“Wade,” Hettie said, her voice almost a whisper. “Why did you come over here tonight?”
He was silent for a few seconds, and then he said, “Will you let me make love to you?” He released her and sat back on his heels and looked up at her face, which was filled with confusion and fear, although he did not see that. He said, “Just this one time, here, in this place. In the dark, with the lights out, and you can be Lillian, and I’ll be whoever you want. I’ll be Jack, if you want. Just this one time.”
“I can’t, Wade. I’m scared. No kidding, really. I’m scared of this. You should go.”
“In the dark I can call you Lillian, and you can call me Jack. And it will only happen this one time. I need to do that. Lillian.”
“Please. Please don’t call me Lillian.” Her eyes welled up, and tears broke across her cheeks. “You’re scaring me.”
Wade reached up and touched her hair at the bottom of her long slender neck. “You look nice with your hair cut short like that,” he said, and he reached beyond her to the light switch on the wall and doused the overhead light, a bulb hidden in a Chinese paper shade, dropping the room into darkness, with only the lamp in the bedroom showing now, casting a long plank of light into the room, so that they could see the shape of each other’s bodies but could not make out the face. And he did look like Jack to her at that moment, kneeling next to her, one hand on her thigh, the other on her shoulder, his fingertips brushing her throat. He said, “I wonder what your hair smells like now. If it smells the same as it used to when I kissed you and we made love.”
She was shaking; her heart was pounding and the blood roared in her ears.
“Lillian,” he said. “Say my name. Say it.”
“This scares me. Don’t.”
“I want you to say my name. Jack. Say it.”
“I’m afraid. I really am.”
“Lillian.”
She whispered his name. “Jack.”
He touched her lips with the tips of his fingers. “Say it again.”
“Jack.”
He took her hand and placed her fingers across his lips, and he said, “Lillian.”
He stood slowly and said, “Wait here,” and he walked into the bedroom, crossed to the bedside table and put out the light. Then he quickly returned through the darkness to stand behind her.
She said, “This scares me a whole lot. We shouldn’t do this.”
“It’s all right. We’re not who we are. I’m Jack, and you’re Lillian.” He reached down and placed his hands on her shoulders. He let his hands slide to her breasts and gently hold them, and she laid her head back against him, her breath coming rapidly now, as he moved his hands over her breasts, her nipples hardening, her hands on his, pressing them against her. Then he was kissing her neck, her ears, her cheeks and her lips, and she was kissing him back, and they were standing in the room holding tightly to one another, and in seconds they were moving through the darkness to the bedroom.
She said to me, “I knew it was wrong, but it isn’t like I was married to Jack or anything. And things had been pretty bad between him and me lately anyway, Jack and me, since that hunting accident he was involved with. I guess I was mad at him. And I liked Wade, you know, he was like an old friend, ever since I was a kid, and he had always been real sweet to me, and he seemed so sad and all. I really felt sorry for him. And it was like just this one time. I had never been what you’d call attracted to Wade, but this one night, it was different. And making me call him Jack like that, and him calling me Lillian, it was strange, like being real high, and it kind of took me over, you know?”
Wade undressed her in the darkness, and then he took off his own clothes and moved onto her, gently kissing her with his damaged mouth, drawing her warm breath into him, gulping it down. He lifted himself up on his arms, and she opened to him like a flower, and he entered her, easily, with excruciating slowness, until he was all the way in, and he felt huge to himself, as if he had gone all the way up into her chest and were touching Lillian’s heart.
Down in front of the store, a burgundy pickup pulled off the road and parked next to Pop’s truck. The road was empty and dark. The store windows reflected the flash of the headlights, while Jack sat in his truck and peered up through the windshield and saw that there were no lights on in Hettie’s apartment. Shit, he thought, and he looked at his watch in the green glow of the dashboard.
Then, wondering what the hell Wade’s father’s truck was doing parked in front of the store by the gas pump, he got out and looked inside, thinking that maybe the old bastard had passed out and was lying on the seat. Gone. Strange. The sonofabitch’s probably three sheets to the wind down at Toby’s, wondering where the hell he left his truck, Jack thought.
He moved around to the front of his own truck, and pulled a small notepad and pencil from his shirt pocket, and, in the reflected splash from the headlights off the store windows, scribbled a note and tore it from the pad. He walked heavily up the stairs to the landing and stopped in front of Hettie’s door. He studied the door for a second, and thought, What the hell, maybe she came home already and fell asleep, and he turned the doorknob. The door swung open, and Jack stepped inside.
“Hettie?” he called into the darkness. “Hey, babes, you here?” Silence.
“By then, when Jack came,” Hettie explained to me, “we were just lying there in the darkness, you know? Not saying anything, just thinking, I guess, about what we’d done. This terrible thing we’d done, Wade and me. I was really scared when I heard Jack outside, and then, when he actually came into the apartment, I jumped, and I was so scared I almost screamed. But I didn’t. Wade, he didn’t even seem to react. I mean, like he just lay there the same way, without even his breathing changing, his hands behind his head, like he was going to lie there on his back naked in bed and let Jack walk right into the room. It was weird.
“But then I heard Jack bump against something in the living room, and he swore and tried to find the light switch on the wall, you know, right by the door. But he couldn’t find it, so he backed outside to the landing again, thank God, and a few seconds later, I heard him go back down the stairs, and finally I heard his truck drive off.”
Slowly, Wade sat up and swung his legs off the bed, as if he were an old sick man. He stood and in the darkness began to dress. He and Hettie said nothing to each other, and when he was dressed, he walked from the bedroom to the couch, where he had tossed his hat and coat. He picked them up and put them on and went out onto the landing — closing the door behind him with care, as if he did not want anyone to hear him.
Jack’s note fluttered from the door to the landing. Wade leaned down and picked it up and read it: Meet me at Toby’s. I got some good news today. Love, Jack. Wade inserted the note between the door and the jamb just above the doorknob, where Jack had placed it, then went down the stairs. He started up Pop’s truck and left, heading north on Route 29, out of town, toward home.
22
THIS TIME, FOR HIS MEETING with J. Battle Hand, Wade dressed up, or at least he did not appear in his work clothes: he wore the dark-blue gabardine sports jacket and brown trousers he had worn to Ma’s funeral, with a white shirt and a green-and-silver diagonally striped tie — clothing he had purchased over the last couple of years at J. C. Penney’s in Littleton, so that he could go to weddings or funerals or out with Margie for a movie and Chinese food, say, and not look like a hick, a woodchuck, a goddamned shitkicker from the hills of Cow Hampshire.
Lillian had always scolded Wade about his taste in clothing: he did not have bad taste, she told him, he had no taste, which was worse. He simply did not care how his clothing looked, she explained; he cared only that it functioned adequately to cover his nakedness and protect him from the elements. Early on, Lillian had actually found this quality endearing, but as she grew older and a bit more sophisticated herself, Wade’s apparent inability to care how he looked began to embarrass and irritate her. Then, three years before, when he had gone to court for his divorce wearing what he wore every day in those days — dark-blue twill trousers and shirt, with Wade on the left shirt pocket and LaRiviere Co. on the right— Lillian had been unable, even on so formal and momentous an occasion, to restrain her embarrassment and deep irritation with his clothing, and her words had cut him deeply enough to let him, for the first time in his life, see himself in his clothes as he thought others saw him, and he never wore LaRiviere’s uniform again, even to work. They had come out of the courtroom, during the judge’s lunch break, still waiting for their case to be heard, and were standing in the hallway outside, and, while talking strategy with their respective lawyers, had inadvertently backed into each other. When they turned to apologize for the bump, they both expected to see a stranger, but instead husband and wife suddenly found themselves standing face to face.