Affliction (38 page)

With the phone book in his lap, Wade flipped through the yellow pages and checked the Littleton listings for dentists: there were four, and he called one after the other in alphabetical order, asking, and then begging and finally shouting, for an appointment that afternoon. All four refused to see him. Two of them—I later learned, having called them myself—remembered hanging up in the middle of his rant, convinced that he was either crazy or dangerous or both.

Wade slammed down the phone, tossed the telephone book across the room, and when he stood up and turned around, he saw Margie standing by the door, watching him, mouth open, ashen-faced.

“What?” he said.

“What on earth is happening to you, Wade? Why are you acting this way?”

“What do you mean? It's my tooth! My fucking tooth! I can't even think anymore because of it!”

“Wade, I heard you talking. You got fired this morning, didn't you?”

“Look, that's just temporary, believe me. There's so much shit going to hit the fan in the next few days, my getting fired by LaRiviere and Chub Merritt won't matter a bit. Those sonsofbitches are going to be out of business and doing time before I'm through.” He paced around the room while he talked, and clamped his hand against his throbbing jaw, as if making sure that it was still attached to him. Behind Margie, Pop came into the kitchen from outside with a half-dozen chunks of wood in his arms and dumped them noisily into the woodbox. “There's a lot of stuff I haven't told you or told anyone yet, but by God, I'm going to blow this town wide open now,” Wade said. “Don't worry, I'll get another
job. I can find work doing lots of things around here. People are going to need me, anyhow. After this is over, and people see what's been going on behind their backs, they'll make me into a goddamned hero. You wait: when this blows, people will need me. Like the way Jill needs me, right? You'll see, I'll deliver. And I'll be the best goddamned father for her who ever lived. You need me. Even Pop, for Christ's sake, he needs me. So don't worry, I'll have a job, a good job, when this is over, and I'll take care of this house, fix it up, make it nice for all of us. And this town needs me too. They don't know it yet, but they do. The same as Jill and you and Pop. I'll be the town cop again, don't worry. Maybe now they think they can send me howling into a corner, like a kicked dog or some damned thing, some small irritating thing in the way, but by God, it'll be different soon.”

Slowly, as if being shoved back by the force of his words, Margie retreated from the room toward the kitchen, where she lifted her coat from the hook by the door and picked up her pocketbook, and while Wade paced and ranted on behind her, gesturing and explaining quite as if she were still standing at the living room door, she stepped outside.

She hurried down the steps and got into her car, started the motor and backed out to the road, thinking, The man's crazy. One's a drunk, and the other's crazy. What on earth am I doing here? She could leave, she thought: her furniture was still in her old place in town, and she had not yet written to her ex-husband's parents in Florida to tell them that she had moved out. But all her clothes, her linens and personal belongings, photographs, papers, were in Wade's house, which was how she thought of the house now. Somehow the place smelled like Wade and looked like him: once a fine piece of country workmanship, symmetrical, handsomely proportioned, attractively located, the house was now broken down, disheveled, barely functional.

Wade was turning into his father, she suddenly realized. Wade, sober, sounded and acted the way his father did drunk. And his father was being eased out of existence altogether. She could see what was happening. She did not intend to turn into Wade's mother. She would stay in the house one more night, she decided, and tomorrow, when Wade went down to Concord to see that lawyer of his, she would move out.

 

The pain was worse than it had ever been: it had turned scarlet, had painted half of the inside of his face, was smeared from the point of his chin to his temple and was eating its way in toward the center. Wade's vision was affected now, and he saw things in discontinuous flutters and flashes—Pop was in the kitchen shucking his jacket; the television set was turned on, the horizontal control out of whack, the picture flipping again and again; Pop was seated on the couch in front of the television; was in the kitchen; was adjusting the horizontal control. Noises were unnaturally loud, followed by strange bits of silence: the sound of Pop opening the kitchen cabinet, unscrewing the top of his bottle, pouring whiskey into a glass and drinking it down—Wade heard it all clearly and at high volume, as if Pop had a microphone attached to him; and then the television came on, loud at first, suddenly silent, loud again; and the sound of Pop dropping an armload of wood into the woodbox, like a rock slide, punctuated by a hollow silence.

Pop was watching wrestling, his hands clapped onto his knees as if to hold them still, while Wade chased the pain in his face around the room, from window to window to door, as if his face were a dog in a pen looking for a way out. Pop said something about a dish antenna, he wished he had one of those dish antennas, they should buy one of those dish antennas, how much did a dish antenna cost, did Wade know how much people paid for those dish antennas you see all over town these days?
Shut up!
Wade
shouted. Just shut the fuck up!
The television audience was screaming, as a huge nearly naked man wearing a mask picked up another man and tossed him to the mat and leapt onto him, and the crowd shrieked with joy. Then the picture flipped again, and Pop got out of his seat and adjusted the knob and said he wished he had one of those dish antennas and sat back down, while the man with the mask flew through the air with his feet out and slammed the other man in the back, sending him staggering across the ring against the ropes, and the audience went crazy, booing, screaming, clapping hands, some even standing on their seats and shaking their fists. Then silence, as Wade stood by the window and looked out across the snow-covered backyard to the half-collapsed barn. A crow—in sharp black profile, like a silhouette, perched on a rafter—turned its head slowly, as if it knew
it was being watched, until its beak was aimed at Wade like an accusing finger:
You!
Wade turned away, and the sound of the television bored into his head, the screams of the audience, the grunts and thuds of the wrestlers, the hearty voice of the announcer, strands of loud noise winding around one another and making a single shaft that drilled into his brain: Pop was out in the kitchen again; the television went silent; Wade heard the bottle being opened, the whiskey splashing into the glass, the sound of his father's mouth, lips, tongue, throat, as he swallowed.
Leave that fucking bottle out!
Wade shouted, and he strode into the kitchen, passed Pop coming the other way, grabbed the bottle from the counter and hurried outdoors.

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.

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 Massachu
setts 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 recognition 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.

 

“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.