The Three-Day Affair by Michael Kardos
For my family
PROLOGUE
SIX YEARS AGO, MY band’s bassist was shot dead in a New York nightclub. Her name was Gwen Dalton, and she’d only been with the band a few months when she was killed.
Our original bassist, Andy, had surprised us all when he decided to move to Los Angeles with his girlfriend. We were annoyed that he would leave New York just when the band was finally creating a stir. High Noon had been together for five years, and we’d worked hard to build up a following. We were finally packing the Wetlands and CBGB, and a small indie record label was talking to us about recording a CD. So how can you leave us now? we asked him. How can you do that to us?
“I’m doing it for love,” he explained.
And how do you argue with that?
We held auditions at Fred McPhee’s apartment in the East Village. Fred was the band’s guitarist and lead vocalist. I was the drummer. We’d already heard half a dozen players stumble their way through our songs when Gwen showed up.
In all the years I’d played in rock groups, starting at the age of fourteen, I hadn’t ever been bandmates with a woman before, and for a brief moment I was doubtful. Then Gwen lifted the instrument out of its case, and I saw that it was a custom-made, six-string Fodera—four grand easy. As she tuned up, her fingers ran nimbly up and down the fretboard. Underneath her spiky hair and pink lipstick was a delicate face, but her fingers were stubby and callused. A musician’s fingers. We taught her one of our tunes, which she picked up immediately. The second time through, she was already adding licks that Andy couldn’t have played. By then we were all loosened up. She was smiling to herself, head tilted in concentration, and it was obvious that we’d found our new bassist.
All that fall we played shows throughout New York and Connecticut and New Jersey. Gwen had infused our jangly rock sound with a hint of funk and looked good doing it. But on Sunday morning, December 5, 1999, at 2:10 AM, while we were packing up our equipment after a gig at the Cobra Club near the Columbia University campus, somebody fired a gun outside on the street. The bullet passed through a window and struck Gwen just above her right cheekbone. She had been talking to me at the time. I was standing less than three feet away. When she got hit, her head jerked to the side a little, as if an invisible hand had slapped her. She stood there for the next few seconds, and I stood watching her and wondering why she’d suddenly stopped talking.
The shooting was a drive-by, the intended target somebody out on the street who fled the scene. It had nothing to do with us. No one was ever caught. Gwen died two days later at St. Luke’s Hospital. I was there in the critical care unit at the time, pacing outside her room. I remember looking in and seeing the nurses moving their hands and a doctor shaking his head and the setting sun absurdly bathing her parents’ faces in the prettiest orange light.
That night, I told Fred that I wouldn’t be playing the drums anytime soon.
My wife, Cynthia, and I had always thought of ourselves as city people. She was from Philadelphia. I had grown up in Bayonne, and lived in Greenwich Village since graduating from college. But now my heart would lurch with every sudden noise. I’d spend most nights wired on coffee, sitting by the window of our third-story walk-up and staring out at shadows. I felt wholly unable to protect either myself or my new bride from any of a thousand brutal deaths. One day during the week before Christmas, we went exploring on the Jersey side of the Holland Tunnel and kept driving until the traffic lightened, the trees became plentiful, and we had ourselves a good, quiet suburb.
Besides playing in the band, I had been working part-time in a midtown recording studio. I told my boss that I wouldn’t be back. Cynthia hired a headhunter to find her a new public relations job in Jersey. By the new year, we had packed our things into a U-Haul and were gone.
We knew the suburbs would be less exciting than the city, but really that was the appeal. We chose the town of Newfield, where the people we talked to assured us that any criminal activity was limited to Halloween and involved nothing more than toilet paper and eggs. The public schools, we learned, were top rated. We planned to have children someday, maybe soon, and Newfield felt like the right place to raise them.