A Happy Marriage (6 page)

“Okay, I’m going to leave you alone for now,” he said, unwilling to admit defeat. “You’re here for tonight. So we’ll talk tomorrow—”

“No,” Margaret cried out. “Please. I can’t talk about this anymore.” She buried her face in Enrique’s arms and sobbed. “No more, no more, no more,” she whimpered over and over in a hysteria of desolation.

The healer stepped off his conductor’s stand and stumbled to the door. He caught Enrique’s eye and said in a low but firm voice, “We’ll talk.”

Enrique had kept mum while the great man made his plea because Margaret was right and his case was unsupported by facts. But when she ceased sobbing and he handed her new tissues to replace the soggy ones, he couldn’t restrain himself from asking, “Mugs, maybe there’s something to what he says. You could stay on the TPN for just a month and try another dose of—”

She shrank from him, repelled, more terrified by these words
than by anything he had ever said to her. “Puff!” she exclaimed in a whispered scream. “Puff! Puff!” she repeated, using the silliest, the most private, the sweetest of her nicknames for him. “You have to help me!” She gasped for air as if her feelings were strangling her. “I can’t do this without you! I can’t do this alone! I don’t have the strength to argue! I need you to fight them for me! I need you to help me die! I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I know it’s not fair—I know I’m putting too much on you—”

And that was all he let her say, ashamed to have somehow managed the monstrous feat of provoking a woman who was dying in midlife to apologize to him for unfairness. He pressed her fragile, thin-haired head to his chest, pleading, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to say it, I’m sorry,” and then a litany of I love yous.

She answered each of his declarations. “I love you
so
much. I love you
so
much,” saying the “
so
much” as if it were a significant development, a furthering of her feeling for him that she had only recently understood.

Her sobs declined into sniffles, and she sighed into another motionless Ativan sleep. He lay beside her and occasionally kissed her forehead, as soft and moist as a baby’s. He expected, when she woke up, that they would start talking in a way they never had, in a way they now must, about their marriage.

“And how are
you
doing?” he was asked at the end of almost every conversation with a friend or relative or doctor, as if they had all read the same manual. A few informed Enrique, in case he hadn’t the wit to notice, that cancer could be as hard on the spouse as on the patient. They didn’t accomplish their objective of letting him feel sympathy for himself. Inevitably, he felt obliged to point out that he was not dying and so it could never be as hard on him as on Margaret, that compared to most cancer victims and their families, he and Margaret were lucky. Their medical bills would
be paid by Enrique’s excellent insurance through the Writers Guild of America, the union of screenwriters. Other indulgences, such as the faux hotel suite at Sloan, were available to them thanks to the generosity of Dorothy and Leonard, Margaret’s parents. Enrique was a writer and could either drop his work entirely or shift it to odd hours so as to be available to Margaret and to Max and Gregory. They had many friends who had rallied around them. They had both the intellect to negotiate the hierarchical world of medicine and sufficient contacts among the bullying powerful of New York with which to cajole doctors. He said it so often, he felt a little insincere, like a candidate making a stump speech, “This is a terrible piece of bad luck for Margaret, but compared to most families who have to deal with this, we’re lucky.” He meant every word. At age fifty, it seemed to Enrique that too much of his life had been wasted in a twisted shame of self-pity for what had been the petty frustrations and mistakes of his career. Faced with this, a true misfortune, he was surprised to find himself more often grateful for the allies and resources that he had been given to help him fight on Margaret’s behalf than discouraged by an opponent who didn’t even know he existed.

He could not and did not ask Margaret or his boys for comfort. His father was dead. His mother too old and too self-pitying to be a solace. His in-laws too frightened and too bereft themselves. His half brother, Leo, too anxious and too selfish. His male friends too distant from the realities and too uncomprehending of the experience. Margaret’s best friend, Lily, too preoccupied comforting Margaret and herself. His half sister, Rebecca, who had been present and understanding and so great a help, could spell and reassure him, but she could not provide, no one could provide, what he had forsaken for nearly three years, what cancer had taken from him, and would soon take from him forever: Margaret’s attention.

Lying beside her, waiting for the paperwork to bring her home
for the last time, he expected that soon they would begin their final conversations, their farewell to each other. The struggle to live would no longer dominate. He was lucky even in this, he thought. She hadn’t been incinerated by a terrorist’s plane or shattered by an errant taxi. Even in her dying, he consoled himself, she was giving him something precious, a time for them to part with grace.

But he had miscalculated. Her decision to die brought a crowd.

H
E TRIED TO
be late. Not truly late, just the proper ten or fifteen minutes so he wouldn’t be the first to arrive, which was odd, because he wanted more than anything to be alone with her.

He was dressed an hour and a half ahead of time. He wore black jeans and his sole white Brooks Brothers button-down shirt, which he ironed twice on a towel covering his butcher-block table. The second pass was necessary because the first left a crease on the collar that would symbolize something bad about him, he couldn’t say what. Once all the creases were eliminated, he thoroughly concealed the white shirt underneath an equally white and very puffy hand-knit wool sweater. Looking at the total effect of this ensemble, few would have suspected how much thought had been put into it. It certainly wasn’t flattering. The puffy sweater had been
given to him as a Christmas gift by his Jewish mother and atheist father, purchased from a local craftswoman who lived near them in Maine. It would have worked best for a beer-guzzling bear of a man, concealing the overhang of his stomach and making great round thighs seem proportional. Instead, in this wad of white, Enrique resembled a pregnant anorexic, or perhaps an enormous cotton ball impaled on a pair of sticks.

He had a persistent suspicion that he looked silly in this outfit and anxiously checked and rechecked himself in the full-length mirror on the back of his bathroom door. His once roommate and bachelor best friend Sal Mingoti, who now lived, inconveniently, with a girlfriend of Sylvie’s, had insisted that Enrique buy the looking glass at Lamstons. “The Women will need this,” he assured Enrique as they awkwardly lugged the six-foot-tall glass up the five flights, and then Sal helped him drill and attach plastic holders to support its frame. That installation was a forbidding task for the literary Enrique but laughably easy for Sal, who had pioneered a dying manufacturing neighborhood soon to be known as SoHo. Sal, a broke, struggling sculptor, had learned to be plumber, electrician, carpenter, and tile layer en route to the coveted loft prize: a certificate of occupancy, or C of O.

Enrique had occupied the vast illegal space with Sal, or rather mostly slept for nearly a year after his breakup with Sylvie, and occasionally served as a holder of things that Sal drilled or glued or nailed. Sal had been kind about providing shelter for Enrique. He had refused all offers to help with the rent but also gently spurred Enrique to get his own place. In exchange, Enrique had inadvertently supplied Sal with a new inamorata. They were close and true friends despite the fact that Sal, unlike Bernard Weinstein, wasn’t literary and had never read Enrique’s novels. In fact, he hardly seemed to read at all, claiming to be dyslexic. Also unlike Bernard Weinstein, Sal was rooting for Enrique to succeed
with Margaret (or any woman, really) and called about an hour before the dinner to ask, “Nervous?”

“No,” Enrique not so much lied as deluded himself. “Just, you know, I don’t like…dinner parties. I mean, what are they? You just sit and eat and talk.”

“Oh yeah, Mr. E?” Sal said, using his affectionate name for Enrique. “You wish it was a dancing party?”

“No!”

“Yeah, that’d be a fucking nightmare. Dancing. It’s sex with all of the work and no fun.”

“All the potential for ridicule and none of the fun,” Enrique amended.

Sal laughed, with the relaxed grace of a man who knows with whom and when he will next get laid. “Don’t be nervous. She likes you, Mr. Ricky. It’s obvious. She would have torn your clothes off if that bozo Bernard wasn’t there. Women don’t stay up all night talking ’cause they want to hear what men have to say.”

“Then why a dinner party with all these other people?”

“Safety in numbers. She’s a little scared of you. And that’s good. That’s really good. Just what you want.”

Enrique loved Sal. He felt at ease with him, probably because Sal, precisely because he was neither a writer nor a reader, didn’t resent Enrique’s precocity. And the fact that Enrique almost never agreed with Sal’s opinions and perceptions of the world (and thought his nonrepresentational shape-sculptures didn’t qualify as decoration, much less art) only seemed to increase his feeling of trust. He knew that if he made a fool of himself with Margaret, Sal would not truly think less of him whereas, with the Bernard Weinsteins of the world, Enrique felt he was forever on probation, one misstep away from their permanent disdain.

Sal, the shaman of seduction, had a final word of advice. “Promise me one thing. Kiss her when you leave.”

“What?”

“On the lips, Mr. E.”

“In front of everybody!” Enrique fairly squealed with incredulity and horror.

“Yep.”

“No!”

“I mean, no tongue. Don’t ram it down her throat, but you know, move in, right up to her, pause for a sec, just one second, and then kiss her softly on the lips. She’ll appreciate it. Believe me. The Women want men to make the move, you know? She’s invited you to dinner with her old friends and you have to show her, you’re not just another friend.”

Sal’s kiss order haunted Enrique. He knew he wasn’t capable of so bold and public a gesture. With or without an audience, he might lack the nerve to kiss Margaret. Sal’s suggestion caused him to forget to ask his friend if he ought to be wearing this huge, hot sweater on his bony frame. The thick wool felt especially close once he’d donned his green Army coat, trudged down the five flights, and pushed open the heavy metal door out onto dirty and frigid Eighth Street. He knew from the ice-cold mask of air that caused his eyes to wince and the tip of his nose to go numb that he ought not to be perspiring in this weather. He could already feel one particularly large and hot drop run down the washboard of his ribs to his bony hip. He paused to decide if he had time to run back upstairs, take another shower, and remove the tent of a sweater.

During this internal debate, his eyes drifted to the five black steps of Bernard Weinstein’s building. He wondered, for perhaps the ten thousandth time, whether his nemesis was one of Margaret’s guests this evening. Certainly Bernard was orphaned. More so than Enrique. Bernard’s parents had divorced when he was a child, his mother had died while he was in college, and his father
had long since remarried a woman who, Bernard claimed, hated him. Why don’t I feel sorry for the scumbag? Enrique wondered. Whether he ought to or not, it seemed likely Margaret would take pity on Bernard and invite him to a dinner of holiday orphans. Enrique had been pretty sure he would have to contend with Bernard and his barbs since the day he got Margaret’s call inviting him to join “a crazy group. I don’t even know who’s going to show up. I’ve invited everybody I could think of who’s stuck in New York without family. And I have no idea what I’m going to make. We may starve.”

That was his chance to ask if Bernard would be among them, but he was too paralyzed with pleasure and surprise that she had called him back. He had been unable to find a reply other than “Can I bring anything?” a question provoked by a memory of how his parents behaved. Of course what his mother could offer was a delicious salad made from her vegetable garden in Maine, or his father a signature blueberry pie, featuring a thin, crisp, and buttery crust, whereas Enrique could do no better than hand over a can of Campbell’s soup. “How about a bottle of Mateus?” Margaret said and released her abbreviated shout of a laugh. “I’ll bring a case,” he said gamely and asked what time he should appear. “Sevenish,” she said.

He hung up and felt humiliated, by what exactly he couldn’t say. Replaying her joke about Mateus, he wondered if she was laughing at him, and had been laughing at him all along with her probes about his education. His mind reevaluated her cutoff laugh as a suppression of mockery rather than modesty, and he began to suspect that the role he was playing was a pathetic character in a Dostoyevsky novel: a lonely, hapless young man humiliating himself by pursuing a beautiful young woman obviously above his station; that he would eventually split Bernard Weinstein’s skull with a hatchet, then Weinstein’s unpublished manuscript would
be posthumously hailed as a masterpiece, while Enrique’s sole claim to fame would be as the envious monster who had robbed the world of a delicate genius.

It was in this hopeless frame of mind that he decided against going back to shower and remove the sauna of a sweater. He was certain to fail no matter what he wore, and so, perspiring in the cold, he marched toward Margaret’s in a state of excited doom.

Having left his building at six-thirty, he arrived at his destination three blocks away at six-forty. Since he knew being early was tacky, he walked quickly past 55 East Ninth Street, spooked anyway by the doorman, who scowled at the double glass doors as if they were about to admit his greatest enemy.

For someone who had lived all but two years of his twenty-one in Manhattan, Enrique had little experience with doormen. In working-class Washington Heights, they didn’t exist, particularly one in a starched gray uniform and possessed of a forbidding article of furniture—his lectern faced the entrance as if he were a Stalinist bureaucrat empowered to cast you into the gulag. Enrique rarely traveled to the Upper East Side precisely because up there they were ubiquitous. Not downtown—yet. This was 1975 Greenwich Village, one leg still in the bohemia of the fifties, the other sunk in the garbage and violence of the seventies.

Enrique’s Village of Eighth Street displayed clear evidence of both. The washed-out red façade of the New York Studio School, looking vacant behind its dirty, blank windows, stood out from the otherwise commercial street of head shops and shoe stores. Home to a generation of Abstract Expressionists, it admitted through its scarred metal doors beautiful and moody young men and women day and night, as well as the middle-aged wrecks of their teachers, bald men in berets mostly. The artists moved unconcerned past the resentful and predatory gaze of the drug dealers and nodding off junkies in pools of urine. Turning off this
street of art and degradation, and walking uptown a mere three blocks, was to time-travel forward to the thoroughly bourgeois Village of the second millennium.

When he and Bernard had walked Margaret home, Enrique had noted the unusually stately appearance of her street, beginning with an elegant prewar co-op on the corner of Ninth and University Place. Its unusual double-height windows provided glimpses of well-furnished rooms that looked European, as if the contents had been transported from Paris. The rest consisted of architecturally undistinguished postwar structures. Margaret’s was especially blank, with its officelike array of identical size windows. He had also noted that her apartment faced a vast beige brick complex on the downtown side, which was saved from dullness by the rare setback garden—twenty feet or so of greenery. Even in December, there were half a dozen pine trees, gaily fitted with white Christmas lights, towering over dirty clumps of frozen snow.

There wasn’t a single commercial building, or a tenement, or a dilapidated brownstone on Ninth Street stretching from Fifth to Broadway, although all the surrounding streets had plenty of them. It was a two-block oasis. Broadway was a hard-line border between it and the dangerous decay of the East Village. To cross Broadway in that direction, say to taste the spicy pastrami and steaming knishes of the Second Avenue Deli, was to step around the strewn upturned garbage cans of youth lost to drugs, to avert eyes from the homeless and the shattered ambitions of would-be artists and intellectuals stringing banners of futile political rage across the broken windows of abandoned tenements. Soon the neighborhood would have the romance of a modern
La Bohème,
and within half a decade the glory of gentrification, but what it meant to Enrique in 1975 was that he shouldn’t walk east of Broadway after nine at night unless he was prepared to be mugged. Margaret’s Ninth
Street, in Enrique’s eyes, was a sole survivor of another time, the ruling classes of Henry James or a progressive Eleanor Roosevelt. He assumed it was a last gasp of a dying city, and in no way a harbinger of a post-2000 Manhattan filled with millionaires, oozing expensive condos to both rivers. He thought he was walking into the past while in fact he was seeing the future.

At Broadway, he turned uptown, struck by the delicate Gothic spires of Grace Church, once the most favored church of the powerful Episcopalian elite. From Tenth Street until Seventy-seventh, Broadway disobeyed the rule of the grid and cut its way on an angle through the heart of Manhattan. Enrique stood in admiration, the perspiration beneath his layers of Army coat and wool turning into a freezing sheen so that he was at once shivering and sweaty, an impressive feat of discomfort. He observed how the avenue’s angle at Eleventh Street allowed a rare sight in New York, not a profile of a skyscraper, namely the Empire State Building twenty-odd blocks north, but an angled view of its rise above the city, as if it had rotated on the granite, to show off the details of its handsome façade. With nineteenth-century Grace in the foreground and the 1930s Empire State rising above uptown, lit against the black metallic sky, he felt small and unimportant. He really was an American Raskolnikov, too intelligent to be reconciled to his unimportance and helpless to escape it. He was in the city of his birth, the city of his childhood, the city of his adolescence, the city of his ambition, and he felt lost.

He also felt stupid. Killing twenty minutes on the street produced both tedium and anxiety. He walked to the Strand, the secondhand bookstore on Broadway and Twelfth, glad, as always, to see the familiar spines of the Modern Library editions of literary classics. He paused at the self-improving table with soaring piles of important nonfiction works, from Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
to Boswell’s
Life of Johnson,
and guiltily maneu
vered to the remainder shelves of modern fiction, furtively wending back to the
S
’s, where he found, as he did once a week, the same battered copy of his first novel (the spine was actually dented), a pair of his second, one without a jacket, and six copies of his mother’s first novel. Of his father’s eight books, only two were present. He paused on his way out at the newly published books obtained from the dozens of reviewers who lived nearby and enhanced their livings by illegally selling these free editions from publishers. Some were what the industry called advance readers’ copies, with promotional copy citing advertising budgets and the like. Enrique glanced at a few and endured spasms of envy while reminding himself that he wasn’t in a race, that readers did not ignore one writer because they liked another. After fifteen seconds of attempting to sustain this good fellowship with novelists everywhere, he once again failed to convince his spirit to be generous.