Stephen King - A Good Marriage

He chuckled soundlessly, as he sometimes did when they were watching Modern Family or Two and a Half Men . It was a way of laughing that had, until tonight, always heightened her own amusement.

“You want to know something, Darce? If they caught me dead to rights, I’d admit it—at least I guess I would, I don’t think anybody knows a hundred percent for sure what they’d do in a situation like that—but I couldn’t give them much of a confession. Because I don’t remember much about the actual… well… acts. Beadie does them, and I kind of… I don’t know… go unconscious. Get amnesia. Some damn thing.”

Oh, you liar. You remember everything. It’s in your eyes, it’s even in the way your mouth turns down at the corners.

“And now… everything’s in Darcellen’s hands.” He raised one of her hands to his lips and kissed the back of it, as if to emphasize this point. “You know that old punchline, the one that goes, ‘I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you’? That doesn’t apply here. I could never kill you. Everything I do, everything I’ve built… modest as it would look to some people, I guess… I’ve done and built for you. For the kids too, of course, but mostly for you. You walked into my life, and do you know what happened?”

“You stopped,” she said.

He broke into a radiant grin. “For over twenty years!”

Sixteen, she thought but didn’t say.

“For most of those years, when we were raising the kids and struggling to get the coin business off the ground—although that was mostly you—I was racing around New England doing taxes and setting up foundations—”

“You were the one who made it work,” she said, and was a little shocked by what she heard in her voice: calmness and warmth. “You were the one with the expertise.”

He looked almost touched enough to start crying again, and when he spoke his voice was husky. “Thank you, hon. It means the world to hear you say that. You saved me, you know. In more ways than one.”

He cleared his throat.

“For a dozen years, BD never made a peep. I thought he was gone. I honestly did. But then he came back. Like a ghost.” He seemed to consider this, then nodded his head very slowly. “That’s what he is. A ghost, a bad one. He started pointing out women when I was traveling. ‘Look at that one, she wants to make sure you see her nipples, but if you touched them she’d call the police and then laugh with her friends when they took you away. Look at that one, licking her lips with her tongue, she knows you’d like her to put it in your mouth and she knows you know she never will. Look at that one, showing off her panties when she gets out of her car, and if you think that’s an accident, you’re an idiot. She’s just one more snoot who thinks she’ll never get what she deserves.’”

He stopped, his eyes once more dark and downcast. In them was the Bobby who had successfully evaded her for twenty-seven years. The one he was trying to pass off as a ghost.

“When I started to have those urges, I fought them. There are magazines… certain magazines… I bought them before we got married, and I thought if I did that again… or certain sites on the Internet… I thought I could… I don’t know… substitute fantasy for reality, I guess you’d say… but once you’ve tried the real thing, fantasy isn’t worth a damn.”

He was talking, Darcy thought, like a man who had fallen in love with some expensive delicacy. Caviar. Truffles. Belgian chocolates.

“But the point is, I stopped. For all those years, I stopped . And I could stop again, Darcy. This time for good. If there’s a chance for us. If you could forgive me and just turn the page.” He looked at her, earnest and wet-eyed. “Is it possible you could do that?”

She thought of a woman buried in a snowdrift, her naked legs exposed by the careless swipe of a passing plow—some mother’s daughter, once the apple of some father’s eye as she danced clumsily across a grammar-school stage in a pink tutu. She thought of a mother and son discovered in a freezing creek, their hair rippling in the black, iceedged water. She thought of the woman with her head in the corn.

“I’d have to think about it,” she said, very carefully.

He grasped her by the upper arms and leaned toward her. She had to force herself not to flinch, and to meet his eyes. They were his eyes… and they weren’t. Maybe there’s something to that ghost business after all, she thought.

“This isn’t one of those movies where the psycho husband chases his screaming wife all around the house. If you decide to go to the police and turn me in, I won’t lift a finger to stop you. But I know you’ve thought about what it would do to the kids. You wouldn’t be the woman I married if you hadn’t thought about that. What you might not have thought about is what it would do to you. Nobody would believe that you were married to me all these years and never knew… or at least suspected. You’d have to move away and live on what savings there are, because I’ve always been the breadwinner, and a man can’t win bread when he’s in jail. You might not even be able to get at what there is, because of the civil suits. And of course the kids—”

“Stop it, don’t talk about them when you talk about this, don’t you ever .”

He nodded humbly, still holding lightly to her forearms. “I beat BD once—I beat him for twenty years—”

Sixteen, she thought again. Sixteen, and you know it.

“—and I can beat him again. With your help, Darce. With your help I can do anything. Even if he were to come back in another twenty years, so what? Big deal! I’d be seventy-three. Hard to go snoot-hunting when you’re shuffling around in a walker!” He laughed cheerily at this absurd image, then sobered again. “But—now listen to me carefully—if I were ever to backslide, even one single time, I’d kill myself. The kids would never know, they’d never have to be touched by that… that, you know, stigma … because I’d make it look like an accident… but you’d know. And you’d know why. So what do you say? Can we put this behind us?”

She appeared to consider. She was considering, in fact, although such thought processes as she could muster were probably not trending in a direction he would be likely to understand.

What she thought was: It’s what drug addicts say. “I’ll never take any of that stuff again. I’ve quit before and this time I’ll quit for good. I mean it.” But they don’t mean it, even when they think they do they don’t, and neither does he.

What she thought was: What am I going to do? I can’t fool him, we’ve been married too long.

A cold voice replied to that, one she had never suspected of being inside her, one perhaps related to the BD-voice that whispered to Bob about the snoots it observed in restaurants, laughing on street corners, riding in expensive sports cars with the top down, whispering and smiling to each other on apartment-building balconies.

Or perhaps it was the voice of the Darker Girl.

Why can’t you? it asked. After all… he fooled you.

And then what? She didn’t know. She only knew that now was now, and now had to be dealt with.

“You’d have to promise to stop,” she said, speaking very slowly and reluctantly. “Your most solemn, never-go-back promise.”

His face filled with a relief so total—so somehow boyish—that she was touched. He so seldom looked like the boy he had been. Of course that was also the boy who had once planned to go to school with guns. “I would, Darcy. I do. I do promise. I already told you.”