Affliction (21 page)

“And a police officer,” Wade interrupted him. “I'm the town police officer.”

“Ah. That'll help,” he said. “Say, didn't you have a shooting up your way yesterday? Some kind of hunting accident? A man from Massachusetts. Some kind of union official, right?”

“Yeah.”

“You know much about it? Sounded a little… unlikely to me.”

“How's that?”

“Oh, I don't know. Big-time union official out hunting with his guide, and somehow he shoots himself. You always wonder a little about these stories. Who was the guide? Local man, I suppose.”

“Yeah. Kid named Jack Hewitt. Used to be a ballplayer, got drafted by the Red Sox a few years back, then ruined his arm. You might've read about him in the papers. Nice kid. It was an accident, though. No doubt about it. Kid like Jack wouldn't have any reason to kill a guy like Twombley anyhow.”

“Money,” the lawyer said, smiling. “There's always money.”

“Yeah. Money. Yeah, there's always that. But it's hard to imagine,” Wade said.

“Yes, well, speaking of which,” the lawyer said, “my point in asking about your job is, can you manage the costs of a custody suit? Because you might be better off legally, as well as financially, just to go for the…”

“I know, I know,” Wade said, standing up and pulling on his coat. “I guess… I guess the custody suit business is just my way of showing how pissed off I am at my ex-wife. I'm not as dumb as I probably look. I'll do whatever you recommend,” he said. “And it looks like you're recommending me to forget the whole goddamned custody business.”

He made for the door, opened it and over his shoulder said to the lawyer, “I'll send you the divorce decree on Monday. And the five hundred.”

The lawyer looked impassively at him and said nothing.

Wade walked through the outer office, then stopped in
the doorway and peered back for a second and watched the lawyer's chair scoot out the door opposite him, as if rushing him off to another meeting. The lawyer's swift and purposeful mobility in his chair frightened Wade somehow. He tried to smile at the receptionist or secretary or whatever she was, but she was busily typing; she wore a headset and showed no sign of knowing Wade was even in the room. He closed the door carefully and moved on.

At the end of the hall, he almost bumped into two girls coming out of the women's health center. They were giggling teenagers, kids, only a few years older than Jill, in scarlet lipstick and powder-blue eye shadow. They wore jeans, half-unbuttoned blouses and quilted down vests.

They probably just got fitted for diaphragms, Wade thought, and it was an embarrassing thought for him, although he did not know why and did not go any further with it than that. He restrained himself from judging the girls, though for a second he wanted to scold them, and he merely said, “‘Scuse me,” and stood back a second and watched them leave, switching their behinds, heads held high, hands patting their healthy hair in anticipation of the cold wind outside. As he got into his car, he thought, Those girls probably just had abortions! Jesus H. Christ. What a world.

WADE DROVE THE LENGTH of Main Street, halfway to the prison north of Concord, then turned around and drove all the way back. Specks of snow were coming down. It was two forty-five, and Wade felt himself drifting swiftly toward a familiar form of hysteria: a tangible panic. His particular desire, to conduct a successful custody suit against Lillian, now looked like a naive delusion, and his more general and long-lived desire, to be a good father, was starting to feel like a simpleminded obsession. There was a waxing and waning connection between the two desires, he knew, a hydraulic connection, so that when one was strong, the other weakened. When both weakened, however, as now, Wade dropped through the floor of depression into panic.

To fight off the panic, he decided that he wanted to see Jill. What the hell, it was a Saturday afternoon, he was coincidentally in Concord, and he needed to explain some things to the child. Why not call up and arrange to spend the rest of the afternoon with her? He also hoped that, after the fiasco at the Halloween party, she would be able to reassure him somewhat. Surely, his company was not so bad, so boring, that she could
not enjoy herself with him. It was more or less a communication problem. They had missed each other's signals the other night; that was all. He could apologize, and she could apologize, and everything would be swell.

Besides, it was his right, goddammit, especially after Lillian and her husband had driven up to Lawford Thursday night and taken her away from him. When you take a man's child from him, you take much more than the child, so that the man tends to forget about regaining the child and instead focuses on regaining the other—self-respect, pride, sense of autonomy, that sort of thing. The child becomes emblematic. This was happening to Wade, of course; and he dimly perceived it. But he was powerless to stop it.

 

He called from a phone booth in the parking lot of the K mart in the shopping mall east of Main Street. The snow was coming down harder now and might amount to something, he observed, thinking warily of the drive home. The afternoon sky had darkened and lowered, and the day seemed to be easing into evening already. Shoppers, mostly women and children, occasionally a man, hurried back and forth between their cars and the store.

He let the phone ring an even dozen times before giving up. Hell, it's barely three, he thought: too early to head back to Lawford and see Margie, but still early enough to wait around awhile and then take Jill out for supper at a Pizza Hut. She would like that. Meanwhile, he decided, he would go someplace for a beer, maybe try one of those fancy new bars in the renovated old warehouses behind the Eagle Hotel he had heard about, where there were supposed to be lots of single men and women hanging out, swingers or yuppies or whatever the hell they call them these days. He would not mind a look at that. Then he would try to call Jill again.

He parked on North Main Street in front of the hotel and, passing under phony gas lanterns, strolled through the bricked-over alley to The Stone Warehouse in back, walked in without hesitation or a preliminary look around the place—as if, though not exactly a regular, he came here frequently—and, using tunnel vision, zeroed in on the bar. He ordered a draft from a tall good-looking youth with slicked-back hair and then turned, glass in hand, and slowly perused the place.

The room was large, with mostly empty booths and rough tables covered with red-and-white-checked tablecloths. Large potted ferns, ornate brass coatracks and spittoons cluttered the aisles, and on the walls old-fashioned farm tools had been hung, scythes and sickles, hay rakes, even horse collars, and elaborately framed pictures of New England couples dead a hundred years, dour and disapproving. Who would have thought junk like that could look good? But it did.

The place smelled of raw wood, beer and roasted peanuts, a downright pleasant smell, he thought. Not like Toby's Inn. Wade looked down the bar, where a pair of young large-bellied men were watching the Celtics on TV and munching peanuts, and then he noticed that the floor by the bar was covered with peanut shells. A waitress approached the bar, and the shells crackled under her feet like insects.

Next to him on his right, three young women were seated and talking intently, smoking cigarettes with a kind of fury and every few seconds sipping in unison at their large beige drinks. Wade studied them, slyly, he thought, and tried to overhear their conversation, which he soon discovered concerned a man whom one or all three of them worked for. They were in their early thirties, he guessed. Two of the women wore jeans and plaid flannel shirts and cowboy boots; the third also wore jeans, but with tennis shoes and a washed-out yellow tee shirt with
GANJA UNIVERSITY
printed across the front. When Wade saw that she was not wearing a bra, he tried not to look at her anymore. She was a long-haired blond; the other two were brunettes and had short hair. Wade thought that maybe those two were sisters.

He ordered another beer. The Celtics were leading the Detroit Pistons by twelve at the half. Maybe he ought to try calling Jill again. He pulled his coat off and hung it on the brass rack behind him and went looking for a pay phone, which he found at the bottom of the stairs leading to the rest rooms.

Again, he let the phone ring a dozen times, in case she was just coming in the front door, he thought, and then realized he had visualized not Jill but Lillian, visualized her unlocking the front door, her arms wrapped around grocery bags, key in hand, the phone ringing. He hung up and came back to the bar.

He cast a glance at the breasts of the young woman in the yellow tee shirt, then asked the bartender for a basket of pea
nuts and started to concentrate on cracking them open and popping the nuts into his mouth. The women, he realized, were talking about the size of a man's penis. He listened closely: there was no doubt about it: three attractive young women were laughing about some man's small penis! He did not dare look over; he just bore down on the shells, splitting them open between his thumbs and sweeping them onto the floor, faster and faster, as if he were ravenous.

Two of the women, the blond and one of the brunettes, had slept with the man, whoever he was, and they were regaling the third woman by comparing his organ to a thumb, a mouse, a clothespin—a peanut, for God's sake! “I mean, you could've knocked me over with a feather when I got a look at it!” the blond said. Wade pushed the basket of peanuts away and ordered another beer.

“He's sort of amazing, though,” the brunette said. “I mean, he gets a whole lot of mileage out of that thing. Wouldn't you say?” she asked the blond.

“Oh, jeez, yes.” She laughed. “Miles and miles,” she added, and then she shrieked, “Except that you think you're never going to get there!” They all laughed loudly, and then one of the brunettes noticed Wade and hushed the others. Wade turned on his stool and tried to see what was happening with the Celtics.

“How's Bird doing?” he called down the bar.

One of the big-bellied pair at the end turned slowly and said, “Oh-for-seven, three fouls.”

Wade said, “Shit,” as if he cared, got up and took his beer to the end of the bar and sat down. “Whatsascore?”

Without turning around, the man said, “I dunno. Seventy-something-sixty-something. Celts by six or seven.”

“Aw
right!
” Wade said, and he checked into the game with the same intensity he had devoted to shelling the peanuts. He lit a cigarette and tried to concentrate on the game, but his tooth was starting in again, a low throb that threatened to build quickly, and he was feeling once again like a double exposure: everything the other people said and did was half a beat off the rhythm of everything he said and did, so that the others seemed almost to be members of a different species than he, as if their species had a slightly different metabolism than his and relied on a related but different means of communication than his, so that everyone else in the room seemed to be shar
ing everyday knowledge and secrets that he was biologically incapable of experiencing. Knowledge and secrets: everyone had them; and Wade Whitehouse had neither.

He looked into the mirror behind the bar and tried to watch himself, as if he were a stranger, look strangely back, and then he saw over his shoulder and behind, coming into the bar from outside, where it was snowing hard now, his ex-wife, Lillian! She brushed snow off her shoulder in that quick impatient way of hers, as if taking the snow personally. He kept her in view in the mirror, saw her ask something of the woman at the cash register and then disappear down the stairs toward the rest rooms.

She must have come in to pee, Wade thought. Maybe Jill was waiting outside in the car. He checked his watch: four-twenty: still plenty of time to take Jill out for pizza. Wade slid off his stool and walked to the cash register and started down the stairs after Lillian, when he saw the back of her long lavender coat and realized that she was using the phone. He halted several steps above her; he moved out of her line of sight and listened.

“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.