Russell Banks - Affliction

“Yes. It is nice. And strange,” she said. After a few seconds, she added, “I don’t think it’s the same for women, though.” She opened her eyes, and the vertical creases in her brow reappeared, and Wade’s view of her as a child got blocked. “I mean, women can see the little boy in the man pretty easily, you know. But I think we see it mostly when the man doesn’t know we’re watching. It happens when he’s paying attention to something else. Like watching sports on TV or fixing his car or something.”

“What about after making love?”

“Well … I think mostly men try to hide the boy in themselves. They think it’s a sign of weakness or something, so they try to hide it. Maybe especially when they’re making love. You, for instance,” she said, and punched him lightly on the shoulder. “After we make love, you look like you just climbed a mountain or something. Triumphant. The conquering hero! Tarzan beating his chest.” She laughed, and he laughed with her, but hesitantly.

“Oh, you try to be cool about it,” she went on, “but you’re proud of yourself. I can tell. And you should be,” she added, and she punched him again. “Frankly, though,” she said, and she peered out from under her eyelashes, “frankly, though, you needn’t be proud. Because I’m easy. Real easy.”

“For me.”

“Oh yes, only for you. Very hard for anybody else.”

Wade laughed and slid out of bed and padded barefoot and naked down the hall to the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of Rolling Rock. By the time he got back to the bedroom, the bottle was half empty. “Want some?” he asked, and passed it over to her.

She said, “Thanks,” propped herself up and took a delicate sip.

Wade lay on his back, folded his arms behind his head and peered into the cloudy darkness above him. The candle beside the bed was guttering; on the wall the flickery shadows of his elbows and arms looked like tepees and campfires.

Margie sipped at the beer and studied the shadows and decided once again, as she always did at times like this, when Wade was peaceful and sweet and smart, that she loved him.

“Do you still think,” he said, “do you think I ought to forget this custody thing? After what I saw tonight, with Lillian and that lawyer of hers? Illegal drugs and illicit sex, you know.”

Margie was silent for a moment. She sighed and said, “Wade, you got to be able to prove those things. But really, I don’t know what I think. It’s not me who’s the father, it’s you.”

“Yeah, I am. And that’s the whole problem in a nutshell,” he said. “I’m supposed to be the father, but I’m not able to. Not unless I make a huge fight over it. A goddamned war. Thing is, Margie, now it’s a war I believe I can win.”

“You’re obsessed with this, aren’t you?”

He thought about the word for a few seconds— obsessed, obsessed, obsessed —and said, “Yes. Yes, I am. I am obsessed with it. It may be the only thing I’ve wanted in my life so far that I’ve been clear about wanting. Totally absolutely clear.”

She took a sip of beer and said, “Then… I guess you have to go ahead and do it.”

He was silent. Then he said, “There’s another thing I’ve been thinking a lot about lately,” and he took the bottle from her hands, finished it off in one long swallow and set it on the floor beside the bed. He slipped one arm under her head and reached around her with the other and heard himself say words as if a stranger were speaking and he had no idea what words the stranger would say next. “I don’t know how you feel about the idea, Margie, because we’ve never talked about it before. Maybe because we’ve been too scared of the idea to talk about it. But I’ve been thinking lately, I’ve been thinking that maybe we should get married sometime. You and me.”

“Oh, Wade,” she said, sounding vaguely disappointed.

‘I been just thinking about it, that’s all,” he said rapidly. “It’s not like a marriage proposal or anything, just a thought. An idea. Something for you and me to talk about and think about. You know?”

“All right,” she said. And she waited a moment and said, “I’ll think about it.”

“Good.” He kissed her on the lips, then rolled away from her and blew out the candle. When he lay back down, he could hear her low slow breathing, and after a few seconds, he tried catching her rhythm with his, as he did when they made love, and got it, so that soon they were breathing in harmony, walking along together, stride matching stride, brave and in love and crossing a grassy meadow together with blue sky overhead, drifting puffs of white clouds, soaring birds above and sunshine warming their heads and shoulders, and neither of them, ever again, alone.

THE SHRILL RING of the telephone tumbled Wade from light and heat — a blond dream of a beach town in summer— tossed him into darkness and cold, a bed and a room he could not at first recognize. The wrangling jangle of a telephone: he did not know where the damned thing was; it kept on ringing, still coming at him from all sides; some kind of maddened bird or rabid bat darting around his head in the darkness.

Then it stopped, and Wade heard Margie’s voice, realized he was in her bed, her house, phone, darkness, cold. He was naked, and the covers had slipped down to his waist, and his chest and shoulders and arms were chilled. He shivered his way under the covers and listened to her sleep-thickened voice.

“What? Who is this? Oh, yeah, he’s here. Wait a second,” she said, and she bumped Wade on the shoulder with the receiver. “It’s Gordon LaRiviere. He’s rip-shit about something.” She peered at the clock radio on the table beside the bed. “Christ. Four o’clock.”

Wade placed the receiver against his face, said, “Hello?” and remembered: the snow. Oh, Jesus, yes. It had been snowing all night, and here he was lying in bed, sound asleep. He had acted like any other citizen with a right to go to bed at night expecting the roads to be plowed in the morning when he woke up and made ready to drive himself and the family to church. Why had he forgotten? How had he been able to spend the night as if he did not work for LaRiviere?

It was the first time since LaRiviere got the contract to plow the town roads that this had happened to Wade; it alarmed him. What will you do next, when you have forgotten something this routine? It puzzled him; it made no sense. His life was essentially so simple and reactive that to do everything that was expected of him, Wade almost did not have to think: if it snowed, he went to LaRiviere’s garage and took either the truck or the grader and plowed the roads until they were clear; if the roads were covered with ice, he hooked the sander to the truck or grader and sanded the roads; and, of course, if it was a school day, he showed up at the school at seven-thirty and directed traffic at the crossing. After that, Monday through Friday, he spent the day doing whatever LaRiviere told him to — drill a well in Catamount, estimate a job in Littleton, clean the gear and stack pipe in the shop. Simple. A wholly reactive life.

Now, for the first time in that life, it had snowed and Wade had not reacted. A strange kind of memory lapse: he had behaved as if last night had been merely an ordinary clear cold Saturday night in November instead of a snowy one; and he had ended up in bed with Margie Fogg — because his daughter was not with him this weekend and Margie had made it clear that she wanted him to make love to her; and then he had fallen asleep — because he was sleepy. Only to find that somehow in the last eight or ten hours he seemed to have stepped out of his life and into some other person’s life, a stranger’s. And this scared him even more than LaRiviere’s predictable and justifiable wrath did. He realized that his hands were sweating. What the hell was going on with him? Maybe he really was fucked up, just like when he was in his twenties. Just like Jack. He had thought everything was going to be fine.