Russell Banks - Affliction

I asked it, of course, whenever I happened to see Wade himself or when he called me on the telephone. But I also ask it when I find myself seated at dinner next to the attractive unmarried woman poet from Chicago with the interesting new haircut who is visiting her older sister, who happens to be the wife of my ophthalmologist, a man who knows no one more suitable as a dinner companion for his sister-in-law than I. And I ask it in the middle of the high school parking lot as I watch my scrubbed well-fed elaborately dressed and coiffed students pile into their new Japanese cars and race away to the beaches, ski slopes and dance bars. I ask it when I read in my morning newspaper another account of the death of a child at the hands of her mother’s drunken boyfriend. I ask it while driving in my car when I come to the outskirts of town where the hills and forests begin and I turn my car around and head back south into town. Why me and not Wade — and why Wade and not me?

It is depressing, at least to me, to linger over such questions, and distracting. After all, this is not my story, it is Wade’s. I am but the witness, the compiler; I am the investigator and the chronicler; and I should get on with my work.

When we last saw Wade, he had left Margie’s warm bed and was plowing the town roads at dawn on a Sunday. You no doubt will have noticed by now that we often leave him there, perched up on the grader with snow blowing in his face, dreaming of his past or future, adrift on a wave of feeling that carries him away from his present life. That is a characteristic tableau for him, perhaps an emblematic one. He is alone, and while he is of the town and plays an essential role in its life, he is not in the town exactly, is not going intently about his private business like everyone else. Gordon LaRiviere, in pajamas, is seated at his kitchen table drinking coffee and balancing his personal checkbook, while his wife sleeps. Alma Pittman is dressed and making a pot of tea and wondering if it is too early in the season to shop in Littleton for the Christmas cards that she likes to have ready to mail to every taxpayer in town the day after Thanksgiving. Chub Merritt is down at the garage already, on his back underneath Hank Lank’s truck, fixing an oil leak. Nick Wickham has opened the restaurant, and his first customers, a pair of deer hunters from Manchester, have just shucked their orange coats and sat down at the counter, briskly rubbing their cold hands. While at the north end of town, in the drafty old house she rents from her ex-husband’s parents, Margie Fogg, naked, lies awake in her bed, pondering Wade’s suggestion that she marry him.

She has lived alone in this house for almost five years now, but she lived there with her husband, Harvey, and his parents for the previous five years as well. They had wanted children, she and Harvey, but had been unable to conceive one, and they had wanted their own house, but Harvey was a carpenter without much work and she worked part time then, tinting photographs of babies and graduating seniors for a Littleton studio photographer, and they could never seem to get enough money together for a down payment. Then Harvey fell in love with a twenty-two-year-old waitress at Toby’s Inn, and he left Margie, to live with the waitress and her two small children in a trailer out on Route 29, and six months later she had his baby. Harvey’s parents felt sorry for Margie and ashamed of their son and let Margie live on in their house, and when they decided to move to a retirement village near Lakeland, Florida, they took out a second mortgage on the house and let Margie make the payments to the bank as rent.

It was not a bad deal, but Margie was not happy in the big old house, a ramshackle colonial that got shabbier every year, as paint peeled, shutters fell, shingles blew off and the furnace broke. She repainted the downstairs rooms and closed off the second floor, so that she would not have to heat it in winter and did not have to go on sleeping in the same bedroom she had shared with her husband. His leaving her for the waitress had not afflicted her nearly as much as her in-laws supposed. Harvey had been a boastful insecure man, and from the start their sexual connection had been at best problematic. He wanted children, “a real family,” as he put it, and blamed her for their not producing any and consequently treated her as if she were depriving him of an essential right. It made him bossy and sarcastic and filled him with self-pity, which saddened her: she remembered Harvey Fogg when he was a teenaged boy, skinny and shy and eager to please, surprised and nervously passionate when, at nineteen, he discovered that she loved him and married her for it.

Then, a year before Harvey left her, Wade had come into her life — sort of. She had not intended or expected it, but they had become the kind of friends who are bound by unhappy marriages — they could talk to each other as to no one else of the hurt their marriages were causing them — and for a few months they sustained a jumpy distracted love affair, until both decided to try to save their marriages and broke it off. They were not in love with each other and knew it. Wade was in love with Lillian, he thought: he had already divorced her once and married her again, and besides, they had Jill now. And Margie, secretly, loved only her memory of Harvey as a teenaged boy. Sometimes she was afraid that the only man she could ever love would be a teenaged boy, shy and fragile, awkward in his passion and openly embarrassed by it. She found herself increasingly attracted to the boys who came into the restaurant, and though she hid her interest in them, she could not keep herself from lingering at their tables, talking and joking and teasing them about their clothes and hair, their sweet male pretensions. The boys thought of her as motherly but still young and sexual and flirted with her as they wished they could flirt with girls their own age or with their mothers. They said things to her that combined tenderness and bravado, and she made them think they were brilliant.

Later, when both their spouses had left them, Margie and Wade gradually resumed their old friendship, and the sex, licit now, was easeful and generous without the fervent anxiety of before. Once a week or so, they slept together, always in her bed. For Wade, it was not the way it had been with Lillian, fraught with mystery and often capable of astonishing him with the thoughts it provoked. Instead, it was what he assumed sex was for most people. For Margie, making love with Wade was slightly boring but necessary, and it always made her feel better afterwards, like exercise.

Marrying Wade, however, was something she had not thought about once, not in all the years she had known him, which might seem strange: she was a single woman in her late thirties in a town where such a woman was suspect, and Wade was the one man in town whose company she enjoyed. Wade was smart, everyone knew that, and not bad-looking, and he could be funny when he wanted to, and he worked hard, although he did not make much money, and a chunk of that went to his ex-wife. He drank too much, sure, but most men did, especially unmarried unhappy men. And he had that reputation for violence, his sudden bursts of anger. But most of the unmarried unhappy men she knew had that same reputation: it seemed to go with the territory. They were disconnected men, cut off from what calmed them — a home, children, a loving loyal woman who comforted and reassured them when everyone else treated them as if they were useless and expendable. Of course, Wade had once possessed all that, and he had still been violent, not down at Toby’s Inn, as now, but worse, at home and against his own wife. Remember, Margie thought, Wade Whitehouse was a wife-beater.

It was known , by rumor and surmise, the way it usually happens in a village, without the principals ever telling anyone. Lillian’s mother lived up in Littleton with her second husband, and people remembered that when Lillian was married to Wade she had left him several times for a week or two and had gone to stay with her mother. And people knew that there were three or four other times when she and Jill had left the house they shared with Wade and had stayed overnight in town at Alma Pittman’s. Later, on her return home, when out in public with her husband, Lillian had acted like a POW— dutiful but sullen, slow-moving, careful: most people, though they do not say it and may not even think it, associate this kind of behavior in wives with domestic violence. And when Wade and Lillian had got divorced the second time, rumors drifted back down from Littleton, rumors possibly started by Wade’s lawyer, Bob Chagnon, that the reason Wade got slapped with heavy child-support payments and lost the house to Lillian and could see his daughter only once a month was that he had admitted to having lost his temper on several occasions and hit his wife with his fists. Wade could have denied it: she had no proof: there were no medical records to be subpoenaed; and Alma had refused to get mixed up in marital problems, as she put it; her mother, after all, was her mother, and Lillian had wanted to spare her the pain of having to say in public what her daughter had revealed to her in secrecy and shame; Jill, of course, was too young to be questioned about it. Fortunately for all of them, Wade had simply hung his head and confessed that, yes, in the heat of a quarrel, he had hit her. People shook their heads sadly when they heard this, but they understood: Lillian was a hard case, a demanding intelligent woman with a lot of mouth on her, a woman who made most people feel that she thought she was somehow superior to them, and no doubt she made Wade feel that way too. A man should never hit a woman, but sometimes it is understandable. Right? It happens, doesn’t it? It happens.