The Three-Day Affair (14 page)

He was turning his head in the mirror. “I can’t see it! Fuck, Will, I can’t see it. Tell me what’s going on.”

Blood was oozing from him, turning the floor beneath us crimson. I forced myself to look at the wound. Nothing but blood. “I can’t tell. You need to stop the bleeding.”

“I can’t without seeing. You need to do it.”

I didn’t want to touch him. What if the ear came off in my hand? But I did anyway. I gently pressed his ear to his head with one hand, and held the wad of paper towels to the wound with my other hand. In seconds the blood had soaked the towels.

“This isn’t going to work,” I said. “We have to get you to the hospital.”

“Try!” he said. “Please.” So I got more paper towels and tried again. He shivered. “It really hurts. Oh, man.”

“I know why you don’t want to go to a hospital,” I said, “but you don’t have a choice.”

He was breathing deeply, slowly, trying to regain control. He reached up and took my place holding the paper towel against his ear. “There’s always a choice.”

“You know what I mean,” I said. “This is a serious injury.”

“I fucking know that!” he cried.

I washed my hands under hot water, scrubbed them with soap. We stood there, Nolan pressing the paper towels to his head, me looking on to see if the blood flow was slowing. And gradually—after fifteen or twenty minutes—the paper towels I handed him weren’t immediately turning red.

“Why would he do this to me? Huh, Will? Why would he hit me like that?”

“He must’ve thought you were going to hurt her,” I said.

“Well, I wasn’t.” He sounded out of breath.

“Or maybe he’d reached his limit of being a kidnapper.” But what I really believed, though didn’t say, was,
It’s because he thinks you slept with his wife.

We stood there another minute, watching the paper towel fill with blood again. And then, as if reading my mind, he said, “I’ll bet it was revenge.”

I’d been tearing more paper towels out of the dispenser. I froze. “How do you figure?”

He looked at me strangely. “What do you mean? It’s simple: I hit him in the mouth yesterday, he hits me in the head today.”

“Oh. Yeah, I guess it could be that.” I handed him the paper towels.

After another fifteen minutes, during which time I tried to clean blood off the bathroom floor, Nolan pulled the ball of paper
towels
away from his head and I made myself take another look. He was still bleeding, though less so, and I could see now that the wound wasn’t as dire as I’d first thought. The ear wasn’t going to come off. Still, the cymbal had sliced deeply into the cartilage, and the angle between his ear and his head seemed to have shifted by a few degrees.

“You’ve got to get stitched up,” I said. “Otherwise it’s never going to stop bleeding.”

He nodded, and I thought I’d finally gotten through to him when he said, “How’s your sewing?”

The implication made me queasy. “No. Forget it. Not a chance.”

“Yes,” he said.

“No.” There was absolutely no way. My hands were already shaking just thinking about it. “Anyway, you’ll want a plastic
surgeon
. This is your face we’re talking about.”

“It sure is. So you’re going to have to be careful.” When I tried to protest again, he cut me off. “Listen. This is nonnegotiable. Forget the hospital. Got it? When I’m back in Missouri—if I’m ever back in Missouri—I’ll have my doctor tend to it. He’s a good man who won’t ask questions. Until then, I’m in your hands.”

Last night this stretch of town would’ve been deserted. The only people who came out at night here were either looking for trouble or already in it. But now it was a bright Saturday morning, and plenty of people were on the sidewalk feeding meters and pushing strollers and holding kids’ hands. My window was cracked open, and I smelled fresh bread. The sign hanging over the bank said it was fifty-two degrees. It would have been a perfect morning on the golf course.

I headed back into the outside world to get Nolan the supplies he needed. I was driving too fast, but for the first time since Friday night the kidnapping had been relegated to some less critical place in my mind. Right now I had an urgent task to do. Doing it was almost a relief. Almost. At the pharmacy, just a mile or so from the studio, I rushed from aisle to aisle, not knowing exactly what was required. Everything I knew about first aid centered around what to do until the professionals took over. What, though, if the patient refused the professionals?

I found gauze and Band-Aids and first-aid tape. Several kinds of pain reliever. I grabbed a bottle of Pepto-Bismol for my own stomach. Could you buy surgical thread at a pharmacy? Maybe
not. But then, in the next aisle, I came across a small sewing kit. A needle was a needle, I figured. Thread was thread. I looked at it and looked at it, then walked away, then returned. Could I
actually
sew thread through someone’s flesh? I’d never even sewn on a button before. I imagined Nolan, liquored up from my whiskey, gritting his teeth as I pushed the needle through his ear with all the skill of an ape.

Disinfectant cream. I’d almost forgotten. My decision
postponed
, I returned to the first-aid aisle, and that was when I saw, on the bottom shelf, the First Aid & Survival Kit. Professional Series, it said. Eighty-nine dollars. I bent down, set everything I was
carrying
on the rack, and read the list of contents: dressings, tapes, ointments, medications, antiseptics … the list went on and on. There seemed to be an entire hospital inside.

And then from behind me: “Good morning, dickless!”

I turned around. Bobby Hazen was standing in the aisle
wearing
a Night Ranger concert T-shirt and black parachute pants. His hair was sticking up and he was holding a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, with which he saluted me.

I gave him a noncommittal “What’s up?” and continued
evaluating
the first-aid kit.

I knew Bobby from back when we both lived in the Village. He was one of those guys who’d spent his teenage years cocooned in his bedroom with his acne and his Fender Telecaster and emerged like some soft-spoken guitar god that everyone wanted in their band.

The coincidence of running into Bobby wasn’t so great.
Despite
his frequent New York gigs, he’d moved to Jersey a couple of years ago, to his brother’s place not far from here, to save on rent.

“Lycanthrope,” he said. “Tell me that’s not the shit.” I hadn’t seen him in probably a month or more, but our conversation
about naming his new band continued as if there’d been no
interruption
. “Seriously,” he said, “what do you think?”

This was no time to engage him in conversation, but I didn’t want him to think I was acting strangely. So I told Bobby that
Lycanthrope
was about the worst name I’d ever heard, which was saying a lot considering what I’d heard.

He gave me the finger, yawned, scratched his stomach
underneath
his T-shirt, and told me about his gig at Blackbirds this
coming
Thursday. Blackbirds was a small club in the East Village whose dubious claim to fame was that the Spin Doctors had
gotten
their start there fifteen years earlier.

“We’ve been working a cellist into a few tunes,” he said. “She went to Juilliard for a year.”

“Why only a year?”

“You’re missing the point. The point is, she’s killer. And really hot.” He sipped his coffee. “
Really
hot.”

Bobby was my last remaining link to a life I once led, and
seeing
him always aroused my pity and envy.

“I’ll try to be there,” I said, and looked at my watch. “Look, I gotta run.”

He grinned. “You’ll be there, huh? You’re such a fucking liar.” He slapped my back and went in search of whatever it was he’d come in for.

“I’m not lying!” I called after him. I meant it, too, or at least I wanted to mean it. But seconds later I was carrying the First Aid & Survival Kit up to the checkout counter, and my thoughts
returned
to injured ears and stolen people.

The clerk ran the kit through the scanner. “I’ll bet you’re a speedboater,” he said, “am I right?”

“No,” I said.

“Rock climber?”

I shook my head. “Sorry.” I ran my credit card through the machine.

He handed me my receipt and I signed it.

“Well, whatever it is,” he said, “you be careful.”

I didn’t know Evan’s cell phone number from memory. It had been stored in my own cell, now smashed to bits. If his home number wasn’t listed, then I would have to drive back to the house to get it out of my address book. With Nolan’s injury there wasn’t time for that. I parked my car at the gas station, exchanged some singles for quarters, and dialed directory assistance. The operator asked me to repeat the last name three times, and then to spell it. Finally I was given the number.

I got his answering machine. There was no choice but to leave a message, simple and unambiguous:
Call me at the studio. It’s urgent. We need you here
. I left the studio’s phone number on the machine.

And then, as an afterthought:
Be sure you erase this message.

Not until I’d parked behind the studio again, and my stomach cramped up so hard that I saw floating flecks before my eyes, did it occur to me that I’d forgotten to take the Pepto-Bismol up to the register.

I sat there with the engine running, hugging my gut and
waiting
for the pain to pass.

How was it, I wondered, that I’d crossed over to a world that gave weight to the rules of revenge? We were merely four friends who met up each year for golf. For some good meals and beer and cards. For joking around and reminiscing.

What could be simpler?

In all the years we’d spent together, I hadn’t once considered whether Jeffrey might still harbor some deep grudge. And why would he? He’d married Sara. He’d gotten the girl. He’d won.

So why, then, the violence? Why the attack? Did he really
believe
he’d been protecting Marie from Nolan? Or was it
something
else? And did he himself even know? This was, after all, the same man who’d kidnapped Marie fewer than twenty-four hours earlier. All I could come up with was that his recent problems with Sara must have dug up emotions that’d been buried ever since that one fraught night nine years earlier.

It almost hadn’t been a problem, either. We’d just about
graduated
. Only a couple more days. We’d already stripped our dorm room walls of posters and prints and bulletin boards, stuffed dirty
clothes into suitcases, stacked textbooks and notebooks and a year of assignments into cardboard boxes. Sara had even begun to tape shut some of the boxes in her room. She just hadn’t gotten around to taping all of them.

That close.

The weekend before graduation, Princeton University
transformed
itself into a many-ringed circus. Everyone other than
seniors
had already left for the summer, their now-vacant dorm rooms rented out to thousands of alumni who returned to campus for the school’s annual reunion. In all the major courtyards across campus, enormous tents had been erected, under which, for three days, alumni and their families would be treated to gluttonous meals, live music, dancing, and unlimited alcohol, all in the service of maintaining strong ties between the university and its alumni—and, some would readily admit, encouraging alumni donations.

It really was some party, though. The rumor was that it was second only to the Indianapolis 500 in terms of kegs of beer
consumed
. Three days of parties, of games for the kids, guest
lecturers
for the scholarly minded, service projects for the service project–minded, three days of reuniting with lost friends, lost loves, three days of social (and, it would be fair to say, sexual)
intercourse
, and all of it culminating in a parade—called, naturally, P-rade—where Princetonians wore their orange-and-black garb (each reunion class having come up with its own themed
clothing
, strangely a source of little embarrassment to
accompanying
spouses) and marched through campus just as previous
generations
had marched before them. Leading the P-rade was the
oldest
living alumnus, riding beside the university president in an orange and black golf cart. Bringing up the rear an hour or so later were eleven hundred inebriated, raucous graduating seniors staggering their way toward the end of college and the beginning of the rest of their lives.

Alumni and their families traveled far and wide to be here. Watching them, we couldn’t help imagining ourselves in five or ten or twenty years, returning with our own spouses, many of whom we hadn’t yet met, with our children whose births were still years away. We wondered what our future selves might be like, and what we’d think of them. And we wondered what that older self might have in the way of advice or wisdom for a
twenty-one
-year-old just now on the threshold of leaving the security of this privileged place.

Quickly, though, we stopped wondering and started partying. Final exams were done, senior theses turned in, and so we drank. And then we drank some more. Thursday, Friday, then the P-rade on Saturday. By Sunday we were wiped out. The alumni were
leaving
. By dinner they were gone, all twenty thousand of them. The circus had left town, and now only the tents remained. Late Sunday night, against official university policy and at the risk of getting
injured
or, worse, busted by campus police so close to graduation, several of us planned to adhere to another Princeton tradition.

We would go tent sliding.

The idea was to boost one another up onto one of the tents, crawl up to its apex, and slide down again on the steep mountain of thick canvas, ideally stopping before reaching the edge and the ensuing eight-foot drop to the grass below.

I’d never done this before. But a group had planned to meet up at midnight and head over to the fifth-reunion tent, the largest on campus. It had started to drizzle earlier, the
first
time in days, and we hoped the water would add an element of speed to the descent.

At nine thirty, Sara phoned my room and asked if I’d seen
Jeffrey
. I told her not since dinner.

“That’s weird,” she said. “He was hanging out in my room, but when I came back from taking a shower he was gone.”

She didn’t sound overly concerned, though. They were the rare couple, I’d noticed, that hadn’t become strained as
graduation
neared. It seemed that graduation was rarely a time of unity. More often it caused outright breakups or, for the warmer of heart, vague promises of long-distance relationships. We were an ambitious bunch, eleven hundred Jack-in-the-boxes full of
potential
energy, just waiting to be sprung upon the world. This was no time for diversions, no time for compromise. All we had to do was to follow the path that our education had cleared for us. Even a good campus romance, even love, had little force to deflect the pull of an acceptance to a top medical school or a plum job at a New York consulting firm.

Jeffrey and Sara were an exception. On Tuesday they would be shipping all their belongings, except for a suitcase or two, to their respective parents’ homes, and then casting off together in
Jeffrey
’s boat of a car, his 1982 Ford Taurus station wagon with 150,000+ miles, bound for San Francisco. There he would
program
computers—though he really didn’t know very much about programming computers—for a company so new and
underfunded
that the CEO, a twenty-six-year-old UCLA dropout,
carried
his coffeemaker from home to work every day so the company wouldn’t have to spend twenty dollars on another one. (Jeffrey had told me this detail, one of many that he found charming rather than alarming, upon his return from interviewing there. He interviewed at several other companies, too, but had liked this one best.
They think big
, he’d explained.) Sara wanted to spend the next year or two working on a novel. Once she and Jeffrey settled somewhere, she’d take part-time work—as a barista or maybe a bartender—for extra money.

That was their plan. Compared to the plans of many of our peers, it seemed like a recipe for starvation. But they’d be starving together.

I had started seeing a political science major named Wendy just a few weeks earlier, and unlike Jeffrey and Sara, we would be starving separately. Or rather, I would be starving alone. She’d made it clear on our first date that she wasn’t going to get
involved
in anything complicated right now, not with Michigan law only three months away. When I told her that I was heading for New York after graduation to play the drums, and that a
long-distance
relationship probably wasn’t in the cards, she seemed pleased, and our springtime romance was on.

I’d spent much of the day with Wendy, and now she was
having
some sort of last-hurrah dinner with her suite mates and would catch up with us at midnight by the fifth-reunion tent. At eleven o’clock I was in my room, just sitting with the bay window open, looking out into the dark courtyard and killing time before we all met up in an hour. There was a pounding on my door. I got up and opened it.

Jeffrey stood in the doorway looking wet from the rain,
bloodshot
eyes, hair a mess. Definitely drunk. He came in and sat down on the floor. The night was warm and humid, but he was shivering.

I asked him what was wrong.

“Can I borrow a T-shirt?” he asked. “This one got wet.”

All my things were in boxes. I dug around until I found a T-shirt and tossed it to him. He pulled off the wet one and put on mine.

“Thanks.”

He was breathing heavily, and when he looked up at me, it wasn’t the rain making his eyes wet.

“Jeffrey, what is it?”

Outside, the most determined of us were still in full party mode, despite the hangovers and the rain. A drunk student was announcing to the whole courtyard how fucking drunk he was, and in response a second guy yelled at him from inside one of the
dorms to shut the fuck up, and in response to
that
the first guy reminded the second guy that it was a free country, and then his belch echoed across the quad.

“It’s Sara,” Jeffrey said.

“What? What about her?” The way he looked, my first thought was that she’d just broken up with him.

“I can’t believe it.”

“Tell me,” I said.

“She cheated on me.”

At that precise moment, another partyer outside began
singing
a loud, off-key version of the “Love Boat” theme.
Love, exciting and new
…

“What are you talking about?” I said. “How do you know?”

Come aboard, we’re expecting you
…

“I … that guy really needs to shut up.” Jeffrey got up and slammed my window closed. He sat down again. “I need a
cigarette
,” he said. “I really need one and I’m completely out.”

“All right,” I said, except that I didn’t have any. I left him in my room and banged on a couple of doors, returning a minute later with the last of a pack, borrowed from a guy at the end of the hallway I’d been trying to avoid all semester, an aerospace
engineer
named Gilbert who apparently played the bass and was
always
asking me to “rock out” with him.

Jeffrey struggled to breathe normally—he was still crying a little—and lit his cigarette. Took a long drag. Then he told me what’d happened. How the information had come out in the worst possible way. In one of Sara’s short stories.

She’d been taking the advanced fiction writing class that
semester
with Tanya Mahoney. Since freshman year she’d been
trying
to get into that class.

“She said she didn’t want me reading her work this semester, that she was ‘getting close.’ To a breakthrough or whatever. I
wasn’t suspicious,” he said, “only curious. I mean, for four years I’d read every word she ever wrote.”

They were the ideal couple that way. Sara loved to write, and
Jeffrey
loved to read. She wouldn’t show her work to anybody besides him, but he was always bragging about her talent, saying it was only a matter of time before she began to publish her stories.

After dinner that night, he’d been alone in her dorm room while she went to take a shower. While she was out of the room, he’d noticed in one of the open boxes a pile of her stories.

“What do you mean, you ‘noticed’ a pile of stories?”

“Okay, I dug a little. I was curious. I hadn’t read anything of hers for months.” He pulled a bundle from the back pocket of his jeans. “Maybe I was a little suspicious. It’s possible. I don’t know. Anyway, here. Read it.”

“You stole her story?”

“Yeah, I took it and left. I couldn’t stand to be there when she came back. Go on—read it.”

I unfolded the pages he’d given me. Sara was always telling us that her stories went long—twenty, thirty pages. This one was short, though, just eight pages. It was dated from the middle of the semester and titled “The Three-Day Affair.”

I turned the page and kept reading. The boyfriend has taken a trip to California to interview for jobs as a computer
programmer
. He is made out to be a decent person but a bore and an
unsatisfying
lover. The man with whom she has the affair is handsome and ambitious and bound for success in Washington, DC. He has always pined for her, and she for him, but neither one ever acted on their desires until now. He wants the story’s narrator to break up with her boyfriend and come with him to DC.