Russell Banks - The Sweet Hereafter

I like to be the strong, silent man in charge, the boss, the point man, the lieutenant, the head of the household, et cetera, a preference that may come from my having been the oldest of five children, with a more or less incompetent mother and a father who took off for Alaska when I was twelve and was never heard from again. Looking back, it seems I spent most of my youth cleaning up my father’s mess and the rest of my life making sure that no one mistook me for him. He was an impractical man, not quite honest, a fellow of grand beginnings and no follow-through, one of those men who present their children and wives with dreams instead of skills, charm in place of discipline, and constant seduction for love and loyalty. When he took off to make a fortune in the oil fields, he left behind a huge hole in the yard that was going to be a swimming pool, a pile of cinder blocks that was going to be a restaurant, a hundred old casement windows that were going to be a greenhouse, a stack of IOUs written to half the people in town, and a promise to return by fall, which no one in town wanted him to keep.

Anyhow, when I began trying to seduce Risa Walker, I found myself behaving like my father, which embarrassed me and made me feel incompetent as well. I felt his phony smile on my face, heard his glib words coming from my mouth, and it made me cringe. I’d be pumping gas into her Wagoneer and mouthing lines like “Gee, Risa, you’re looking swell these days! Life must agree with you, or you must agree with life, or something like that anyhow….” I’d smile and smile and yammer on, playing a part. Then suddenly I’d switch roles. I’d have somehow become a member of the audience, and I’d hear myself yammering on, and it would be my father, and I’d see myself wink and grin and see my father, so I’d break off in the middle and freeze Risa out completely, leaving her somewhat confused, I’m sure. Other times I’d call her on the phone, and if Wendell answered, I’d gab about the Expos and the weather and local politics, like we were close buddies, which we were not; if Risa answered, I’d just ask for Wendell. Passing by the motel in my truck, if I happened to see her outside, I’d slow almost to a stop, wave like a long-lost friend, and when she made a move toward me, I’d speed up and take off, as if I were heading to a fire.

I have never been good with women, that is, skilled at the games that most men play — flirting, cajoling, soliciting their attention and favors — and until Risa, had never especially wanted to be. After all, I had always been able to count on Lydia. Who needed to flirt? Lydia and I in a sense spent our whole lives together: we were childhood friends and then high school sweethearts, and when I came back from Vietnam we discovered that we still loved each other, and so we got married. Technically, I was faithful to Lydia from beginning to end. There were a couple of occasions while we were married when, drunk or stoned or just inattentive, I slipped into what might be called compromising positions with a few local women, who shall remain nameless, but I got out before any damage was done and was even able to come home feeling virtuous. And there were a few sexual encounters with bar girls and prostitutes when I was in the service, Stateside and in Vietnam and once in Honolulu. Sowing wild oats, as they say. But in fact, for my age, I was unusually inexperienced in sexual matters.

The night Risa and I finally got together, it happened not because of anything I did but because Risa simply came up and put it to me at the bar at the Rendez-Vous, where I was sitting over a beer watching an NBA playoff on TV with three or four other men. She’d come through the door and stood there a minute as if looking for someone in particular. Then she walked straight to me, slipped her arm through mine and leaned in close and whispered in my ear, “Listen, Billy, when you’re through here, why don’t you come over and visit me? Room 11,” she added, and patted my forearm and departed. As simple as that.

I left at halftime. Los Angeles was beating the hell out of Utah, and I just said I was going home. It was a cold, clear spring night with a sky full of stars, and my breath puffed out in front of me in little clouds as I walked past my pickup in the parking lot, crossed the road, and practically jogged the hundred or so yards along the road to the motel and went straight to Room 11.

I don’t know how much in fact I had controlled or arranged it, how much I actually had seduced her with my awkward embarrassed onslaughts of alternating attention and withdrawal — probably a lot (sometimes you act a part and don’t realize that the role is of a man who doesn’t know how to act). But that night it appeared to me that Risa alone had made it possible for me to be, once again, not my father but myself, the strong, silent type of man I admired and had grown used to being, and I was deeply relieved and immensely grateful to her.

From then on, I guess you could say we were in love. At least we called it that. From start to finish, though, it was a secret affair. Risa has always assured me that no one knew we were in love; she insists that during the nearly three years we were involved she confided in no one. Consequently, she had her private version of the love affair, and I had mine, and there was no third version to correct them. None that I know of, anyhow.

As a result, until the morning of the accident, Risa Walker and I behaved toward each other as if we could go on like that forever — meeting and making love a couple of times a week in a darkened room late at night for an hour or two, and acting like mere acquaintances the rest of the time. Our love affair seemed to be permanently suspended halfway between fantasy and reality. Our sense of time and sequence was open-ended; it was like a movie with no beginning and no ending, and it remained that way because we did nothing to make our relationship public, to involve other people, a process that would have been started if Risa had ever confided in someone or if I had revealed it to someone. That would have objectified it somehow, taken it outside our heads, and no doubt would have led Risa to choose between me and Wendell, or would have led me to demand it. She would have chosen me, I believe that, and we would have married soon after. And then, by the time of the accident, when we lost our children, we would have had each other to turn to, instead of away from, which is what we did.

Out there on the Marlowe road that snowy morning, I remember at last climbing back up the embankment from the sandpit to the road and seeing her in the crowd. It was by then a large mixed stunned gathering along the shoulder of the road, of parents and local folks trying to calm and comfort one another, and cold exhausted state troopers, firemen, and rescue workers, and a pack of ravenous photographers and journalists. There was even a TV camera crew from the NBC affiliate in Plattsburgh on the scene, headed by a blond woman in tights and leg warmers and a leather miniskirt who kept shoving her microphone at people’s gray faces, asking them what they were feeling. As if they could say.

Of course, I thought of Vietnam, but nothing I had seen or felt in Vietnam had prepared me for this. There was no fire and smoke or explosive noise, no wild shouts and frightened screams; instead, there was silence, broken ice, snow, and men and women moving with abject slowness: there was death, and it was everywhere on the planet and it was natural and forever; not just dying, perversely here and merely now.

And when I saw Risa Walker standing among the others up there by the road, it was as if I were seeing her for the first time in my life — as if seeing her on newsreel footage, a woman from the village who had lost her son, a mother who had lost her only child. She was like a stranger to me then, a stranger whose life had just been made utterly meaningless. I know this because I felt the same way. Meaning had gone wholly and in one clot right out of my life too, and as a result I’m sure I was like a stranger to her as well. Our individual pain was so great that we could not recognize any other.