Marriage Is Murder

by Nancy Pickard

  “It’s the full moon that does it,” Geof said in a joking tone. I knew he didn’t believe it, because he had shown me the statistics that proved it wasn’t true, no matter what the popular belief about full moons and emergency rooms. “You show me a full moon and I’ll show you a town full of men and women beating up on each other. It’s lunacy.”

  He smiled at his own pun. Obligingly, I groaned.

  “The first year I became a cop, and this would be maybe fifteen years ago, I almost bought it on a domestic call, on a full moon, of course. Jenny’s heard this story a thousand times.” He squeezed my hand on top of the table. “Can you stand it one more time?”

  “I love cheap thrills,” I assured him.

  He nodded in mock agreement. “I know. That’s why you live with me.” With a smile, he admitted the two people across the table from us into the intimate kidding. One of them was Willie J. Henderson, the newest detective on our small municipal force, and the other was his wife, Gail.

  Willie was a wiry black man with eight years of a Boston street beat behind him. It showed in the lines that were gouged in his narrow face—giving it the look of African sculpture hacked out of hardwood—and in the prematurely gray hair cropped close to his prematurely balding skull. Geof was the older, taller, and larger of the two men, but compared with Willie, he looked collegiate in his open-necked white oxford shirt, denim trousers, and tweed sport coat. And there I was beside him—blue eyes, blond hair, corduroy pants suit. We looked like a page out of an L.L. Bean catalog. Willie wore black leather jeans, a black leather sleeveless vest, and ankle boots. His wife was dressed in early Montgomery Ward-polyester skirt and sweater, hose, and low black heels. They were handsome together in a life-hardened way, like two uprights in a wrought-iron railing on a widow’s walk.

  Willie kept his gaze fixed on the scarred wooden table that separated us from him and Gail. He rarely smiled. She smiled too often, preceding everything she said with a nervous little laugh, a sort of ha-ha, so that you could actually hear the double syllables, like words.

  She gave that laugh now. “Ha-ha.” And she said, in a high voice that was straining to sound animated, “I’ll never forget Willie’s first week as a rookie.”

  Geof waited politely, expectantly. But she only flickered her nervous smile at him, then at me, and returned to sipping her low-calorie beer. Not that she needed to lose weight—she was a little woman, all stark, pointing bones, the sort on whom you want to force spaghetti. During the moment of awkward silence, she began to cough.

  “Asthma,” she murmured, even managing to smile between coughs. She choked out: “It’s why we moved. Ha-ha. No lung power. Willie had to get me out of the pollution. Ha-ha. It was so good of him, leaving the force that way. Willie earned medals, you know. For bravery and marksmanship. Everybody respected him. . . .” The wifely support petered off into another paroxysm of coughing.

  “Gail,” I said, “do you want to go?”

  She shook her head, took a couple of quick drinks of beer, and then a deep breath. The coughing stopped. She placed her hand against her breastbone and pressed it there as if holding an incipient cough in place.

  While we waited for her to recover, her husband scanned the clientele. It was a cop’s glance: I’d seen Geof level it at parties, at grocery stores, in traffic, even in his own home with his own, family—any burglars here? rapists? escaped convicts? He couldn’t help it: After years of checking crowds for criminal elements, it was an unconscious mannerism, although it could be disconcerting for the other guests at class reunions and Christmas parties. Having evidently failed to recognize anybody from the FBI’s Most Wanted list, Willie returned his gaze to a spot in the tabletop where some previous customer had gouged a deep pit, like a tiny grave in the wood. Now it held his attention as if it contained a corpse.

  “I’m all right,” Gail insisted weakly.

  Geof continued his story: “So I’m cruising along, and I hear a call for officer needs assist on a house burglary.” He switched to the present tense and leaned forward, as if he were reliving the moment. “I’m the closest cop to the address, which is 800 Southwest Twentieth Street. I’ll never forget that number as long as I live, which I didn’t think, at the time, was going to be all that damn long.”

  “I got a few addresses carved in my brain,” Willie said.

  “Ha-ha,” Gail said.

  “It’s pitch night.” Geof, like most cops, was a natural storyteller. “Clouds over that damned full moon. Foggy as hell. And I come up on a fight, with the other cop in the middle, and he’s trying to pull a woman off a man. She’s flailing around with one of those fat plastic baseball bats like kids have, and the man’s got hold of a toy gun, looks like a sawed-off shotgun. She’s screaming, He tried to kill me! Arrest him!’ Well, the man drops his toy gun. But he grabs the baseball bat and clobbers her between the eyes. She goes down like a demolished building. Thump. On his backswing, he lays the other cop out flat. Thump. ‘Stop!’ I yell forcefully, as I was taught at the academy.” (It was true, I had heard this story many times, but this part, the way he told it, still made me smile.) “ ‘Lay down your weapon!’

  “Well, the sucker lays it down all right, and he picks up the sawed-off shotgun and now I see this isn’t any toy. I figure I’m dead. But damn if he doesn’t stare at me for the longest minute I ever lived and then he sprints off into the fog. I can’t see him to shoot him. So instead of running after him, I call for a couple of ambulances and tell the dispatcher to send some cars to look for a track star with a shotgun. I figure I’m on my way to a commendation for my amazing display of restraint.” (That always made me smile, too, and start to laugh in anticipation of the climax. I started laughing now, with Geof nudging me to try to keep me quiet so I wouldn’t ruin it for Gail and Willie.) “About that time, the woman wakes up, and she’s frantic. ‘Where is he? Where’s that son of a bitch!’ she’s yelling. And I say in my best Canadian Mounties voice, ‘We’ll get him, ma’am. We’ll get that burglar.’ ” (Now I’m really giggling, and Gail and Willie are looking from Geof to me, and back again.) “But she starts beating on me! ‘Burglar!’ she screams. ‘That ain’t no burglar, that’s my husband, you chickenbrain! You lay a hand on that man and I’ll tear your’—excuse me—’fucking legs off!’ And she lays into me with the plastic baseball bat, so by the time the ambulances get there, they need three stretchers to haul us all out of there!”

  As always, I doubled over as if I’d never heard it before. Gail and Willie seemed amused, if not quite as hysterically as I was. It had occurred to me that maybe Geof told his cop stories again and again just for the pleasure of seeing my reaction to them. As for his language, Gail had obviously been a cop’s wife too long to be shocked.

  “Ha-ha-ha,” she said. Willie’s narrow face broke into a slow grin, his first of the evening.

  “I learned many things that night,” Geof said ruefully, rubbing the cheekbone that had been broken in that melee. I dried my tears with a cocktail napkin. “Besides the fact that domestic disturbances suck, I mean. I also learned: Don’t take anything for granted. Situations are not what they seem to be. People are not who they seem to be. And without Tonto, the Lone Ranger wouldn’t have lived long enough to adjust his mask.”

  He had smiled straight at Willie as he spoke.

  “Willie.” Gail nudged her husband’s arm. “Tell them about Jesse.

  “There was this babe on the street once.” Willie’s voice was as slow and deliberate as his smile. He stared over my shoulder as he spoke. “Clothes all torn up. Cryin’. Standing just inside an alley, like she’s hiding. Me and my partner, we pull over and ask her, has she been hurt. She’s fair looking, tall like a model, a white gal, lots of makeup, tight silver pants, off-the-shoulder blouse, only it’s been torn off her shoulder. Gold pointy heels, lots of pretty red hair. Real clean hair. And we’re thinking, maybe her pimp did this to her, and we ask her, does she want us to take her to the woman’s shelter? She says yes. Gets
in the back seat. Still crying, tells us her name is Jesse, tells us her boyfriend beat her up, but she won’t give us his name, where they live, nothin’ else. All we can do is deliver her. We take her to the shelter. We’re standing downstairs, shootin’ the shit with the director, and suddenly there’s this screaming from all these women upstairs on the second floor. And the director goes running up, and pretty soon she comes back down with our white gal, who is now holding her pretty red hair in her hands. Everything about her story turned out to be true except for one minor detail: Jesse was a man.”

  “Where’d you take her?” I asked. “Him.”

  Willie shrugged. “Back to the station. He cleaned himself up. In the men’s room.” Willie cracked a brief smile, and so did Geof, but I wasn’t finding the story very amusing. “He slept in a chair all night.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Next morning he borrowed some makeup from one of our women officers and made himself gorgeous again. We gave him bus fare and I guess he went on back home to his boyfriend.” When he noticed the expression on my face, Willie shrugged again. “There ain’t no shelter for some people.”

  Gail began to cough, at first quietly, as if she were trying to hide it, but it was soon shaking her small body.

  “Where’s your inhalator?” Willie said.

  “Forgot,” she choked out. “Home.”

  He looked annoyed, as if that was a bad habit of hers, but he patted her back perfunctorily.

  “Domestic disturbances!” Geof shook his head, and looked ready to wax philosophical on those cases that were the greatest bane and hazard of a cop’s existence. But he was interrupted. It was at that moment, which was not really all that much of a coincidence, that his beeper sounded. We all looked at each other with varying degrees of tension and resignation.

  Geof sighed. “Is it a full moon tonight?”

  When he returned from the phone, he leaned down and murmured, “Reported homicide. Let’s go, Willie. We’ll take your car.”

  Then he kissed me quickly on the mouth and said, in what had become a ritual over the two years we’d lived together, “I’m sorry. I love you.” I kissed him back and offered my own part of the formula: “Be careful. I love you.” There wasn’t any need to waste words or time in saying I’d take Gail home, or that he’d wake me up to tell me he was still alive. We knew all that. There had been plenty of shattered days and evenings in which to establish such habits. As always at such times, my consciousness focused on him like a laser, since I never knew if this would be the last time I’d see him. If it was, I wanted to be comforted—later—by knowing we had given our last moment together the respect and attention it deserved.

  On the periphery of my awareness I saw Willie kiss Gail.

  “I’ll be all right.” He sounded impatient, angry, eager. He sounded like a cop.

  2

  GAIL AND I WERE LEFT STARING ACROSS THE TABLE AT each other in a booth that suddenly seemed too large without the men to fill it. Even the air in the room seemed lighter and the lights brighter with the men gone to their appalling jobs.

  “Well,” I said, one cop’s lady to another, “here we go again.”

  Her hazel eyes were wide and full of fear, but she flickered her nervous smile at me. I smiled back at her. She smiled back at me. I began to feel like one half of two flashing stoplights.

  “Do you want another beer, Gail?”

  “No, thanks.” Her smile flickered on, off.

  “Would you like a Coke? Coffee?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “So.” I glanced around the room, looking for conversational gambits. When none came to view, I said, “How long have you and Willie been married, Gail?”

  She coughed, and her mouth twitched again. “Eleven years.”

  “He’s been a cop eight of those years?”

  She nodded, coughed again, smiled again.

  The conversation was turning out to be something of a struggle, but I persevered, hoping that if we remained in the bar a while longer, the look of terror in her eyes might fade. I was surprised to see all that fear in her, Geof always told me there wasn’t much danger associated with a homicide call unless the killer was still on the premises, which he usually was not. Unless it was a domestic disturbance, of course—they were always dangerous, because they were so full of passion, uncontrolled and unpredictable. And Gail had been a cop’s wife a lot longer than I’d been a cop’s lover. Maybe I was naive in my security; maybe she was wise in her fear. Was this what I had to look forward to, the fear growing worse the longer I loved him?

  “Do you have any children, Gail?”

  “Willie, Jr.,” she said between coughs. “He’s six. And Natalie Renée. She’s five. I’m expecting another baby. In June.”

  This was November, making her three months pregnant, with her husband in a job with less than perfect odds on whether he’d still be alive in six months to kiss the baby. No wonder she looked terrified. Who wouldn’t?

  There is nothing like one confidence to stimulate another.

  “Gail,” I said, “it’s kind of a secret, but Geof and I are getting married in a couple of weeks.” It was, in fact, set for two weeks from that night. We hoped to keep it small, quiet, private.

  “Congratulations,” she said, and coughed.

  “Tell me something—do you ever get used to—”

  She didn’t even let me finish the sentence. “No. Never.

  “Never?”

  She shook her head. “It gets worse when you have kids. Then you’re scared for them, too.” She pushed her half-empty beer glass away. “Would you mind taking me home now, Jenny? I need to let the baby-sitter go. It’s hard to find baby-sitters in a new town. I don’t want to be late and make her mad at us.”

  I thought it wasn’t really the baby-sitter she seemed scared of losing. After paying the check, I escorted her to my car, a new Honda Accord that was a conservative silver on the outside, a brash cherry-red within. There was a full moon, risen. On the drive to her house, I made another stab at conversation: “Did you have a job in Boston, Gail, outside of your kids?”

  “No, but I’ll have to now.” She was staring out the window when she said it, wistfully. With a visible effort, she returned the polite inquiry. “What about you?”

  “Do I have kids? Do I work? No, and yes. I’m the director of the Port Frederick Civic Foundation. To put it simply, we give other people’s money away. If you, for instance, were stinking rich . . .

  “Ha-ha,” she said.

  “... you might leave your money to the Foundation when you died. Then we would distribute it to worthy causes, like the home for battered women, or we might buy a new X-ray machine for the hospital, or we might sponsor a benefit for handicapped children, or we might help to build a memorial to the Vietnam vets, or we might. . .”

  I chattered on, hoping to relax her. And myself. Her fear was beginning to infect me, and I resented it; I felt the symptoms of dry mouth, liquid bowels, rapid pulse, and I didn’t want them. She directed me to a neighborhood of nearly identical, run-down rental properties and then to the gravel driveway of one of the small brick houses. The porch light was on. Through the picture window I saw a light, the kind of odd, dead luminescence that only televisions emit. As a child, I had been superstitious about that light, afraid that if I walked through it, it would suck the colors and dimensions from my body, leaving me flat, black-and-white, and trapped like the grinning little people who lived in it. Even as an adult, I couldn’t look at a TV glowing in a dark room without feeling briefly desolate.

  I put the car in park but left the engine running.

  Gail and I stared at her new home.

  “I hate this house,” she said suddenly, fiercely. I had the feeling it was only tact that kept her from adding, just as fiercely, “I hate this town.”

  “You miss your old home.”

  She nodded, and seemed to be holding back tears.

  “Well.” She took a shuddery breath t
hat turned into a cough; then she flickered her smile at me. “Thanks for bringing me”—the face she turned toward the brick house was bleak—“home, Jenny.”

  Impulsively, I reached across to touch her arm.

  “Things will get better, Gail.” I wanted to bolster her morale, but managed only to give her clichés bunched together like a bouquet of plastic flowers. “You’ve still got Willie and the kids. You’ll find a house you like better, you’ll make friends. This is a pretty good town to live in, really.”

  She grabbed my hand briefly, strongly, but she didn’t reply, not even to tell me to mind my own business. I thought I ought to give her a chance to return the favor of passing out advice, so I kept hold of her long enough to say, “Gail, do you have any words of wisdom for a lady who’s about to marry a cop?”

  “Yes.” She opened the door, slid out of the car, and looked back in at me. “Don’t.” Her smile flickered one last time, and then she pulled her jacket closer around her and trotted off toward her front door. I waited in the driveway until I was sure she was safely inside. For a moment, as she stood on the porch fumbling for her keys in her purse, her small figure was illuminated by the dead light from the TV. She was coughing into her fist when she shut the door.

  When I got back to Geof’s house—the hideously large and modern one that his second wife, Melissa, had picked out and then abandoned—I climbed to the second floor to take a shower. Then I put on a thick, warm robe and tennis socks. I went down to the kitchen to eat a snack of cream cheese, onions, and salmon on garlic bagels, with a dark Beck’s Beer—I may have inherited Swedish skin, but my stomach’s Hungarian—while glancing through the newspapers. After a look at the cable network news, I brushed my teeth, spent my usual moment feeling guilty for not flossing, pulled out the alarm on the clock, and crawled into bed—the queen-size one that Melissa Bushfield Vance had picked out and then abandoned for the digital charms of a computer whiz.

  “Hello, there,” I said to my mental image of her. “Why are you coming to mind tonight, and so cynically?”