Affliction (40 page)

She said to me, “I knew it was wrong, but it isn't like I was married to Jack or anything. And things had been pretty bad between him and me lately anyway, Jack and me, since that hunting accident he was involved with. I guess I was mad at him. And I liked Wade, you know, he was like an old friend, ever since I was a kid, and he had always been real sweet to me, and he seemed so sad and all. I really felt sorry for him. And it was like just this one time. I had never been what you'd call attracted to Wade, but this one night, it was different. And making me call him Jack like that, and him calling me Lillian, it was strange, like being real high, and it kind of took me over, you know?”

Wade undressed her in the darkness, and then he took off his own clothes and moved onto her, gently kissing her with his damaged mouth, drawing her warm breath into him, gulping it down. He lifted himself up on his arms, and she opened to him like a flower, and he entered her, easily, with excruciating slowness, until he was all the way in, and he felt huge to himself, as if he had gone all the way up into her chest and were touching Lillian's heart.

 

Down in front of the store, a burgundy pickup pulled off the road and parked next to Pop's truck. The road was empty and dark. The store windows reflected the flash of the headlights, while Jack sat in his truck and peered up through the windshield and saw that there were no lights on in Hettie's apartment. Shit, he thought, and he looked at his watch in the green glow of the dashboard.

Then, wondering what the hell Wade's father's truck was doing parked in front of the store by the gas pump, he got out and looked inside, thinking that maybe the old bastard had passed out and was lying on the seat. Gone. Strange. The sonofabitch's probably three sheets to the wind down at Toby's, wondering where the hell he left his truck, Jack thought.

He moved around to the front of his own truck, and pulled a small notepad and pencil from his shirt pocket, and, in the reflected splash from the headlights off the store windows, scribbled a note and tore it from the pad. He walked heavily up the stairs to the landing and stopped in front of Hettie's door. He studied the door for a second, and thought, What the
hell, maybe she came home already and fell asleep, and he turned the doorknob. The door swung open, and Jack stepped inside.

“Hettie?” he called into the darkness. “Hey, babes, you here?” Silence.

“By then, when Jack came,” Hettie explained to me, “we were just lying there in the darkness, you know? Not saying anything, just thinking, I guess, about what we'd done. This terrible thing we'd done, Wade and me. I was really scared when I heard Jack outside, and then, when he actually came into the apartment, I jumped, and I was so scared I almost screamed. But I didn't. Wade, he didn't even seem to react. I mean, like he just lay there the same way, without even his breathing changing, his hands behind his head, like he was going to lie there on his back naked in bed and let Jack walk right into the room. It was weird.

“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.

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 Thanksgiving 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 inten
tions 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 intelli
gent as hell, Wade thought, like a schoolteacher, filled with information and judgments and opinions that he could never have.