The Sweet Hereafter (7 page)

By that time, which was about three years before the accident, their marriage was essentially dead, except for their love of Sean, of course. I suppose I want to believe that; anyone who’s an interloper in a marriage wants to think the marriage was dead before he pulled up and parked; but in this case I’m sure it’s the truth.

It started innocently enough hat is, without my knowing anything had been started. I’ve known Risa and Wendell most of my life; we more or less grew up together here in Sam Dent, although Risa is a few years younger than Wendell and I. When I was in Vietnam, Wendell, who was bagging groceries at Valley Grocery in Keene Valley, started dating Risa, who was then barely out of the eighth grade. They stuck together, though, and the year she graduated high school, he got a job as a Tru Value cashier in Marlowe, and they got married. I always liked Wendell, even though he was indeed, as Risa eventually discovered, lazy and pretty dumb and pessimistic. That’s a hard combination for a wife to like, and frankly I never would have hired him to work for me, even if he had been one of the Vietnam vets who for a long time were the only people I hired at the garage. But Wendell made it relatively simple, by being good looking and passive, for a man to call him a friend. (Some folks might regard him as low key or easygoing, but I have to say passive. ) What it came down to was that in an important sense, Wendell didn’t really give a damn about much.

He liked sportsTV sports, that is; he was a little heavy in the gut to play any himself and he was very fond of his son. Not like Risa was, of course, for she was much more intense about everything than he, but sufficiently fond to have his heart broken by the boy’s death.

Wendell is like the rest of us, a person whose life has two meanings, one before the accident and one after. I doubt, however, that he worries much about connecting the two meanings, as the rest of us do, but that’s Wendell Walker. That was always Wendell Walker. Even so, I felt guilty because, before his life became a tragedy, he was basically a likable fellow. Just as, before her life became a tragedy, Risa’s superstitious nature was an aspect of her character that was downright attractive. At least to me it was.

I was a widower and a relatively young man still, with two small children in a big house and a business that was making money but was top heavy with debt. Those were the facts that filled my head night and day the death of my wife, the needs of my children, and cash flow at the garage. For a year or so after Lydia died, and even for most of the year before she died, it was as if I had no sexual nature. From the time she went to the hospital to stay, I woke alone in that huge king sized bed of ours every morning in darkness and never once had an erection or even thought about the pleasures Lydia and I had taken from each other in that bed at exactly that time of day so many hundreds of times; I couldn’t permit such a thought. I had work to do, children to wash and dress and feed and get off to school so I could get to the garage by eight, and at the garage I’d work like two men until the kids got out of school, so I’d be free then to drive them to Cub Scouts and Brownies, to their friends’, to the dentist in Placid, to Ames in Saranac for winter boots, stopping off at the Grand Union for groceries that I’d cook for supper and popcorn for after supper while watching TV together, and when they had gone to bed, I’d stay up late drinking and doing the garage account books that Lydia used to take care of. I had started drinking pretty heavily by then; but nothing like now.

For a long time, though, that was my whole life. There was no way I could let myself think about anything that did not lie directly before mow-the death of my wife, the physical and emotional needs of my children, and my business.

It was as if during that period I were crossing a crevasse on a high wire, and if I once looked down at the ground or off to the side or even ahead of me or behind, I’d fall, and I’d take down with me anyone holding on to me, meaning my children.

Then I started to change. First in erotic dreams and after a while in fantasy little pornographic movies in which I was both actor and audience: my sexual nature had begun to reassert itself. It was only chromosomal and glandular, but even so’ whenever it happened I felt oddly ths loyal to Lydia. While she was alive I had been able to wake from my dream or fantasy and immediately cast her in the leading female role and let reality take over; but with her gone, if I tried casting her, the dream turned instantly to grief and sorrow. It was specifically to avoid that pain that I auditioned for the sex scenes numerous women I knew personally and believed I could be attracted tithe wives and daughters of the town of Sam Dent. And to my surprise, my number one sex goddess turned out to be Risa Walker.

I say surprise because Risa was by no stretch of the imagination the sexiest woman in town. That title went by male consensus to Wanda Otto, whom the boys in the garage called The Beatnik Queen, because of her long straight hair and her eye makeup and the low cut knit dresses she wore. It was probably the image of 19605 hippie sex that she evoked most of my mechanics suffered from a kind of time warp anyhow.

Also, Wanda behaved in what you might call a provocative way at least it provoked the boys in the garage, who scrambled to fill her Peugeot with gas whenever she drove in. Normally, when someone pulled up to the pump, Bud or Jimbo or whoever was on duty only crawled further into the vehicle he was working on and pretended not to see or hear it.

Selling gas was strictly a necessary frill at the station, and whoever happened to be on duty was supposed to look after it; there was no regular attendant, and I myself spent most of my time in the office, with Lydia when she was alive and alone afterwards, or supervising the more delicate and difficult jobs out in the garage. No one wanted to pump gas. But Wanda Otto never to my knowledge wore a bra, and so long as she was without her husband, Hartley, or her son, the Indian boy Bear, she had a habit of driving into the station with her dress pulled halfway up her very attractive thighs. Wanda could get a mechanic out from under the hood and beside her open window faster than any other customer. She laughed easily and flirted and used expressions like Shit! and Fuck! if you told her she was down a quart, and that turned men on. Although it probably scared them too, because I don’t know of anyone who ever made a direct pass at Wanda, at least not when he was sober. They just talked about it with one another.

Risa, by contrast, though she is an intense person and when present fills your entire screen, drawing all your attention, is unadorned, shy, and private. Her manner, until the accident, was upbeat and warm, but her smile was undercut by a look of permanent sadness that she seemed to be trying to hide, as if she were struggling to protect you from it. Everyone liked Risa, but when she pulled in with her Wagoneer, no one rushed out to fill her tank, and like most people, she often had to fill it herself. She is tall, broad shouldered, with ample breasts and a nice large female butt that she covers with somewhat mannish clothes, flannel shirts and loose jeans, that sort of thing. Typical for up here.

She is the kind of woman who makes a man think of his favorite sister, if he has one, or his best friend’s sister, if he doesn’t. Not a likely candidate for erotic fantasy.

But lying half drunk in the darkness in that king sized bed in my house on the hill, the twins sleeping soundly in their room at the end of the hall, I’d imagine Risa Walker naked and ecstatic, and it positively thrilled me. Took me straight out of the misery of my daily life and let my hormones run things for a while. Risa released me sexually when no other woman could. Women like Wanda Otto are already so close to naked and ecstatic in public, it’s not much of a thrill to take them one more step alone and in private. In fact, what you imagine is a woman you can’t satisfy an image that is well known for dousing the fire in a man. But picturing Risa calm, reticent, controlled, decent, and modest Risa Walker picturing her wild with passion, sweating and naked, long legs akimbo, hands digging into your back, mouth grunting and licking into your ear… well, that’s a picture a man can cook with.

In time, the fantasies were insufficient. That’s how it is the more vivid the imagined sex, the less satisfying it is as sex. You have to keep upping the ante, just like they do in pornographic movies, until finally you have to either replace it with the real thing or else rent a different movie.

I didn’t want a different movie; by then all I wanted was Risa Walker.

Any other woman was a diminishment, and even a slight diminishment was a total loss. I wanted, I needed, Risa.

The trouble was, Risa was thoroughly married to a friend of mine, and in all the years I had known her, she had not once shown the slightest interest in going to bed with anyone other than her husband.

Especially not with me. To be fair, I had not given her much opportunity. I am known as a self contained man and am probably not very approachable, which has always been my choice of character anyhow, insofar as a person can choose his character.

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 in competent 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 name less, 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 Rendezvous, where I was sitting over a beer watching an N.B.A 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.