He closed his eyes for a few seconds and leaned against the cut-stone wall behind him, and when he opened them he saw a car ease through the falling snow into the parking lot. It was a dark-green Mercedes sedan driven by a man who, Wade knew at once, was here to meet Lillian. The car drew up next to Lillian’s Audi, and she instantly got out, walked purposefully around the front and got in.
The headlights reflected off the wall of the warehouse and cast light back into the car, and Wade could see Lillian and the man clearly, as if they were up on a stage, while they kissed. It was a long serious kiss, but slightly formal too, done without their arms around one another: they were a man and a woman who had been lovers for a long time and who knew that their kiss was only a preliminary and did not have to stand for everything else. Then, when they drew apart, Lillian handed what was left of her joint to the man, and he relit it and inhaled deeply, and Wade realized that he knew him.
The man backed the Mercedes away from the wall, and his face disappeared into darkness again, but Wade had seen him; he knew absolutely who he was. There could be no doubt. The face was one Wade would never forget: it had shamed him, and then it had haunted him, and Wade had come to despise it. The face was smooth and symmetrical, as large as an actor’s, with square chin, wide brow, long straight nose. The man’s hair was dark, with distinguished flecks of gray, combed straight back. And he was taller than Wade by six inches, at least, and appeared to be in good condition, the kind of condition you buy from a health club, Wade had once observed. His name was Cotter, Jackson Cotter, of Cotter, Wilcox and Browne, and he was from an old Concord political family, and no doubt he was married, had three beautiful children and lived in a big Victorian house up on the west end. And here he was having an affair with Lillian, who three years before had been his client in what he no doubt regarded as a simple but slightly unpleasant upstate divorce case.
Jackson Cotter turned his big green Mercedes around and headed out of the parking lot to the street, turned left and disappeared. Wade realized that his mouth was open, and he closed it. He felt wonderful. Jesus, he felt great! He was standing alone in a darkened doorway next to a restaurant parking lot in downtown Concord in a snowstorm, and he felt more purely cheerful than he had felt in years. Maybe ever. He clapped his hands together as if applauding, stepped from the doorway and strode into the falling snow.
A minute later, he was back in The Stone Warehouse shoving a quarter into the pay phone at the bottom of the stairs. This time, after three rings, someone answered: it was Lillian’s husband, Bob Horner; he caught Wade by surprise. Wade pictured the man with an apron tied around his waist and almost laughed, but he quickly recovered and said in what he felt was his normal manner of speaking to Horner on such occasions, “This’s Wade. Is Jill around?”
Horner was silent for a few seconds. Then he said, “Ah… no. No, Wade, she’s not here.”
“Jeez, that’s too bad. She out with her mom someplace?”
“No. No, Jill’s with a friend.”
“You expect her back soon? I’m in town, you see. In Concord. And I was hoping maybe I could scoot by and take her out for a pizza or something.”
Horner hesitated, then said, “It’s kind of late, Wade… and she’s… Jill’s staying overnight with a friend tonight.”
“Oh-h.” Wade hoped he sounded disappointed.
“Yeah, well, maybe if she’d known you were going to be in town…”
“I didn’t know myself,” Wade said. “But next time I’ll call ahead,” he offered.
Horner said that was a good idea and he would tell Jill that he had called. Then he said, “Wade, maybe I shouldn’t mention this, but I was wondering…”
“What?”
“Well, I don’t want to stir things up again, but… look, I lost my hat the other night up there. In Lawford. I was wondering if maybe somebody picked it up. You didn’t see it, did you? After we left.”
Wade said, “Your hat? You had a hat?”
“Yes.” His voice had turned cold; he knew Wade was lying. “A green felt hat.”
“Jeez, Bob, I don’t remember any hat. But I’ll keep an eye out for it. Maybe somebody else snagged it. You never know.”
Horner said thanks and then hurriedly got off the phone.
Smiling broadly, Wade hung up, mounted the stairs and stood at the cash register for a second. He noticed that the three young women and the two guys at the bar had left; the place was almost empty now. There were only a few diners sitting at the tables, and the waitresses were standing around in the back, talking to one another.
The cashier, a stout middle-aged woman filing her nails, said to him, “How much snow out there?”
“Oh, inch or two, I guess. Not much.”
“Enough to keep everybody home, though,” she said.
“Yeah. Which is where I ought to be getting,” Wade said.
“It’s too early for winter,” the woman observed.
“Yeah. Yeah, it is,” Wade said, and he pulled his watch cap down over his ears. “But I like it,” he said, and he waved and went out the door.
“Drive careful,” the woman called after him, but he didn’t hear her.
Making love with Margie that night was especially easy for Wade. Not that it was ever difficult; it was just that sometimes Wade would rather be left alone to think his own thoughts, to use his skull as a wall that kept him in and other people out.
But being in bed with Margie made Wade feel safe and free in ways that he rarely felt — not at work, certainly, thanks to LaRiviere, and not when he was at home alone, either, and not when he was with Jill, and not once with Lillian in all those years of being married to her. When he was drinking late at Toby’s he sometimes got to feeling safe, but never free.
No, it was only with Margie, and only in bed with her, that he felt the way he imagined he should have as a child but could not, because of his father, mostly, but also his mother, who could not protect him. And thus, when he lay down beside Margie and they began to make love to one another, he often hesitated, held back slightly, as if loitering, while she plunged on ahead. Then she would grow impatient and would urge him to hurry up, for God’s sake, let us not hang around here any longer than we have to, my friend, and he would come forward toward her, and that would be that.
Tonight, though, he loitered not at all. He had arrived at Margie’s house around eight-thirty, his drive north from Concord slowed somewhat by the snow. All the way up, he had pictured Margie naked and turning softly in her bed beneath him, her arms flung back, mouth open, legs wrapped tightly around his hips, her sweet soft skin smooth and pliant, her large slow body suddenly vulnerable, swift and intrepidly intimate, the way Wade believed only women could be, and when he walked across her back porch into the warm kitchen, he was already tumescent, oh boy, ready to go; and she was ready too, perhaps having numerous times that afternoon and evening imagined him naked and in bed as well, his tough thick body arched intently over her at that exquisite moment when he first entered her, so mysteriously male and powerful in that precise way, in the way of his maleness, that to give herself over to the power, to succumb willingly to the sheer physical force of his body, was to enter deeply into the mystery, which she did instantly, for that was where she wanted to be.