The Three-Day Affair

by Michael Kardos

  He’d never given me any indication that he gave the matter of love any thought at all, let alone “forever,” and I could only assume that he had surprised himself, as well.

  “It’s too bad she’s with Jeffrey,” I said.

  “Yeah. Too bad.”

  “But she is with Jeffrey. So . . .”

  In January, the Gothic buildings, leafless maples, and brown athletic fields looked dreary and ominous. I sloshed through a puddle.

  “It kills me, you know,” he said, “seeing them together.”

  “I understand,” I said, “but that’s how it is.”

  “God, Will, what does she see in him?”

  “Oh, don’t start blaming Jeffrey. That isn’t cool.”

  “Maybe. It’s just that I’ve never felt this way about anyone.”

  “You never kept any of them around long enough.” His record, I believed, was a month. “You’ve known Sara now for two years. Which of your girlfriends have you known that long?”

  It was a question I could’ve asked myself. I’d dated a few women, and none of them had aroused feelings in me that remotely suggested forever.

  “Good point,” he said.

  We passed a cluster of dormitories built during World War II, squat ugly structures with names like “1942 Hall” that resembled army barracks and were consistently bypassed, I’d noticed, on campus tours in favor of the older, ornate buildings for which the university was known.

  “Look,” I said, “if they were to break up sometime down the road . . . maybe that’d be a different story. But otherwise, you can’t make a move. You just can’t. It’s that simple.”

  “It is?”

  “Of course. So you’ll just have to put her out of your mind. Anyway, it’s not like you have any trouble, how do I say this . . .”

  “If you’re going to tell me that there are plenty of fish in the sea, I’m going to beat you senseless.”

  But then he thanked me for listening to him, and soon we reached our dormitory, where we lived in adjacent singles. After I went into my room and he into his, we never spoke of the matter again. Within the week, Nolan had begun a brand-new liaison, and I could clearly hear the honesty and respect coming from the other side of our shared wall.

  So it surprised me to learn about Nolan’s election-night confession all those years later. However ill-advised, it did reveal a level of longing and romantic depth that I hadn’t known he was capable of feeling.

  But also, if Nolan really had confessed his love to Sara while in some drunken, postelection despair, why would the incident, now six years in the past, continue to bother Jeffrey? Except, I knew why. Jeffrey had linked that transgression to another, earlier one. And the combined effect was evidently to tarnish Nolan irrevocably in Jeffrey’s eyes.

  Before today, I hadn’t the faintest clue that one of my closest friends was deemed a serpent in the eyes of my other friend. And wasn’t that the strangest thing of all? Jeffrey had been able to conceal those feelings from the rest of us all these years. The Jeffrey I’d met twelve years ago would’ve been incapable of that sort of deception. It was why I’d liked him immediately—his transparent, somewhat bewildered expression was a refreshing change from the guarded gleam I saw in the eyes of so many future lawyers and CEOs and bankers on campus.

  Jeffrey’s parents must have protected him well, because except for the cigarettes, he’d seemed a young eighteen when I first met him. He seemed a bit immature, or—to take his age out of the equation—prone to emotional swings, and I used to imagine that somewhere in the world there was an artist searching fruitlessly for his temperament.

  As I was thinking about Jeffrey, he let out a heavy sigh in his sleep and rolled over onto his side.

  I wondered what, exactly, had changed him. What about his personality had led to today’s blatant unhinging? Was it personality at all, or was it circumstance, or some amalgam of the two? And if so, were any of us immune?

  Once this evening’s agreement had been reached, and the twelve hours lay long before us, we had little to say to one another. We were talked out, and so we watched TV. At eleven o’clock we watched the local news, anxiously waiting, but then the hard news was over and we were looking at sports highlights, then a map of the United States—plenty of sun over much of the country—and then eleven thirty arrived and with it the brassy riffs signaling the beginning of late-night television.

  Nolan, Jeffrey, and I came up with shifts to watch TV. Jeffrey until 1 am, Nolan from 1 to 4, and me from 4 to 7. None of us believed that we’d actually get any sleep, but all the same it felt productive to make a plan.

  The moment of truth came just after midnight, when Marie asked where the restroom was, and I told her, and then she walked out of the recording room and into the hallway, shutting the door behind her. We all looked off in our separate directions, waiting, until after what undoubtedly seemed longer than it was, there came the unmistakable sound of water rushing through pipes, the studio’s one important acoustical deficiency. (During recording sessions, nobody was allowed in the john while the tape was rolling.) Another minute passed, and then the door, improbable as it seemed, was opening again, and in the doorway stood our lovely, trustworthy hostage, hands and face washed, makeup removed, ready to settle in for a night on the sofa and earn her forty thousand dollars. Our slumber party had begun.

  I went over to Nolan now and sat down on the floor beside him.

  “You should’ve woken me up,” I said quietly. “It’s my turn.”

  “That’s all right,” he said. “I’m not tired.”

  “You’ve been awake a long time.”

  “I don’t mind.” On TV a man with enormous biceps was stuffing broccoli into a juicer. He stood on one side of a kitchen island, and his four friends stood on the other side. The muscled man handed one of his friends the glass of bright green liquid, and the friend took a sip and said, “Mmmm,” and high-fived the man who’d made the juice because it tasted so good and healthful, and then their other friends applauded.

  “So I guess it was all a matter of settling on the right price,” I said.

  Nolan looked at me. “How so?”

  “We raised our price from one thousand to forty thousand inside of three hours.”

  He shrugged. “She’s smart. She’s one of us.” He looked back at the TV. “That’s why it’ll be good to never see her again.”

  We both watched TV awhile. “Why don’t you try to get some sleep,” I said after a few minutes had passed. “I’ll take over.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “None of this matters. None of it makes any sense.”

  “What doesn’t?”

  “Any of it. Giving her forty thousand dollars. Staying here overnight.”

  It did make sense, though. However strange this day had been, now we had a plan where before we didn’t.

  “Everything’s going to work out,” I said.

  “Oh, come on, Will. Wheeling and dealing with some ­nineteen-year-old? This isn’t getting any better.” He looked at me. “There’s a simpler solution. You know that.”

  “Don’t.”

  “I’m not saying we do it, so relax. I’m just saying that when no one knows you’re missing, then it means you won’t be missed.” He shook his head. “Look, forget it. It’s late, and I’m exhausted, and I’m only acknowledging what we’ve all been thinking.”

  “No one’s been thinking that.”

  “Of course you have.”

  “No,” I said. “I haven’t.” I watched him closely for a moment, but he was looking at the TV impassively, impossible to read. “Things are going to look different in the morning.” I hoped that would be the case. I needed Nolan’s usual hopefulness. I needed to believe in his belief. “And you need to rest your eyes awhile.”

  “Maybe later.”

  “Then do y
ou mind if I watch with you?”

  The strongman transformed sweet potatoes and beets and spinach into tall glassfuls of juice. The audience oohed and aahed. It was beautiful to watch how happy they all looked, even if they were only actors.

  CHAPTER 16

  We decided to end our vigil early. There was no reason not to.

  At eight thirty in the morning, Nolan was still sitting in front of the TV. The rest of us had slept a little, but Nolan’s eyes were bloodshot, his shirt untucked, his hair no longer perfect. It had taken eighteen hours, but he finally looked as rumpled and spent as the rest of us.

  It appeared that Marie was telling the truth. There was nothing about her on TV overnight and nothing this morning. As far as the media were concerned, yesterday was nothing but a day with some bad storms that’d since moved off the coast. I was anxious to leave yesterday behind and get on with today. Yesterday we’d kidnapped a girl. Today we would set her free.

  At a little after nine, Nolan shut off the TV and rubbed his eyes. Blinked a few times and stood up. “How about let’s get this show on the road already,” he said, massaging his neck. “Any objections?”

  There were none.

  I put the blanket, which Marie had neatly folded and then draped over the arm of the sofa, back into the bass drum. I asked Jeffrey to help me carry the sofa back into the control room. Without my asking, Marie held the doors open for us. When we went back into the recording room, she sat at the drum set and tapped a couple of the drums with her fingertips.

  A pair of drumsticks was lying on the floor tom. “Here,” I said, handing them to her. “You can try playing if you want.”

  She looked at me a moment, then took the sticks. A couple of light taps on a tom-tom. On a cymbal. Abruptly she stopped, got up from the seat, and handed the sticks to me.

  “You do it,” she said.

  The drum set was mine. Or it used to be, anyway, charged on my Visa card the year I graduated college and paid off slowly over the next several years. Before that, all I had were the secondhand drums my parents had bought me when I was twelve years old.

  The newer set was the best purchase I’d ever made, and well worth going into debt for. The shells were made of birch, with a beautiful red lacquer finish. All the best hardware. I’d taken excellent care of them, too, somehow keeping the drums free of nicks and scratches even as I hauled them in and out of a hundred clubs crammed with drunk, careless patrons.

  The best part of the drum set, however, wasn’t even the drums at all, but the cymbals. There were a ride cymbal, two crashes, a splash, and of course a hi-hat. Most people don’t think about the importance of cymbals, but drummers do. The cymbals are like the drummer’s signature. Choosing them had taken hours at one of the giant music stories on Forty-eighth Street in Manhattan. Finally, as one employee began to dust the equipment, and another began to vacuum the carpet in some other part of the store, I decided on a series of Zildjian “K” cymbals for their dark, mournful tones.

  After Cynthia and I moved to Newfield, the drums and cymbals remained in their cases for months, stacked in a corner of our bedroom. Eventually I gave them to Joey as a gift for the studio. I only ever sat at the drums anymore to tune them up for a band. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d actually played them, but I wanted to now. They were sharp and shimmering—a wonderful instrument—and I wanted Marie to see me play, to know about this other side of me, the musician. It’s hard to imagine, now, what I’d hoped to achieve, but it seemed important then to prove to her, in the last few minutes of our ordeal, that I wasn’t just some twisted man who locked people in closets.

  I sat down at the set, and with everyone watching I began to play a simple funk beat, nothing fancy. I’d replaced the drum heads before The Fixtures had begun their sessions, and the drums had a nice thwap to them. They sounded pure and full of tone even when you hit them softly, though they always sounded best when you hit them hard. So I hit them hard.

  What a release, banging on a set of drums! I had forgotten. I’d forgotten, too, what it felt like to have a group of people watching me play and thinking, This guy’s good. Even Marie. Ever since jamming with Burn in Ronnie Martinez’s musty basement I’d come to know the look on someone’s face of being transported, however briefly, to a place they hadn’t expected to go. I threw in a couple of fills, complicating the beat a little, some syncopation, off-beats on the ride cymbal, ghosting on the snare drum. And as I played, it felt as if I were controlling our collective pulse. Everyone’s trust was in me, and it was well-placed trust because I knew exactly what I was doing, and even now—especially now, after everything that happened after—I wish that I could’ve found a way to keep that one beat going without ever stopping. Because for the briefest of moments there was only this rhythm I was playing, only this rhythm and nothing else—no kidnapping, no desperate plans, no deception. For thirty seconds, maybe a minute, all of that was forgotten.

  But every song ends. I ended mine with a couple of cymbal crashes that echoed and then died away, and then the room fell silent.

  Everyone let the silence linger a moment, until Marie looked at me and said, “Sweet.”

  I smiled, set the drumsticks on the floor, and left the recording room for the bottle of Jack Daniel’s I kept in a drawer in the control room. When my bands finished their final session with me, I liked to have a toast with them, unless they were underage. And sometimes even then. No matter how difficult the recording might have been—even in the best of circumstances there are usually some disagreements and hurt feelings—the whiskey toast always made for an uplifting coda to the project and left the band feeling like they were wrapping up something important.

  This morning our toast would go beyond music. It would be a toast to freedom. To the possibility of keeping a lifelong secret. And, of course, to luck. I wasn’t sure whether we’d already been granted luck or whether we’d need it sometime in the future, but I felt that the role of luck ought not be dismissed, though others might call it fate.

  I returned to the recording room with the whiskey and four plastic cups. Poured a small amount in each cup and handed them out.

  Only then, cups in hands, did I realize my mistake. I’d meant to cement something between us, to express goodwill. But our parting was nothing to celebrate. No doubt we all wanted to forget as quickly as possible that we’d ever been together at all. So nobody said anything—there was nothing to say—and we all just looked into the bottom of our cups, saw what we saw, and swallowed.

  It was time then for logistics. Time for Marie to walk out alone, go home, and call us at the studio with her bank information. Nolan and Jeffrey would then wire a lot of money, and we’d all try to live our lives.

  Marie was rubbing her thumbs over the top of her plastic cup, still looking into it. She bit her lip and looked up at us.

  “So I’ve been thinking,” she said, and hesitated. The words dangled in front of us.

  My body must have sensed something before my brain did, because my gut seized in pain as if the whiskey were tainted. I needed to sit down, but I stayed standing and gently rubbed my stomach outside my shirt, trying to massage away the pain.

  “What have you been thinking?” Nolan asked.

  “Well, a lot of things.”

  I couldn’t help it—the pain was too much. I sat down on the floor and leaned against the wall.

  “I had all night on that couch,” she was saying, “and I thought about a lot of things. And what I’ve decided is, well . . .” She sighed. “Forty thousand isn’t enough.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut. “Don’t do this, Marie,” I said.

  “I’m not doing anything,” she said. Her tone was tinged with sarcasm, even a bit of confidence. I opened my eyes again. Something important had happened overnight while I had been sleeping. She looked different—her eyes more severe, a darker, more calculating blue—and I couldn’t imagine
ever thinking she was sixteen. “It’s just that, the way I figure, I’m standing between all of you and a lot of trouble,” she said. “A lot of trouble. And I just wonder if maybe forty thousand dollars . . . you know, all things considered . . . might be a little stingy.”

  “It isn’t,” Nolan said. “It’s generous, and you know it.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “You could be right. But my nana, she used to pay a neighbor’s kid forty dollars to cut the grass. He was a nice little kid in the sixth grade, but sort of dumb. I think he might have been retarded. But as I was lying on that couch last night, I kept thinking about him, and about how you’re all important men. Family men, too. I think you’d do pretty much anything to avoid . . . well, you know. And all night I kept asking myself, am I only a thousand times more important to these men than some retarded kid who cuts my nana’s grass? And my guess is no. I’ll bet I’m way more important than that.”

  Her voice exuded confidence, but her hands squeezed the empty cup and shook slightly.

  “Cut to the chase.” Nolan’s gaze bored into her. “How much do you want?”

  Her brilliance, if it could be called that, was in recognizing the power she had over us and having the nerve to act on it. Had she named her price at that moment, she almost certainly would’ve gotten it. Her mistake was to equivocate.

  “Well,” she said, looked up at the ceiling as if considering the question—blatant theatrics—then back at Nolan again. She shrugged. “That depends.”

  “It depends?” He laughed dismissively, then narrowed his eyes. “All right, fifty thousand.” Silence. “Sixty.” He shook his head. “Fuck, I knew this was all a waste of time. Now get the hell out of here before I throw you out.”