The Three-Day Affair (7 page)

I returned to room a, unlocked it, and went inside. Marie sat against the wall, the blanket covering her feet.

“Feeling any warmer?” I asked.

She looked up at me and shrugged.

“Mind if I sit down?”

She shook her head.

I sat across from her, not too close. “We thought you might be hungry, so we ordered you a pizza. Everything on it. The works.”

“Oh,” she said.

“What?”

“It’s nothing.”

“Tell me. Please.”

“I’m a vegetarian.”

So simple a task, and I’d messed it up. “We’ll get you another—”

“Forget it.” She scratched her neck. “I’m not really very hungry.”

“I’m happy to order another one.”

“It’s okay. I’ll just pick off the meat. Picking off the meat isn’t such a big deal, all things considered.”

Sitting this close, I could tell she was a smoker, and I was glad to learn this fact about her. It made her seem a little older, a little less fragile—a little less like we had irrevocably tarnished
something
that’d been flawless.

“So, what did you think your day was going to be like when you got up this morning?” I asked.

She looked around the room, at the microphone stand, the monitor, the headphones lying on the floor. “I guess pretty much like this.”

She didn’t smile, but I felt grateful for this small joke.

Normally, when nobody is speaking, there are plenty of sounds all around us, the ongoing accompaniment to our lives. We might pay them no mind, but they’re always present: a clock’s ticking, a refrigerator’s humming, cars passing by, leaves blowing down a sidewalk, a plane high overhead. We don’t know real silence until we’re exposed to it. Here in this small
recording
room, sheets of thick foam covered the walls. Carpet
covered
the floor. Even the rain, audible in the control room, couldn’t penetrate the thick ceiling insulation in this part of the studio. The only thing to hear was our own breathing and our blood pulsing past our ears.

I credited this unnatural quiet with helping me to forge fast connections with the musicians who came here to record.
Without
that connection, you can’t ever hope to see the project you’re working on together with a singular vision. A lot of the recording process is talk. What are we going to do in this next take? What are we trying to achieve? And the studio itself helps us with these conversations. With the background noise gone, we hear one
another
with greater precision. Timbre, inflection, intensity—these are the raw elements that first the ear, and then the brain and the gut, transform into feeling and understanding.

I hoped that the studio would come to my aid now, and that Marie would hear in my words the full spectrum of regret that I was feeling.

“We’ve got another friend coming,” I said.

She didn’t react for a moment, and I got to hear my blood some more.

“He’s a lawyer,” I continued. “We’re hoping he’ll be able to help us straighten all this out.”

More silence. Then: “And you’re telling me this because …”

“It means this is going to drag on a little longer. At least
another
hour or two, until he gets here.”

“Oh.” She had been joking with me a minute ago, but now her eyes got wet and she wouldn’t look at me. “I was supposed to go straight home when my shift ended at eight.”

“Your grandmother is probably getting worried.”

She shook her head. “No, I’ll bet she’s isn’t. She’s probably glad I’m not home.”

“I see,” I said, not seeing at all.

“She’s been on my case to take the SATs. This morning we had a pretty bad fight about it.”

“Is that such a bad idea?”

“Yeah, it is. I don’t want to go to college. I want to move to New York and be an actress.”

I nodded. “Acting’s a really hard business.” In the midst of all this, I could give advice. Sure I could.

“I’ve had leading roles in my high school musical the past two years.”

“Are you a triple threat?”

“What’s that?”

“Singing, acting, and dancing. If you can do all three, you’re called a triple threat.”

“I can’t dance too well. I’m a good singer, though. Really good.
People tell me all the time. Even today, I’d just started my shift at noon and was sort of singing to myself, I don’t even remember what it was, but I was singing and didn’t know there were any
customers
in the store, but there was this lady who came out of the restroom and she was like, ‘You know, you should be on
Broadway
.’ And I could tell she meant it. It wasn’t just some dumb
compliment
. So, yeah, I can sing.” Her eyes weren’t watery anymore. “Is this where you work?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s a recording studio, isn’t it?”

I told her it was. “And a record company.” I said it to see whether I still believed it.

“Has anybody famous ever recorded here?”

I told her I had no idea.

She looked outside the glass door into the main recording room. “Why did your friend kidnap me?”

“He doesn’t know.”

“That’s not a good answer.”

“Maybe. I don’t think it’s such a bad answer, either. Haven’t you ever done anything and not known why you did it?”

“I guess. But even then I think I usually know.”

“Then you’re smarter than the rest of us.”

She chewed on that for a minute. “When you’re out getting the pizza, would you buy me a pack of cigarettes?”

“Sure,” I said.

“You aren’t going to tell me I shouldn’t smoke?”

“No,” I said. “All things considered, I’m happy to buy you cigarettes.”

“You know, you don’t seem like the kidnapping type.”

“I’m not the kidnapping type.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but you are.” A hard point to argue. “I wouldn’t tell anyone, by the way. I know that’s why
you’re all freaking out and offering me money and stuff. All the things I said in the car, I only said them because I was so scared. But I can keep a secret. My friends, they don’t ever worry about telling me their secrets, because I view a secret as a sacred trust. One of my girlfriends, I’m not going to tell you her name, but anyway, she told me about an abortion she had when her
boyfriend
knocked her up. She didn’t even tell the guy, but she told me. And I promised to keep it secret, and I have. So I know you probably don’t believe me, but I’d keep this whole thing a secret and nobody would get in any trouble.”

“I know you believe that,” I said.

“I believe it because it’s the truth.”

“Marie,” I said, “this would be a very, very hard secret to keep.
I
couldn’t do it. Neither could my friends. And that’s what
matters
, isn’t it? Not what
you’d
do, but what they can imagine
themselves
doing if they were in your shoes.”

“Your friends should have a little more faith in other people.”

I smiled.

“Will,” she said, “can you do something for me?”

“What’s that?”

“Give me your hand.”

I didn’t want to touch her. I wanted to cling to whatever
propriety
I could. But suddenly she leaned toward me and her two hands were surrounding my own. My wife’s hands were slim and soft. She took great care of them, and they always smelled faintly of moisturizing cream. Marie had the hard, sweaty paws of a high school kid.

“I want you to pledge to me,” she said, looking me in the eye, “that you won’t let your friends cause me bodily harm.”

Bodily harm?
Exactly like a teenager, I thought. She’d found a way, even under these circumstances, to be overly dramatic. I was completely charmed.

“I’ve already told you, nobody’s going to hurt you.”

She yanked her hands away. “When you said it before, you were just being nice. You hadn’t really thought it through. Now …” She took my hand again and sat up a little straighter. “… I want you to pledge it and mean it.”

“Marie, I promise. You’re safe.”

“Then
pledge
it.”

“All right. I pledge that you’re safe. I pledge that you will not come to any bodily harm.”

She kept holding my hand until she had reached some sort of decision about me. Or maybe it was simply more teenage theatrics.

“I believe you, Will,” she said. “You’ll protect me.”

I was nearly out the door when she called my name again. I turned to face her. “She’s not all bad,” she said.

“Who isn’t?”

“My nana.” For the first time, she smiled a little. “She wears pink all the time—sweaters, hats, gloves. And even though she’s over eighty, her hair is still black. And she doesn’t dye it or
anything
. It’s kind of cool. Anyway, I just thought I should say that. Because I don’t hate her or anything. I mean, she raised me. I don’t take that for granted, you know. I actually think about it a lot. She probably thought she’d have a normal person’s old age, and then suddenly she’s got
me
to raise.” She shook her head, as if thinking what it must have been like raising a girl like her. “So I don’t hate her. She’s just old. Her mind is sort of going. But I
actually
really love her.”

“I’m glad,” I said. I turned to leave again, and again she stopped me.

“Hey, Will?”

“Yes?”

“Marlboro Lights,” she said.

The sun had set. Streetlights were lit. Up and down Lincoln
Avenue
, shops and restaurants and apartment buildings still stood. Drivers took no notice of me. Neither did the pedestrians who walked under umbrellas or darted from awning to awning in the light rain. Away from the studio, Friday evening was unfolding with impossible ordinariness.

When I tuned the car’s radio to the news, instead of reports of a kidnapping, there was talk of power outages in Hudson and Essex Counties. Delays easing up at the Lincoln and Holland tunnels.

But it looks like we’re on tap for a pleasant weekend!
said the
woman
’s voice.

I listened and waited. Business news. The Dow closed down fifty points for the week. The Federal Reserve was rumored to be cutting interest rates again.

And after the break, have you ever suspected that your dog might be a genius? Ernesto Sanchez interviews the headmaster of a new school for gifted pooches—

I shut off the radio and noticed, in the space between the seats, my Albright-for-Congress hat. I’d removed it before going into
Antonello’s for dinner. Remarkable, I thought, how one minute you were optimistic enough to print your dream on a hat, and the next moment … this.

What if I were to keep driving? Just disappear? I played with the idea of starting over, new home, new identity. Maybe grow a beard. Become the captain of a Caribbean fishing boat. I
understood
right away how absurd this was, but I allowed myself a brief mental getaway to Fantasyland as I drove the very real streets of downtown Newfield toward the railroad station and into the parking lot. Only when, several minutes later, the train came into view and groaned to a stop did I reluctantly shake off images of palm trees and white sand.

I believed it was rotten of us, fooling Evan into coming. But he was a lawyer, a good one, and nothing seemed more valuable at that moment than his sage advice. I arrived just as the train did. Evan stepped onto the platform along with the dozens of other passengers returning from their long workday. He had on khakis, an orange golf shirt, and a Mets cap and was carrying his suitcase and golf bag. Unlike the rest of us, Evan was a serious golfer. His father had played varsity in college and made sure that Evan had grown up playing, too.

We shook hands, and I took his golf bag from him. As we walked to the car, he told me that Meghan, his new girlfriend, had just landed a gig as lighting designer for the revival of
Fiddler on the Roof
. I’d only met Meghan once, at a dinner party Evan had thrown around the holidays, and had liked her immediately. She had an honest, toothy smile and a habit of swearing like a sailor when telling stories. A vast improvement over his last girlfriend, the actuary.

He was launching into a story about a party he and Meghan had gone to last weekend when I said, “Evan, hang on a second.”

“What is it?”

“Let’s sit in the car,” I said. “We need to talk.”

We put the suitcase and golf bag in the backseat and got in my car. With the engine running, I explained that Jeffrey, Nolan, and I had gotten ourselves into serious trouble. And that we had no clue what to do about it.

“Tell me what happened,” he said.

I really wanted to. It was good to see Evan, extremely
comforting
, and I felt a strong desire to unburden myself and tell him every thing. But I knew I shouldn’t, for his sake. Luckily for him, he’d gotten tied up at work just long enough to be uninvolved. And I knew that the right thing was to keep it that way. “I can’t,” I told him. “It’s bad, though.”

“How bad?”

“Really bad.”

The train chugged to a start and left the station. We watched it go. When the station was quiet again, Evan asked, “Did one of you kill someone?”

Three hours earlier, the question would’ve seemed absurd.

“No.”

“Look, whatever’s going on, Will, you need to tell me. You’ll need a lawyer.”

“Maybe so.” I tried to word this delicately. “If you learned that a crime was being committed … you know, in progress … you’d need to report it, wouldn’t you?”

“That’s right,” he said.

“Then I can’t tell you anything else.”

A quarter mile down the track, the train rounded a curve and blew its whistle. Then it was out of sight.

“Then what the hell am I doing here?” he asked. “I mean, if you can’t even tell me … Look, maybe I can offer you some
hypothetical
advice?”

Hypothetical advice, it suddenly occurred to me, was exactly what he was doing here. “A hypothetical situation would be okay for me to talk about?” I asked.

“Just be careful what you say.”

“All right.” I paused, considering my words. “Let’s say that,
hypothetically
, three men had gotten themselves involved in a situation.”

I was looking out the front windshield. Stragglers were getting into their cars and leaving the parking lot for a well-earned
weekend
. Early Monday morning, they’d be standing at this same train platform, carrying the same briefcases.

“Are the three men equally responsible for their … situation?”

“Say that one man is most responsible, but the other two didn’t do anything to make it better or to stop him.”

“Go on,” he said.

“And say that what happened was inadvertent.”

Evan looked at me. “What does
that
mean?”

“It was an accident.”

He was shaking his head. “I’m already skeptical. You’d be
surprised
how many so-called ‘accidental crimes’ aren’t so accidental. You bring a loaded gun where it doesn’t belong, the gun goes off by accident—that isn’t really an accidental crime, is it?”

“Then I guess I mean it wasn’t planned.” I wasn’t going to get into details. “So now these three men want nothing more than to set things right. But they aren’t sure how, without …”

“Without facing the consequences.”

“That’s right.”

The small ticket office by the platform was shutting down for the evening. Out front, a gray-haired woman in a large yellow sweater briskly swept a broom across the pavement. A man of about the same age was on his knees by the door, tying twine
around stacks of unsold newspapers. I couldn’t help wondering about tomorrow’s front page.

“Maybe there are mitigating circumstances,” Evan said, more to himself than to me. His eyebrows raised. “Was there a car involved?”

He must have seen the surprise register in my face.

“That’s what I thought,” he said. “And I’ll bet there was drinking.”

“A little,” I said. “Nobody was drunk, if that’s what you mean.”

But he’d evidently come to a conclusion. “Time is critical.” And just when I thought that, impossibly, he’d figured out about the kidnapping—that maybe he’d already heard about it on the radio—he said, “In New York, a hit-and-run is a third-degree
felony
. That’s three to five years in prison. Doesn’t even matter if anybody’s injured. I’m sure the law is similar in New Jersey.” He watched me closely. “The driver of the car is probably terrified, but he needs to understand that the longer he waits to turn
himself
in, the worse off he’s going to be. And that by waiting, he’s making things a lot worse for his friends.”

We watched the man from the ticket office stack more newspapers.

“If he wants to help his friends,” Evan said, “he’ll confess. He’ll take the blame. Maybe even suggest that his friends tried to get him to stop the car, but he refused. Do you understand this
hypothetical
advice I’m giving you?”

I was thinking about Jeffrey, how when earlier he’d offered to take the full blame, Nolan and I had called him naive. We were wrong, though.
We’d
been naive. And how much time had passed now? I glanced at the clock on my dash. Almost two hours since she’d first gotten into my car. Sitting there with Evan, feeling the weight of each passing minute, I wished that I were back in the studio urging Jeffrey on. Write that confession! Take the blame! It
seemed so obvious, now. He had gotten us into this trouble. Only he could get us out.

“I need to get going,” I said.

“Are you sure you don’t want to tell me any more?”

I wanted to, but I wasn’t going to. “Thanks,” I said.

“Suit yourself.” He said he’d wait here at the station for the next train. We got his things out of the backseat.

“I was looking forward to golfing this weekend,” he said, and put a hand on my shoulder. “I was going to play well. I just dropped four hundred bucks on a new Callaway driver.”

“Some other time, I hope.” We shook hands.

“You’ve got to remember,” he said, looking me in the eyes, “that these are lifelong decisions you’re making now. Decisions that you can’t unmake. So please, Will, if you think there’s any way I can help—”

“I’ll let you know. I promise.”

I got into the car, still wishing I could have told him more, yet relieved to have spared one friend. But before I’d driven even ten feet, he was waving his arms at me. I stopped the car and rolled down the passenger-side window. He jogged over.

“Get rid of your cell phones! They can be tracked, even if they’re turned off.”

I thought about the phone in my pocket. Nolan and Jeffrey must have had cell phones, too. I thanked him again, rolled up the window, and left him standing there in the empty parking lot with his confusion and his golf clubs.