Russell Banks - Affliction

It was the same with Lillian: she did not want to become like her mother and all the women she knew in town, a sad oppressed lot whose only humor was self-deprecating, whose greatest fear was of the men they lived with, whose children were their ballast but weighed down their lives like stones in a shroud. Wade recognized the young thing in her, the bright delicacy of feeling and thought that every other girl her age she knew was intent on snuffing out, and she treasured him for that. She married him for that.

They married also for sex, naturally, but they never did grow used to sleeping with each other, as the cynic would have us believe. Before they were married, they made love passionately every chance they had and became sweetly familiar with each other’s bodies, knew the other’s response to the touch of hands and fingertips, lips, tongue and teeth as well as they knew their own. But true consummation, the act itself, did not take place until after they were married and lived in one of the small apartments over Golden’s General Store, and when it did, to their great surprise, pleasure and gratitude, it was a simple continuation and extension of what they had been doing all along. It was not different; it was more. And they never stopped loving to touch each other with their hands and tongues and mouths, so that, in bed in the dark, when Wade finally rose up and covered Lillian’s smooth and lively body and entered it, the pleasure of his entry and the force of it, the long sweet swing of it, was for both of them an irresistible crescendo that never failed to surprise and thrill them with its ability, like gravity, to control them.

No, he did not leave her because he had grown used to sleeping with her. When Wade left Lillian and joined the army — hoping to follow Elbourne and Charlie to Vietnam but getting sent instead to Korea — it was because at the age of twenty-one he had come to believe that by marrying so young, he had ended his life prematurely. It was the last, perhaps the only, chance he had to start over. His knowledge of himself, of his golden interior, thanks to Lillian, was of a boy whose life was not yet defined, whose potential was large but had in no way been realized. He possessed this knowledge because Lillian’s love had kept the young thing in him alive long after it had died in everyone else he knew, just as his love for her hadkept the young thing in her alive too. But despite that, here he was, living like a trapped adult, a man much older than he, a man whose life was already determined in every important way — by the job at LaRiviere’s, by the small dark apartment filled with other people’s castoffs, by the village of Lawford itself, all of it hemmed in by the dark hills and forests. This was adult life, and he was not ready to accept it.

He had started to drink heavily, usually at Toby’s after work, and had grown confused and angry. And he quickly lost his connection to that lovely young thing, the fragile humorous affection for the world that he had nurtured and kept alive all through adolescence, and he grew increasingly angry at the loss and began to blame Lillian for it. The more he blamed her, the further he flew from it, until, indeed, he was like the men who surrounded him, and one night he lashed out at her with his fists and afterwards wept in her lap, begging forgiveness, promising to be different, new, clean, loving, gentle, funny.

But within weeks, he found himself breaking his promise, horrifying himself, and he began to blame the context of his madness, his life with Lillian, confusing it with the cause of his madness, and so he left her. He drove to Littleton and enlisted in the army and went to Fort Dix, New Jersey, for basic training, and wrote Lillian a long letter from there, asking her to divorce him, saying she could use any grounds she wanted, physical cruelty, even, and they could both start over again.

They tried, both of them, to do just that. Wade got shipped out to Korea — two Whitehouse brothers in Vietnam was evidently as much as the army was willing to risk that early in the war — and Lillian went to secretarial school in Littleton and worked nights as a waitress at Toby’s Inn. They slept with other people — for Wade, there was the young woman in Seoul, Kim Chul Hee, and no one else; for Lillian, there were several men during the two years she and Wade were apart.

Two of the men she told Wade about; one she did not. I was only eleven years old then, but I knew that Lillian, briefly, was meeting Gordon LaRiviere, who was married and was thin then and attractive, and who from time to time stopped by Lillian’s apartment in town, the apartment over Golden’s store, where she had lived with Wade. LaRiviere usually came to visit her very early in the morning, and on several of these occasions I myself saw him arrive before six and leave by seven-thirty, for I had my first job that summer, working at Golden’s General Store as a stockboy, and pedaled my bike all the way into town to sweep out the store and clean the counters before it opened at seven. I was shocked by what I saw, and felt betrayed, as if I and not my brother Wade were off defending our country against the Asian Communists, and I suspect that I have not even today forgiven Lillian for her affair with Gordon LaRiviere, although she was of course quite entitled to it: LaRiviere was the married one, not she.

The other two men Lillian went out with and slept with during those years that she and Wade were divorced the first time, the men she told Wade about, were Lugene Brooks, then the sixth-grade teacher at the school, single and fresh out of Plymouth State, still single twenty years later but now the middle-aged principal of the school, and Nick Wickham, who made it a point in those days to bed all the unmarried and most of the married women in town at least once. Now the compulsion seems to have weakened, and although he still goes through the motions, it is mostly for effect. Twenty years ago, however, Nick had good looks and a brilliant smile and a sense of humor that was superior to that of most of the men in town, in that his was flirtatious and affectionate, and theirs was misogynous and violent.

Within a week of Wade’s return to Lawford, he and Lillian were sleeping together in the bedroom of the apartment over Golden’s store again and were talking about remarrying, so she confessed her affairs with Lugene Brooks and Nick Wickham. Wade accepted the news mildly, because she insisted that neither man had been able to please her the way Wade could, a comparison that may well have eroticized her for him.

As it happens, what Lillian told Wade about sleeping with Lugene Brooks and Nick Wickham was essentially true: compared to sex with him, it was boring and even a little embarrassing. He did not press her for further details, although he admitted to himself that he was curious — not about her but about the men.

When he confessed to her that he had indulged in a three-month love affair with the woman in Seoul, he lied: he said that she had meant nothing to him, except occasional mechanical sex. “She wasn’t a hooker or anything, a prostitute,” he assured her. “Just a woman who was there.” In fact, however, she had meant a great deal to him, for she had renewed that sense of himself as a child that he had obtained with Lillian when they were first together. She spoke almost no English and he no Korean, and she tried with diligence and imagination, when he was with her, which was nearly every weekend and day off he could take, to be exactly what he wanted her to be — protective but dependent, bossy but unthreatening, sexually provocative and skilled yet innocent as a child and as personal as a sister. Impossible needs for any mere mortal to meet; she failed him, eventually. He contracted a mild case of gonorrhea, and when he went for treatment, Wade learned from the doctor — a young wise guy recently graduated from Harvard Medical School who insisted that Wade provide him with the name of the woman or women he had been sleeping with: his sexual contacts, was the phrase — that she was sleeping with at least three other GI’s, two of them guys in his outfit, and was supporting her parents, younger sisters and several children of her own with the money he and the other GI’s gave her. Wade never saw her again. But he felt guilty for that: he remembered her laughter, her black hair, her sad small beautiful breasts — her very tangibility; and he knew that he had not been wrong when, during those three months, he had believed that she was as real as he and as frightened. He spoke of her only casually and with disrespect after that, however — with the guys in his outfit and, when he got home, at work and around the bar at Toby’s and at first, late at night, with Lillian.