A Happy Marriage (2 page)

“Yes…,” Enrique said, drawing the word out warily.

“I’m having dinner with Margaret. I’ll bring her by your place after. Around eleven? That a cool time?”

“I’ll be home,” Enrique said and held his laughter until after he hung up.

And so Enrique’s charge of a fictionalized Margaret had been the perfect bait. She was certainly real, so terrifyingly real that although the suede-clad foot kept piercing his peripheral vision, he maintained focus on Bernard. His annoying friend had seated himself at the small, round butcher-block table to the right of the fireplace. He had kept on his too skimpy (for this weather) black leather jacket and now reached into its inner pocket to remove a fresh pack of cigarettes. He began the infuriating cigarette ritual,
using the blond wood as a drum to beat out his Bartók concerto for unfiltered Camel and cellophane.

With his guests settled, Enrique sat on his bed-couch, currently in couch incarnation thanks to two long foam pillows with blue corduroy covers. He realized immediately that this position was untenable, since he would have to choose whether to look straight ahead at Margaret astride his director’s chair or twist his neck to the right to see Bernard the modern nicotine composer, it being a wide-angle impossibility to keep both in his range of vision and disguise his real interest.

He bestirred himself as part of a maneuver to adjust his line of sight on his guests. “Need an ashtray?” he asked, moving behind Bernard and up the step to the kitchen area. He looked for the one made out of clear glass bought at Lamstons, around the corner on Sixth Avenue. He was pleased and proud of the relentless newness of everything in his apartment. He cherished the butcher-block kitchen table, and his long desk accommodated eight for poker, positioned under the studio’s two windows facing noisy Eighth Street. He adored the Trinitron placed between it and the fireplace, and relished the kitchen’s new and unused pots, pans, cutlery, plates, and bowls.

As he disappeared behind the kitchen’s jutting three-foot wall, which housed his stove, it occurred to him that he was a host. “Anybody want something? Wine? Coke? Coffee?” And he added doubtfully, looking toward his garbage can, considering what could be rescued from the Chinese delivery and its supplementary offerings, “Tea?”

“Beer,” Bernard said.

“Beer,” Enrique repeated, opening his refrigerator. He looked inside although he knew the answer. “Sorry. No beer. Wine?” he reoffered since he possessed a bottle of Mateus, a cheap wine his ilk liked because its unconventionally shaped flask could be con
verted into a candleholder, dried wax forming a monstrous shawl down its slumped shoulders.

“Scotch,” Bernard said as if that settled it.

“No scotch, Bernard. How about a vintage Mateus?”

“Mateus?” Margaret cried out in what could have been amazement or disdain.

Enrique leaned back from the fridge, reconnecting himself visually to his guests, to ask Margaret if that meant she wanted a glass. He was unsettled to discover that the blue-eyed beauty had removed her right leg from its perch on the chair’s arm, to shift ninety degrees leftward to observe his movements in the kitchen, incidentally making what appeared to be an uncomfortable cradle out of the director’s chair. Her back was no longer resting on the canvas sling but leaning against the right arm; somewhat painfully, Enrique assumed, although the pine edge was cushioned by her down jacket. Her legs were draped over the left arm, pointing slim hips, cute butt, and smooth pelvis toward Enrique. In his feverish imagination, she was offering herself to him—though Bernard was between them in this configuration and could claim Margaret meant the invitation for him. She raised her right arm to idly tuck a pretty mass of tight black curls behind her perfectly formed ear. Her hair was straight everywhere but at her temples, he noticed, too unsophisticated in feminine ways to distinguish whether that was natural or not. Gazing at the girl spread across his chair in a posture which defied its design, Enrique couldn’t remember what he had intended to ask her.

Margaret smiled broadly and fully exposed her teeth for the first time, revealing a flaw in her beauty. They were too small for her generous mouth and spaced apart, like a child’s. “You really have a bottle of Mateus?” she said, her freckled cheeks full of merriment.

“Yes, it’s a dirty job, but someone has to buy it,” Enrique admitted, humiliated.

“No scotch? No Jack Daniel’s?” she asked with a laugh.

“No hard liquor,” Enrique confessed and hung his head in mock shame. “Just cheap wine.”

“Told you,” Bernard said to her.

Enrique shut the refrigerator door, perhaps a little too hard. “Told her what?” he demanded.

“You don’t drink,” Bernard said, an unlit cigarette bouncing like a conductor’s baton between his lips. He positioned the phosphorescent tip of a match on the rough surface of the striker and lowered the book’s cover over it. Enrique watched as Bernard drew the match out from this hiding place in a slow and graceful motion, igniting it safely in the air. A few months before, over one of their midafternoon breakfasts, Enrique had tried to duplicate Bernard’s enviable method. He lit the match all right, and also the rest of the book, which flared into a fireball, soaring out of Enrique’s startled hand up and away from their booth, terrifying two elderly patrons nearby, triggering a supercilious smile on Bernard’s face, and enraging the waiter, who squashed it out and then cut off that day’s free coffee refills at a drowsy two. Subsequent solo attempts at practicing Bernard’s technique had similarly failed.

“How come you don’t drink?” the brilliant blue eyes demanded.

“I drink,” Enrique insisted, bringing an ashtray to his interrogators.

“He doesn’t drink ’cause he didn’t go to college,” Bernard said, holding his burnt-out match high, a dismal Mr. Liberty, failing to light Enrique’s way to the shores of the Ivy League.

“Right!” said Margaret, reaching back into one of her jacket pockets to produce a pack of Camel Lights. “Bernard told me you dropped out of college to write.”

“I dropped out of
high school,
” he said, back in possession of the trump suit’s ace, “to write my first novel.” He timed this play of
the winning card with a gliding movement of white socks on glazed oak floor, arm and hand fully extended to offer Margaret the glass ashtray, a skinny, long-haired courtier in black jeans, asking the princess’s restless suede boot:
Good enough? Good enough? Good enough?

“You didn’t finish high school?” she asked.

“Didn’t finish tenth grade,” he said, less prideful now, not sure if she was impressed by his reverse achievement.

“Well, at least you stayed long enough to learn how to smoke,” Margaret commented drily, swinging her boots down to the floor and leaning forward to accept his glass gift—and that did it. That brought those depthless blue eyes within a foot, perhaps six inches, maybe even closer, and something happened inside Enrique, like a guitar string suddenly unstrung. There was a shock and a vibration in his heart, a palpable break inside the cavity of his chest. He had dropped out of high school and never took a class in anatomy, but he did know that the cardiovascular system wasn’t supposed to react as if it were the source and center of feeling. And yet he would have sworn to all and sundry—not that he expected to admit it to anyone—that Margaret, or at least her bright blue eyes, had just snapped his brittle heart.

E
NRIQUE STUDIED HER
sleeping profile, the heavy Ativan unconsciousness she hugged for security against the terror of what she faced alone. All alone, he had to admit, although he had tried hard, and succeeded with a grind’s grade-grubbing anxiety, to be with Margaret for every examination, every CT scan and MRI, every infusion of chemo, fingers entwined for each of three surgeries until obliged to release her to the OR’s whooshing doors. Even during those enforced separations he didn’t separate, pacing in prominent view in the waiting area, afraid to break for a piss. He wanted to be the first face remembered out of anesthesia’s woozy awakening, including the shivering agony before morphine drapes fell to hide her from the latest wounds. But that’s fanciful, isn’t it? he asked himself. The same drugs that cleared pain also wiped away the memory of his comforting words and kisses,
although she seemed to know, always know, that he had been there.

Enrique was so diligent he would have suspected himself of insincerity except that he had missed once. Badly. Nearly three years ago, he had left it to her beloved friend Lily to walk the overnight hospital hall of terror after the urologist finally delivered to Margaret the diagnosis of bladder cancer that he had confided to Enrique two days before. Sure, Enrique had the excuse that their youngest, sixteen-year-old Max, was home alone, still ignorant of why his mother was staying in the hospital for a third night after what was supposed to have been an hour-long procedure. Sure, but he could have arranged something else, as he had done subsequently many times. His half sister, Rebecca; or Lily; or someone could have stayed with Max while Enrique attended to what was more urgent: to embrace Margaret’s dread, to encourage and console her, to cheer and to love her although he was scared to the bone, sick to the soul with fear.

But all those desperate feelings were long ago, two years and eight months ago, one hundred and forty-seven days and nights in the hospital ago, three major surgeries, a half dozen minor surgeries, and fourteen months of chemo ago, two remissions and two recurrences ago. Looking back through the defeated glaze of fatigue, it seemed inevitable now that it would end like this, this inch-by-inch dying, this one-track terminus when hope had become a skeleton’s grin.

Margaret seemed hardly to breathe or dream, small figure made smaller by the fetal hunch, and yet he didn’t believe it was a peaceful sleep, or true sleep at all. The drugs dimmed her consciousness, but they did not let her forget the accumulating loss of pleasurable life, and certainly not the looming dead end ahead.

He looked out the window at a dense, rain-swollen sky lowering over the East River and sipped a Dean & Deluca’s coffee. Any
taste with the promise of energy, no matter how short-lived, was welcome to join the fight against pervasive fatigue. Yet despite two cups, he could feel his forehead, eyelids, cheeks all sag as if he’d been scalped and a mask of flesh was sloughing down to his chin. If Enrique let his eyes shut briefly to rest them from the burn of Sloan-Kettering’s air-conditioning, in an instant the private room’s carpeted floor fell away and he was afloat—until a nod, a voice, the vibration of his cell phone startled him back to a state of exhausted alertness. These days friends urged him to get more sleep and immediately withdrew the advice because of its evident impracticality. However, to silence his willfully dense half brother—who, in lieu of visiting Margaret at the hospital, insisted on inviting Enrique over to his apartment for dinner—he had to spell out the logic of his schedule: “I want to be at the hospital at night when she’s most alone and I don’t want to abandon Max so that means sleeping at Sloan, getting up at dawn—which, believe me, is no problem in a hospital—to get downtown to wake up Maxy to try to convince him to eat something and walk him to the subway and then take a shower, change my clothes and get back up to Sloan for morning rounds which I usually miss anyway, ’cause they do them early which doesn’t matter since I can catch the doctors again in the afternoon just before I head down to dinner with Max.”

He had talked like that since the earliest days of combat with Margaret’s disease, in narrative spurts sorely in need of punctuation and editing, without proper endings or middles. It was a symptom of fatigue and an adaptive response to the way most people reacted to his wife’s frightening illness: they interrogated Enrique intrusively about the logistics of Margaret’s battle while carefully avoiding discussion of its denouement. Enrique had grown old—three weeks ago he had turned fifty—but he had not lost his youthful fondness for altering a famous quote to aggrandize his daily life. When he raised the subject of victory or defeat
for Margaret, and friends were quick to end the conversation, he would intone to himself in a whisper: “I am become Death, the destroyer of chitchat.”

Margaret’s eyes opened just as he had decided to leave the tall chair beside her bed for a midmorning nap on the room’s couch—although experience had taught him a daytime snooze accomplished little more than transforming grumpy and alert fatigue into despairing grogginess. It was hard to resist, however, the lure of the uncomfortable sofa bed, which had been restored to couch incarnation by an orderly while Enrique was downtown. Enrique had insisted on spending an exorbitant amount—after her third hospitalization, the cost had been assumed by her generous parents—for a room on Sloan-Kettering’s nineteenth floor, because it provided a bed for him and he could stay with Margaret during the desolate and frightening nights at the hospital. On this so-called VIP floor, the rooms were decorated to resemble those of a luxury hotel and included a small desk, a comfortable armchair, a coffee table, and a foldout sofa, which had just seduced him when Margaret opened her great, sad eyes.

She didn’t speak. She didn’t ask about seeing Max off to take his class’s high school graduation photo. She didn’t volunteer whether the doctors had come back during Enrique’s hour-and-a-half absence. She gazed as if they were in the midst of a lull in a long conversation and she was giving thoughtful consideration to his last remark. She seemed to absorb him with her brilliant eyes—as blue as the day they met and bigger than ever in a face narrowed by starvation.

They were upper-middle-class New Yorkers, rich by any reasonable standard, citizens of the wealthiest metropolis in the richest nation in the world, and Margaret had been starving for half a year. She hadn’t been able to digest solid food or drink fluids since January because her stomach no longer emptied its contents into her
intestines. This failure, elegantly named gastroparesis by science, had first been hopefully diagnosed as a side effect of chemotherapy’s accumulating toxins—the premise being that it was theoretically reversible—until in time several of the specialists said that the more likely cause was her metastasized bladder cancer, growing and spreading on the outside of her intestines. Cancerous lesions, too small to be detected by CT scans, were stiffening the bowel’s peristaltic action, stalling it, and preventing anything she swallowed from being digested; solids and fluids remained in her stomach until she threw them up, regurgitation provoked by overflow.

Back in February, one of Margaret’s many doctors, a short, autocratic Jewish Iraqi émigré, had inserted a flexible plastic tube known as a PEG (an acronym of the medical term
percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy
) through her skin and into her stomach to drain everything she swallowed into a bag outside her body. The drain was necessary even if Margaret took nothing by mouth. Enrique had vividly learned that when the intestines shut down and the stomach doesn’t empty, green-black bile—digestive juice manufactured by the liver and passed into the gallbladder—finding itself with nowhere to go, backs up into the stomach and, in four hours, fills it.

A pint of that repulsive liquid had collected at the bottom of a bag hanging beside her bed, inches from where Enrique’s foot kicked like a metronome to keep him awake. Near his other foot was a pump suspended on an IV pole that had been disconnected and pushed away last night. Its task was to circumvent her useless stomach by pushing a finely grained, beige-colored gruel, an easily digested nutritional substitute, not very different from the Enfamil formula they used to give their infant sons, into her small bowel through a second tube that had been surgically inserted ten days ago by a different doctor, an apologetic, ruddy-cheeked surgeon. This tube was called by a confusingly similar acronym, PEJ,
the
J
standing for
jejunum.
It was intended to supply nutrition directly into her intestine, not to provide stomach drainage.

Margaret’s team of doctors and nurses had been trying to nourish her through the PEJ for the past three nights, beginning at midnight with a goal of continuing until six. Each night they had failed to complete the enteric feeding. The first try had worked until five in the morning, the second until three-thirty, and last night it had flunked almost immediately. A little after one am, Enrique had been awakened by Margaret calling his name in exhausted distress, asking him to summon the nurse to turn off the pump because the fine gruel had backed up to the rear of her throat, giving her the terrifying feeling of being drowned by a meal she hadn’t swallowed in the first place.

Margaret hadn’t starved to death in January—it was now June—thanks to a system called TPN, an acronym for total parenteral nutrition, which provided all sustenance intravenously, avoiding her digestive system altogether. The necessary fats, proteins, and vitamins were delivered in liquid form through a port in her chest and absorbed by her blood system. At the hospital, the staff taught Enrique how to clean her port, mix the TPN, and connect her to its pump. With his new training, Enrique could treat Margaret at home.

It was cold and snowy, and Margaret had weighed one hundred fourteen pounds when they started. TPN had sustained her into the warmth of June, but it kept little else alive for her. It did not provide her with energy or the freedom to use it. The TPN, a sour-smelling, milky brew, required twelve hours daily to flow. Even if the process was started as late as ten at night, TPN would truncate evening plans and consume most of the morning. The nutritional system was also failing at its main task, as evidenced by Margaret’s current weight of one hundred and three pounds.

This ebbing of her life force was painfully charted for Enrique
by Max, who had been told the previous September that his mother was considered incurable, that she would live beyond nine months only if she responded to experimental drugs for which there was no proof of beneficial effect. Max, like his older brother, Gregory, shared his mother’s keen affection for facts. He fixed on one in April. Margaret had been hospitalized to treat an infection. Max visited after school for an hour, lying quietly beside her in a Sloan-Kettering bed. When Enrique walked him out to the elevator, he asked, “Are they going to do something about Mom’s weight?”

Enrique explained, in the gentle, reassuring tone he tried to maintain, although often what he had to say was neither gentle nor reassuring, that they would be upping her calories in the TPN from now on. Max interrupted, his blue eyes getting bigger. “Good,” he announced. “Because her fat pads are gone.”

Enrique had no idea what Max meant. Margaret’s cancer had taught him that making assumptions or deductions could easily lead to error, that it was always prudent to ask questions, so he asked his baby boy what fat pads are. “Fat pads, Dad, like this one.” Max grabbed a hunk of fat near his father’s hip and lower back that Enrique hadn’t realized was there. “Hers are gone,” he said and frowned.

“Well she’s always been thin—” Enrique began.

Max shook his head. “No, Dad. You’re skinny and you have fat pads.” Max pinched the lump of flesh again, painfully, and Enrique twisted away. “Sorry,” Max apologized for hurting his father. “Fat pads are for storage, Dad. You only use them when you’re starving. Mom doesn’t have any left.”

After that exchange, Enrique stopped wondering why Margaret’s expeditions consisted of nothing more adventurous than a slow walk around the block. For a woman who had relished fast-paced hikes, hours of tennis or painting in her studio, a morning
at the Met for inspiration, an afternoon at Costco for toilet paper and cans of tuna, a day of gossiping and volunteering with other mothers at her sons’ former or current schools, for that energetic Margaret, who would hop on the balls of her feet with sheer pleasure if you proposed doing something entertaining, an out-of-breath stagger didn’t seem like activity.

For Enrique, TPN felt like a full-time occupation. Supplies were delivered to their apartment building twice weekly, always on time, although Enrique waited for them with an anxious uncertainty, betrayed by the ferocity with which he immediately tore open the boxes to make sure everything was there. In their bedroom, the stuff lined a six-foot-long wall to a height of three feet. Enrique walked to Staples on Union Square and bought a half dozen stackable plastic file-storage units. He threw out the folders inside, using the units as bins to sort and store the bags of saline hydration, the requisite packages of sterile tubing, sterile gloves, sterile syringes, sterile caps for the plastic attachments to her chest port, the sterilizing sticks to clean its see-through adhesive bandage, and a dozen other bits of paraphernalia that produced two bags of garbage he carried to the hall chute each day. There were three bins for the TPN tubing and various bottles of antacid and vitamins that Enrique had to inject into large, translucent bags of nutrition. He stored them in a small refrigerator he bought at P.C. Richard on Fourteenth Street, nodding pleasantly at the salesman’s assumption that Enrique was purchasing it for his son’s NYU dorm. By then, their bedroom, with its IV pole and sterile packages, looked as much like a home as Sloan’s imitation of a luxury suite resembled a hotel.

The labor of being a TPN nurse was both dull and terrifying for Enrique: the meticulous hand washing, the weird hot and slimy feel of the gloves, the care to make sure he didn’t puncture the bag or himself when adding ingredients or attaching the tub
ing, the danger of contaminating something in the dozen or so steps that required sterility since Margaret could easily end up with a one-hundred-four-degree-plus fever. He was vigilant, although he no longer feared that a repeat of one of her infections would kill her, as he had in the early days of her fight, when cure was a real possibility. The end was inevitable and very near. She had to die of something because cancer does not kill alone. It kills with accomplices, so why not a sepsis? The reason he continued to dread an infection as the particular assassin was that he could not bear to watch her once again shiver and bake, eyes dulling, soft moans for rescue escaping as her brow broke into a fine sweat, her mind melting into delirium.