The Three-Day Affair Read Online Free PDF Page B

fitfully that night and awoke in the morning with heavy limbs and a need to stay in bed all day. And the next day. And the next. I passed the hours not reading, not watching television, sleeping the occasional hour in the afternoon and then lying awake all night.
    Even the fear I’d felt in our SoHo apartment, following the shooting, began to seem preferable to this nothingness, endless hours marked by the movement of shadows on the bedroom wall, punctuated by birds or kids outside flaunting their cheerfulness . Yet I felt unable to do anything to relieve this private, ugly grief that I couldn’t explain to Cynthia. The truth was that I had fallen, a little, for Gwen. She and I had been partners, drums and bass, night after night making music and sweating together under the same hot lights. After she died, my feelings of genuine sadness were undercut—polluted—by the selfish wish that Gwen were still alive just so I could prove my faithfulness to my wife.
    Mostly, I wanted to lie in bed and not think about Gwen or the shooting. I didn’t want to think or feel anything, or even exist.
    When Cynthia tried to talk to me, I answered in monosyllables . Or I didn’t answer at all.
    Get up
, I’d think.
Say something. You’re hurting the woman you love.
    When she suggested that I get professional help, it took every bit of energy I had just to refuse.
    I’d hear Cynthia unpacking our things, stacking dishes in cabinets , and running loads of laundry. I would sleep during the day, and at night I would lie in bed awake while Cynthia slept. Sometimes I’d get up in the middle of the night and sit in the kitchen with the lights off, returning to bed with the first hint of daylight.
    After three weeks, Cynthia got around to tough love.
    “Will,” she said one morning, her hair wet from the shower. She sat on the bed and shook me to be sure I was awake. “Will, today you’re leaving the house. I’m going out to run errands. I’ll be gone an hour or two. When I come home, I don’t expect to see you here.”
    When I got around to opening my eyes, I saw that she’d left on the bed the Help Wanted section from the newspaper and a county map. I wanted to remind her about my heavy limbs, but she was already gone.
    I showered for the first time in too long, and on my way to the kitchen for juice I took a good look around. While I’d been sleeping , Cynthia had made the house ours. Our pictures on the walls. Our books in the shelves.
    Rather than look at the help-wanted ads or the map, I got in the car and drove. Drove for hours, getting myself lost, and then more lost. Midafternoon, on my way back home, I found myself on the main street of some run-down, slightly urban area, and I remember feeling a strange comfort in having found a neighborhood reminiscent of the one I had just fled. Seeing a weathered sign for Snakepit Recording Studio, I pulled over to the curb. The building stood between an antique furniture store and a nail salonthat appeared to be out of business, its glass door cracked. The studio’s entrance was around back. The door was shut but unlocked , so I went in. The dark, musty hallway reeked of stale beer and cigarettes, and I felt thankful for the familiar, acrid smell. I didn’t hear any activity, though, and I was about to leave when a man’s voice called out from someplace deep inside the studio: “What do you want now, for fuck’s sake?”
    My eyes slowly adjusted to the dim light as I went farther down the hallway, past a restroom, past the darkened recording room, to the control room. Sitting behind the sound console was a man of around sixty with a messy white beard and a pair of wet, resigned eyes that suggested he was world-weary, drunk, or a little of both.
    “Sorry,” he said, “I thought you were that homeless guy. He wanders in here if the door doesn’t latch shut.”
    “No,” I said, “I have a home.” The man was paging through a copy of
Hustler
. “This your studio?” I