Affliction

by Russell Banks

  “But then I heard Jack bump against something in the living room, and he swore and tried to find the light switch on the wall, you know, right by the door. But he couldn’t find it, so he backed outside to the landing again, thank God, and a few seconds later, I heard him go back down the stairs, and finally I heard his truck drive off.”

  Slowly, Wade sat up and swung his legs off the bed, as if he were an old sick man. He stood and in the darkness began to dress. He and Hettie said nothing to each other, and when he was dressed, he walked from the bedroom to the couch, where he had tossed his hat and coat. He picked them up and put them on and went out onto the landing—closing the door behind him with care, as if he did not want anyone to hear him.

  Jack’s note fluttered from the door to the landing. Wade leaned down and picked it up and read it: Meet me at Toby’s. I got some good news today. Love, Jack. Wade inserted the note between the door and the jamb just above the doorknob, where Jack had placed it, then went down the stairs. He started up Pop’s truck and left, heading north on Route 29, out of town, toward home.

  22

  THIS TIME, FOR HIS MEETING with J. Battle Hand, Wade dressed up, or at least he did not appear in his work clothes: he wore the dark-blue gabardine sports jacket and brown trousers he had worn to Ma’s funeral, with a white shirt and a green-and-silver diagonally striped tie—clothing he had purchased over the last couple of years at J. C. Penney’s in Littleton, so that he could go to weddings or funerals or out with Margie for a movie and Chinese food, say, and not look like a hick, a woodchuck, a goddamned shitkicker from the hills of Cow Hampshire.

  Lillian had always scolded Wade about his taste in clothing: he did not have bad taste, she told him, he had no taste, which was worse. He simply did not care how his clothing looked, she explained; he cared only that it functioned adequately to cover his nakedness and protect him from the elements. Early on, Lillian had actually found this quality endearing, but as she grew older and a bit more sophisticated herself, Wade’s apparent inability to care how he looked began to embarrass and irritate her. Then, three years before, when he had gone to court for his divorce wearing what he wore every day in those days—dark-blue twill trousers and shirt, with Wade on the left shirt pocket and LaRiviere Co. on the right— Lillian had been unable, even on so formal and momentous an occasion, to restrain her embarrassment and deep irritation with his clothing, and her words had cut him deeply enough to let him, for the first time in his life, see himself in his clothes as he thought others saw him, and he never wore LaRiviere’s uniform again, even to work. They had come out of the courtroom, during the judge’s lunch break, still waiting for their case to be heard, and were standing in the hallway outside, and, while talking strategy with their respective lawyers, had inadvertently backed into each other. When they turned to apologize for the bump, they both expected to see a stranger, but instead husband and wife suddenly found themselves standing face to face.

  Wade looked into her eyes and gazed at the beautiful person he had loved since childhood, eyes as familiar to him as his own hands: in a series of transparent overlays he saw the child, the girl and the woman and mother she had become, and in a thin voice he said, “I wish we weren’t doing this, Lillian, honest to God, I really do.”

  She took a step back and viewed him from his black hightopped work shoes to the V of his tee shirt at his open collar, and she pronounced, “You look just like you are, Wade.”

  Then she turned away and resumed talking with her lawyer, the tall handsome Jackson Cotter, of Cotter, Wilcox and Browne, a man with gray flecks in his charcoal-colored hair and wearing a three-piece navy-blue pin-striped suit. Clothes make the man, Wade thought. Clothes make the man, and the lawyer makes the client. He saw himself in his clothes the way a stranger would, and he saw a stupid unimaginative man, and he noticed that his lawyer, Robert Emile Chagnon, wore an ill-fitting kelly-green corduroy suit with a yellow knit shirt and no tie and had on a pair of old blue canvas deck shoes with white soles and laces. The man Wade had hired to represent him looked ridiculous and incompetent and dishonest. No doubt just as Wade himself looked.

  Well, this time, by God, things would be different. This time his lawyer would be a man who cut the figure of a distinguished genius, a man wearing a three-piece suit, yes, but entering the courtroom in a wheelchair—a man so obviously skilled that he needed only his brain and his dark melodious voice to obtain justice for his client. This time that sexy tall lawyer of Lillian’s would find that his good looks and clothes worked against him. Wade resisted an impulse to smile and rub his hands together with relish, as he followed Hand’s secretary from the outer office to the familiar paneled room in back, with all the books on the shelves and the leather-covered chairs and sofa. This time, by God, Wade Whitehouse was going to have his day in court.

  “I’ve taken a look at your divorce decree,” Hand said. “And frankly, Mr. Whitehouse, if you want the custody terms changed, I think you’re going to run into a few problems.”

  “What do you mean, ‘if? What the hell do you think this is all about? Of course I want the custody terms changed!” Wade pulled out his cigarettes and lit up, inhaling furiously. The lawyer pressed the reverse button on the control panel with his left hand, and his chair zipped away from Wade to the middle of the room, where he watched Wade like a guard dog.

  “I’m afraid you don’t understand,” Hand said. “In this state, a judge is going to be very reluctant to change the terms of custody, unless conditions in the life of the child now are radically different from what they were when the divorce was granted—”

  “You don’t understand!” Wade interrupted him. “I thought we were going to nail her on the lawyer thing.”

  Hand continued quite as if Wade had said nothing. “… and unless they have changed in such a way as to be deleterious to the child’s health or emotional well-being. Except, of course, when the original terms of custody appear to have been clearly and unjustly onerous—which frankly is not the case here—or when it can be shown that the judgment depended on information that was based on perjured testimony. Something like that, sometimes, can convince a judge to reconsider. But they hate to do it. They hate reconsidering divorce terms.”

  “I thought—what I thought was we were going after this guy.”

  “Who?”

  “Cotter. Her lawyer. Her boyfriend. Remember?”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “And what about her smoking marijuana? What about that? In her lawyer’s company, even. What about that?”

  Hand sighed. “Mr. Whitehouse, let me ask you a few questions that you yourself would be asked in court if you tried to push this.”

  “Shoot.” Wade exhaled a cloud of smoke and coughed.

  “Have you yourself ever smoked marijuana?” He paused. “You’re under oath, remember. Or will be.”

  Wade hesitated, as if trying to remember. “Well, I mean, yeah, I guess so. Who hasn’t?”

  “And you are a police officer, right?”

  “Yeah, yeah. I get the drift.” Wade waved him off with his hand.

  “Let me go on. How much do you drink, Mr. Whitehouse? How much a day do you drink?”

  “What the hell’s that got to do with anything?” Wade bristled.

  “Never mind that. Just answer the question, please.”

  “I don’t know how much I drink. I don’t keep count.”

  “Too many to count?”

  “Jesus Christ! What the hell are you trying to prove? I haven’t done anything wrong! Whose lawyer are you, anyhow?” Wade rubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray next to him. “Look, I’m just trying to make it so I can see my own child when I want to. That’s all. I don’t want to have to get permission from my ex-wife to see my own daughter!”

  “You don’t. The divorce decree says that you can have your daughter one weekend a month, except for Christmas and Thanksgiving, and for one week in the summer.”

  “Yeah, I get Halloween, she gets Thanksg
iving and Christmas. It’s wrong, you know that! Wrong. The whole thing is wrong.”

  “It’s unusually restrictive, I admit. But there are reasons.”

  “Such as?”

  “Apparently, you were physically violent with your wife on several occasions?”

  “That’s in there? That’s not in there.”

  “No. But the divorce was granted on the grounds of physical and mental cruelty. And I did speak with her attorney about the case. Jackson Cotter.”

  “You did what? I thought you were on my side in this! I thought you were working for me!”

  “Mr. Whitehouse, it’s not unusual to communicate intentions like yours to the attorney of the other party.”

  “You mention his hanky-panky with Lillian? You mention that?”

  “I didn’t think it appropriate to threaten him,” the lawyer said.

  “You didn’t think it appropriate.”

  “No.”

  Wade slumped in his chair and looked at his shoes. “You’re telling me to drop this thing, aren’t you? Forget about it.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re telling me I’m dreaming.”

  “Not exactly. But yes.”

  “I’m going to get married, you know. Soon. To a very nice woman, very motherly and all. And I have a house now, a regular house, the house I grew up in. That makes a difference. Doesn’t that make a difference?”

  “Not really.” Hand stole a glance at his watch.

  In a weak small voice, Wade said, “I’ve changed since then. Since the divorce, I mean. I really have.”

  “I’m sure you have.”

  “Did you explain that, to her lawyer, I mean, when you talked to him?”

  “As a matter of fact, I did. And he offered an arrangement that should interest you.”

  Wade quickly looked up from his shoes and watched the man with suspicion. He thought, Lawyers—the sonsofbitches are all in cahoots, making deals behind your back, swapping favors, trading off one case now to win another later. “Tell me.”

  Hand wheeled in closer to Wade and smiled sympathetically. He did mention to Cotter—just in passing, he said, not as a threat—his knowledge of Mrs. Horner’s relationship with her attorney, which relationship, while not illegal, was potentially embarrassing, to say the least, and he did explain to Jackson Cotter that Wade recently had changed his way of living to a considerable degree. The combination of the two, he said, convinced Cotter, after consulting with his client, of course, to agree that if Wade would abandon his suit, Mrs. Horner would allow him to have Jill stay with him on two weekends a month and on alternating Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays and for two weeks in the summer instead of one. The arrangement, he added, need not be formalized in court.

  Wade nodded solemnly. “I get it. You got Cotter to put the arm on Lillian, and now you’re putting the arm on me. You guys cut a deal so that Lillian gives up something, and I give up something, and you two go away with our money in your pockets.”

  Hand backed his wheelchair to the middle of the room, where he slid his yellow pad into the carrier and his pen into his inside pocket. “This arrangement, if you accept it, keeps you out of court, Mr. Whitehouse, in a case you would surely lose. Which saves you ten times the money you have spent, not to mention the emotional damage these things inflict on all the principals, especially the child, whether you win or lose. And I have gotten your visitation rights doubled. What more do you want?”

  “Nothing on paper. Right?”

  “Mr. Whitehouse, you hired me for my legal advice. Do you want it?”

  “Yes, goddammit.”

  “This is the best deal you will get in this state. And you only got it because Jackson Cotter made the mistake of becoming involved with your ex-wife and does not want to ask your ex-wife to perjure herself by denying it, which, of course, she would do, and then it would be your word against hers, that’s all. And frankly, no one would believe you. Not even Mrs. Horner’s husband or Jackson Cotter’s wife. Consider yourself lucky,” he said, and he wheeled toward the door and swung it open for Wade. “Or hire another attorney.”

  Wade slowly rose from the chair. “Lucky,” he said. “Lucky, lucky, lucky.” He walked across the room, and as he left he looked down at the man in the wheelchair and said, “Okay, so when’s the next time I can see my daughter?”

  “Your ex-wife expects you to pick her up today.”

  “You arranged that with Cotter.”

  “I did.”

  “Thanks,” Wade said. He walked through the door and down the hall, past the secretary, who did not look up from her typing, and out to the street.

  It was a bright sunny day, the air cool and crisp against his freshly shaved face. Wade stood on the steps of the building and looked down at Pa’s red truck parked in front. The vehicle looked ridiculous and made him ashamed in the usual way. He rubbed his cheek and realized freshly that his jaw no longer hurt him. Touching his tongue gingerly against the place where the afflicting tooth had been, he felt only a swollen mass of tissue, numb and stupid, it seemed to him. He had tried, Lord, how he had tried to break through the pain and confusion of his life to something like clarity and control, and it had come to this—this dumb helplessness, this woeful thickened shameful inadequacy. At bottom, he knew, there was love in his heart—love for Jill that was as coherent and pure as algebra, and maybe even love for Margie too, and love for Ma, poor Ma, who was dead now and gone from him forever, and love for Lillian, in spite of everything: love for women—but try as he might, he could not arrange his life so that he could act on that love. There were all these other dark hateful feelings that kept getting in the way, his rage and his fear and his feelings of pure distress. If somehow, with one wild bearish swing of his arm, he could sweep all that away, then at last, he was sure, he would be free to love his daughter. At last he could be a good father, husband, son and brother. He could become a good man. That was all he wanted, for God’s sake. To be a good man. He imagined goodness as a state that gave a man power and clarity in every conscious moment of his daily life. Slowly, he descended the steps and got into the truck and started the motor. He backed it out and drove west on Clinton Street, to pick up his daughter.

  On the ground between the yellowed grass and the leafless forsythia bushes by the sidewalk, slubs of porous snow shrank slowly below the late morning sun. Wade parked the truck next to the curb, got out and walked up the front path to the door of the house, a charcoal-gray split-level with pink shutters, and rang the bell. He heard the chimes inside, the first four notes of “Frere Jacques,” and the clicks of Lillian’s high heels on hardwood as she approached the door.

  She drew the door in and stood behind the glass storm door and gazed at him, expressionless and still, as if posing on the other side of the glass for her portrait, as if she were her portrait: tall and slender, wearing a pale-gray wool dress, silver-and-lapis bracelet and necklace, her chocolate-brown hair tied up behind her head, off her neck—and she looked intelligent as hell, Wade thought, like a schoolteacher, filled with information and judgments and opinions that he could never have.

  How did she get this way? How did she get so damned smart, this Lillian Pittman of Lawford, New Hampshire? How did she end up in this nice house in Concord’s west end, with shrubs and a neat lawn and a garage with an almost new Audi in it? That she had married Bob Horner, who sold insurance, did not explain it—that only explained the money, and lots of people Wade knew had as much money as Bob Horner, even people in Lawford. Bob Horner was not rich, and even if he were, it would not have made Lillian smart.

  No, it was something else, something that had always been there, in her eyes, even when she was a girl and Wade had first fallen in love with her—and suddenly he realized that it was why he had fallen in love with her in the first place and why he had been so obsessed with her all those years: he had looked into her eyes way back then, when they were both high school kids, and he had seen her intelligence, the wonderful complexity
of her awareness, and he had seen his own smart eyes looking back at him, and for a while he had felt intelligent too. Then, after a few years, because he no longer saw his own eyes looking back at him from hers, he had lost that belief in his own intelligence, and from then on, all he felt when he looked at her was stupid.

  So it was not really a question of what had happened to her; it was a question of what had happened to him. How had he come to this? How was it that he, Wade Whitehouse of Lawford, New Hampshire, a man who had once been as intelligent and complexly aware as she and possibly even gifted, was standing like this on the stoop of his ex-wife’s house, hat in hand, come begging for a visit with his child, a man wearing cheap mismatched clothes and driving a borrowed battered old stake-body truck, a man without a proper home to call his own, without a job, without any respect in the community, without a wife and with no one to care for but a drunken father who hated him and whom he hated—how had this sorry man come to be the adult version of the bright boy he had seen twenty-five years ago in Lillian Pittman’s eyes?

  Lillian’s voice through the glass was muffled somewhat, but Wade heard her words well enough: “Wait there. She’ll be right out.” Then she closed the inner door, and Wade was looking at his reflection. It was Pop he saw looking back, twenty or thirty years ago, haunted and angry, kept outside the family of man, compelled to stand in the rain and cold and darkness alone, while the others sat around a fire inside; and because he was not there with them, they were unafraid and slung their arms over each other’s shoulders and sang songs or whispered sweet secrets to one another, men and women and children full of good intentions and competence, people who were able to love one another cleanly. He, like his father before him, and like that man’s father too, Wade’s and my grandfather and our unknown great-grandfather as well, stood outside, hands buried in pockets, scowling furiously at the frozen ground, while everyone else stayed warm and loved one another.