A Happy Marriage (16 page)

He tried a different approach once they were an old married couple of one year. He convinced himself that romance and art were a mistake with so practical and hedonistic a girl. He had overheard her several times long for a blender after she had broken the glass container and then lost the motorized base of the one she owned. He bought a shiny new Osterizer for her, confident this time that it was something she liked and used. What seemed certain to succeed was the most disastrous of all his gifts. “A blender?” she blurted. “A b-blender?” she repeated, making her appalled horror comic by pronouncing the
bl
of
blender
as if she were blowing into a tuba. “You gave me a b-blender for my birthday. Aren’t you Mr. Romantic? What am I getting next year? A waffle iron?”

She repeated this witty sally to Lily, who also thought his present hilarious enough to recount to others at a dinner in front of Enrique. He smiled with sheepish good humor but seethed with shame, and wanted to strangle both girls until they turned as purple as one of the fresh fruit drinks Margaret liked to b-blend in his despised gift.

The following year he made another heroic attempt to give her something she would never buy for herself. She had gone back to painting during their vacation at his parents’ house in Maine. She was delighted by how Enrique’s father raved over her two landscapes of the rocky coast. When they returned to the city, she kept up her new energy for painting, renting a space with a woman she’d met in a drawing class. During a visit to their one-room studio high above Union Square, he noticed that she was using two
stacked cardboard boxes with one of the flaps up as her easel. How could alleviating this deficit fail to delight? He walked to Utrecht on Fourth Avenue, where Margaret bought her art supplies, and purchased a wood easel—expensive but in no way elaborate, a useful and handsome present.

He had a premonition of failure as he brought in his gift from a hiding place in the fire stairs. He heard the whisper from a more insightful Enrique, ignored in the basement of his unconscious, that utility of any sort wouldn’t please her. Lily, and her then probably gay boyfriend, were toasting Margaret with champagne over Canadian caviar. All three looked at the noise of his entrance with effervescent expectation. He had a view of the trio’s reactions while he stood there with the folded-up easel cradled against his shoulder like a toy wooden rifle. Lily and her friend cheered and raised their glasses as a salute to his thoughtful magnanimity. Margaret’s face fell with a look of rejection, as if he’d walked in with another girl on his arm.

Her reaction remained a mystery for years. Her contemporaneous explanation that the easel was “too practical” was not the truth. When they shared confidences about their marriage on their twentieth anniversary, she finally explained.

Although the riddle had been solved, and although he knew her response had nothing to do with his taste, standing now on what could become her grave, and what he supposed would be his grave as well, he still had little faith that he could pick the spot where she would prefer to rest. Perhaps that didn’t matter. The elegant plots, no matter whether he chose the maples or the oak as neighbors, allowed three burials stacked one on top of the other. He was choosing their last stop together. Since he would be visiting for a while before joining her, it might as well reflect his taste more than hers. And if they happened to be the same, well, that was the grace of marriage.

He walked back toward the maples once more. “Can’t decide?” the always somewhat anxious and loving Lily asked. “I kind of prefer this view,” she offered, standing so that she was facing the tomb of Peter Cooper in the distance, a gleaming white temple among the leafy trees of June. She asked her not-gay husband of twenty years, “What do you think?”

“This is a great view,” Paul said and put his arm around her. “And we like Peter Cooper, don’t we?” They clung to each other and regarded Enrique with gentleness in their postures: chins rueful, shoulders relaxed, heads tilted quizzically.

“You get that view from both of them, though,” Enrique pointed out. “Just depends where you stand.”

“Oh,” Lily sighed, whacking the side of her head. “Duh…” Her usually merry brown eyes were big and worried these days, like a child’s on the first day in a new school. Her parents were both alive; no one close to her had yet died, and, in a way that only lifelong women friends can be, Margaret was closer to her than anyone. “I don’t know,” the always opinionated Lily said. “I can’t decide. I can’t help you.”

“You’re here. That’s a help,” he said and meant it. He walked back to the maple. He tried to clear his head of worry and consider which spot was more lovely.

He had taken his time on Margaret’s birthday fifteen months ago to see if he could, at last, select a present she would cherish without her help. It had been only a few weeks before they had learned that her cancer had metastasized, that, although they could try to slow the disease, she was incurable. For years their routine on her birthday had been set, a negotiated settlement of their mutual neuroses. He would accompany Margaret to a shop where she had seen something she desired: a hat, a bracelet, a dress, a pair of shoes, and, once, a coffee table. Enrique would go through the charade of purchasing and wrapping what she had
picked out for herself and offer it as if it were his idea. “You have such good taste,” she would say with enough conviction that unwitting friends sometimes believed her and commented how lucky she was to have so discerning a husband. Margaret never failed to kiss him in front of the crowd, genuinely delighted and satisfied by her own choice. More dismaying than her self-gratification was that he never found her selections predictable. The lesson he learned was that satisfying his wife wasn’t something you could memorize out of a chapter in
Our Bodies, Ourselves.
Nevertheless, no matter how daunting the task, her illness and her brave endurance of suffering made him want to try one last time to find her heart’s content.

He decided not to devote only a few hours to hunt for a gift. He gave himself a month. He settled on earrings once again. He loved her small and faultless ears, and when he was allowed to nestle behind them, tasting lightly with the tip of his tongue the crevices there, she would shiver with pleasure. He wanted to adorn them.

He went back several times a week to browse three antique jewelry stores in their neighborhood. Margaret had bought gifts in those shops for herself and for her friends. He had learned that she favored antique silver, nearly pewter in color, over shiny gold, and she preferred a single stone set in a design that was intricate but small in scale. By the second week, the shopkeepers had gotten used to his hour-long visits. One discerning saleswoman noticed the general qualities of his interest and pointed out a pair of antique silver earrings. They dated from the 1880s, she claimed. There was provenance to prove it, but that didn’t matter to him since they had all the elements he wanted and one that he feared: surrounding the single ruby at the center of each earring was a circle of little diamonds. More like sparkling stars than diamonds, but diamonds nevertheless. When she said, “What about these? I
think they’re so delicate and lovely,” he answered, “Yes, so do I. But they’re diamonds. My wife doesn’t like diamonds.”

She laughed. “Your wife doesn’t like diamonds,” she repeated as if he were joking.

“No,” Enrique said. “She doesn’t.” He studied them anyway. He brought them kissing close. But for the diamond halos surrounding the warm red rubies, they were her taste. He didn’t buy them. He returned to the store twice the following week, tempted more each time. They were the earrings he wanted to buy for her, but he was afraid it was another mistake, another example of his stubborn inability to see the world through her eyes.

In the same store there were similar earrings with no diamonds, but they had a less appealing design encompassing their single red stones. The pair he wanted to buy didn’t need their diamonds as far as he was concerned. They were attractive because of the miniature work, a careful weaving of an ivy pattern of antique silver so finely wrought that they looked organic. He knew Margaret would like the design. But the diamonds? Did that matter anymore? If she didn’t care for them, so what? So much had happened in the twenty-nine years since his first disastrous gift. So many illusions dispelled. So much strength revealed. She had said things to him as cruel as anyone would ever say; and he had been crueler to her more than once. They had sworn love; they had endured hate. As children they had made children, one of whom was already a man, the other becoming one too fast. By now she must know that he knew that she didn’t like diamonds. If he bought them anyway, because he felt sure the rest of the design was to her taste, he had to believe she would understand that he had meant well. She might not like them, she might never wear them (there wasn’t much time left anyway to wear them) but she couldn’t be offended if, once again, consistent with their entire
marriage, he had failed to pick out the right present on his own. They had different tastes, and sometimes wanted different things from each other, and yet they had lived a happy life together—he had to believe she would understand.

He wrapped them in their velvet box in the plain blue tissue paper she favored, and bought her a funny card, the kind she liked to buy for him. He was more earnest than she, so below the jokey line he wrote a heartfelt note: “For the only jewel in my life.”

“Uh-oh,” she said when she read the note. She looked up at him, dabbing at her nose to make sure it wasn’t running from the new chemo protocol. She smiled wanly. “Puff, you didn’t spend a lot? It’d be ridiculous to spend a lot on me now.”

“Don’t say that,” he said.

“Well,” she said, opening the small box, ever the thrifty Queens girl, “I can leave it to Gregory or Max to give to their wives…” She trailed off when the earrings were revealed. She regarded them for a moment as if she didn’t recognize what they were. She looked up at him, lips parting slightly, gazing at him with deep puzzlement.

Here it comes, he braced himself, her outrage that I haven’t remembered she hates diamonds.

“Endy…,” she whispered. She removed the earrings, holding them in her palms long enough to say, “They’re beautiful.” She ignored him. No kiss, no protest about money, none of the usual dodges. She walked over to the mirror she had hung in the front hall, which she used for a last look before braving the outdoors. She put them on with an intent air of concentration and then stared at herself, in her wig, her eyebrows painted on, turning this way and that. She repeated quietly, “They’re beautiful.” Two sets of tiny clear tears rolled down each cheek, but they were probably chemo tears, he told himself. He was suspicious of this apparent success, afraid to accept her congratulations. She loved and needed
him with such intensity since her diagnosis that he feared she had become too easy on him.

He walked over to say, “I’m not fishing for a compliment, but I made sure that I could take them back, so if you’re not happy just say so.” To his surprise, she continued to ignore him. She kept her moist eyes fixed on her image in the mirror, again rotating her head this way and that to view each one. He continued to make it easier for her to reject his gift by adding, “There’s another pair of earrings there without diam——”

“These are beautiful!” she snapped, annoyed. She didn’t look his way. She stepped back, pressing down on her wig to adjust it. “Puff, I love them,” she said ardently, wheeling and sliding into his arms. She rose on her toes and pressed her lips to his, whispering between a pair of kisses, “They’re perfect. Just perfect.”

“Even though they have diamonds?” he whispered back and waited through two more kisses before she said, “I love them. Thank you.”

He didn’t believe her until she wore them for an entire week, except for the afternoon they went uptown for her PET scan. She even took the trouble to explain that omission, saying she was afraid they would somehow get lost.

Enrique still wasn’t absolutely sure that this was a victory he could have won without the advantage of her illness. But he reminded himself that he had at last succeeded in understanding Margaret’s taste, and so had a right to make this decision. He walked across the little hillock of the burial lot over to the oak and stood where her, and someday his, headstone would go. He scanned slowly, in a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree arc, taking in the leafy trees, the sentinel headstones, the distant view of New York Harbor, the pretentious tomb with Ionic columns, and the gray serpentine road dividing the manicured lots that would soon, slung low in a black hearse, carry her lifeless body here.

“This one,” he said to Lily and Paul.

“It’s beautiful,” Lily said, although a moment ago she had suggested he choose the other grave. “It’s the right one,” she added, knowing the depth of his anxiety.

“Maybe,” he answered.

E
NRIQUE KNEW BY
the time he paid the check with a firmness he had learned from his father—a dismissive shake of the head, waving Margaret off with an air of gravity that implied he was sparing them both an egregious error—that he was never going to be able to forgive himself if he didn’t kiss her that night. He had tried not to show it. He had answered her questions, listened to her life so far, and fixed his eyes on hers, not straying to her amused lips, her smooth white neck, her wool-encased breasts. It was a focus he maintained out of fear rather than good manners; the one time he pictured her naked in his arms, he forgot everything they had ever discussed.

In truth, he couldn’t imagine holding her hand, much less fucking her. When she turned this way and that, to slide slim arms into her goose-down jacket, he got another peek at her shapely
legs and buttocks. They seemed like an impossible dream, not a goal. How had any man in the history of the world summoned the nerve to kiss a woman? He certainly couldn’t remember how he had accomplished the feat. As early as age twelve he had angled his lips at a girl and landed without damaging himself on her formidable grill of orthodontia, but the great grown-up man of twenty-one exiting the restaurant and walking back toward their neighborhood felt as if he had never made love, that he was as ignorant and as sexless as a toddler.

Although he couldn’t imagine daring to touch her, his mind raced, calculating how to confront himself with just that opportunity. Should he invite her up to his place? With what excuse? Should he ignore his building when they passed, presuming to walk her home? That way Margaret would have to make the call. “Do you want to come up?” she would ask. Or not.

If not, then what? Should he kiss her in front of her snobby doorman? Impossible. Having himself and her for an audience already felt like having too many people. If he could manage it, he would prefer to kiss her without being present himself. Certainly eliminating her blue eyes would make the fearsome challenge much easier.

“Shall we go back the right way?” she asked as they reached Seventh and Grove.

“Any way you like,” he said, feeling queasy. How was he going to bring her to ecstasy if he could barely walk? That Margaret seemed available, that this date wasn’t a quixotic adventure, perversely struck him as worse luck than if he had had no chance. The ball was in his court, and he was supposed to hit it hard for a winner when he didn’t even feel strong enough to lift the racquet.

“You were very good-natured about being wrong,” she said. She could have been speaking in Farsi; Enrique’s mind was locked up with dread. “What?” he stalled.

“About going the wrong way. When I pointed it out, you were really cool about it.”

“But—you—were—” he began slowly as he struggled to catch up to what she meant. He got it: “The one who thought Christopher was faster.”

It took a few exchanges before the predinner misunderstanding became clear. After several “But you saids,” they realized they had been in complete agreement about which way was more direct. Margaret had mistaken Enrique’s vague nod at Grove as meaning he wanted to try Christopher, and she had decided to defer out of politeness. When she proceeded to walk toward Christopher, Enrique, thinking she was stubbornly taking charge, had decided not to protest, also out of politeness. “Jeez!” Margaret bumped her denim hip against his Army coat. “We’d better stop being so nice to each other or we’ll never get anywhere.”

Enrique leaned close to her pretty face, tempting himself. “The longer it takes us to get where we’re going, the more fun we’ll have.”

Three evenings of talking with Margaret had convinced Enrique that there was one arena in which she would never be his equal—conversation. She was smart, a lot smarter than he had realized at their first meeting, and certainly better-educated. But her careful way of listening to what was being said meant that she wasn’t preparing a clever reply, and her caution about accuracy—twice she had paused to check herself as to whether she had a detail right—caused the rhythm of her speech to be clumsy, and spoiled the wittiness of her observations. She hadn’t grasped the secret to entertaining conversation, that how things are said is much more important than what is said. So he was surprised to find himself in any sort of repartee with her and certainly didn’t expect to lose an exchange of witticisms, as he now did. Margaret gazed at his lips as they came near. When they halted a good foot
away from where they wanted to go, she ran her blade clean through him: “What makes you think we’ll ever get where we’re going?”

He almost gasped, but she didn’t let him suffer for long. She raised her rapier graciously by adding, “Maybe we’ll just stay lost together forever.”

Here was his cue to act. Her chin was tilted up, parted lips lifted to his. There was no moon above bathing the Village town houses in silver light, but the streetlamp’s yellow could have been considered a romantic glow. The air, instead of carrying the usual aroma of urine and rotting garbage, was fragrant with the woody smoke of nearby chimneys. Behind her sparkling face, white Christmas lights were strung on a row of trees. Her eyes were merry, her mouth on offer. What more of a signal could she give him, short of grabbing his head and demanding, “Kiss me!”

He smiled, a feeble smile. She had robbed his voice. His body was frozen with fear. The twelve inches between their lips looked to be an infinite chasm to bridge. He was not the romantic hero of his own life. His disappointment in himself could hardly have been greater if she had told him that he was not worthy of her, that he ought to be locked in an airless basement and never permitted the social company of others. He would have agreed with that assessment. Right then and there he accepted in his heart and mind that he was never going to touch this woman. Like the hapless Bernard, he was never going to be more than her friend. In that spirit he said, “I hate being lost.”

Probably any other girl would have taken his answer as a rebuff. Certainly once the words escaped his lips, he wished he could have them back. Margaret didn’t appear to be put off. Her eyes drifted up to the sky, and she said with a wistful look, “Really? I love being lost.” She turned toward Grove, the right direction, and began walking home. “I love an adventure.”

He stepped beside her, relieved that the question of sex had been resolved, albeit unsatisfactorily, and said, “Good for you. I wish I was that way.”

“You’re not?” she exclaimed. She was moving briskly, in such a hurry that he felt sure she wanted a quick end to this date. “Come on, you dropped out of high school. You left home at sixteen. You cohabited”—she smiled at the word—“with an older woman. You’re way more adventurous than I am.”

“Not really,” he insisted. A heavy silence fell, and the quiet panicked him. He was scared they had nothing left to talk about. They were friends, that was a relaxing thought, no more worry about how and when to leap the chasm. But without that worrying undercurrent, his mind seemed to have lost navigation. Was there any point in continuing the evening? He felt that the whole enterprise, the weeks of maneuvering to get her alone, was a waste. Shameful though it was, given his avowed belief in feminism, he had to admit to himself that apparently his sole interest in her was sexual. He didn’t miss the pressure to act, but without it he seemed to be just as interested in going home to watch TV. “What about your brothers?” he heard himself say, although he had no awareness of manufacturing this thought. “Are they adventurous?”

She chuckled, making a rich sound in her throat, a complicated mixture of affection and contempt. This was a musical note no male could ever play: knowing and sarcastic, loving and irritated all at once. “My brothers…,” she said. “They are the most buttoned-down young men you’ll ever meet. Such obedient boys.” She sighed. “My mother trained them but good.”

Enrique noted that being obedient wasn’t a quality she admired in a man. That was the problem, he decided on the spot. Margaret imagined that Enrique was a bad boy. She didn’t know that he longed to be obedient, if only he could find a ruler he could trust. “They’re younger than you?”

“No, Rob’s older. Four years older and prematurely middle-aged. He acts like he’s as old as my father.” She laughed, another complicated melody, this one of disappointment and forgiveness. “He was so mean to me when I was little. Teased me terribly.” She shook her head, dumbfounded by the memory. “My parents left him to babysit me one night. We ordered a pizza, which I was so excited about. My favorite, with mushrooms. While we were waiting for the delivery, we played Cowboys and Indians, and Rob fooled me into letting him tie me up. And then, when the pizza came, he didn’t let me go. He ate the entire pie in front of me, taunting me the whole time.” Her anger about it was green, yesterday’s hurt.

“How old were you?”

“Six? Wait. Seven? I’m not sure. Let’s see, it was—”

He stopped her. He’d learned her fetish for precision wouldn’t allow her to be off by even a few months, and he wasn’t interested in that exactitude. “So your brother was a kid, too, right? He was just being a mischievous boy himself. He’s not like that now? Not still tying up girls?”

She laughed. “I wish! Then I would forgive him. No, he was just being mean, not kinky. He’s a tenured professor at Yale. An old fogy at twenty-eight.”

“He has tenure at twenty-eight?”

“Probably ready to collect his pension.” She turned away and said to a town house’s steps, “He’s brilliant. He’s a genius. But he’s a genius at microeconomics. So who cares?” She laughed and twisted back toward Enrique to add, “I’m sorry. I’m being terrible. But it’s true. Who cares?”

I’m exotic to her, Enrique thought. That’s why she likes me. But I’m not. I’m a nerd like her brother, only much less smart. “What’s the difference between a microeconomist and a regular economist?”

“Oh, they’re very different. Don’t make that mistake in my family. They sneer at macroeconomists.”

“I’m sorry, but I’m a high school dropout. What’s the difference between macro and micro?”

“A macroeconomist is like, you know, someone who makes pronouncements about whether the stock market will go up or down, or interest rates are headed up or down, someone who makes big—well, my father and Rob would say—
guesses
about the economy. They don’t do that at all—”

“Your father’s also a microeconomist?”

“My father, Rob—and I guess they’re making Larry head that way, too.”

“So what do microeconomists figure out?”

“If AT&T or Con Ed has to ask the government for a rate increase, or if you have to figure out what to charge in order to cover your costs and other possible disasters and still make a profit, you hire a microeconomist, and using
science
”—she paused to smile at Enrique in order to be clear that this emphasis originated with her father and brother—“you come up with the correct number. Anyway, my brother teaches it, my father used to teach it (now he’s got a consulting firm), and my baby brother’s studying it also—it’s the family business.”

“I see,” Enrique said. He hadn’t had any wine with dinner, but if he had knocked back an entire bottle this would have sobered him up. What an astonishing gap between her family’s business and his. That her father worked for AT&T and Con Ed was, in his parents’ view, tantamount to collaborating with the Vichy government. And what, my God, what would her parents and her brothers make of his insane left-wing, novel-writing, perpetually broke family?

Another silence had fallen. Enrique’s door was only a block and a half away. He feared the silence would remind her that they
would soon be making a choice about when and where to say good night. “Your brother’s got to be sorry about the pizza thing,” he said without having thought it through. “He’s got to be very sorry he did that to you. I’m sure he’s ashamed of it.” What he wasn’t sure of was why he was arguing on her brother’s behalf. To try out disagreeing with her about something? Isn’t that what friends do? Amiably disagree?

Margaret fished in her purse for a cigarette when they paused at the corner of Sixth. “Rob likes to tease. He’s sarcastic. Very sarcastic about everything. Listen, I love him. And when I was little, I worshiped him. I thought he was the greatest. He was my big brother and he knew everything. But he was mean to me. You can’t blame him. He had my mother breathing down his neck all his life. Having to be perfect and do everything perfectly. Tenure at twenty-eight. I mean, my God. So I understand.” She lit her cigarette.

“What about your baby brother?” Enrique asked, dutifully following this sexless turn in the conversation—new friends at camp learning about each other’s siblings.

“Aw, Lawrence. My baby brother Larry. Little Lollipop Larry. He’s sweet. I’m his big sister, six years older, so I got to be the one who was worshiped.”

They were crossing Sixth, drawing near to the probable end of this utter failure of an evening. “And you took great care of him, of course,” Enrique said.

She released a laugh from her gut that a male could produce. “Actually, I was a much worse babysitter than Rob. I gave little Larry a concussion one time. And I broke his arm another. Twice, after leaving him with me, my parents had to meet us at the hospital.” She laughed with infectious delight.

“How did you give him a concussion?” Enrique asked. “You dropped him on his head?”

“No—” she said, gasping out the words between laughs, “I was trying to teach him to ride a bike.”

“And his arm?”

“
I
didn’t break his arm—”

“Oh come on. ’Fess up. You were dragging him by the arm to buy drugs—and you snapped it—”

“No, no, no, I was trying to teach him to roller-skate…”

They were nearing the corner of Eighth and Sixth. To go to Enrique’s apartment, they’d turn east. If they proceeded one block farther north to Ninth, they would be heading to her place.

To distract her as they passed Eighth Street, so the choice of going to her apartment house would occur without a discussion, he belabored the joke: “Roller-skate? Admit it: heroin fix. What did you do? Twist his arm to get his lunch money?”