TRUTH
In a night that registered the rhythmic coos of birds and the dripping of dew from the gutters, a night when cats padded across the dark streets without a sound and stray dogs roamed the downtown alleys banging over garbage cans in search of food, in a night when the night trains came through with their lonesome whistles on the approach and then faded away quickly down the long tracks into the dark, in a night when truth weighed on Veronica, and Lowell was back at last and in deep sleep, a night a few weeks after his return when nothing much was expected, Veronica turned on her bedside lamp and sat up, waiting for Lowell to awaken. She listened to his even breathing. She looked at his face. Whatever was dogging her, she could no longer resist it. When Lowell did wake up, she spilled all: “While you were gone, because I knew you’d slept with Carol, I fucked Howie Packer—twice in fact, in the Inman Hotel in Champaign. At the Kopi, we sat and talked, and planned the paint and the concrete, and then, without a word of discussion, we went to the hotel. It was odd. We didn’t talk about going, we just went. It was what I wanted.”
Lowell, suddenly wide awake, didn’t say anything.
“So,” Veronica said. “There it is.” This level of frankness was more their style than the long silences, which had taken over after Lowell’s return from rehab and were, in effect, lies. She loved Lowell and didn’t want the whole thing to blow up. Still, she did mean to push hard, to deaver tell the truth brutally, which was how brutal truths needed to be told.
“Okay,” Lowell said. He rolled onto his side and turned on his light. Rolled back onto his back and took a big breath.
She stared at him. “Okay? That’s all you’ve got?”
He was quiet a moment. Then he whispered: “I saw her scars.” He stared into his bedside light. “He really cut her up.”
“Why did he do it?”
“We’ll probably never know.” Lowell yawned. “The theory is, he did it because she was fucking Nick Bellinger, and he deduced that from her phone calls. Or maybe Rachel Crowley told him—how she knew we’ll never know. Also of course Wally was prone to going off his rocker and, here’s where I come in, he was a poor match for the Prozac Doc Landen had prescribed for him at my request.”
“So you think you figured in the stabbing scenario.”
“Yeah. I saw there was a problem with the Prozac, but I didn’t call Landen to get Wally on something else. I had too much going on. I kept putting it off, never dreaming that something really awful would happen. I never called him.” He tossed himself over, flipped a pillow. “I never called Landen about the Prozac.”
Veronica considered at what level of detail these truths should come out. There was such a thing as too much. “Interesting,” she said, “because I had a chance to see Howie’s scars, too. He was shot in the back in Vietnam. Through his shoulder blade, then a huge exit wound out the front.”
Lowell nodded. “Yeah.” He turned his head to look at her. “He told me all about it. I’m his shrink.”
“Used to be.” Howie had also recently begun ducking Veronica.
“What?”
“You used to be his counselor. I doubt he’ll be back.”
Lowell sighed. “Ah. Yeah. Probably not. I noticed I haven’t heard from him to get started up again.” Lowell thought for a minute. “If you’re behind him when he’s running, talking Howie here, you can tell something’s up with that shoulder.”
“In my experience, he can work circles around about anybody. He paints perfectly with both hands. He can paint a straight line, steady as can be, without tape. And he’s good with concrete, too.”
“Yeah.” Lowell sighed again. “He’s a good guy, many talents. He’s trying to raise enough money to pay tuition at the college. I never know how to tell him being a volunteer at the homeless shelter doesn’t raise a lot of cash. A pure soul, for sure.” Lowell took in a huge breath. “I’m glad the two of you hit it off.”
“What?”
“I said I’m glad the two of you hit it off.”
“We did one whole helluva lot more than just hit it off. Don’t be glad I was unfaithful.” She was near tears for a moment, and then the moment passed. “Anyway. He painted the interior of the house in a week, which was a new land record. He worked with his headphones on, without saying a thing to me.”
“Did you fuck him in our house?”
“No. It crossed my mind, but no.” She’d reckoned that was going too far. She rolled away from him. “I wanted him to seduce me in our bedroom, but he was all business with the painting, and also I think he thought—though he never said anything about it—that he’d done enough damage. I doubt if he’ll be able to face you again. Just remember, I was the aggressor.”
Lowell chuckled. “Yeah. How could he resist?”
“I mean to say, don’t blame him.”
“I know what you mean to say, Veronica. I’ll make it easy. I won’t let him know I know.”
“Yeah, well, okay, just so you know, that never works.”
“Why did you tell me all this now?”
“I wanted to. The truth has its way with us. Somehow it’s mathematical, like gravity.” She was staring at the wall. “I couldn’t sleep. I decided to try to control when you found out.”
He flipped his pillow again. “I can stand you. I love you, but…Jesus.”
“What bothers you? The Howie part or the Carol part or the meknowing-everything part?”
“All of it,” he said. “Though, as you must suspect, you don’t quite know everything.”
“Will you at some point think ‘What the fuck have I done to my marriage?’ or ‘Oh well, what can it hurt to betray her again?’”
“Most likely both.” Lowell stared at the ceiling. “But I’d never do anything like that again. It’s serious trouble, and I’m messed up about it. I’m phobic about it.”
“I don’t know everything?”
“You don’t seem to have internalized how horrible I felt afterwards. You seem to have forgotten that I felt bad about it. I have a feeling you didn’t feel as bad as I did once it was over.”
“Well, you’re right about that. I felt justified. Do you love her and want to marry her?”
Lowell laughed. “No. I didn’t have control. As you will recall.” He laughed again. “You want to marry Howie Packer?”
“Not really.” Veronica had known for a long time that he was vulnerable to Carol Brown. “Did I just hear you blame the alcohol?”
“Oh no, I’m not doing that. I own what I did. I’m not pushing it off on anybody or any one thing.”
The bedroom was full of tension. The curtains at the open window stirred. Even the lights flickered. Lowell got up for a drink of water, then slid back into bed, turning off his light.
“And it only happened once with Carol? I find that hard to believe.”
“Of course you do,” he said sleepily. “You thought it was going on for years.” He looked her in the eye.
Veronica slid down into the covers so she was lying flat.
Lowell put his arm behind his head. “But we got through it,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. They got through it because of her, because she soldiered on no matter what happened, because she loved Lowell and Monique and wanted everything to turn out fine. This Howie behavior wasn’t who Veronica was.
But, as Carol said, she was far from perfect.
How they’d actually got to making love was unclear to Veronica. Maybe they just did it because it was a ritual they understood and there was nothing else to do. After sex they slept. It was mid-morning by the time they showered and made coffee. Very late that night, Monique’s friends had picked her up and she went back out to the college. She didn’t know any of this was going on.
Around noon, an unusual thing happened. Carol called. Veronica recognized the number. Lowell probably did, too. He picked up.
“Hello.”
“Hi, it’s Carol. Hope you’re fine. Could I please speak to Veronica?” She was being all bubbly and bouncy. It was the first he’d heard her voice since the call before he was kidnapped into rehab.
Lowell was quiet a moment. Veronica could tell there was something he wanted to say, but with her in earshot it couldn’t happen. Finally he said “Sure” and waved at his wife, pointing to the phone.
Veronica picked up in the kitchen. Carol jumped right in. “I wanted to tell you that I got a letter from Wally. He and I don’t talk on the phone because phone calls are monitored in the pen, so this letter is precious rare communication. First, he told me that he has colon cancer, probably terminal since it’s all through his system, and they are going to release him from prison. Good behavior, he says, because he wrote his book in their rather marginal psych ward and was never a problem for anybody and his meds are squared away. He said when he gets out he’d like to see me.”
“I’m sorry to hear Wally’s sick,” Veronica said. “That’s one of the worst things I’ve ever heard.”
“Well, I…”
“Will you see him?”
Carol kept going. “But there’s also news. He has a letter from Ben Carlyle, sent before he shot himself. Ben apparently died a few hours after putting the letter in the mail. Ben’s dead, you know.”
“I didn’t know, no.” She spoke to Lowell. “Hey, did you know Ben shot himself?”
“I heard,” Lowell said. “Did it at his ex-wife’s house.”
Carol went on: “Anyway, Ben wrote Wally from up in Rockford to confess to burning down the administration building. It was a giant accident, he said, having something to do with a ritual Ben was conducting in his office, something perverted and private with the filing cabinet in front of the door and pictures of Barbi Benton he’d gotten on eBay taped on all three walls and the window. Wally knew something was going on because he and Ben were in their offices, next door to each other, and Wally smelled smoke. Wally knocked on Ben’s door, tried to open it, but couldn’t because of the filing cabinet. You know the whole town thought Wally burned the building down. He said Ben apologized for letting Wally take the fall. He said Ben knew he’d been an asshole his whole life, and that was why Barbi Benton was his only true love—Playboy, January, 1970.” Carol was jumpy, sounded like a squirrel. “Isn’t that about as sick a thing as you ever heard? I wanted you to know, because you’re my friend now.”
“Well, I’m glad Ben fessed up before he shot himself,” Veronica said. “Wally’s not a bad guy and he never would have set that fire. Does he know you think he’s a good guy, you having fucked him over a few times with your old pal and lover Nick Bellinger in Ohio?”
“How do you know about that?”
“I never thought Wally was a bad guy.”
“Did Rachel tell you?”
“Oh, so Rachel knows about it? Never mind, Carol. The word’s out, just so ya know.” Veronica sighed. “I always thought you were a bit of a slut. I could never put you and Wally together. It makes sense to me that you drove Wally over the edge and that he’s the one in prison with a fatal disease that will put an end to him in the middle of his life.”
“Well, I just wanted you to know.”
“I don’t really want to know everything anymore,” Veronica said. “So stop telling me stuff. You will always know more than I do about everything in this town, and you don’t need to call me up and tell me. I’m done with the soft underbelly of this fucking town.”
“I suppose.” Carol chuckled, then changed gears. “Well, so okay, I don’t want to argue. I’ve remembered almost fondly our, to your great credit, humane conversation at Squeak’s. Like we’re friends. I just wanted to give you a call, and pass along this info about Wally being very sick and Ben and the administration building. Maybe pass it along to Lowell.”
“Yeah, well, Carol, you can fucking forget that.”
“Sorry to have caught you in a bad mood this morning. Okay, I have to go.”
“Carol, are you on pills?”
“No.” She sucked in her breath. “I mean yes.”
“Seems like it.”
“I might have called you even without drugs. I might call again. I feel close to you now, maybe closer than to anyone else. We’re sisters. We’re bad in the same ways.”
Veronica felt Carol working to get under her skin. “Don’t call anymore, Carol. If you please.”
“I might. If I want to. We’re sisters. We have a certain behavior in common. We pass each other on the streets. We meet up in a local bar. We do Come-To-Jesus. We’re potential good friends, but we just haven’t gotten there quite yet.”
“We’ll never be friends, Carol.” Veronica took a sip of cold coffee, tossed it in the sink. “Seriously, don’t call. Something might happen.”
“Nothing that hasn’t happened to me before. I suggest you think about being my friend. I’m not afraid of your anger. I’ll stare it down, fly right into it, I’ll eat it for lunch. I’m not afraid of you. You don’t have me over a barrel. We both know what I’m talking about. Let’s be friends. We can meet up from time to time, have a beer and talk. You probably need it as much as I do. We’ve got a buncha shit in common.”
“I thought you had to get off the phone.”
Carol was quiet for a second, settling down. “Nah. I just said that. I actually don’t, but while I’ve got you I need to say a few things to you. You threaten. You’re mean. You call me names. You think I can deaver handle anything, being called a slut and about anything else. You’re wrong. I’m not made of granite. I’m not made of granite, Veronica. With you my guard is down. I’m not stupid or oblivious. I’ve said I’m sorry for what I’ve done. Clearly you hate me and aren’t inclined to treat me like a human being. I want to be your friend. Say yes.”
“Unthinkable.”
Carol said, “I could be dead right now.”
“That’s an interesting thought,” Veronica replied.
“I don’t know how I ended up in this godforsaken shithole.”
“You followed your first husband here.”
“Maybe I think we could be friends. You just need to soften a bit and think about it. Would you like to meet me at Squeak’s again sometime in the near future? We could have a great chat.”
Veronica concluded the pills were making Carol crazy and hung up on her.
Lowell put down his coffee cup. “Wow.”
“Wow what?”
“That phone call was a thrill a minute.”
“She said she wants to be friends.” Veronica poured herself more coffee. “How does she think that’s ever gonna happen?”
“I have no idea. She does need friends though.”
“There’s Rachel.”
“Carol knows Rachel’s watching her from across the street and spreading rumors. If she had the dough, Carol would move to Champaign.”
Veronica fired back, “I won’t ask how you happen to know that. Maybe we should provide financial assistance for the move if we’re so friendly.”
Lowell said, “You’re being mean, honey. It’s not like you.”
“Okay, well. Truth is, I haven’t been like me for quite some time, case you haven’t noticed.” She sipped her coffee, suddenly slammed down the cup. “Hell with it. I’m going back to bed.” Instead of shuffling down the hall, Veronica, tears streaming, broke into a run.
•
A month later, after many of Carol’s phone calls, Veronica caved and met her at Squeak’s. For Veronica the seven miles out there was a long drive, on ice and snow. But the cool air was good. In Illinois, in the flatlands, the wind is strong and unrelenting. Tuscola is the county seat of Douglas County, the flattest county in Illinois, and so there’s not much cover unless you stand behind a building or hunker down in your car. In the gravel parking lot, Veronica hopped out and ran for the front door, her winter coat tightly wrapped around her all the way to her chin. She went immediately to the back booth, in honor of their first face-to-face.
Carol was not far behind, and came in the front door, spotted Veronica and hurried to the booth in her snowboots. “Wow, this is very interesting,” Carol said, her opening salvo as she removed her coat. “The same booth. Nice!” She shook the snow off her boots. “It is big of you to join me here and be my friend. You’re really a class act.”
Veronica smiled at her. “Whatever, Carol.”
“Well, neither of us is perfect. Geeez, could you get off that? It’s wearing me out. You may or may not know it, but you’ve made your fucking point.” Carol smiled a hard smile.
Veronica removed her own coat but held the eye contact. “Is Wally out of the slammer?”
“Should be soon. His illness is holding things up—hard to figure, I know. I keep saying they just need to airlift him out of there and get him up to Champaign where there’s proper medical treatment available, but it’s not that easy to get out once you’re in. Paperwork, they say. I’ll bet Wally’s going crazy, knowing his days are numbered and being lashed to the penitentiary.”
“Will you talk to him?”
Carol looked toward the bar, wanting to order a Stella for old time’s sake. “I will, yes.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“I hope we can get somebody, a third party, to be there, too. Some kind of protection, or maybe not protection but at least somebody objective.”
Veronica knew Carol really did mean protection, and she was probably implying Lowell. “Lowell likes Wally and is really sorry he’s sick. Of course, Kelleher could play the objective third party role, or Vasco Whirly.”
“I thought maybe we could all meet up at the Kopi, or at Forty Martyrs.”
“Well, don’t turn it into a canasta party. Forty Martyrs makes sense. You don’t want Wally driving all over Central Illinois, delaying the meeting even further when his time is short. Do it on the home ground.”
“Good advice. But it’s a tough one for me,” Carol said.
“Why?”
“I really don’t have a home ground in this town. It’s difficult.”
“I’m sure it is, but you have to give him a chance to say what he has to say. He can’t die without that.”
Carol looked at her. “Yeah, I know.”
“I’m sure it’s plenty awkward for you.”
“Very awkward.”
Two draft Stellas arrived at the table. Veronica had thought ahead.
Carol and Veronica toasted with their chilly beer mugs. “Here’s to friendship,” Carol said.
“Whatever,” Veronica replied, and their beer mugs clacked. “By the way, I just want to say you were right on the phone. I’ve been nasty, particularly to you—I’m just so damned angry about everything. I’m sorry. It’s not like me—calling you names and all this other business. There’s no end to what all I wanted to say to you, emptying both barrels. But when we’re together I never can think of all of it. It won’t happen anymore.”
“Does that mean we’re friends now?”
Veronica replied, “Hell no!” She sipped her beer. “Stop it, bitch.”
They both laughed.
By arrangement with Carol, though she denied it repeatedly, an old fellow sat at the bar with a big camera, a long lens, and the toast was photographed. The next week it played in the very popular photography section of the Tuscola Journal. This, after all, is how Carol operated, stretching heaven and hell for witnesses to her new friendship with Veronica.
•
And so winter locked down on the town, and people retreated indoors. January, a dark, hopeless month, sat on Tuscola like a boulder. A drive on the night streets during the week was reliably quiet but for the tires crackling on the icy snow and the low hum of the car’s heater. Few people would be out late. Instead, families were huddled indoors, the furnace on, the fireplace crackling, dinner dishes in the sink. Teenagers, and certain adults prone to closet fever, went out late at night on weeknights and on the weekends, prowled the town’s streets, gathered with friends in drafty booths at the Dairy Queen, or Squeak’s out on the township line, or sat in their cars at Mel’s Drive-in––yes, there was a Mel’s Drive-in. The whole panoply of human behavior, though, didn’t pause for winter. Babies were made. The college was bustling. The administration put a new administration building on the drawing board, one that paid homage in size and grandeur to the one that burned, including a five-story atrium (but not the spiral stairs behind Lowell’s desk). The faculty offices would of course be smaller, thinner doors, lower ceilings. Part of the reduction of expectations so characteristic of the times. Real materials were expensive.
That winter was dim, long, and cold. At Forty Martyrs one evening in February, Wally and Carol sat down, with Father Kelleher and Vasco Whirly nearby (Lowell didn’t show). Wally, who was failing, made his peace with his wife. In the Forty Martyrs elementary school gym, they sat at a folding table, across from each other, and they whispered so the witnesses wouldn’t hear. Wally had grown old deaver in prison. His hair was long and gray, and he had a beard and a tattoo on one arm that read “On the Stoics.”
“I don’t even remember what happened,” Wally told her, and she believed him. “But I’m very sorry, in fact I’m horrified that I’d do you harm and not even know I was doing it. So prison was probably right for me.”
“Well,” Carol said, taking a breath and attempting to match Wally’s level of frankness. “Your meds were all wrong.”
Wally offered, “I love you—that’s all I wanted to say.”
“Okay,” she said. “I love you, too, and I wish you weren’t so ill.”
“Would you accept me back?”
“I don’t think so, Wally. I’ve been on my own for a while and am learning to prefer it.”
“Okay,” he said. He looked away. “I knew that would be your answer. Why would you ever let me back in?”
They tearfully touched hands, hugged goodbye, knowing it would be the last time they’d see each other or speak this intimately.
That spring Vasco and hospice attended to Wally in a little apartment on Green Street in downtown Urbana. Wally passed quietly on a big dose of morphine, and by April first he was buried. His book, On the Stoics, came out that May and did well, but he was gone and never knew it.
Carol moved to Church Street in Champaign. She signed up for yoga classes at the YMCA nearby. Initially, Veronica and she met sometimes at the Café Kopi, but as time went by that happened less and less. Three years after Wally, Carol remarried in a subdued ceremony in a side-chapel of St. Matthew’s Catholic Church in Champaign, and not long after, disappeared into the north suburbs of Chicago.
In May, Lowell received a letter from Carol. “I promised Veronica you and I wouldn’t be in touch, but I wish you would write or call. Here’s a little reminder of us.” It was a full frontal nude picture of Carol taken in a bathroom mirror, her big nasty scars on full display. Lowell stashed the letter and picture deep in his private files at the office, and started up a correspondence with Carol.
He continued to run and play racquetball. He counseled a growing number of clients because the town was growing. He and Veronica remained together in their good marriage, and the new trees around their little bungalow grew tall and thick. One of them, an oak, had such robust roots it began to lift the sidewalk in front of the house.
From time to time on her meandering winter drives while Lowell taught his night class, Veronica would spot Howie Packer motating down Main Street toward the homeless shelter. It seemed to Veronica that nothing ever got over, not really. She had no idea how right she was. Things festered and gnawed at her. And there was Howie, headphones on over his stocking cap and ever the Marine, staring down at the snow and hellbent to get where he was going. Though he never noticed, she would always wave.
And with that, the facts in the matter sank into the dank, mossy, unspeakable history of the town’s people and its walking wounded.