"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?