The Three-Day Affair (3 page)

“Wait here,” he said. “I’ll be back in a minute.” He went into the Milk-n-Bread.

Nolan clicked the radio on and immediately started fiddling with the dial. “He shouldn’t have given you such a hard time back at the restaurant,” he said, settling on a Van Morrison song.

“It’s his money. He can decide what to do with it.”

“Bullshit. He’s just being negative. I love him, Will, you know that. But he can be such a downer sometimes.”

Maybe so, but Nolan’s observation was based on incomplete information. He didn’t know about Jeffrey’s marital problems, and it wasn’t my place to tell him. And so with Jeffrey inside the Milk-n-Bread changing all of our lives forever, Nolan and I sat in the car quietly and listened to the radio, while the drizzle turned to the kind of soupy rain that was good for vegetable gardens but bad for golf. The forecast was turning out to be wrong, and I hoped that our round tomorrow wouldn’t get rained out.

A white-haired woman left the store using a magazine for an umbrella. She hurried to her car and drove away.

The song ended. Another began. Daylight savings wasn’t for another week, and now that the sun had set night was coming on quickly.

When the next song ended, Nolan unbuckled his seat belt. “Oh, hell,” he said, “I’ll go and see what—”

Just then the door to the store swung open and Jeffrey came outside. But not alone. He was holding on to the arm of a young woman who was wearing the tan pants and red shirt of a Milk-
n-Bread
employee. They hurried toward us as if she were a young movie star and he her bodyguard, helping her quickly past the paparazzi.

Jeffrey opened the back door and half guided, half pushed her into the car. He climbed in beside her and yanked the door shut. And before I could ask a single thing, he shouted: “Drive!”

That one word, and my mouth went completely dry. All I could imagine was that the cashier had been injured. Another young woman was going to die, and I was about to watch it
happen
. It felt, suddenly, preordained, as if my life these past three years had been nothing but limbo, a long wait for this exact moment.

“Hurry up, Will! Go!”

“What’s wrong with her?” I managed to ask. “What is it?”

“Just fucking drive!”

What do you do when your longtime friend tells you to drive? You drive. So I did. I fucking drove, stamping on the gas, gunning the car out of the parking lot, and hanging a right onto Lincoln Avenue.

My heart raced, but unlike Jeffrey I wasn’t panicking: I knew exactly where I was going. Ever since Gwen’s death, it’d become a compulsion of mine always to know how to get to the nearest hospital. My house was 5.8 miles from Mountainside. The
recording
studio was 3.5 miles from Valley Regional. Wherever I was, whatever I was doing, some part of my mind was always quietly mapping routes.

We needed to go six miles—fortunately to the east, where the lane was all clear. I sped up and checked the rearview mirror. The young cashier looked left and right, eyes wide. She was either breathing quickly or shivering. It was dark in the car. Was she bleeding?

“What happened to her?” I asked.

No response.

“Jeffrey!”

“Just keep driving.” His voice quavered.

“I can have us at Mountainside Hospital in ten minutes,” I said.

“Hospital?” Jeffrey said. “Why there?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Forget it. Go somewhere else.”

Now I was utterly confused. “Go
where?
”

We were at least a mile down the road, leaving Newfield now, passing storefronts and a supermarket and a car dealership.
Another
driver might have sized up the situation differently, maybe more accurately, but all we had was me behind the wheel. Only me, with my particular history and my refusal ever again to wait around impotently for an ambulance to arrive. It simply hadn’t
occurred to me, yet, that this could be anything other than a
second
chance for me to save a young woman’s life.

The oncoming lane was at a standstill, but we were flying. I sped through the next intersection toward Mountainside Hospital and waited for answers as the road widened to four lanes.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Nolan said, his voice louder than
before
. “Will somebody explain what the fuck’s going on? Honey, take a deep breath and tell me what’s the matter.”

“Really?” The girl looked at me, then Nolan. Maybe she saw the bafflement in our faces. “He just—” She took a deep breath, and another. Jeffrey was looking down at his lap. “He just—” But then she began to hyperventilate and couldn’t get out another word.

Once i began to understand the key facts—there were no grave injuries; this was no mad dash to the hospital after all—my first feeling, however fleeting, was relief. I was at the wheel of my trusty Cutlass Ciera with my old friends and, yes, this young
cashier
, but the radio was on and I was driving the well-worn roads of my daily life. These were facts I could cling to. Whatever the girl thought might have happened, she must be mistaken. This was Jeffrey. All hundred and forty pounds of him. He was not a threat. A little moody? Sure. But not a mean bone.

When he finally spoke, only a few more seconds had gone by, but we’d traveled another full block. “I didn’t mean to take her.”

Take her
. Those two words, despite all the immediate evidence, hit me like a knockout punch.

The girl lurched for the door—foolish, since we were going more than forty miles an hour. “Hey, be careful,” Jeffrey said, grabbing at her hands. “You’ll hurt yourself.”

“Don’t touch me!” She yanked her hands away.

“Take it easy,” Nolan said. “Nobody’s going to hurt you.”

“You
kidnapped
me!” Her eyes were wild. I couldn’t stop
looking
into the rearview mirror. A car blared its horn at me for
drifting
into the oncoming lane.

“Jeffrey,” Nolan said, “what in God’s name—”

“I had to take her,” Jeffrey said. “I swear—now wait a minute. Just listen to me for a second. Just listen. The thing is, I’m flat broke.”

This was either a brazen lie or an astonishing revelation. Either way, I couldn’t have cared less.

“What’s your point?” Nolan asked.

“My point?” Jeffrey sounded offended. “Didn’t you hear me? I lost it all! You can’t imagine—”

“The girl,” Nolan said. “Connect this to
her
.”

“Connect?”

“Why is she in our fucking car?”

“She would’ve called the police,” Jeffrey said, as if this made perfect—or any—sense.

“What am I missing?” Nolan asked.

Jeffrey sighed. “I sort of robbed the place.”

“No, you didn’t.” Nolan shook his head. “Tell me you fucking didn’t. Holy Jesus Christ.”

I tried to imagine Jeffrey committing a crime. What had he said? Did he have a weapon? But the details would have to wait. What mattered right now was the girl in the backseat. Through the rearview I could see that she had a small nose, freckles, thin lips. I might have seen her before, working at the Milk-n-Bread. I’d probably flirted with her a little at the register, just to convince myself that I was still young enough to flirt with someone her age, even though I knew I wasn’t.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

She met my eyes through the rearview. “Are you insane? I’m not telling you anything.”

“Well, I’m going to take you back to the store now.”

“Don’t you dare turn this car around.” Nolan’s voice was
almost
calm, as if he’d made a decision and already come to terms with it.

“Nolan.”

“Think about it. Robbery, kidnapping … it doesn’t matter how
long
we kept her. No one will care about that.”

I shook my head. “You’re only saying that because of the
election
.” It was easy to imagine the headlines. The scandal. Even if we let her go and Jeffrey were somehow able to take the heat alone, Nolan was still ruined. That much seemed obvious. “You’re afraid of bad press. That’s why you’re thinking—”

“Bad press? You don’t get it—if you stop this car, the three of us are going to prison. Trust me on that.”

Jeffrey groaned. “I think I’m going to be sick.” The girl scooted farther away from him.

I could better comprehend vomiting than kidnapping. Cynthia and I had just finished paying off the car. And the prospect of
Jeffrey
getting sick in it was what finally made this unreal moment all too real, leaving me with a new set of facts.

We had been driving for almost five minutes.

We were already several miles away from the Milk-n-Bread.

We had not yet returned the girl.

The radio played on. Rain smacked the windshield. My hands were sweating on the steering wheel as the tang of panic rose higher in my throat.

“We have to take her back,” I said, “or go to the police
ourselves
to explain.” But I was already in the next town and had no idea where the police station might be. Mapping police stations had never been my compulsion.

“Wrong,” Nolan said. “We need to go someplace—Will, shut the goddamn radio off.”

I shut it off.

“We need to go someplace,” he repeated, “where we can talk this thing through. Work out a solution.”

“We’ve only gone a few miles,” I said.

“Wake up, man! Look at what’s just happened. Three men in their thirties just took a teenager against her will and
drove away with her
. Do you think the police will care how far we went?”

“I thought she was injured! I was heading to the hospital.”

“Liar!” screamed the girl, who’d clearly had enough. “You all planned this—I mean, you’re driving a
getaway
car!” She glared at me again through the rearview.

“See?” Nolan said. “Nobody’s going to give a shit what we say.” His voice lowered, sounding grave. “Get this through your head, Will: Jeffrey robbed that fucking store, and
she’s
right. You’re
driving
the getaway car. It happened. It’s happening. The minute we let her go, she’s running to the police.” He looked over at her. “And don’t even pretend you aren’t.”

“Damn right I am.”

Nolan shook his head. “Will, buddy, I know you don’t know what to do, so I’m telling you. Drive someplace safe where we can think for a few minutes and figure this out. You need to trust me. That’s what you need to do right now.”

I wanted to argue with him, but there was no time to think. That was the maddening part. I looked at the clock: 7:22—now seven minutes had passed. Everything was happening too fast. Buildings and streetlamps were flying past us, and every second that I didn’t make a decision, a decision was being made for us, because we were getting farther and farther away from the Milk-n-Bread with no easy way back. The traffic in the fucking westbound lane was at a standstill. I’d been caught in Friday rush before. If I turned the car around right now, it would be forty minutes, easy, before we were back at the store. And with the rain? More like an hour.

I couldn’t bear the thought of her being in my car that long, and I was searching desperately for something to say or do when Nolan added, “Mark my word. If you stop this car, you’re going to miss out on a lot of your kid growing up.”

His words made my gut squeeze and my eyes lose focus. The streetlights along the road dimmed for a moment, and I was afraid I might pass out. I’d always believed in Nolan, trusted his instincts. For as long as I’d known him, he was the guy who wanted—and deserved—the ball with ten seconds left. I gripped the wheel tighter and my vision returned. The car was still
slowing
down—my foot had been off the gas for the last quarter mile—but it didn’t seem to matter. Nolan was already on to other things.

“This’ll work out just fine for you,” he was saying to the girl now, his voice less dire. “So don’t sweat it for a second. We’ll have you home in no time. You have my word. This’ll be just fine.”

It turned out that those words, directed toward the backseat, were what I most needed to hear. Jeffrey had lost his head, but now we’d set things right. Nobody was injured—thank God for that—and nobody had meant anyone any harm; therefore, I told myself, everything could be fixed. All we needed, as Nolan said, was a little time to work out a solution.

Trust Nolan
, I kept telling myself—a simple, comforting
mantra
.
Nolan will know what to do
. I gently placed my foot back on the gas. We passed the army/navy store and the Lincoln Diner.

“He’s right,” I said to her, forcing myself to sound calm and reassuring. “Don’t you worry about a thing.”

“
You’re
the one who should worry,” she said.

She was a young, frightened girl trying to sound tough, but I didn’t doubt her willingness to make our lives immeasurably harder. She’d never allow us to walk away from this. Not unless we convinced her.

“We should go to your house,” Jeffrey said to me. “The house is empty, right? So that’s where we need to go.”

“With all that traffic?” Nolan said. “We’d never get there.”

“So we drive around awhile first until the traffic lightens.”

“No,” I said. “I know where I’m going.” Home was out of the question. And to get to the hospital, I’d have had to turn off this road a mile back. Then I realized that for the last minute or so, I’d already been heading away from the hospital and toward the
safest
place I knew.

T
HE DAY CYNTHIA AND
I moved into our house in Newfield was one of muted celebration. The stillness of our house unnerved me. I slept fitfully that night and awoke in the morning with heavy limbs and a need to stay in bed all day. And the next day. And the next. I passed the hours not reading, not watching television, sleeping the occasional hour in the afternoon and then lying awake all night.

Even the fear I’d felt in our SoHo apartment, following the shooting, began to seem preferable to this nothingness, endless hours marked by the movement of shadows on the bedroom wall, punctuated by birds or kids outside flaunting their
cheerfulness
. Yet I felt unable to do anything to relieve this private, ugly grief that I couldn’t explain to Cynthia. The truth was that I had fallen, a little, for Gwen. She and I had been partners, drums and bass, night after night making music and sweating together under the same hot lights. After she died, my feelings of genuine sadness were undercut—polluted—by the selfish wish that Gwen were still alive just so I could prove my faithfulness to my wife.

Mostly, I wanted to lie in bed and not think about Gwen or the shooting. I didn’t want to think or feel anything, or even exist.

When Cynthia tried to talk to me, I answered in
monosyllables
. Or I didn’t answer at all.

Get up
, I’d think.
Say something. You’re hurting the woman you love.

When she suggested that I get professional help, it took every bit of energy I had just to refuse.

I’d hear Cynthia unpacking our things, stacking dishes in
cabinets
, and running loads of laundry. I would sleep during the day, and at night I would lie in bed awake while Cynthia slept.
Sometimes
I’d get up in the middle of the night and sit in the kitchen with the lights off, returning to bed with the first hint of daylight.

After three weeks, Cynthia got around to tough love.

“Will,” she said one morning, her hair wet from the shower. She sat on the bed and shook me to be sure I was awake. “Will, today you’re leaving the house. I’m going out to run errands. I’ll be gone an hour or two. When I come home, I don’t expect to see you here.”

When I got around to opening my eyes, I saw that she’d left on the bed the Help Wanted section from the newspaper and a county map. I wanted to remind her about my heavy limbs, but she was already gone.

I showered for the first time in too long, and on my way to the kitchen for juice I took a good look around. While I’d been
sleeping
, Cynthia had made the house ours. Our pictures on the walls. Our books in the shelves.

Rather than look at the help-wanted ads or the map, I got in the car and drove. Drove for hours, getting myself lost, and then more lost. Midafternoon, on my way back home, I found myself on the main street of some run-down, slightly urban area, and I remember feeling a strange comfort in having found a
neighborhood
reminiscent of the one I had just fled. Seeing a weathered sign for Snakepit Recording Studio, I pulled over to the curb. The building stood between an antique furniture store and a nail salon
that appeared to be out of business, its glass door cracked. The studio’s entrance was around back. The door was shut but
unlocked
, so I went in. The dark, musty hallway reeked of stale beer and cigarettes, and I felt thankful for the familiar, acrid smell. I didn’t hear any activity, though, and I was about to leave when a man’s voice called out from someplace deep inside the studio: “What do you want now, for fuck’s sake?”

My eyes slowly adjusted to the dim light as I went farther down the hallway, past a restroom, past the darkened recording room, to the control room. Sitting behind the sound console was a man of around sixty with a messy white beard and a pair of wet, resigned eyes that suggested he was world-weary, drunk, or a little of both.

“Sorry,” he said, “I thought you were that homeless guy. He wanders in here if the door doesn’t latch shut.”

“No,” I said, “I have a home.” The man was paging through a copy of
Hustler
. “This your studio?” I asked.

“Proud owner since eighty-six. Bought and mostly paid for.”

I introduced myself.

“Joey Pitts,” he said, and we shook hands. “So what can I do for you?”

“You don’t by any chance need an extra recording engineer, do you, Joey?”

He sized me up. “You have any studio experience?”

I told him the name of the New York studio where I worked and, briefly, why I left.

“Are you into any hard drugs?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“Are you a douchebag?”

I told him I wasn’t.

He nodded. “I could actually use a little help. I got a band
coming
in an hour. You want, you can stick around and assist. Like an audition.”

I called home and left a message telling Cynthia where I was. That I’d be home late.

“Okay,” Joey said, shutting the magazine and setting it on the console. “Have a seat. Let’s talk.”

At eleven that night, after the band left, Joey hired me on a trial basis. We negotiated a salary (that is, Joey proposed one; I agreed). We shook hands and left the studio together.

The street was quiet except for a streetlight buzzing at the end of the block. On the curb beneath it stood an old man in torn pants and a gray hooded sweatshirt, rocking from foot to foot. Seeing us, he started to come our way.

“And here we go,” Joey said. “You work here, you’ll be seeing a lot of this one.”

The man asked us for a dollar. “For protecting your car,” he said.

“Ignore him,” Joey said, “or he’ll be your friend for life.”

I couldn’t ignore him. My father spent his professional life helping just such people. He was licensed in clinical social work and directed Hudson County Coalition, an organization that oversaw local shelters and soup kitchens and, when there were funds, did some occupation training. Back in high school I
volunteered
there sometimes. My interest had more to do with helping out my father than the homeless, but ever since then I’d never been able to ignore a panhandler. At least I had that check mark on the merit side of God’s scorecard.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out two quarters. In the months and years that followed, I’d drop countless quarters into that same hopeful hand.

The man stuffed the change into the pocket of his sweatshirt, which was several sizes too large for his small frame.

“You seen my dog?” The man had the veiny nose of a longtime drinker and the fragile eyes of somebody who’d disappointed his share of well-meaning counselors.

I told him I hadn’t seen any dogs. “What kind is it?”

“Man, you know my dog.”

“Sorry, I don’t,” I said, concluding that the dog in question
probably
had never romped anyplace other than this man’s imagination.

“How about you?” he asked Joey. “You seen him?”

“I told you a hundred times already, I haven’t seen your dog. I see him, you’ll be the first to know.”

Through with us, the man went back to his spot beneath the streetlight and sat down on the curb. Joey and I kept walking. When we were out of earshot, Joey said, “I don’t care much for that guy, but I kinda liked his dog. Real well behaved. Last week I saw it on the side of the street, about a mile from here. Road pizza.” He shook his head. “Well, good night.”

I got in my car and turned on the radio but didn’t drive
anywhere
. Joey beeped his horn as he rode past. When he was out of sight, I got out of my car again and walked to the sub shop a half block down the road. Chairs were stacked in the window, and a lone employee wearing a sauce-splattered apron was sweeping the floor, but the neon sign overhead claimed open for business. I bought a cup of coffee and a footlong Italian sub. Extra tomatoes, no hot peppers, exactly the way I liked it. When I left the shop five minutes later, the neon sign was dark.

“I’ll keep an eye out for your dog,” I said, and handed the man his dinner.

When I began to work at the studio, the equipment—and the other engineers—were all in states of dysfunction. Joey knew I could help him. I was dependable and competent, and lacked the sort of ambition that would have me leaving him suddenly for a better studio and stealing his clients away.

Almost immediately, he began to give me more responsibility. Rather than work the sound console himself, he preferred to drop
by and shoot the bull with the bands. The studio was his own small kingdom where he could come and feel welcomed.
Otherwise
, he wasn’t too interested in the day-to-day business of the studio, and in six months I was in charge. I fired the incompetents and lobbied Joey to overhaul the main console, which he had bought used when he first opened the studio.

This became my life, working at a third-rate recording studio in the middle of New Jersey, spending the bulk of my days with musicians of questionable talent, and then coming home to our house in the burbs. Cynthia and I were living the middle-class dream, only we weren’t middle-class, and I needed to figure out if this bothered me. And if it didn’t, why not.

Yet I must not have been entirely without ambition, because after about a year at the studio I began to toy with the idea of starting up a small record company. At first I kept it to myself. I began to save a little, and convinced Joey to throw some money into fixing the studio’s worst atrocities.

When I finally told Cynthia about my idea, I remember being bothered by her instant enthusiasm. It was August, and we were sitting on the back porch having breakfast. The porch was my
favorite
part of the house. Our little yard felt private, its perimeter lined on the sides with burning bushes and in the rear with
forsythia
hedges that, come fall, would turn a brilliant yellow.

“It isn’t a terrific plan,” I told her. “It’s risky as all hell.”

“Maybe so,” she said, “but I love the idea of our working
together
on something. And anyway, you need this. I know you do.”

I hadn’t been any fun at all for quite some time. That was
putting
it mildly. Not that I walked around sulking. But I had accepted unhappiness as a small price to pay for a life filled with most of the things I wanted.

“There are other remedies for depression,” I said, “besides throwing our money into a risky business.”

“Such as?”

“I don’t know. Prozac? Therapy?”

Cynthia took my hand and began to rub it. And trying to sound nonchalant, she said, “Why not all three?”

A year and a half had passed since the shooting and our flight from the city. And now, rather than the heavy exhaustion
following
our move to Newfield, I felt tired of mourning. Tired of being tired. Tired of sadness. It was enough already.

And after a few more months, and with a little help from both Dr. Shelling, PhD, and Pfizer Inc., I felt myself finally coming out of something I hadn’t even known I was still so deeply in.

Cynthia and I began to laugh a little more, make love more often. We began to talk about the future: not only the record company, but us. Being together. Starting a family. We even started thinking of names.