The Three-Day Affair (16 page)

He sometimes wandered in from the street when Joey left the door unlocked, which was why I never left it unlocked.

“Get out of here!” I yelled, not that he could hear me through the thick glass. After a quick explanation—“Homeless guy”—I left the control room and went into the recording room. “Out of here, right now!”

“Cute girl,” he said. “Who is she?”

By now Nolan and Jeffrey were on my heels.

“She’s nobody,” Nolan said.

Marie was looking at us with an expression of mild curiosity. He didn’t look like the kind of guy who’d save anybody. She
probably
assumed he was another one of my friends.

“She’s recording an album,” I said. “I mean it—out, or I’m
calling
the police.” I had him by the arm, and before Marie could change her mind and begin pounding on the locked door, I’d led him out of the studio and into the hallway.

As soon as I let go of him, he stopped walking. He had a moldy, boozy smell. “My friend,” he said, “those submarine sandwiches you were out buying today were probably delicious. I could use one of them subs myself, if you could spare a dollar …”

I didn’t like the idea of him watching me without my noticing. What else had he seen? Nolan got out his wallet, removed a twenty, and held it out. The man’s eyes got huge. “You’re going to leave right now and not come back. Isn’t that right?”

“My friend, everything you say is right.” He wasn’t taking his eyes off the bill.

When Nolan handed it to him, he held it up by its ends like a prize fish, then tucked it into the pocket of his flannel shirt.

“Now find some other street,” I told him. “Somewhere across town.” But why would he cross town, knowing he could get twenty dollars from us?

“As good as done,” he said. “God bless. You’re good men.”

“Sure we are,” I said. “Now go.”

He took his time walking down the hallway and out the door. I slammed the door behind him, and like a fool hanging a smoke detector on the charred embers of his burned-out house, I made certain it was locked.

Evan called from the airport, where he’d bought a ticket for
Newark
. The flight was scheduled to leave at 4
PM
Central Time. But weather in the Twin Cities had worsened. No spring blizzard, as some had predicted, but freezing rain and lots of it.

“So far no flights have been canceled,” he said, “but it’s coming down hard.” He promised to call again when he had an update.

More waiting. And now the minutes seemed to matter again as they began to pile up. I paced the control room. Four o’clock came and went, and the phone continued not to ring. Then came four thirty and five, and still no word.

We had to let Marie go. That fact had always quietly filled the studio like ambient noise. You could put it out of your mind, but only for a while. There would be no money paid in exchange for her silence. Not anymore. Undoubtedly, she would go to the police,
and it wouldn’t be long—hours? a day?—before we were arrested. And then we would confess. We had no alibi. Also, we were guilty.

We’d been arrogant, believing that any problem could be solved as long as you had intelligence and determination and a little time. We had all those things but couldn’t solve this one, and now time was up. I was beginning to feel ready. Whatever disgraces—prison? Divorce? A hungry media?—I was about to face were, for the first time, being overshadowed by a basic need to do the right thing.

And yet I strongly believed that the way we handled our
surrender
now would have far-reaching consequences down the road, the way that traveling a few degrees off course could mean, upon crossing an ocean, the difference between landing on your continent and missing it entirely. Although the beginning of this weekend had been out of control, the end of it was still unfolding and, I believed, still subject to our influence. Should we write up a confession? Go to the police ourselves? Have them come here? Evan would know. That was why it was so important for him to get here.

At 6:15 I called his cell again. “We’re waiting for the plane to get here from L.A.,” he said. “The good news is, flights are still coming in and out.”

“How’s it look outside?” I asked.

“Like hell. But I think they’re used to that here.”

By 7:00 we were all hungry. And I really wanted cigarettes. I remained spooked, however, from my run-in earlier and was afraid to go outside. So we all sat around waiting, looking at our watches and at one another and at the telephone that kept not ringing—until, finally, it rang.

There was a problem.

Evan was scheduled to change planes in Chicago, but because of his delay, by the time he’d get there he’d have missed the last
plane leaving for any of the New York airports. The only other option was a direct flight to Philadelphia, scheduled to leave
Minneapolis
at 11:30.

If everything went perfectly, he’d land at 3
AM
. We were located about two hours from Philadelphia. That would get him here shortly after 5
AM
. It would mean another night in the studio.

Another goddamn night. Another ludicrous phone call to Cynthia—
Everything’s great!
—followed by a thousand more years of waiting.

“Book it,” I said, and then asked Jeffrey to help me again with the sofa.

Marie retreated obediently to a corner of Room A so we could cram the sofa in for her. We went through the routine again:

“Swear on your grandmother’s life that you won’t try to escape when we open the door.”

“Aren’t we past all that by now?”

“No. Swear it.”

Hesitation. Then a shrug. “I swear on my nana’s life.”

We told her there would be no dinner tonight for any of us. Jeffrey removed the blanket from the bass drum again, spread it out on the floor, and lay down on top of it. Nolan took his spot by the television. I went to the control room and dimmed all the lights in the studio. I sat in my chair for a while and presided over my wrecked kingdom. In this artificial twilight, Marie’s
resemblance
to Sara increased. It was more than physical likeness—it was the posture, the way she carried herself. And this, I thought, was because of the violence, or the threat of it. It
produced
a sort of grace, whose purpose was to mask fear. We could tell Marie a thousand times she was in no danger, but she’d never fully believe it. And why should she? To her,
violence
was always imminent.

I hadn’t been witness to Sara’s violence—that’d all happened long before college—but we all felt the wake of it. Every now and then—not often, maybe once or twice a year—she’d say something horrible to Jeffrey. She’d find ways to dig at his insecurities by
praising
her ex-boyfriend’s athletic body. Telling him that some nights she craved a real man’s shoulders, and chest, and cock. When this happened, he would become severely depressed until, a day or two later, they would talk and cry together and, to outward
appearances
, become better again. She was testing him, evidently, waiting for him to do something brutal, because in her experience that was what men did. She crossed the line to see if he would, too.

I used to wonder about her past but hadn’t felt comfortable asking. And Jeffrey wasn’t the type to share somebody else’s
secrets
. Yet college, more than any other time in one’s life, puts a person in situations where the questions that can’t get asked get asked anyway. Sara and I were doing laundry one Sunday evening in the basement of our dormitory. This was early in our senior year. We’d both scored large single rooms, luck of the room
lottery
, and this night found us sitting at a rickety wooden table, sick of studying, and waiting for our things to dry. I mentioned that my mother had called me earlier in the evening and given me hell for forgetting my father’s birthday (“What? Not even a card?”), and Sara asked if my parents were happily married. “Sure, I guess so,” I said, and then felt funny because I knew that her family life had its problems. All she’d ever mentioned outright, though, was her hometown’s unforgettable name: Slaughter, Texas.

She must’ve felt like talking that night, though, because
suddenly
she was telling me about being raised by her single mother, how she’d never even known her father.

“And I’m not one of those people who’ll track him down
thinking
we have some magical connection,” she said. “Though I
imagine
he was exactly like every guy my mother ever dated.”

I asked her what she meant.

“This one guy she was with, back when I was fourteen …” She shook her head as if remembering, or maybe trying not to. “Leo. He owned a garage and always seemed greasy. I think my mom broke up his marriage. Anyway, he rented an apartment in town but stayed at our place a lot. Whenever he took a shower, his towel was always ‘accidentally’ slipping down. I used to lock my bedroom door, and I’d wake up in the middle of the night
sometimes
and swear I heard the doorknob rattling.”

“That’s incredibly creepy,” I said.

“Damn right it was.” A few other students were in the laundry room with us, at other tables, heads down in their books, but the sound of the machines kept our conversation private. “Then one night I came home from being out with friends, and my mom was walking around the kitchen in obvious pain, but she wouldn’t talk about it. She said Leo had been there, but that was all.”

“Pain where?” I asked.

“So that’s the thing. I noticed she wouldn’t sit down.
Then
I noticed Leo’s long leather belt draped over a kitchen chair. I
remember
the buckle had a Cowboys logo on it. Mom didn’t sit down all evening or the next day. When she was awake, she just stood around grimacing. She managed a bookstore at the time but couldn’t even go to work. She refused to talk to me about it, except to say that if Leo called, I was supposed to tell him she wasn’t home. And to this day I still don’t know if his beating her ass was something kinky or a straight-ahead whipping. But she stayed with him. That killed me. You know, my mom’s got three siblings. I don’t see them much—they’re scattered all over the country—but when we do I’m always amazed by how ordinary they are. Ordinary marriages, ordinary jobs …”

“Managing a bookstore sounds pretty ordinary,” I said.

“It was an adult bookstore.” She watched my face turn red and smiled. “All I know is, within the week Leo was back, showering in our bathroom, watching football on our TV.”

My own life had always lacked drama. My parents had gotten along. They’d protected me and sacrificed again and again for me. I wasn’t sure if this made them ordinary or extraordinary, though I knew it should’ve made me grateful. And it did, usually, though at the moment I felt sorry that I had nothing to share, nothing of my own to balance out her story with. All I had were questions.

“Is your mom still with him?”

“No. She finally dumped him. One night at dinner—this was during a pretty good spell, actually—he wiped his face with his napkin, like a real gentleman, and told Mom and me that he had this terrific idea. Something that the three of us could do together. He said it so matter-of-factly, he could’ve been talking about us all going to a Cowboys game. But he wasn’t.” One of the washing machines behind Sara began to shake violently as it entered the spin cycle. “Anyway, that’s what it took for my mother to get rid of Leo.”

I was twenty-one years old that year, old enough to know that even among friends full disclosures were rare. They always came when you least expected it—in line for burgers, or at the movies just as the lights dimmed, or waiting for your clothes to dry. And often you had just that one brief window, and you knew it wouldn’t stay open for long. So you’d better find out all you could.

“Did things change after that?” I asked. “With your mother?”

“No, she just took up with another troublemaker. Some
ex-army
guy, retired but still built like a truck.” Then she laughed. “My mom calls herself a passionate woman, and she claims her men are passionate, too. But she just uses that word to excuse people for their bad behavior. Her so-called passion leads her
from one loser to the next. She was a beautiful woman, though. Still is. Very alluring. One day she’ll be alone, that’s for sure. I feel bad for her. And I won’t let it happen to me. It almost did, you know.”

“The baseball player.”

She smiled. “He played backup second base for the county high school. He was always throwing the ball over the first
baseman
’s head. Beautiful eyes, though. The boy was beautiful, I’ll give him that. And not violent or mean. But a local guy.
Small-minded
. The sort of guy who thinks that the ultimate thing a woman would want is her name spelled correctly when it’s
tattooed
on his bicep. You’ve got to be crazy to build a future with a guy like that. When I told him I wanted to go to college and
become
a novelist, he literally laughed, and then when he saw I was pissed he said all he meant was that there was a perfectly good newspaper right in Slaughter that I could write for.” She shook her head. “Which was extra stupid because it wasn’t a ‘perfectly good newspaper.’ It was a shoddily written weekly devoted mainly to church activities.”

“You really need to stop bringing that guy up in front of
Jeffrey
,” I said. “It makes him crazy.”

She nodded. “I know. I hate when I do it, even when I’m doing it.”

“Well, maybe just don’t do it.”

In that regard, our conversation wasn’t just informative, it was practical. Because as far as I know, she never mentioned him to Jeffrey again.

“You know, I’ve never told anyone about Leo,” she said, several minutes later, once our shirts were dry and folded.

“Except for Jeffrey, you mean.”

“Nope.”

“Just me?”

She must have seen the confusion in my face, because she smiled. “It’s no big deal. I just sort of felt like talking, that’s all.” She shrugged. “Anyway, you’re a good listener.”