Russell Banks - The Sweet Hereafter

It’s a way of living with a tragedy, I guess, to claim after it happens that you saw it coming, as if somehow you had already made the necessary adjustments beforehand. I could understand that. But it irritated me to hear it, especially with so many journalists poking microphones in people’s faces and with all the downstate lawyers crawling around looking for someone to blame, so I want to say right out front that I was the person closest to the accident and I never saw it coming.

I knew that stretch of road as well as anyone in town, and I knew the bus inside and out, and I knew better than anyone what Dolores’s driving habits were, because one of my habits was to follow her into town every morning; and believe me, I was not in the slightest afraid of an accident. I would be now, of course, because the accident has changed everything, but back then, even though I expected death in a general way as much as the next person — probably even more so, since I am a widower and a Vietnam vet and had already learned a few things about the precariousness of daily life — I was able that morning, while I drove along behind the school bus, to let my mind fix on the image of the woman I happened to be sleeping with, a woman I was having an illicit affair with. Illicit because she was married to a friend of mine.

I feel guilty for it, of course — for conducting the affair, I mean, not for having a fantasy about sex with her at that awful moment in my life, in her life, in the life of everybody in this town, practically. I could as easily have been thinking about money, which I did not have much of, as sex with Risa, which at that time I had quite a lot of, owing, I suppose, to my freedom of movement and to her unhappiness with her husband, Wendell, and her financial problems — although we liked to believe then that we were in love with each other, and often said it: “I love you, I love you, oh God, how I love you.” That sort of thing; playing a role. We did talk that way then. We don’t anymore.

But it was a lie, and I think we both knew it. I surely did. I still loved my wife, Lydia, and I don’t think Risa loved anyone except her son, Sean. Nevertheless, we were both lonely and both burdened with strong sexual natures. But neither of us had the ability to say that to the other in a way that would not be hurtful. So, instead, we said, “I love you,” and let it go at that. I have the benefit of hindsight now, of course, and at the time maybe I half believed the tender words I whispered in her ear after we had made love and I was still inside and surrounding her, covering her body with mine in the darkness of the motel room.

We used to meet like that, in Room 11 at the Bide-a-Wile, after Wendell had gone early to bed alone, which he had been doing for several years, except when there was a Montreal Expos ball game on TV — Wendell adored the Expos; probably still does. I would leave my kids with a babysitter, usually Nichole Burnell, who took care of the house and kids from after school two days a week until eleven at night, when her father, Sam, drove over from Bartlett Hill and picked her up. The drill was for me to kiss the twins good night, tell Nichole that I was going down to the Rendez-Vous or the Spread Eagle for a few beers or to Placid for a movie, and a few minutes later, with the key that Risa had given me, to let myself into Room 11 and sit in the darkness and wait for Risa to arrive.

It sounds sordid, I know, but it didn’t feel cheap or low. It was too often too lonely, too solitary, for that. Many nights Risa could not get away to Room 11, and I sat there by myself in the wicker chair beside the bed for an hour or so, smoking cigarettes and thinking and remembering my life before Lydia died, until finally, when it was clear that Risa could not get away from Wendell, I would leave the room and walk across the road to the lot next to the Rendez-Vous where I had parked my truck and drive home.

On those nights when Risa did arrive, we spent our time together entirely in darkness, for we couldn’t turn on the room light, and we barely saw each other, except for what we could make out in the dim light from the motel sign outside falling through the blinds: rose-colored profiles, the curve of a thigh or shoulder, a breast, a knee. It was melancholy and sweet and reflective, and of course very sexual, straightforwardly sexual, for both of us.

Our meetings were respites from our real and very troubled lives, and we knew that. Whenever I saw Risa in daylight, in public, it was as if she were a wholly different person, her sister, maybe, or a cousin, who only resembled in vague ways the woman I was having an affair with. I’m not sure that’s how I appeared to her — men and women see each other differently. For instance, a man generally doesn’t even know how small a woman really is until he holds an article of her clothing up in front of him, one of her nightgowns, say, and sees how small and flimsy it is and how like a child’s and unlike his own, and how thick and heavy his hands seem. Women almost always appear larger to us than they actually are, and we don’t have much opportunity to observe how small and delicate their bodies are in comparison to ours.

They know our size, of course, know it thoroughly, for they have felt our weight on top of them — smaller people always know the size of people who are larger than they. But we men have usually taken the physical measure of the women in our lives only with our eyes, and because we are secretly afraid of them, we tend to see women as having bodies that are at least as large as our own. I think that’s one reason why a man is so often surprised by how easily he can injure a woman with his hands. Although I myself have never hurt a woman with my hands. But you know how men talk to one another. Surprise is one of our main motifs. We like to pretend we’re surprised by common knowledge.

I remember one night shortly after my wife, Lydia, went into the hospital to stay, I gathered up all her clothing and spread it across our bed — dresses, blouses and skirts, jeans and shirts, nightgowns, her underwear, even — and folded everything neatly and boxed it and carried the boxes out to the garage, where we have a storage room in back. I don’t know why I did that; she hadn’t died yet, although I knew of course that in a few weeks at most she would be dead from the cancer. But I could not bear to look at her clothes hanging in our closet or see them whenever I opened a dresser drawer; I could not bear even to walk past the closet or dresser and know that her clothes were inside, hanging or neatly folded in darkness like some foolish hope for her eventual return.

That night, without planning it, I made myself a double-sized drink of Scotch and water (the twins had finally fallen off to sleep), and I walked back to our bedroom and simply started to pack her clothing, and at once it seemed deeply correct somehow, and so I went on doing it until the job was done. I must have known this was a task that I would have to do soon anyhow, and I must have sensed that it would be much more painful for me later, with her dead, so I did it now, while she was still alive, while I could keep myself from weeping with self-pity.

It was not so bad, it was almost a kindness, as if she were about to leave me and the children for a long journey, and as I held up her thin blouses and nightgowns one by one and studied them, I was amazed at how small they were, what bare scraps of cloth they were, seen like that, without her body inside to fill them out and give them weight.

I remember that night and standing there beside our bed and holding up my wife’s articles of clothing as clearly as if it were last night; it was a discovery of an aspect of her deepest reality and, through it, a discovery of a part of my own. Mourning can be very selfish. When someone you love has died, you tend to recall best those few moments and incidents that helped to clarify your sense, not of the person who has died, but of your own self. And if you loved the person a great deal, as I loved Lydia and my children, your sense of who you are will have been clarified many times, and so you will have many such moments to remember. I have learned that.