, it was strange, like being real high, and it kind of took me over, you know?”

  Wade undressed her in the darkness, and then he took off his own clothes and moved onto her, gently kissing her with his damaged mouth, drawing her warm breath into him, gulping it down. He lifted himself up on his arms, and she opened to him like a flower, and he entered her, easily, with excruciating slowness, until he was all the way in, and he felt
huge to himself, as if he had gone all the way up into her chest and were touching Lillian’s heart.

  Down in front of the store, a burgundy pickup pulled off the road and parked next to Pop’s truck. The road was empty and dark. The store windows reflected the flash of the headlights, while Jack sat in his truck and peered up through the windshield and saw that there were no lights on in Hettie’s apartment. Shit, he thought, and he looked at his watch in the green glow of the dashboard.

  Then, wondering what the hell Wade’s father’s truck was doing parked in front of the store by the gas pump, he got out and looked inside, thinking that maybe the old bastard had passed out and was lying on the seat. Gone. Strange. The sonofabitch’s probably three sheets to the wind down at Toby’s, wondering where the hell he left his truck, Jack thought.

  He moved around to the front of his own truck, and pulled a small notepad and pencil from his shirt pocket, and, in the reflected splash from the headlights off the store windows, scribbled a note and tore it from the pad. He walked heavily up the stairs to the landing and stopped in front of Hettie’s door. He studied the door for a second, and thought, What the hell, maybe she came home already and fell asleep, and he turned the doorknob. The door swung open, and Jack stepped inside.

  “Hettie?” he called into the darkness. “Hey, babes, you here?” Silence.

  “By then, when Jack came,” Hettie explained to me, “we were just lying there in the darkness, you know? Not saying anything, just thinking, I guess, about what we’d done. This terrible thing we’d done, Wade and me. I was really scared when I heard Jack outside, and then, when he actually came into the apartment, I jumped, and I was so scared I almost screamed. But I didn’t. Wade, he didn’t even seem to react. I mean, like he just lay there the same way, without even his breathing changing, his hands behind his head, like he was going to lie there on his back naked in bed and let Jack walk right into the room. It was weird.