The Ax

15

We still treat Sunday as something different, Marjorie and I, although there's no reason to any more. I don't mean we go to church. We don't, though we did years ago, when the kids were young and we were trying to be a good influence. Since I was chopped, Marjorie's mentioned the idea once or twice, going to church some Sunday, but she hasn't made a real point of it, and we don't have a church in particular here in Fairbourne, don't really know any churchgoers, so it hasn't happened yet. I don't suppose it will.

No, what I mean by our treating Sunday as something different, I mean we still act as though it's the day I don't go to work. (The other day. Saturdays I get up early and do chores, still maintaining that fiction as well.) We sleep an hour later, not getting up till eight-thirty or nine, and we dawdle over a long breakfast, and we don't dress until lunchtime, and we spend most of the daylight hours with the Sunday New York Times. Of course, these Sundays I turn first to the help wanted section, so that's a change.

So today, this Sunday, is a true time-out. After my experiences last Thursday and Friday up in Lichgate, I'm ready for some time out. Tomorrow I'll take the Voyager to a body shop for an estimate on the damage, which I hope I can get taken care of very soon. I mean, urgently.

Originally, I thought I'd spend part of this afternoon in the office, to decide which of the three remaining resumes I should deal with next, and how to deal with him with less chance of the kind of disaster I've been having. But then it occurred to me, with that damage on it, the Voyager is a lot more identifiable than it used to be. I probably shouldn't use it to go after the others until it's been made anonymous again.

Which I don't like. I want to do it now, I want to get it over with, I really want to get this whole thing over and done with. While I was burning that confession in the backyard yesterday, during the time Marjorie was away at her movie-house job, I realized the tension of this situation could get to me again, that I could have more weak moments, and that some time, in dread and despair, I might even actually make a phone call to the authorities, blurt it all out, destroy myself. So the sooner I get this over with, the better.

"Burke! Burke!"

We're in the living room, Marjorie and I, in our robes, with the sections of the Sunday Times and our cooling coffee. I'm in my regular chair, with its view slightly leftward to the TV set on the far side wall and its view slightly rightward through the picture window to the front of our yard and the plantings that partly shield us from the road and our neighbors. Marjorie is, as usual, on the sofa to my left, feet curled up under her, newspaper spread all across the sofa beyond her.

And now I realize she's calling to me. I start, the paper rattling, and look at her. "What? Something wrong?" Something in the paper, I mean.

"You haven't heard a word I said."

She looks surprisingly tense, agitated. I hadn't noticed that before. Is this about something that isn't in the paper?

I'm a pretty big guy, now going to seed a bit, and Marjorie's what they call petite, with very curly brown hair and wide bright brown eyes and a wholehearted way of laughing that I love, as though she's about to blow herself over. Though I haven't heard that laugh for a while, really.

When we first started going together in '71, back in Hartford, we had to put up with a lot of not-very-witty jokes from our friends because I was so big and tall and she was so skinny and short. I was still a bus driver, then, for the city, and in fact I first met Marjorie when she got on my bus one morning. She was a college student, twenty years old, and I was an Army vet and a bus driver, twenty-five, and she had no intention of getting involved with somebody like me, and yet that's what happened. And even though I was a college graduate myself, she took a lot of ribbing from her friends at school when she started going out with a bus driver, and I suppose it was that as much as anything that led me to apply to Green Valley, and get the job selling paper, and find my life's work, that's now been temporarily lost.

And now she's telling me I haven't heard a word she's said, and it's true. "I'm sorry, sweet," I say. "I was distracted, I was a million miles away."

"You've been a million miles away, Burke," she says. There are little white blotches under her eyes, high on her cheekbones. She almost looks as though she might cry. What is this?

I say, "It's the job, sweet, I just can't—"

"I know it's the job," she says. "Burke, honey, I know what the problem is, I know how much this has been weighing on your mind, driving you crazy, but—"

"Well, not entirely crazy, I hope."

"— but I can't stand it," she insists, not letting me interrupt or make a joke. "Burke, it's driving me crazy."

"Sweet, I don't know what I can—"

"I want us to go into counseling," she says, with that abrupt matter-of-factness people use when they finally say something they've been thinking about for a long time.

I automatically reject this, for a thousand reasons. I start with the most explainable of those reasons, saying, "Marjorie, we can't afford—"

"We can," she says, "if it's important. And it is important."

"Sweet, this can't go on forever," I tell her. "I'll find another job before you know it, a good job, and—"

"It'll be too late, Burke." Her eyes are bigger and brighter than I've ever seen them. She's so serious about this, and so worried. "We're being torn apart now," she says. "It's been too long, the damage is being done. Burke, I love you, and I want our marriage to survive."

"It will survive. We love each other, we're strong in—"

"We're not strong enough," she insists. "I'm not strong enough. It's wearing me down, it's grinding me down, it's making me miserable, it's making me desperate, I feel like a… I feel like a woodchuck in a Hav-a-Hart trap!"

What an image. She must have been thinking about all this for quite a long while, and I haven't even noticed. She's been unhappy, and keeping it to herself, trying to be brave and silent and wait it out, and I haven't noticed. I should have noticed, but I was distracted by this other thing, concentrating on this other thing.

If only I could tell her about all that, tell her what I'm doing, how I'm making sure everything will be all right. But I can't, I don't dare. She wouldn't understand, she couldn't possibly understand. And if she knew what I was doing, what I've already done, what I'm going to do, she'd never be able to look at me in the same way again. I understand that, all at once, right now, sitting here in the living room, looking at her, in our robes, the both of us covered like bums in the park with sections of the New York Times. I can never tell her what I've done, what I'm doing, to save our marriage, to save our lives, to save us.

I say, "Sweet, I know what you're feeling, I really do. And you know I'm feeling the same frustration, I'm having to deal with it every second of every—"

"I can't do it," she says. "I'm not as strong as you are, Burke, I never was. I can't deal with this awful situation as well as you can. I can't just, just hunker down and wait."

"But there's nothing else to do," I say. "That's the bitch of it, sweet, there's nothing else to do. We both have to just hunker down and wait. But believe me. Please. I have a feeling, I just have a feeling, it won't be that much longer. This summer, sometime this summer, we'll—"

"Burke, we need counseling!"

How she stares at me, almost in terror. For God's sake, does she know? Is that what she's trying to say?

No, it can't be. It isn't possible. I say, "Marjorie, we don't need any third party, we can talk things out together, we've always been able to do that, even that bad time when I was… You know."

"When you were going to leave me," she says.

"No! I was never going to leave you, you know that. I never for a second thought or said or planned that I could ever leave you, not you, sweet, my God. We talked all that—"

"You were living with her."

I sit back. I put one hand over my eyes. With everything that's going on, to have to deal now with something like this. But it's important, I know it is, I have to pay attention to this. Marjorie is my other half, I learned that eleven years ago, the time we're talking about now. Everything I do is as much for her as for me, because I can't live without her.

Still shielding my eyes with my hand, I say, "We talked that out then, and that was the worst thing that ever happened. We talked it out—"

"It wasn't the worst."

I lower my hand and look at her, and I want her to see in my eyes how much I love her. "Oh, but it was," I say. "This job business is terrible, but it isn't as bad as that was. And we talked that out."

"We had help."

"Yes, that's true."

A friend of Marjorie's from her college days had been her confidante, back then, and the friend was a churchgoer, and she took Marjorie along to meet this Episcopalian priest, Father Susten, and then Marjorie brought me along, and he actually was a help, he gave us somebody to pretend to talk to when we were saying things we couldn't say directly to one another. Father Susten's church was down in Bridgeport, he probably isn't even there any more, he wasn't a young man eleven years ago.

Besides, that was a marital difficulty, that was my infidelity, the stupid mistake of a man who had to go for just one last hurrah, no matter how much it hurt. Our problem now is a job and an income; what could he say about that? What could he do to help? Give us something out of the alms box?

And what would I have to say to him about this problem? Discuss what I'm doing with the resumes? I say, "Marjorie, Father Susten couldn't—"

"He isn't there any more. I phoned."

So she's very serious about this. But I want to head it off, I don't want to entangle my mind with counseling when I have this hard, tense, frightening work to do. I say, "Marjorie, we can talk it out together, all this stuff about the job."

"I can't talk to you," she says. She looks over at the picture window. She's calmer now. "That's the problem, I really can't talk to you."

"I know I've been inattentive," I say, "but I can pay attention, and I will pay attention."

"That's not what I mean." She continues to look at the picture window. Now that she knows I'm listening, she's become very quiet, draining all the passion out of what she says. "I mean I can't talk to you about the current situation."

I simply don't understand. "Why not?" I ask her. "We both know the situation isn't—"

"No, we don't both know," she says, and turns her head, and looks at me again. "You don't know the situation at all," she says, "and that's why we need counseling."

I don't want to know what she's telling me. It's too late not to know, but I don't want to know. I feel myself trembling. I say, "Marjorie, you haven't… made any… done any… you're worried about… you think you might…"

She's looking at me. She's waiting for me to stop. But when I stop, I'll have to know. I take a long painful breath, a deep inhale, and when that breath comes out I say, "Who is he?"

She shakes her head. I'll kill him, I think. I know how, I didn't used to know how, but now I do, and I know I can do it, and I know it's easy. It's easy. With this one, a pleasure.

"Just tell me who he is," I say. I try to sound very gentle, like someone who doesn't kill people.

She says, "Burke, I called some state social services offices. There's counseling we can go to, it isn't terribly expensive, we can—"

"Who is he, Marjorie?"

How many people could he be? How many places does she go? Not many, not since we sold the Civic. Could it be the dentist, Dr. Carney, that white-coated wimp with his Coke bottle glasses, endlessly washing his hands? Or that fellow at the New Variety, the movie house, what's his name, balding, harried, slovenly, Fountain, that's it. Could it be Fountain? Somebody at one of those places.

I'll follow her, I'll trail her, I know how to do these things now, she won't know I'm there, I'll find him, and then I'll kill him.

She's still talking, while my mind races around like a dog that's lost the scent, and what she's saying is, "Burke, either we go into counseling together, or I'm going to have to move out."

That stops the questing dog in his tracks. I give her my full attention. I say, "Marjorie, no, you can't go— How could you? Where could you live? You don't have any money!"

"I have some," she says, and I realize I'm the one who doesn't have any money, not since the unemployment insurance ran out a few months ago. (That was so humiliating, taking the unemployment insurance, going down there, signing the forms, standing on the lines with those people. It was shaming and degrading, but it wasn't as bad as when it stopped.)

And if Marjorie goes away? We can't afford one household, how could we afford two?

She says, "I have my part-time jobs, and I can get another one, part-time, at Hurley's."

Hurley's is a liquor store, in the same mall as Dr. Carney's office. Could it be Hurley she's shacked up with, stinking of stale cigarettes?

I'm feeling desperate, scared, trapped. I say, "Marjorie, none of this would be happening if I hadn't lost my job."

"I know that, Burke," she says, as desperate and trapped as I am. "Don't you think I know that? That's what I'm saying, the strain of this, it isn't fair, it isn't fair for any of us, but it's getting to us, it's making you silent and secretive, I have no idea what you do in that office all the time, all those papers you're constantly going over and marking up with your pencils, all those trips you take—"

"Interviews," I say, quickly. "Job interviews. I'm trying to get work."

"I know you are, honey," she says. "I know you're doing your best, but it's driving us apart, it's making me feel I want to laugh again sometimes, I want to stop being so miserable, feeling so weighed down all the time."

"All right," I say. I have to speed up the operation, I have to finish it all very soon. Her… person… whoever he is, I'll get to him later. I have to finish the other first. "All right," I say.

She cocks her head, watching me. "All right?"

"I'll go along with you, to… counseling," I say, and even as I say it I feel lighter, happier. It won't be easy, I know. I'll have to hide so much from this person, and this is a person you're supposed to be seeing so you can have somebody to be open with. But I can't be open, not with anybody, not till this is over, and even then never about this. I'll never be able to tell anyone in the world about this, about this awful period in my life, not a single human being ever. Not Marjorie, not a counselor, not a thousand counselors sworn to secrecy.

But still, we'll be able to talk about some of it, the desperation, the resentment, the feelings of inadequacy, the shame, the feeling that somehow it is all my fault even when I know it isn't.

"All right," I say again. "Counseling. I'm sure it's a good idea anyway."

"Thank you, Burke," she says.

I say, "Marjorie…"

"No," she says. She's very firm. "Don't say anything about it."

I was going to say to her, don't see him any more. But I know she's right, I can't say that, I don't have the right to say it. "All right," I say.