The Three-Day Affair (12 page)

“Before taxes. Yeah, that’s about right.”

“And you say we can trust you.”

Another glance toward the door. “Yes. Absolutely.”

One last deep breath, as I tried to come to terms with the
inevitable
fact of Marie’s existence in our lives. Nolan and Jeffrey were watching me closely. “Okay, then there’s our answer.” I gestured toward the door. “You can go.” But before a single one of them could do or say anything, before they could catch a breath or even blink, I added: “
However
, Nolan would like to give you twenty thousand dollars first.”

Marie’s eyes widened, then narrowed. “What for?”

“And Jeffrey—he’d like to give you twenty thousand dollars, as well.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Jeffrey asked.

I explained that Jeffrey and Nolan would each give Marie a check for twenty thousand dollars. Marie would deposit the money into her bank account. “You have a bank account, don’t you?” I asked.

Still looking suspicious, she nodded.

“Good,” I said. “You’ll endorse the checks and deposit them into your account.”

“News flash, Will,” Jeffrey said. “I don’t have twenty thousand at my immediate disposal.”

“Then sell a car.” This was
my
plan, and I didn’t have any time for bullshit. “Do what you need to do. In the meantime, Nolan will loan you what you need.”

“I don’t get it,” Marie said. “What am I supposed to do with all that money?”

Nolan’s icy expression was beginning to melt. “Whatever you want,” he said.

“That’s right,” I said. “Quit your job, and go back to school. Move out of your grandmother’s house. Take a vacation. It’ll be your money. Yours to use however you want.”

As we explained the offer to Marie, her continued presence in that chair filled me with gratitude and hope. It seemed nearly
impossible
that we weren’t hearing echoes of her footfalls, the door shutting behind her. Yet here she remained.

“Forty thousand dollars.” She said the words slowly, as if
trying
to imagine the sum. And even though this was my idea, I couldn’t help thinking about where those forty thousand dollars had been allocated only hours before and silently mourning the brief financial solvency of Long-Shot Records.

“You told us you can keep a secret,” I said. “Well, this will give you some incentive to be true to your word. If you ever tell the police about us, it’ll be hard to explain away all this money you’ve willingly accepted from us. There will be a money trail, and any story you might tell about a kidnapping will be complicated by that fact.”

“It’s not an ideal plan,” Nolan added, “but everyone will make out okay this way. It’s a lot of money, Marie, and it sounds like you could really use it.”

She closed her eyes a minute. She must have been imagining all the ways that money would make her life easier. “Just say for a minute,” she said at last, “that I agreed to this. How will I know for sure you’ll keep your word?”

Nolan removed his wallet from his pants pocket and handed her a business card.

“Because the three of us want nothing more than to forget any of this ever happened. Because I’m a state senator running
for national office, and I know you hold all the cards in this
relationship
, and I believe that you know it, too. This money isn’t a gift, it’s insurance. And for that insurance, you’ll be earning more than two years’ salary. Not a bad day’s work.” Marie looked at Nolan’s card and put it into her back pocket. “So what do you say?” he asked.

She said, “This is crazy.”

“You’re considering it, though, aren’t you?” When she didn’t answer, Nolan said to Jeffrey, “Checks won’t work, though. My checkbook’s in Missouri. I assume yours is in California. But we can wire money directly to her bank account.”

“There won’t be any endorsed checks that way,” I said.

“Still, the money will be in her account,” Nolan said. “There will be an electronic record of the transaction. That’s the best we can do. I think it’s good enough.”

“And if I
don’t
agree to this,” Marie said, “I can just get up and leave?”

“That’s right,” I said. “It’s completely up to you.”

She nodded. “But if I do agree—then what happens?”

“We’ll drive you to your house,” Nolan said, “so that you can get your account information, and then we’ll go to a Western Union office and wire the money to your bank.”

“Or,” I said, “in the spirit of trust you can leave on your own, go home, and then call us here with your account information.” I looked at my friends for any objections.

“Forty thousand dollars,” she said.

“Forty thousand,” I said. It was a sleazy deal we were
making
, and I would have to find a way to live with that. Incredibly, though, it seemed like we were all going to agree. Marie would sleep in her own bed tonight, and so would I, and then
tomorrow
we could all begin to pretend that none of this had ever happened.

“And there’s no catch?” she asked.

“No catch,” I said.

“That’s right,” Nolan said.

There was a beautiful silence, the silence of a decision nearly made. Jeffrey seemed to find no joy in breaking it.

“Actually,” he said, “if we’re going to do this right, then there
is
one catch. And it’s a big one, and nobody’s going to like it.”

I awoke because of the pain in my shoulder. I rolled onto my back, but that also ached. In fact, I seemed to hurt just about everywhere. The hard floor underneath me reminded me of yet another reason why, in my experience, camping was better
imagined
than experienced. And this floor lacked even the earth’s slight give; nor was there a soft sleeping bag anywhere in sight.

It was dark—I had dimmed the overhead hours earlier—and very quiet. I lifted my head (there was one comfort, at least—an old sweatshirt I’d been using for a pillow) and saw the lack of
activity
around me. Earlier, we had carried the sofa from the control room into the main recording room. The sofa was only a loveseat, but Marie was small and seemed comfortable on it, curled on her side underneath the blanket that, if everything went according to plan, would soon return to its designated place inside the bass drum. Closer to me on the floor, Jeffrey was lying on his back, eyes closed, using his jacket for a pillow. His breathing was deep and even and, it appeared, peaceful.

I tilted my watch to catch the room’s dim light: 4:10
AM
. I’d been asleep for nearly an hour. I’d thought I would only rest my eyes for a while, as I’d done the nights before Cynthia and I fled
New York, when I used to sit by the window and worry one hour into the next.

And yet when I’d lain down tonight, I’d felt as tired as I’d ever been in my life. In a recording studio it is difficult to tell day from night, but apparently not impossible—eventually the body takes over. Evidently my exhausted body knew that night had come. Then again, for millennia human beings have fallen asleep in more perilous circumstances than ours—with tigers on the prowl, in frigid temperatures. Right now, how many people were
sleeping
exposed to the elements in Bayonne or New York or Detroit? And how many others, across the globe, were right now in dreams while around them war threatened to gut them or blow them to pieces? We call ourselves human, think we’re rational beings, but we’re animals first with animal needs. We can’t help risking the big sleep for the little one. It seemed absurd, lying there in the
studio
, that I’d ever stayed awake all night long for something as monumentally trivial as a term paper.

Nolan was awake. He lay propped up on an elbow, looking at the television, which flickered silently and gave the room a slight strobe effect.

Earlier, I had wanted to run out briefly for essentials. Now that everyone’s stay here was more or less voluntary, I began to feel a little like their host. I thought we ought to have toothbrushes, for instance, and contact lens solution. There was a twenty-four-hour supermarket a couple miles down the road, and I didn’t believe that it would be a risk for me to go there. But I was persuaded otherwise. Better to stay here. Stay unnoticed. For one night we could do without the comforts of home.

The plan—the catch—was to give Marie’s story twelve hours. First she tells us that her grandmother will practically notify the White House if she isn’t home promptly at eight o’clock, then she tells us that her grandmother actually lives in a nursing home.
First our arrest seems imminent, then she tells us that not a single person knows she’s missing. We believed the second story
because
it filled the holes in the first one. It explained why we were not yet in custody. But there could be other reasons, other
explanations
that we simply hadn’t thought of.

So before going through with my plan, a plan that would
irrevocably
tie us all together, Jeffrey had proposed—insisted, really—that we wait. That we stay right here in the studio, where we’d be insulated from the outside world, and continue to watch TV and see if the kidnapping story broke. If after twelve hours—by ten thirty tomorrow morning—there was no word of any robbery/kidnapping at the Milk-n-Bread or anybody reporting Marie
missing
, then we could assume that she was telling us the truth: that there was no surveillance tape at the store, and nobody to report her missing at home. In that case, the deal was on. In the
meantime
, the door leading from the recording room to the hallway remained unlocked and unobstructed. If at any time she wanted to abort our agreement, she was free to walk out the door. Of course, if she was telling the truth, then there’d be no need to.

Jeffrey was right. We didn’t like this. It seemed foolish to
maintain
our proximity to Marie a minute longer than necessary, let alone for twelve more hours. But Jeffrey had insisted, and Nolan soon came around to his way of thinking.

“It’s better for all of us in the long run,” he said to me. “We need to know for sure that we can trust Marie, and she needs to know for sure that she can trust us.”

“We’re only talking twelve hours,” Jeffrey added, “and for most of them we’ll be asleep.”

Fat chance of that,
I thought. And yet, amazingly, I had dozed. And beside me Jeffrey was dreaming of flying, maybe, or dunking a basketball, or perhaps he was reliving his first date with Sara in the reserve room of Firestone Library, sipping their coffees and
whispering back and forth, their whole future still tantalizingly ahead of them.

As I lay on my back, trying to ignore the hard floor beneath me, I thought about what Jeffrey had said earlier. I knew that Nolan once had a thing for Sara, but I assumed it was short-lived. I remembered the cold, rainy afternoon of our sophomore year when Nolan stopped by my dorm room and asked if we could go for a walk. Never mind the freezing rain—he needed to talk through a problem he was having, and he preferred to do it on the move. He was always on the move.

I needed to return my car to the parking lot at the edge of campus, so we drove there together and then walked back toward the dorms. But he wasn’t talking. He was kicking a rock in front of him, until it rolled into the gutter. Then he said, “So I’m sort of in love with Sara.”

I nearly laughed. “Oh, is that all? Come on, we all are.” Jeffrey had a habit of telling Sara that she was the prettiest girl in the room. This wasn’t mere flattery. We had all become friendly with her by then, and despite the various imperfections that had come to light—like how, despite her high grades, she seemed to require constant reassurance from her professors; like how one of her front teeth wasn’t real, having been knocked out by a field hockey stick in high school gym class—I nonetheless continued to view her as someone on whom the Great Sculptor had worked overtime.

Unlike many women her age, Sara seemed to recognize the power of her body, of her beauty. She hadn’t yet learned this
lesson
that day of freshman year in our modern European authors class. She hadn’t imagined just how threatening her sexuality might seem, even to an internationally renowned academic like Professor Rinehart. But this was a lesson she came to learn, and in the three years I’d known her she had changed in subtle ways,
toning
down the makeup, dressing a little more like it was 1994 in
Jersey and the trend in fashion was to obscure rather than reveal. She had changed just enough to make her time at Princeton easier.

Except at parties. Then the hair came down and the cowboy boots came out, and, in her words, her “inner Texas” got
unleashed
onto an unsuspecting campus.

Yet even then she was no flirt. Guys would seek her out,
laserlike
, standing too close, shouting over some band playing Pearl Jam or Nirvana and toasting her plastic cup of beer with their own. She would slip away gracefully and go over to Jeffrey and put her arm around his waist—or, in his absence, she’d come over to one of us and say, “Save me.” So you’d engage in the easy banter particular to a guy and his buddy’s girlfriend. And you couldn’t help feeling proud, knowing that you were the one that the prettiest girl in the room had chosen as her knight in flannel armor.

At one of these parties, when intoxication had sufficiently
lowered
my inhibitions, I asked her what exactly she saw in Jeffrey. Simple curiosity. He was my friend, but she seemed out of his league.

“I know he won’t beat the shit out of me,” she said with little hesitation. Then, as if basing her next words on my reaction, she grinned. “I’m kidding. I mean, books.” Before Princeton, she went on to explain, she’d never met a guy who read books outside of class. Then, as if unsatisfied with literature as an answer, she went on to mention his smile, his sense of humor, his intellect. Then her face lit up again, as if just remembering something. “And he loves me.”

But now Nolan was telling me that he, too, loved her. “I’m being serious,” he said. “I’ve thought about this for a while. I think I’m in actual love with her. I’m talking about we-can-be-
together-forever
kind of love.”

Nolan’s romantic exploits rarely included the same woman for very long. He wasn’t looking for love, and—the way he told it, anyway—he seemed remarkably candid about this fact with the women he dated. He believed that his liaisons were in fact far more honest and respectful than most long-term, monogamous relationships, which, as he described them, were typically nothing but cauldrons of manipulation and hurt feelings. My own theory was that his philosophy came second to his actions. He was a good-looking guy with a magnetic personality. He found
romantic
partners easily.

He’d never given me any indication that he gave the matter of love any thought at all, let alone “forever,” and I could only
assume
that he had surprised himself, as well.

“It’s too bad she’s with Jeffrey,” I said.

“Yeah. Too bad.”

“But she
is
with Jeffrey. So …”

In January, the Gothic buildings, leafless maples, and brown athletic fields looked dreary and ominous. I sloshed through a puddle.

“It kills me, you know,” he said, “seeing them together.”

“I understand,” I said, “but that’s how it is.”

“God, Will, what does she see in him?”

“Oh, don’t start blaming Jeffrey. That isn’t cool.”

“Maybe. It’s just that I’ve never felt this way about anyone.”

“You never kept any of them around long enough.” His
record
, I believed, was a month. “You’ve known Sara now for two years. Which of your girlfriends have you known that long?”

It was a question I could’ve asked myself. I’d dated a few women, and none of them had aroused feelings in me that
remotely
suggested forever.

“Good point,” he said.

We passed a cluster of dormitories built during World War II, squat ugly structures with names like “1942 Hall” that resembled army barracks and were consistently bypassed, I’d noticed, on campus tours in favor of the older, ornate buildings for which the university was known.

“Look,” I said, “if they were to break up sometime down the road … maybe that’d be a different story. But otherwise, you can’t make a move. You just can’t. It’s that simple.”

“It is?”

“Of course. So you’ll just have to put her out of your mind. Anyway, it’s not like you have any trouble, how do I say this …”

“If you’re going to tell me that there are plenty of fish in the sea, I’m going to beat you senseless.”

But then he thanked me for listening to him, and soon we reached our dormitory, where we lived in adjacent singles. After I went into my room and he into his, we never spoke of the matter again. Within the week, Nolan had begun a brand-new liaison, and I could clearly hear the honesty and respect coming from the other side of our shared wall.

So it surprised me to learn about Nolan’s election-night
confession
all those years later. However ill-advised, it did reveal a level of longing and romantic depth that I hadn’t known he was capable of feeling.

But also, if Nolan really had confessed his love to Sara while in some drunken, postelection despair, why would the incident, now six years in the past, continue to bother Jeffrey? Except, I knew why. Jeffrey had linked that transgression to another, earlier one. And the combined effect was evidently to tarnish Nolan
irrevocably
in Jeffrey’s eyes.

Before today, I hadn’t the faintest clue that one of my closest friends was deemed a serpent in the eyes of my other friend. And
wasn’t that the strangest thing of all? Jeffrey had been able to
conceal
those feelings from the rest of us all these years. The Jeffrey I’d met twelve years ago would’ve been incapable of that sort of deception. It was why I’d liked him immediately—his
transparent
, somewhat bewildered expression was a refreshing change from the guarded gleam I saw in the eyes of so many future
lawyers
and CEOs and bankers on campus.

Jeffrey’s parents must have protected him well, because except for the cigarettes, he’d seemed a young eighteen when I first met him. He seemed a bit immature, or—to take his age out of the equation—prone to emotional swings, and I used to imagine that somewhere in the world there was an artist searching fruitlessly for his temperament.

As I was thinking about Jeffrey, he let out a heavy sigh in his sleep and rolled over onto his side.

I wondered what, exactly, had changed him. What about his personality had led to today’s blatant unhinging? Was it
personality
at all, or was it circumstance, or some amalgam of the two? And if so, were any of us immune?

Once this evening’s agreement had been reached, and the twelve hours lay long before us, we had little to say to one
another
. We were talked out, and so we watched TV. At eleven o’clock we watched the local news, anxiously waiting, but then the hard news was over and we were looking at sports highlights, then a map of the United States—plenty of sun over much of the country—and then eleven thirty arrived and with it the brassy riffs signaling the beginning of late-night television.

Nolan, Jeffrey, and I came up with shifts to watch TV. Jeffrey until 1
AM
, Nolan from 1 to 4, and me from 4 to 7. None of us
believed
that we’d actually get any sleep, but all the same it felt
productive
to make a plan.