A Good Marriage (3 page)
She looked at the cover again, and noticed an odd thing: there was no price on it. No bar code, either. She checked the back cover, curious about what such a magazine might cost, and winced at the picture there: a naked blonde strapped to what looked like a steel operating-room table. This one’s expression of terror looked about as real as a three-dollar bill, however, which was sort of comforting. And the portly man standing over her with what appeared to be a Ginsu knife just looked ridiculous in his armlets and leather underpants—more like an accountant than someone about to carve up the Bondage Bitch du jour.
Bob’s an accountant,
her mind remarked.
A stupid thought launched from her brain’s all-too-large Stupid Zone. She pushed it away just as she pushed the remarkably unpleasant magazine back into the pile of catalogues after ascertaining that there was no price or bar code on the back, either. And as she shoved the cardboard box under the workbench—she had changed her mind about carting the catalogues back into the house—the answer to the no-price/no-bar-code mystery came
to her. It was one of those magazines they sold in a plastic wrapper, with all the naughty bits covered. The price and the code had been on the wrapper, of course that was it, what else could it be? He had to’ve bought the goddarn thing somewhere, assuming he hadn’t fished it out of the trash.
Maybe he bought it over the Internet. There are probably sites that specialize in that sort of thing. Not to mention young women dressed up to look like twelve-year-olds.
“Never mind,” she said, and gave her head a single brisk nod. This was a done deal, a dead letter, a closed discussion. If she mentioned it on the phone when he called later tonight, or when he came home, he’d be embarrassed and defensive. He’d probably call her sexually naïve, which she supposed she was, and accuse her of overreacting, which she was determined not to do. What she was determined to do was roll widdit, baby. A marriage was like a house under constant construction, each year seeing the completion of new rooms. A first-year marriage was a cottage; one that had gone on for twenty-seven years was a huge and rambling mansion. There were bound to be crannies and storage spaces, most of them dusty and abandoned, some containing a few unpleasant relics you would just as soon you hadn’t found. But that was no biggie. You either threw those relics out or took them to Goodwill.
She liked this thought (which had a conclusive feel) so well that she said it out loud: “No biggie.” And to prove it, she gave the cardboard box a hard two-handed shove, sending it all the way to the rear wall.
Where there was a clunk. What was that?
I don’t want to know,
she told herself, and was pretty sure that thought wasn’t coming from the Stupid Zone but from the smart one. It was shadowy back there under the worktable, and there might be mice. Even a well-kept garage like this one could have mice, especially once cold weather came, and a scared mouse might bite.
Darcy stood up, brushed off the knees of her housecoat, and left the garage. Halfway across the breezeway, she heard the phone begin to ring.
She was back in the kitchen before the answering machine kicked in, but she waited. If it was Bob, she’d let the robot take it. She didn’t want to talk to him right this minute. He might hear something in her voice. He would assume she’d gone out to the corner store or maybe to Video Village and call back in an hour. In an hour, after her unpleasant discovery would have had a chance to settle a bit, she’d be fine and they could have a pleasant conversation.
But it wasn’t Bob, it was Donnie. “Oh, shoot, I really wanted to talk to you guys.”
She picked up the phone, leaned back against the counter, and said, “So talk. I was coming back from the garage.”
Donnie was bubbling over with news. He was living in Cleveland, Ohio, now, and after two
years of thankless toiling in an entry-level position with the city’s largest ad firm, he and a friend had decided to strike out on their own. Bob had strongly advised against this, telling Donnie that Donnie and his partner would never get the start-up loan they needed to make it through the first year.
“Wake up,” he’d said after Darcy turned the phone over to him. In the early spring this had been, with the last bits of snow still lurking beneath the trees and bushes in the backyard. “You’re twenty-four, Donnie, and so’s your pal Ken. You two galoots can’t even get collision insurance on your cars for another year, just straight liability. No bank’s going to underwrite a seventy-thousand-dollar start-up, especially with the economy the way it is.”
But they
had
gotten the loan, and now had landed two big clients, both on the same day. One was a car dealership looking for a fresh approach that would attract thirtysomething buyers. The other was the very bank that had issued Anderson & Hayward their start-up loan. Darcy shouted with delight, and Donnie yelled right back. They talked for twenty minutes or so. Once during the conversation they were interrupted by the double-beep of an incoming call.
“Do you want to get that?” Donnie asked.
“No, it’s just your father. He’s in Montpelier, looking at a collection of steel pennies. He’ll call back before he turns in.”
“How’s he doing?”
Fine,
she thought.
Developing new interests.
“Upright and sniffin the air,” she said. It was one of Bob’s favorites, and it made Donnie laugh. She loved to hear him laugh.
“And Pets?”
“Call her yourself and see, Donald.”
“I will, I will. I always get around to it. In the meantime, thumbnail me.”
“She’s great. Full of wedding plans.”
“You’d think it was next week instead of next June.”
“Donnie, if you don’t make an effort to understand women, you’ll never get married yourself.”
“I’m in no hurry, I’m having too much fun.”
“Just as long as you have fun carefully.”
“I’m very careful and very polite. I’ve got to run, Ma. I’m meeting Ken for a drink in half an hour. We’re going to start brainstorming this car thing.”
She almost told him not to drink too much, then restrained herself. He might still look like a high school junior, and in her clearest memory of him he was a five-year-old in a red corduroy jumper, tirelessly pushing his scooter up and down the concrete paths of Joshua Chamberlain Park in Pownal, but he was neither of those boys anymore. He was a young man, and also, as improbable as it seemed, a young entrepreneur beginning to make his way in the world.
“Okay,” she said. “Thanks for calling, Donnie. It was a treat.”
“Same here. Say hello to the old feller when he calls back, and give him my love.”
“I will.”
“Upright and sniffin the air,” Donnie said, and snickered. “How many Cub Scout packs has he taught that one to?”
“All of them.” Darcy opened the refrigerator to see if there was perchance a Butterfinger in there, chilling and awaiting her amorous intentions. Nope. “It’s terrifying.”
“Love you, Mom.”
“Love you, too.”
She hung up, feeling good again. Smiling. But as she stood there, leaning against the counter, the smile faded.
A clunk.
There had been a clunk when she pushed the box of catalogues back under the workbench. Not a clatter, as if the box had struck a dropped tool, but a
clunk
. Sort of hollow-sounding.
I don’t care.
Unfortunately, this was not true. The clunk felt like unfinished business. The carton did, too.
Were
there other magazines like
Bondage Bitches
stashed in there?
I don’t want to know.
Right, right, but maybe she should find out, just the same. Because if there was just the one, she was right about its being sexual curiosity that had been fully satisfied by a single peek into an unsavory (
and unbalanced,
she added to herself) world. If there were more, that might still be all right—he was throwing them out, after all—but maybe she should know.
Mostly . . . that clunk. It lingered on her mind more than the question about the magazines.
She snagged a flashlight from the pantry and went back out to the garage. She pinched the lapels of her housecoat shut immediately and wished she’d put on her jacket. It was really getting cold.
Darcy got down on her knees, pushed the box of catalogues to one side, and shone the light under the worktable. For a moment she didn’t understand what she was seeing: two lines of darkness interrupting the smooth baseboard, one slightly fatter than the other. Then a thread of disquiet formed in her midsection, stretching from the middle of her breastbone down to the pit of her stomach. It was a hiding place.
Leave this alone, Darcy. It’s his business, and for your own peace of mind you should let it stay that way.
Good advice, but she had come too far to take it. She crawled under the worktable with the flashlight in her hand, steeling herself for the brush of cobwebs, but there were none. If she was the original out-of-sight, out-of-mind girl, then her balding, coin-collecting, Cub Scouting husband was the original everything-polished, everything-clean boy.
Also, he’s crawled under here himself, so no cobwebs would have a chance to form.
Was that true? She didn’t actually know, did she?
But she thought she did.
The cracks were at either end of an eight-inch length of baseboard that appeared to have a dowel or something in the middle so it could pivot. She had struck it with the box just hard enough to jar it open, but that didn’t explain the clunk. She pushed one end of the board. It swung in on one end and out on the other, revealing a hidey-hole eight inches long, a foot high, and maybe eighteen inches deep. She thought she might discover more magazines, possibly rolled up, but there were no magazines. There was a little wooden box, one she was pretty sure she recognized. It was the box that had made the clunking sound. It had been standing on end, and the pivoting baseboard had knocked it over.
She reached in, grasped it, and—with a sense of misgiving so strong it almost had a texture—brought it out. It was the little oak box she had given to him at Christmas five years ago, maybe more. Or had it been for his birthday? She didn’t remember, just that it had been a good buy at the craft shop in Castle Rock. Hand-carved on the top, in bas-relief, was a chain. Below the chain, also in bas-relief, was the box’s stated purpose:
LINKS
. Bob had a clutter of cufflinks, and although he favored button-style shirts for work, some of his wrist-jewelry was quite nice. She remembered thinking the box would help keep them organized. Darcy knew she’d seen it on top of the bureau on his side of the bedroom for awhile after the gift was unwrapped and exclaimed over, but couldn’t remember seeing it lately. Of course she hadn’t. It was out here, in the hidey-hole
under his worktable, and she would have bet the house and lot (another of his sayings) that if she opened it, it wouldn’t be cufflinks she found inside.
Don’t look, then.
More good advice, but now she had come
much
too far to take it. Feeling like a woman who has wandered into a casino and for some mad reason staked her entire life’s savings on a single turn of a single card, she opened the box.
Let it be empty. Please God, if you love me let it be empty.
But it wasn’t. There were three plastic oblongs inside, bound with an elastic band. She picked the bundle out, using just the tips of her fingers—as a woman might handle a cast-off rag she fears may be germy as well as dirty. Darcy slipped off the elastic.
They weren’t credit cards, which had been her first idea. The top one was a Red Cross blood donor’s card belonging to someone named Marjorie Duvall. Her type was A-positive, her region New England. Darcy turned the card over and saw that Marjorie—whoever she was—had last given blood on August sixteenth of 2010. Three months ago.
Who the hell was Marjorie Duvall? How did Bob know her? And why did the name ring a faint but very clear bell?
The next one was Marjorie Duvall’s North Conway Library card, and it had an address: 17 Honey Lane, South Gansett, New Hampshire.
The last piece of plastic was Marjorie Duvall’s
New Hampshire driver’s license. She looked like a perfectly ordinary American woman in her mid-thirties, not very pretty (although nobody looked their best in driver’s license photographs), but presentable. Darkish blond hair pulled back from her face, either bunned or ponytailed; in the picture you couldn’t tell. DOB, January 6, 1974. The address was the same as the one on the library card.
Darcy realized that she was making a desolate mewing sound. It was horrible to hear a sound like that coming from her own throat, but she couldn’t stop. And her stomach had been replaced by a ball of lead. It was pulling all of her insides down, stretching them into new and unpleasant shapes. She had seen Marjorie Duvall’s face in the newspaper. Also on the six o’clock news.
With hands that had absolutely no feeling, she put the rubber band back around the ID cards, put them back in the box, then put the box back in his hidey-hole. She was getting ready to close it up again when she heard herself saying, “No, no, no, that isn’t right. It can’t be.”
Was that the voice of Smart Darcy or Stupid Darcy? It was hard to tell. All she knew for sure was that Stupid Darcy had been the one to open the box. And thanks to Stupid Darcy, she was falling.
Taking the box back out. Thinking,
It’s a mistake, it has to be, we’ve been married over half our lives, I’d know, I would know
. Opening the box. Thinking,
Does anybody really know anybody?
Before tonight she certainly would have thought so.
Marjorie Duvall’s driver’s license was now on the top of the stack. Before, it had been on the bottom. Darcy put it there. But which of the others had been on top, the Red Cross card or the library card? It was simple, it
had
to be simple when there were only two choices, but she was too upset to remember. She put the library card on top and knew at once that was wrong, because the first thing she’d seen when she opened the box was a flash of red, red like blood, of course a blood donor card would be red, and that had been the one on top.
