The Burgess Boys

  “Why?” she kept whispering as she watched her husband speaking. “Why? Why, Jim?” The man looked at her helplessly. His eyes were small and dry.

  “I don’t know,” he said repeatedly. “Hellie, I don’t know.”

  “Did you love her?”

  “No.”

  The day was a warm one, and Helen got up and closed each window. Then she closed the shutters. “And everyone knows,” she said softly, amazed, as she moved back to sit on the edge of the coffee table.

  “No, Hellie, they kept it quiet.”

  “They can’t keep something like that quiet. That horrible slut herself tells people.”

  “No, Hellie. It’s part of the settlement. She can’t talk about it.”

  “Oh, you are a fool, Jim Burgess. An absolute stinking fool. A girl like that has friends. Girls talk. They talk about the stupid wife. Did you talk about me?”

  “God, of course not.”

  But she saw, she thought, that he had. “Did you tell her I almost died in Arizona because you weren’t paying attention to me? Because when I wanted to go back to the hotel that day, you said no?”

  He did not answer, only stood with his arms by his sides.

  “Every day you walked out of this house and went to the library? Every single day you lied to me like that?”

  “I was scared, Hellie.”

  “Did you go to see her?”

  “Oh no. God, no.”

  “Where were you last night?”

  “In Atlanta, Helen. Doing a deposition. Helping to finish a case.”

  “Oh my God, you’re lying.”

  “Hellie. Please. I’m not. Please.”

  “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t even know if she’s still at the firm. I don’t talk to anyone there except sometimes Alan, since he’s distributing my cases.”

  “But you’re lying! If you were in Atlanta last night you must’ve been with someone from the firm. So either you weren’t in Atlanta, or you do talk to people other than Alan in the firm. And you know perfectly well where she is!”

  “There was an associate with me in Atlanta. He didn’t mention her because he doesn’t even know—”

  “I’m going to be sick.” In the bathroom she almost allowed him to stroke her hair, but then she was not sick, and so she pushed him away. There was something theatrical to her gestures. She meant them, as she meant everything she said. But the way she moved her arms, the way she said words, had never been needed before, and was foreign. She struggled to be calm, understanding that once it left her she would be wild inside the foreignness—a void of hysteria waited. She stalled.

  “I don’t understand,” she kept saying. Jim remained standing and she told him to sit down. “But not near me. I don’t want you near me.” Loudly: “I don’t want you near me.” She withdrew farther into the corner of the couch. She was not saying this to punish him. She did not want him near. She wanted to be away, away. She felt like a spider, contracting. “Oh God,” she whispered, feeling herself closer to the wilderness waiting.

  “What did I do wrong?” she asked.

  He was sitting on the edge of the leather ottoman, his lips almost white. “Nothing.”

  “That’s not true, Jim. I must have done something you never told me about.”

  “No, no, Hellie.”

  “Please try and tell me why.” She said this nicely, deceiving them both.

  He did not look at her. But he began slowly to talk in sentences. He said going to Maine to take care of Zach, which he had failed at, and which Bob had failed at too, had made him feel really angry, furious, like a pipe with rusty water pouring through him.

  “I don’t understand,” she said truthfully.

  He said he didn’t understand either. But he said he had wanted to wander far away and never come back. Seeing the mess Zach turned into, the emptiness of Bob’s life—

  “The emptiness of Bob’s life?” Helen almost screamed this. “The emptiness of Bob’s life made you have a sordid office affair? And Bob’s life isn’t even empty! What are you talking about?”

  He looked at her with his small, frightened eyes. “I don’t know, Helen. I was supposed to take care of everyone. Growing up. That was my job. And then I left when Mom died, and I wasn’t there for Susan or Zach when Steve left, and Bob—”

  “Stop. Stop. You were supposed to take care of everyone? Where’s the violin, Jim? Is this suddenly news? Do you think I haven’t listened to you about this before? Honestly—well, honestly, Jim, I can’t honestly believe this is what you have to say right now.”

  He nodded, looking down.

  “But keep going,” she finally said. She did not know what else to do.

  He looked around the room, then back to her. “The kids are all gone.” He put out his arm and moved it through the air to indicate the emptiness of their home. “Things felt so—so awful. And Adri made me feel important.”

  And so Helen’s crying arrived, long, racking, heaving sobs and sounds, and Jim went and touched her arm tentatively. Sometimes she cried out words, or phrases, to indicate that Bob’s life was not empty but Jim’s, and Helen had mourned the children going away and never been comforted by Jim one bit and she never ever would have thought to go find someone to sleep with so she could feel important and he had ruined everything, how could he not see that he had done that? He rubbed her arm and said he knew.

  And never—never—was he to speak that horrible woman’s name again. Bringing her name into the house! She didn’t have children, did she? No, of course not. She was nothing more than a puddle of urine on the floor, a woman like that. And Jim said Helen was right, he would never say the name again, he didn’t want to ever say the name again, not here not anywhere.

  That night they fell asleep holding each other, in their nightclothes, afraid.

  Helen woke early, the light was greenish and not full. Her husband was no longer beside her. “Jim?” He was sitting in the chair by the window, and he turned and looked at her and said nothing. She whispered, “Jimmy, did that all happen?” He nodded. There were dark patches beneath his eyes.

  She sat up and immediately looked for her clothes. She stepped into the dressing room and pulled on what she had been wearing the day before, then pulled those clothes off—she would throw them away—and put on others. Back inside the bedroom she said, “You’ll have to tell the children,” and Jim looked stricken and then nodded. Immediately she said, “I’ll tell the children,” because she did not want them frightened and of course they would be terribly frightened, she had never been so frightened herself.

  He said, “Please don’t leave me.”

  She said, “I’m not leaving. You left.” What she meant was that he had left the bed, had left her in her sleep. But she said, “I want you gone.”

  She did not want him gone, but she must have because she kept saying it, even as he put things in a suitcase, she kept saying, “I want you gone. All I want is to be away from you.” She could not believe he believed her. She wanted this person, repellent, terrifying, to be gone; that’s what she meant. When he stopped and looked at her with blank-faced panic, she said, “Go! Go! I want you gone.” She said she hated him. She said she had given her life to him. She said she had trusted him always. She followed him down to the door as she said she had never once betrayed him. She said again she wanted him gone.

  She ran up the stairs so as to not hear the click of the grated gate. And then she moved through the house, calling, “Jim! Jim!” She could not believe that he would do that, just go. She could not believe any of it. “Jim,” she called. “Jim.”

  The Hudson River had barges and tugboats and sailboats moving on it constantly. More compelling to Bob was the way the river changed according to the time of day and of course the weather. In the morning the water was often calm and gray, by afternoon the sun hit it with glory, and on Saturdays the sailboats gathered like a fleet of toys seen from Bob’s eighteenth-story window. By evening
the sun threw off great gusts of pink and red and the water shone as though it were a painting brought to life, the strokes of color moving and thick and thrilling, and the lights of New Jersey seemed to indicate a foreign shore. All the time he had lived in New York he had been (he now thought) surprisingly uninterested in its history. In Maine he had learned early on about the Abenaki Indians and their trips down the Androscoggin River each spring, planting crops along the way, harvesting them on their way back. But here was the Hudson, and what a history it had. Bob bought books, one leading to another, and then he was reading about Ellis Island, which of course he knew about, but not really. (Growing up in Shirley Falls, he knew no one who had relatives that had come to the country through Ellis Island.) He watched documentaries, leaning toward his television to see the mass of people pressed forward, coming on land with such hope and trepidation, because some of them would be turned back—doctors deciding they were blind, or syphilitic, or just mad—and they knew it. When they were allowed through, waved on, these people in jerking motion of black-and-white, Bob felt relief for each one.

  Bob himself was emerging into a world where all felt doable. This was unexpected and gradual, but swift, too. As autumn returned the city to its routines, he went about his life unencumbered by the crust of doubt he’d been so used to that he had not known it covered him until it was gone. He had little memory of August, only the sense of the city’s grittiness and heat and a roaring of a wind inside him. The unimaginable had happened: Jim was not in his life. At times he woke in agony, and could only think: Jim. But Bob was not a young man, and he knew about loss. He knew the quiet that arrived, the blinding force of panic, and he knew too that each loss brought with it some odd, barely acknowledged sense of release. He was not an especially contemplative person, and he did not dwell on this. But by October there were many days when the swell of rightness, loose-limbedness, and gentle gravity came to him. It recalled to him being a child, when he found one day he could finally color within the lines.

  At work, he noticed that people often came to him for help, their eyes receptive. Perhaps it had always been this way. He became used to the doorman nodding, “Hello, Mr. Bob,” and Rhoda and Murray opening their door, “Bobbeleh! Come in, have a glass of wine.” He babysat for the little boys down the hall one night, he walked a neighbor’s dog, watered plants for someone gone.

  His apartment he kept picked up, and this—more than the fact that he seldom drank and had only one cigarette a day—made him take note: He had changed. He did not know why he hung up his coat, or put the dishes away, or tossed his socks into the hamper. But he understood why his earlier inability to do so had irritated Pam—he did see this now in a different way. Pam, though, was gone for him. Gone with Jim somehow. The two of them seemed to have fallen into a pocket where the self knows to put dark, unpleasant things—and without excessive wine to start his mind wandering, they seemed to stay that way.

  He called Susan each week. Always she told him first what Zachary was doing (they had Skyped, and he spoke words of Swedish). She told Bob her fears that Zach’s current capacity for happiness proved she’d been a bad mother since he’d never been happy like this with her, but all she wanted, she said, was this health he seemed to now have. Bob answered each worry she expressed, noting that her tone was not that of a woman depressed. She had a knitting club she belonged to—Brenda O’Hare, Gerry’s wife, was awfully, awfully nice—and she ate every night with Mrs. Drinkwater; did Bob think she should lower the rent. No, he advised, she had not raised it in years. One day Susan had come across Rick Huddleston from the Office of Racial Anti-Defamation, this was in the grocery store, and he just stared at her like she was evil. Too bad, Bob said. He’s a jerk if he did that. That’s what I told myself, Susan said. (They were like brother and sister. They were like twins.) Only once did Susan ask if he had heard from Jim, she said she had called him and he never called back. Don’t worry about it, Bob said, I don’t hear from him either.

  Wally Packer had been arrested again. This was for the possession of illegal arms, but he had resisted arrest and threatened a police officer; he faced possible jail time. The twins discussed this, Susan saying, in a resigned way, that there was something unsurprising about it, and Bob agreed. Neither mentioned Jim as they spoke of this, and Bob felt the small breeze of freedom to realize he did not have to talk to Jim about Wally Packer (or anything), did not have to be demeaned by him.

  Mostly, he could not have predicted that he would feel the way he did.

  In the middle of October, New York was suddenly very warm. The sun streamed down like summertime, and sidewalk cafés filled with people. On his way to work one morning, Bob passed a place where people sat with their coffee and newspapers, and when he heard his name called he did not think anything about it. But it was Pam, standing up, almost knocking over a chair at a table Bob walked by. “Bob! Wait! Oh, shit,” because she had spilled her coffee. He stopped.

  “Pam. What’re you doing here?”

  “New shrink. Just saw him. Please, can I walk with you?” She had slapped down some bills on the table, plunked her spilled coffee cup on top of them, and was walking to get to the sidewalk to meet him.

  “I’m on my way to work.”

  “I know that, Bobby. I was just thinking about you. This shrink is really good. He says we have unresolved issues.”

  Bob stopped walking. “When did you start believing in therapy?”

  Pam looked thin and worried. “I don’t know. I thought I’d give it a shot. I’m feeling kind of adrift these days. You’ve practically disappeared. Hey, get this.” She touched his arm. “Before I went to this shrink, who’s pretty good, I went to a woman shrink and she kept calling Shirley Falls ‘Shelly Falls,’ and I finally said, Why can’t you get that straight? And she said, Oh, Pamela, a small mistake, excuse me. And I said, Well, people in Shirley Falls might not think it’s a small mistake. What if I said, Oh, your office is on Flatbush Avenue, I got it mixed up with Park Avenue, saaawwry!”

  Bob stared at her.

  “She was an asshole. She kept calling me ‘Pamela’ and I said my name was Pam and she said that was the name of a girl and I was a woman. Honestly. A dipshit in a red blazer with a huge desk.”

  “Pam, why are you paying a therapist to talk about Shirley Falls?”

  She looked taken aback. “Well, I don’t talk about it all the time. It comes up because, you know, I miss it or something.”

  “You live in a huge townhouse and you go to parties with Picassos on the walls, and you miss Shirley Falls.”

  She looked down the street. “Sometimes.”

  “Pam. Listen to me.” He saw fear drop onto her face. People moved past them on their way to work, briefcase straps slung across their chests, heels clicking on the sidewalk. “Let me ask you one question. After we split up, did you track down Jim and get drunk and tell him he was attractive and tell him stuff you’d been up to when we were still married? Just tell me.”

  “What?” Her head ducked forward slightly, as though trying to find him. “What?” she asked again. The fear had changed to confusion. “Tell your brother I found him attractive? Jim?”

  “He’s the only brother I have. Yes, Jim. Many people find him attractive. One of the sexiest men of 1993.” Bob tried to step back from all the people moving down the sidewalk toward their bus stop or the subway. Pam followed him; they were almost in the street. He told her what Jim had said about her in the hotel in Shirley Falls when they had gone up for the demonstration. “That you made poor confessional choices,” he finished.

  “You know what?” Pam spread her fingers through her hair. “You listen to this, Bob Burgess. I can’t stand your brother. You know why? He’s actually kind of like me. Only he’s not like me because he’s hard and successful and manages to find himself new audiences. I’m anxious, a little pathetic, and I can’t find my audience, which is partly why I like going to this shrink even if I have to pay him to be my audience. But Jim and I—w
e recognize each other, always have, and in his passive hostile way, he’s put me down. He craves attention, his need for it is so transparent it makes me sick, and poor Helen puts up with it because she’s too stupid to see it. So he demands attention and then keeps people out when he gets it, because wanting attention has nothing to do with relating to people, which is kind of what most human beings like to do. And yeah, I had a drink with him. He got me to say stuff, because that’s what he does. A whole career spent getting people to say what he wants them to, whether it’s a confession or a lie. Did I tell him I found him attractive? Does that sound like a word I use? Oh, Jim, I’ve always found you so attractive. Are you kidding me? That’s the kind of thing Helen, poor rich Connecticut stuffed sofa, would say.”

  “He said you were a parasite.”

  “Nice. Nice of you to repeat that.”

  “Ah, Pam. Who cares what he said?”

  “You care! Or you wouldn’t be accosting me like this.”

  “I’m not accosting you. I just wanted to know.”

  “Well, what I want is to tell your brother he has no business screwing around with your head. He’s the parasite. Feeding off the back of Wally Packer. And then off the back of white-collar criminals. Oh, that’s holy work, isn’t it?”

  She was not crying. She was not close to crying. She was the most Pam he had seen in years. He apologized. He said he would find her a cab.

  “Fuck that,” she said. She pulled her cell phone from her bag. “I feel like calling him right now. You can hear what I have to say to him.” She pointed her cell phone at Bob’s chest. “Jim and I aren’t really parasites, Bob. We’re statistics. Two more baby boomers not doing all the great things for society we thought we’d do. And then we get whiny about it, boo hoo. Yes, I go to dinner parties with Picassos on the wall, and sometimes, Bobby—shoot me—I feel sad, because I kind of thought I’d be a scientist tramping around Africa finding parasites and people would think I was great. Half-dead people wouldn’t die because of me. Hell, I’d save all Somalia! It’s called grandiosity, Bobby. As far as I can tell it’s a sickness like any other—