A Happy Marriage (10 page)

Phil glanced balefully at Enrique and handed him the bottle with disdain. “Doesn’t mean Margaret.”

“So what does Margaux mean then?” Lily asked Sam, her eyes fixed on his big feet. “If it doesn’t translate as Margaret, what could it possibly mean, I mean translate—Oh my God, I can’t speak English!” She raised her wineglass. “Open that bottle whatever the hell it’s called.”

“Margaux,” the goofy Sam said with professorial solemnity, “is Margaux. Doesn’t translate into something else. It is the thing itself,” Sam concluded with a flourish of a long arm and tapered fingers.

“The thing itself!” cried the pale-eyed warrior. “Sartre,” he added, pronouncing the great philosopher’s name in perfect French. He gazed at Enrique, still stuck in Army coat, clutching his embarrassingly controversial wine.

Enrique burned with shame and resentment at the ruin this handsome young man had brought to his attempt to please the
object of his desire. Enrique offered the bottle to Margaret. She reacted to all this banter as if she had just woken up and wasn’t sure who, or even what he was. She held on to the bag with the second bottle of Margaux and made no move for the bottle Enrique was offering. “I don’t know,” he answered more to her than Phil. “I come from a long line of peasants. To me wine is supposed to come in skins, and I pronounce ‘Sart,’ ‘Sat—rah.’”

Margaret fired off one of her truncated laughs, waking up from her reverie with a start. “Like van Gogh,” she said, pronouncing it “Van Go.” “I can’t stand people calling him ‘van Gawk-k-k,’” she said, exaggerating the proper guttural Dutch enunciation. “I know it’s right, but it sounds disgusting and anyway…who cares?”

“Yeah, so what if you’re a philistine?” Phil shrugged off his own remark, making it unclear to Enrique if he truly meant to be so slighting. It was, after all, an insult directed at both Margaret and Enrique. He hoped Phil meant to demean Margaret. Along with the conviction that no woman could like a cheap man, he believed a supercilious and insulting male attitude was equally repugnant to Margaret’s sex—in short, he was naïve.

“Maybe that’s why Van Gawk-k-k committed suicide,” Enrique said, and for the third time offered Margaret his much-analyzed gift of wine. “Couldn’t stand the sound of his own name.”

It was Lily who laughed, harder than she had at the clown’s boots, Enrique was pleased to note. Phil, the champion of disdain, nodded an acknowledgment at Enrique that he had scored. Margaret was in one of those pauses that seemed to overcome her, as if somewhere behind those blue eyes she had frozen all the action to conduct a thorough review. “That’s funny,” she declared at last without the least bit of amusement in her look or tone. It would have been an unsatisfactory acknowledgment of Enrique’s wit
except that, at long last, she also accepted his gift from his hands. She glanced at the label and returned to her walk-in closet of a kitchen.

Sam called with the answer to the source of his own quote: “‘The Thing Itself.’ It’s a poem by Wallace Stevens.”

“It is!” Lily exclaimed as if that were extraordinary. “What’s the poem?” she asked.

“Wallace Stevens. That motherfucker,” Phil said in a tone of disgust. He resumed the tirade that had been interrupted by Enrique’s appearance, declaiming in a high-volume tenor, suffused with confidence: “Anyway, this fine vintage wine is more evidence of my point. We’re all on the road to being good little suburbanites. Just look at that list.” Phil gestured at a folded over newsletter with the heading
Cornellians at Three.
“Everyone’s either a lawyer or becoming one—or, my God, much worse, a doctor—”

“Wait a minute,” Lily protested and launched out of her chair, abandoning the clown and his shoes and joining Enrique, who was relieved to have her deal with Phil.

Phil didn’t wait to hear her objection. “We’ve even got two MBAs in there. My God. What a nightmare. MBAs—”

“What’s wrong with being a doctor?” Lily objected. “Don’t you want to take your coat off?” she asked Enrique, without a pause for the non sequitur.

Enrique removed the coat and revealed the huge, white, hand-knit sweater. He didn’t know that its bulk (not to mention the suggestion of drowned animal odor it released) was the reason Margaret and Lily gave him and its tented enormity a second glance. But he was sufficiently aware that he proceeded to flatten the balloon of the sweater’s middle so they wouldn’t think it was his stomach.

Fortunately, their attention was yanked back to the charis
matic Phil. “Yes, yes, yes, Lily, we all know about your daddy, the small-town doctor,” he said, moving into the kitchen and once again taking possession of the Margaux. In those close quarters, he inevitably brushed against Margaret and did so without a trace of the self-consciousness that such contact would have created in Enrique. Phil leaned his hip flush against hers while he pulled open a drawer and poked at the silverware inside. “Where’s your corkscrew? I want to open this. I need a drink.”

“I already gave you a drink,” Margaret said with a sly grin.

“So I’m a drunk. Better than being an acidhead.” He bumped her playfully. “Move over. Is it in this drawer?”

“I’ll get it!” Margaret snapped, but she laughed with delight. In Enrique’s eyes, everything about their behavior was as dismayingly cute as Robert Redford and Jane Fonda in
Barefoot in the Park,
an embarrassingly wrongheaded, sexist romantic comedy by Neil Simon that he had watched with guilty pleasure several times on WPIX’s late movie. Only—if such a thing were possible—Phil seemed, as a dark-haired romantic lead, more confident than America’s handsomest blond movie star. And a darker suspicion came into Enrique’s mind while observing their intimacy—she offered a wine opener and hung on to her end teasingly when Phil attempted to take it—that this confident and disdainful youth had already succeeded in removing the apron on this lively female cook. Worse than that thought of ravishment was a more dismal worry: were they an ongoing couple? Had he misunderstood the entire situation? Was this truly an Orphans’ Dinner hosted by a woman with a complete life, this evening merely a bounty born of her pity, a charity event for lost souls like him, men without women to love them? After all, Bernard had never claimed that Margaret was unattached; indeed, he’d made it sound as if all the men at Cornell desired her. He had portrayed her as very picky, but there was no guarantee that she had turned them all away—and
certainly none that she was, God forbid, virginal. Enrique had always assumed Bernard’s claims of her sexual aloofness were a disguised admission that she had rejected the only Cornell man who mattered to Bernard, namely Bernard.

The gloom of his suspicion was unrelieved by a friendly gesture by Clown Feet. He thumped over and said, “I’m Sam Ackerman,” with a chinless grin. “You’re Enrique Sabas, I know. Bernard’s bragged on you a lot.” Enrique didn’t show his surprise, only nodded because, despite Sam’s air of pleasantness, there was something condescending in his attitude, emphasized by the fact that Sam was literally looking down at Enrique from his greater height of six-six. That was the final blow to Enrique’s frail vanity: he wasn’t even the tallest peacock in the room.

Enrique fell into a resentful and sullen silence, deepened by Phil’s persistent monologue, from which there was no respite, neither during or after the arrival of the three remaining invitees. Two were men—one short, chubby, and pleasant, although warily quiet—and the other self-possessed, as lean as Enrique, although not quite as tall, and dressed à la Bernard, in relentlessly black and smudged clothes. Neither of these male specimens seemed inclined to compete, or up to the task of competing, with the monologuist. The third arrival, Pam, was a very thin, small woman with olive skin and dull brown hair, making the orphans an unbalanced three females to five males; but this meek girl hardly seemed to qualify as a full female participant compared to the bold Margaret and the vivacious Lily. Pam was shy almost to paranoia: she made miserly movements with her lips, never quite opening into what seemed to be intended as a smile, while her small, nervous eyes checked her periphery for a blind-side attack. She appeared overwhelmed by the situation, sitting in a corner of the couch and clutching her glass of wine in both hands as if guarding it from purse snatchers.

Pam’s terror did nothing to lure Enrique from hiding. While Margaret passed around Brie on stoned wheat crackers to accompany the bottles of rapidly diminishing Margaux, he scurried into a passivity that felt loathsome. In his eyes, he displayed the least impressive plumage of the assembled males. He stewed in a gray broth of bitterness over his gift to Margaret, which he now felt foolish about. As if his mother had abruptly taken possession of his brain, he calculated that at this rate they would go through eighteen dollars’ worth in a matter of ten minutes. The speed and waste seemed disgraceful and insulting all at once.

At last Margaret appeared with a huge white bowl and announced, “Here it is! My traditional Christmas dinner of linguine and shrimp in marinara sauce.” If Enrique had assumed that the mass movement to the glass table by the wall of windows would slow down Phil’s rant against the bourgeois drift of Cornell’s class of ’72, he was sadly mistaken. Because Lily seated herself directly opposite Phil, his earlier complaint about doctors was renewed. “Just cause Lily’s dad is the last of the good country doctors is no reason to think all these assholes in med school are doing it for anything but the desire to be rich,” Phil pronounced as they settled in. “To be rich and to play golf, God help them. That’s their punishment. To have to play golf for the rest of their miserable moneygrubbing lives.”

Despite Phil’s tone of disdain and outrage, it seemed a performance. Half comedy-club, half A-student display of articulate bombast, it flowed effortlessly and left Enrique in particular with nothing to say, since it was the sort of showy left-wing tirade, delivered with just enough wit to redeem it from humorlessness (although substantially less than what Enrique would produce, he liked to believe), that Enrique sometimes orated himself.

Maybe he is better at this I am, Enrique concluded, and that’s why I hate him. He withdrew further from the room, these
strange young people, and in particular from the velvet-eyed chef, seated at the head of the table, opposite him. In choosing a chair as far away as possible from Margaret, he was conscious only of his moroseness and inclination to give up pursuing her, convinced she belonged to Phil. He was unaware of the symbolism implied by his choice of a seat at the foot of the table opposite Margaret. Phil, however, was not oblivious to his apparent claim of a special role. When Margaret attempted to refute him, he interrupted, “You two are Mom and Dad tonight? Do I ask you for the car keys?” he shot at Enrique.

“Not with only a learner’s permit,” Enrique answered effortlessly, although he had been silent for half an hour and was embarrassed that his act of self-abnegation had been turned on its head. “When you get your license, we’ll talk.” Pam seemed to find this very funny. She displayed a hitherto hidden smile and turned to him—she was seated on his left—arching her skinny torso. She spoke in a voice that surprised him with its raspy sexiness. “Don’t let him. He’s too young to drive.”

“Way too young,” Enrique agreed. He knew that she was flirting with him. He was so young and fearful of women in general that his typical reaction to interest from a source he wasn’t pursuing was to treat the woman as if she had offended him. The truth was that he didn’t know what to do with such interest. Once, he had made the mistake of returning the friendliness with like charm and the woman had led him to bed, where he couldn’t perform. Shame was thus added to his feeling of stupidity and left him more skittish than ever about behaving like normal young men: that is, if nothing better were on offer, to fuck girls they neither liked nor were attracted to. Even as a long-haired, pot-smoking, teenage Marxist, Enrique had enjoyed watching James Bond undress women he didn’t particularly like, and who were sometimes attempting to murder him. It disappointed Enrique
that he, on the contrary, needed to feel love, or something very much like it, even to flirt. His lack of a callous heart, a heart that wouldn’t interfere with the functioning of his penis, made him feel less than manly. So Pam’s interest paradoxically added to his general state of despair about himself.

However he did not want a woman he felt sorry for (and he felt sorry for any woman he thought unattractive) to feel rebuffed. He managed a feeble smile. “Actually, I’m the one who doesn’t have a driver’s license.” His eyes strayed down, surveying the thin boy’s body underneath her white peasant blouse. The top three buttons were undone, and rather than the swelling of a pillow he saw the ridge of a breastbone. That further convinced him that if he attempted to plant his flag on that skinny surface it would not fly.

“You can’t drive?” Pam’s voice, astonished, rose in volume sufficiently to attract a few glances.

“Nope. I can drive,” Enrique said. “At least well enough to total a car. But I don’t have a license.”

“That’s unbelievable!” Pam exclaimed with delight, as though he had announced an accomplishment, rather than the absence of one.

“Oh, there are many things I don’t have. I don’t have a high school diploma because I dropped out in the tenth grade. I don’t have a college degree—obviously. I don’t have a credit card. I could go on and on about what I don’t have. It’s what I do have that’s a short list.”

Of course he had cast a lure, the reliable one, and soon Pam was bobbing her head and saying, “Oh wow. That’s incredible. That’s great.” Between swallows of pasta and shrimp, he told his story of bitter rebellion against his high school and his parents, the publication of his first novel, and his three-plus-year relationship with Sylvie, which he knew meant two things to women: one, he was experienced, in spite of his age; and two, he wasn’t afraid of com
mitment. After his debriefing, he performed a background check on Pam and heard nothing that interested him. Not that he revealed his boredom at her suburban upbringing, her controlling father, her pro-Vietnam war brother, her meek mother, and her longing to be a modern dancer rather than a first-grade teacher—the job she took after graduating from Columbia Ed.