The Three-Day Affair

by Michael Kardos

  “You’re probably better off calling from a pay phone anyway.” I told him there was a phone at the gas station two blocks away. “But can I call Cynthia first? She goes to bed early when she’s at her sister’s.”

  This was completely illogical of me. Time was precious. But I had a sense it might be the last time I spoke to her as a free man.

  He nodded. “Try to make it quick, though.”

  I told him I would. Then I hesitated. “Do you think it’s at all strange that the robbery hasn’t been on the radio? When I was in the car, I kept listening for it.”

  He thought for a moment. “I think every single thing about this fucking situation is strange.”

  I went into one of the stalls and came out with a roll of toilet paper. “Do me a favor.” I tossed him the roll. “Take this in to Jeffrey. And try not to kill anyone while I’m gone.”

  CHAPTER 11

  I had change on me, but not enough. The gas station attendant changed a five-dollar bill for me. (Sure, I remember the guy, I pictured him saying to the police. Gave him twenty quarters.) The phone was attached to the station that only partially blocked the wind that’d kicked up. I called Cynthia’s cell, and when the electronic voice told me how much money to deposit, I began to feed the telephone with quarters.

  Since our niece regularly woke up at dawn, spending the next fourteen hours wearing everybody out, Cynthia went to bed early when she stayed there. She could already be asleep. And even if she were awake, she might let my call go through to her voicemail, not recognizing the number.

  Then I heard that single word—“Hello?”—and my chest tightened. A giant chasm opened up between what I knew and what she didn’t, and I had to force myself not to confess everything.

  “It’s me,” I said. Deep breath, I told myself. Take a deep breath, and lie to your wife. “My cell isn’t working for some reason. How’re you doing?”

  “I’m good,” she said. “Tired.”

  “Me too. We went to Antonello’s for dinner.”

  “Did you have a good time?”

  Just a few hours earlier I was ready to announce, You and I are officially in the record business.

  “Sure,” I said. “It was okay.”

  “Did you have a lot to drink?”

  “Not too much. Why?”

  “You sound funny.”

  “I am funny.”

  She didn’t laugh, but I knew she was smiling. “Oh, so get this,” she said. “Anne was riding her tricycle around the driveway, and I was drawing a road for her with colored chalk . . .”

  I listened, but less to the story itself than to her voice. The lightness of it.

  She didn’t talk for long. Didn’t want to keep me on the phone. “Thanks for checking in,” she said, “but you should get back to your friends.”

  I told her good night.

  “Have a good time,” she said. “Enjoy golf tomorrow.”

  I said I would.

  “Good night, Will,” she said.

  “Wait.”

  “What is it?”

  I needed to get off the phone. Return to the studio. Nolan was waiting.

  “Tell me something first,” I said. “Before you hang up.”

  “Tell you what?”

  Anything, I wanted to say. Tell me anything. Instead, I asked her about the traffic on the Jersey Turnpike. If it was heavy.

  I returned to the control room and told Nolan where to find the telephone. I handed him the rest of my quarters and my building key so he could let himself back in.

  “Where’s Jeffrey?” I asked.

  “Bathroom. Trying to fix his face.”

  After Nolan left, I sat down and waited. Marie was turned away from me, facing the rear of Room A. I felt a strong curiosity about her, and a desire for her to like me, and I wondered if this was true of all kidnappers.

  At least a full minute passed before it dawned on me. There she sat, not thirty feet away. It would be easy. I could have her out and into the cool night air in half a minute. Nothing was stopping me. Except for me.

  Once, I saw a hypnotist perform at a bachelor party. When he told his subjects that they couldn’t get out of their chairs, they really couldn’t. They struggled with all their might—teeth gritting, muscles tightening—but not one of them got out of the chair. I was commanding myself to get up. And I was also commanding myself not to.

  There were a hundred reasons to let her go, yet I felt locked to my chair. It wasn’t only the fear that she’d tell. I still believed in Nolan, and in myself. Believed that we’d find a way out of this with our lives more or less whole. I didn’t believe this completely. Just enough to cause me to hesitate, until Jeffrey appeared in the control room’s doorway, a big wad of paper towel pressed to his face. As he stepped into the room, the big box of untapped courage inside of me snapped shut.

  “How’s the tooth?” I asked.

  I felt chilled, looking at him. His fat lip curved upward like a grotesque grin.

  “It’s still in my mouth.” He sat down on the sofa. “You smell like smoke.”

  I removed the cigarette pack and lighter from my pants pocket and handed them to him. Then I watched him try to hold a cigarette in his busted lips.

  “Why did you say earlier that Nolan was a snake?” I asked. We obviously weren’t going to make a move until Nolan returned, and I wanted to get to the bottom of something.

  He lit the cigarette and took a long draw, like he’d been waiting all his life for that jolt of tar and nicotine. He exhaled and handed me back the pack and lighter. “Oh, pick your reason.”

  “No, I’m serious. Tell me why you said it.”

  “You’re telling me that you disagree with the assessment?”

  “Yes, frankly, I do.”

  Another draw of the cigarette. He shut his eyes in bliss, or maybe pain, and exhaled a stream of smoke. “After all these years, Will, your naïveté continues to astound me.”

  CHAPTER 12

  It all went back to Nolan’s first political campaign.

  Before then, I’d never traveled west of the Mississippi River. A year earlier, with my band stagnating and love life nonexistent, I’d have gladly traded the callous streets of New York for twenty million acres of corn and soybean, for wide autumn skies unspoiled by smog. For four weeks, that would’ve been a real treat.

  By the summer of 1996, though, High Noon was performing in better venues and beginning to generate a little attention. Low men on various music-industry totem poles were starting to make vague promises. When Nolan called and asked for my help, I knew that the rest of the band wouldn’t take well to my leaving.

  But it’d always been my conviction that nothing trumped loyalty to a friend. So I begged the band for their understanding—and if not that, their forgiveness—and I agreed to fly to Missouri in early October and stay there through the election.

  Then Cynthia came into the picture.

  When I met her, she was a senior editor at Center Magazine, a Manhattan arts and culture weekly. One night she happened to catch the band’s set, and afterward she came up to us and asked for an interview. Even the low-wattage room didn’t dim her intelligent blue gaze. I liked looking at her. A red beret capped her head like a cherry on a sundae, and a small stud pierced her nose. Her smile was friendly and unguarded. She looked like the girl next door if the girl next door had spent a year in Europe.

  She plucked a golf pencil from behind her ear, and in the little notebook she was carrying she scribbled down the date and time when we would meet. She thanked us repeatedly, as if we were the ones doing the favor.

  We all met up later that week at an Irish pub near the NYU campus. Cynthia set a tape recorder on the table, and for the next two hours she ordered pitchers of McSorley’s and asked us questions. I liked that she talked about music as if it mattered, but not as
if it mattered more than it actually did. And I liked her vocabulary, such as when she asked the band if we thought that grunge was here for good or “evanescent.” This turned me on.

  When the interview was over, she stopped the tape and my bandmates all made polite excuses and left. Only much later, when our relationship was secure, would I reveal to Cynthia the secret behind those quick exits. It’d all been prearranged. I don’t ask for much, I’d said to my bandmates before the interview, hand on heart. Please—give me this chance alone with her. The guys, romantic fools the lot of them, agreed.

  Alone with Cynthia, over the next two hours I fell in love little by little.

  There was beauty, of course, but this was New York City, where beautiful women seemed to outnumber the pigeons that flocked every park and street corner. No, what got me was that in a city of manufactured looks, manufactured personalities, everything calculated and posed, she seemed genuine. Everyone I met those days claimed to earn a living as a musician or writer or actor or painter. Hearing people talk, one could only conclude that the city must have been suffering from an alarming shortfall of waiters and receptionists.

  Yet Cynthia didn’t hesitate to tell me that Center Magazine was new and underfunded. Also, that despite having the title of senior editor, she made most of her money working as an administrative assistant for a public relations firm. I revealed my own secret: to help with bills, twenty hours a week I worked for minimum wage at a recording studio.

  “Occasionally they let me near the sound console,” I explained. “But mostly I answer the phones, clean the bathroom, and go on sandwich runs.”

  “You and I live glamorous lives.” She smiled and patted the back of my hand.

  When we left the pub, I walked her to the subway and asked for her number. She had that notebook with her, but she wrote her number on the palm of my hand. We saw each other twice more that week. And for the first time I understood why so many sentimental movies took place in Manhattan. The city’s grit and trash suddenly seemed coated with a romantic veneer. I found myself smiling to pretzel venders and subway-token salesmen, buying candles and artwork to spruce up my crumbling, roach-riddled apartment. And hoping.

  The article came out two weeks later. In my view, she’d made the band out to be far more interesting than we actually were.

  “You should be our publicist,” I joked.

  “Actually, I’ll probably move into PR eventually,” she told me. “It pays a lot better than arts journalism.”

  More significant than the substance of this exchange, however, was its location: my apartment. Specifically, my heretofore unremarkable bed, new candles burning on the nightstand, music from a nearby street fair wafting in through the open window.

  I leaned over and kissed her. She kissed me back. Then we just lay there awhile, enjoying the music. We were lazing away a perfect, autumn Sunday afternoon, after spending our first night together. Exactly two days before I had to leave for fucking Missouri.

  I packed my suitcase, endured a terrifying flight through black thunderstorms, and landed in Kansas City. Rented a Chevy Blazer. Be sure it’s an American car, Nolan had warned. People notice these things. Then drove ninety miles into Missouri’s heartland, to the Albright family farm in Nodaway County.

  When I’d met Nolan that first day of our freshman year in college, I’d asked him what town he was from.

  “Town?” He’d shaken his head. “No town.” If you needed to send him a letter, he’d said, you used the zip code for Stokesville, five miles to the south.

  In the last several years, however, the city limits of Stokesville had expanded those few miles to include the farm and the land around it. Farmers saw the city’s expansion as an opportunity to sell their land for development. Not Nolan’s parents, though, despite their property’s appealing location at an intersection of two county roads. They still worked their hundred-acre farm as the town steadily encroached on them. Driving to the farm, I passed a lot of new construction—a residential neighborhood, a row of stores—and I could see into the future to a time when there would be car dealerships and chain restaurants and gas stations, eventually a shopping mall, and then it would look exactly like the America I’d grown up knowing.

  Although Nolan rented an apartment in town, he still referred to the farm as home. From there he ran his campaign. As I pulled up the driveway, a small black terrier ran in front of my car. I stopped the car and got out, and the dog barked comically and spun around in a few circles. A moment later, Nolan came outside.

  “When’d you get Cujo?” I asked.

  “My mother got him from the pound a couple of months ago. She said she’d always wanted a little dog.”

  Nolan’s mother was responsible for his interest in politics. She’d studied political science in college and, for a couple years, had an administrative job at the statehouse in Jefferson City. That was before meeting Mr. Albright and moving to Stokesville, where she became a more than capable farmer.

  But in the spring she’d been diagnosed with breast cancer. Radi­cal mastectomy, chemo, the whole mess. Nolan hadn’t told me much—it obviously upset him to talk about it—but he did say it’d come as a real shock. His mother had gone to her doctor several months before and been assured that the lump she thought she felt was nothing to worry about.

  “How’s your mom doing?” I asked.

  “I don’t like the wig,” he replied. “Makes her look old. Otherwise, she’s doing all right.” He sighed. “I mean, no she isn’t. But we’re trying to be hopeful, you know? Anyway, she likes me running the campaign from home. That way she can still feel part of it.” He bent down to pet the dog, which had flopped over and was wriggling on its back. I noticed its collar had rhinestones on it. “Molly’s a good dog. We had a couple of hunting dogs growing up, coon hounds. They were good dogs, too, but this one’s different. This one’s my mother’s dog.”

  Nolan took one of my bags, and we went inside, led by Molly. The house was two stories and decorated with simplicity, even elegance. I hadn’t ever been to his family’s farm before, and certain touches—a retro-looking leather sofa, a framed Rothko print—struck me more as SoHo than Missouri. (My urban bias would dissipate in the weeks that followed to the point where, upon returning to New York, I’d find myself bristling at rude waiters and jerking awake at night with every passing wail of a patrol car or ambulance.) The house’s single nod to its rustic location was a cow skull hanging over the mantel.

  A dozen or so people of all ages were standing around the living room and looking grave. Nolan explained to me that they’d convened in order to assemble the one thousand yard signs that were due to be delivered that morning—they were already weeks overdue—but he’d just gotten word, moments before I arrived, that the delivery was being delayed again.

  “I needed for them to be made locally,” Nolan explained, “but I’m starting to think the manufacturer doesn’t support our campaign.”

  “You mean they’re intentionally—”

  “Welcome to Missouri politics.” He clapped his hands. “All right, people,” he said to the room, “we have work to do, signs or no signs.”

  They divided into canvassing groups and spent a few minutes looking over maps and lists of registered voters. Then they went out to their cars to convince the citizens of District Twelve that it was “all right to vote Albright.” Nolan’s father went with them—after giving me a bone-crunching handshake—wearing a T-shirt that said, “Vote for my son.”

  Only after they were gone did Mrs. Albright come downstairs. She had on blue jeans and a loose-fitting sweater. I hadn’t seen her since graduation. I didn’t remember her being a small woman, but she looked small now—shrunken, and tired. The wig wasn’t so bad, though.

  She smiled and took both my hands in hers. “It means so much to Nolan to have you here,” she said.

  I told her I was glad to come.
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br />   “You’re a good friend,” she said. “You always have been. Now fix yourself a snack—I’ll bet they didn’t give you anything on that plane.”

  She was right—I was starving. Nolan and I went into the kitchen and Mrs. Albright headed back upstairs. When she was out of earshot I quietly asked, “Do you want to talk about . . .”

  He shook his head. “I’d rather talk about anything else.”

  So I asked him about all the canvassing his volunteers were doing. I wanted to know if it actually worked.

  “You don’t win elections around here with radio or TV ads,” he said. “Not that we’ve got the money for that anyway. Here, the personal touch is everything. Meeting voters, shaking their hand, hearing what they have to say, telling them what you’re all about. Reminding them that you’re from these parts, and your family is from these parts.” His voice seemed to slow down a notch. I detected the drawl that seeped in sometimes during a college debate. “And it doesn’t hurt to have a secret weapon.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  He laughed. “You, that’s what. The volunteers are dedicated and some of them are even smart, but not one of them can really think, let alone write a good sentence.” My job, he explained, besides helping to keep the volunteers organized, was to crank up the campaign’s publicity effort—writing press releases to all the local papers, letters to the editor, and updates to the campaign’s newsletter. Plus, I’d overhaul any campaign literature that I felt needed it.

  He showed me the magazine rack with all the press coverage so far: newspapers, mostly, but a few glossy magazines—Missouri Monthly and the Princeton Alumni Weekly.

  On a table in the living room was a computer and laser printer. Nolan opened a file on the word processor. “Here’s my position on every issue that affects our district,” he said. “Take the afternoon and read it all. Tonight, you can ask me anything you don’t understand. But now,” he said, heading for the door, “I have the important job of getting a haircut.” He grinned. “In Missouri, hippies don’t win elections.”