A Happy Marriage (3 page)

That was a death to be avoided, he thought, although what death to hope for he did not, and could not, imagine. That subject was as great a taboo as any Enrique had lived with in his fifty years. He didn’t think about her dead; he didn’t contemplate a future without Margaret. He understood that she would die, and die soon, but he also knew that he didn’t truly believe her life could end. He had waited a year for his father to succumb to a terminal cancer, and he had learned from the surprise he felt at the event that no warning of the incredible fact of mortality could adequately prepare the primitive brain nature had given him to comprehend its finality.

Five months into the TPN routine, her days were spent lying on the living room couch watching
Law & Order
reruns, punctuated only by ventures to the bathroom, pushing the aluminum IV pole with its liter bag of hydration as if it were holding her up; nights she was plugged into the pump of milky fluid entering her veins. On May 10, Margaret greeted Enrique on his return from the supermarket with tears running down her face. He had bought frozen fruit bars so she could have the pleasure of tasting something sweet that wouldn’t clog the narrow passage of her stomach
PEG. He had already opened the package to offer a choice of orange or strawberry, but he was silenced by the sight of her despair. Though her tears continued to flow, her voice rang with conviction: “I can’t do this. I can’t live like this. I can’t go on being tethered to a bag for half the day. I can’t stand not eating with you and the boys and our friends. I know it sounds so stupid, so trivial, so small, but I can’t live like this.”

He felt the box begin to drip on his jeans. He wanted to put the bars in the freezer because if they melted he didn’t know if he could summon the energy to walk to the supermarket again. But he couldn’t turn away from this statement. He had known for over a year, when her cancer returned in March, that she was almost certain to die. Last September, on hearing the news of her second recurrence and that there were no therapies with a promise of success, Margaret had decided to stop seeking experimental treatments, to try to enjoy whatever time she had left. He had agreed with her decision and felt a guilty relief that at least some of the horrors of the hospital could be skipped. There would be time, perhaps a few months, to commune with their sons, to sleep once more in their summer house on the Maine coast, to visit with friends somewhere other than waiting rooms. They tried to plan what final things to do; and then, on the sixth day, she changed her mind. She couldn’t give up; to live without hope wasn’t life. “I don’t want to do a farewell tour,” she said.

Enrique agreed instantly to this reversal, this time relieved that they wouldn’t be passing up a chance for a miracle. In truth, he could find no comfortable place to sit in the company of her illness. He would feel guilt and shame no matter how he behaved. She was going to die and he was not; in the undeclared war of marriage, it was an appalling victory.

Since September he had lived with a modest hope: to assuage the keen awareness that she must let go of all the things and peo
ple she loved. Nothing grand, or as preposterous as the luminous conclusions of sentimental movies. His ambition since last fall had been to lift a single grain of the tonnage of her grief at saying good-bye to life. Listening to her while the red-and orange-colored frozen fruit bars melted onto his blue jeans, he knew he would fail.

She asked him to call her various doctors and push them to attempt something, no matter how dangerous, to restore her to normal eating.

Enrique made his rounds. Her urological surgeon, usually accommodating, begged off with the reasonable excuse that it wasn’t his specialty. The Iraqi gastroenterologist refused to recommend anyone from his department, stating nothing could or should be done; he insisted she could survive on TPN indefinitely while they searched for a new drug to cure her. Her oncologist did consult with the appropriate specialist, but came back to report that the only possible procedure was unlikely to relieve her gastroparesis. The end-to-end anastomosis he cited certainly sounded like a desperate improvisation: attempting to circumvent her blocked digestive tract by taking a lower, cleared loop of bowel and hooking it up to her stomach. Besides, as each specialist implied with the sentence “It wouldn’t be addressing her disease,” what was the point of a risky surgery to restart her digestion when she would die whether or not they succeeded?

Margaret wore them down. For Enrique it was a grim amusement to watch her work her formidable will on men other than himself and his sons, especially to see these white-coated grandees of medicine, accustomed to patients accepting their rationalizations as incontestable, finally give way to her insistence on the value of the operation to her. “Even if it means I can have just one more meal with my husband,” she explained, lying in a bed at Sloan a few days later. She was addressing the chief of oncology, a
blood cancer specialist who had treated a celebrity friend of Enrique’s. He had taken a fancy to Margaret two years ago, when they were introduced shortly after the start of her treatments, enjoying the apparent paradox of her cynical evaluations of the abilities of her various doctors with a sweet optimism that their treatments would succeed. He was an administrator powerful enough to make a Sloan-Kettering surgeon do almost anything. He listened to Margaret’s plea, then turned to regard Enrique, squinting hard, as if peering through a microscope to discover what made having dinner with this bald, middle-aged writer worth enduring an abdominal surgery that was unlikely to work.

“I don’t think having dinner with me is the crucial part,” Enrique explained. “She’d be happy to have dinner with anyone.”

Margaret laughed, although tears were running down her face, and added, “That’s right. I don’t care who you invite to dinner, I just want to have dinner.”

The head of oncology told her that he and the Iraqi Jew would get her a surgeon, but first he had to provide cover for them all by bringing in the psychiatric department for a consult.

Enrique listened while she explained her desperate logic to a thoughtful shrink with a salt-and-pepper version of Bozo the Clown’s hairdo. He nodded sympathetically as she said, “I had a life. I had a husband and children and friends. Now I lie in bed all day and I can’t think. I can’t even read a murder mystery. All I can do is watch stupid fucking episodes of
Law and Order.
”

“There’s nothing else on television,” the somber Bozo said. After a silence, while Margaret wiped tears off her cheeks and blew her nose, the psychiatrist added, “I guess people like the show.”

“Because it’s about death with no emotion,” Enrique mumbled. Used to her husband’s cranky cultural observations, Margaret ignored him and repeated, “It’s stupid. It’s such a stupid life.
It’s not living. I want my life back,” she cried out and heaved with sobs. “I don’t care if I die trying, I don’t care how long it lasts. I don’t care if it’s only for one day. I want my life back.”

The psychiatrist prescribed Zoloft and affirmed that she was of sound mind to make an informed decision. The chief of oncology and the Iraqi Jew persuaded the ruddy-cheeked colleague to perform the surgery—although in return for this concession they all insisted that Margaret also agree to the PEJ, inserting a tube into her small bowel, so that they could improve on TPN’s intravenous method with an upgrade to enteric feeding if the rerouted plumbing of her stomach didn’t work. Enrique wondered whether Dick Wolf, executive producer of all
Law & Order
s, would be bothered to learn that a team of medical experts had concurred with Margaret’s judgment that watching his creations did not constitute having a life.

That’s what had brought them back to Sloan in late May. The end-to-end anastomosis had failed. Using the PEJ for enteric feeding had also failed. Resuming TPN was her only option. She had lain these past three days, the first three of June, with Ativan’s glazed eyes, pupils dilated, staring with an inconsolable sadness that he had never seen in her before. Not when she turned to him on their terrace two years and nine months ago as the first mushroom cloud from the World Trade Center blossomed in their direction and said, “We’re watching thousands of people die.” Not when she was first told that she had cancer, or that it had come back, or that it had come back again, or that there was nothing else to be done. There had been the flint of anger on those occasions, a willingness to engage and contend with the future. But this morning, this gloomy morning when she knew that her stomach would never work again, that there was nothing to do but lie there and die, her big blue eyes gazed at him from her narrow face and revealed a look of pure pain from deep in her soul, a naked
ness more profound than flesh. “I need this to stop,” she whispered to him without a hello or a preamble. “I can’t do it anymore. I’m sorry, Puff,” she said using the endearment she had invented for him in the first year of their love. “I can’t do this anymore.”

He knew what she meant, but pretended he didn’t. “Yeah.” He kicked at the pump and its narrow tubing filled with last night’s backed-up gruel. “This is done. We’ll go back to the TPN.”

She shook her head. “You have to help me. Please.” Tears fell without effort or interruption, as they did these days, water running from a faucet. “I want to die. You have to help me die.”

He couldn’t answer right away. And in that paralyzed silence, he realized there was something in his brain which—despite all the hours spent learning about survival rates and the nature of metastasis, despite closely watching his father die of prostate cancer—he hadn’t known he would lose, this something in his head that had been present since Bernard Weinstein rang his doorbell twenty-nine years ago. In this silence of her silent, flowing tears, he realized that it was something essential which soon would be gone, and that it was more than simply the expectation that Margaret would stay alive. He had no word for it. A note of music, perhaps it was his name being called, something he didn’t always enjoy, something he had grabbed for rescue, something he had possessed with pleasure, something he had resented with anger. In the carpeted silence of this luxury room of disease, he felt it depart for a moment, a preview of his robbed future, and he understood that this was real in a way nothing should ever be real, that their marriage was a mystery he was going to lose, despite twenty-seven years living inside it, before he understood who they were.

I
T OCCURRED TO
Enrique, sometime around five in the morning, that although the package was enticing and in excellent condition, Bernard had failed miserably in his role as a deliveryman. He had failed in this crucial respect: by not departing. It was clear—at least to Enrique—that there was an almost palpable current of excitement running between himself and Margaret, that something had kept her talking long after
Saturday Night Live.
If that weren’t enough of a clue, when they ran out of cigarettes and Mateus at four-forty-seven in the morning, and Margaret greeted Enrique’s suggestion that they walk over to Sheridan Square for breakfast at Sandolino’s with an enthusiastic, “Great idea! I can be decadent and have challah French toast,” surely then it ought to have been clear to Bernard if he had any novelistic feeling at all for subtleties of character, that this woman, with whom Bernard had
had a handful of dinners since their graduation from college three years ago, all ending well before midnight, had been lured not by French toast, no matter how blessedly Jewish the bread, but by Enrique. Surely if Bernard had any grace he would excuse himself and let Enrique journey with Margaret to Sheridan Square as rosy-fingered dawn crept into lower Manhattan, casting Enrique, he hoped, in a romantic light.

But Bernard leapt at the opportunity for a predawn breakfast, and that made them a party of three—not that they had to wait for the scarred surface of one of Sandolino’s pine tables at five-fifteen am. There were only six other customers present, although this twenty-four-hour comfort-food establishment was convenient to the pre-AIDS gay bars and clubs to the west, NYU students to the east, artists to the south, tourists to the north, and depressed writers from all directions.

Annoyed and disappointed that he had failed to jettison Bernard, Enrique nevertheless remained hopeful, having faith in his conversational endurance and especially comforted by the geographic logic of their eventual farewells. Their way home from Sandolino’s put their apartments in this order: Bernard’s first, at Eighth Street near Sixth, then Enrique’s close by, but still somewhat farther east, at Eighth Street near MacDougal, and Margaret’s last, at Ninth Street east of University Place. They would say good-bye to Bernard, whereupon Enrique would gallantly offer to escort the single girl to her door and make evident that his interest had gone well beyond establishing the mere existence of Margaret Cohen.

Enrique and Margaret kept up a lively dialogue while Bernard said little. When she had dispatched three-quarters of her challah French toast, she pushed the plate to the side and leaned forward to resume her mock interrogation, abandoned over five hours ago, about the extent of Enrique’s education. She asked whether he had
completed elementary school. Enrique triumphantly announced that he was a graduate of P.S. 173.

“What! Nooo!” Margaret shrieked, extending the
o
to indicate amazement while her delicate fingers touched the dark hairs on Enrique’s left forearm, which rested on the distressed wood table between his coffee mug and hers. Her tips brushed his hairs lightly and remained hovering just above. Enrique felt as if each follicle was standing on end, pitifully pleading for continued and firmer contact. He looked down to see what was actually happening. This evaluating gaze caused Margaret to appear self-conscious about having touched him. She raised her eyes to look into his, and for the second time Enrique felt a shock of sensation, something more than sexual excitement. She must have misinterpreted his look, because she immediately withdrew as if he’d rebuked her. “That’s impossible,” she declared.

“Me going to P.S. 173 impossible?” Enrique wondered aloud. “Not only possible. Really easy. I lived across the street.”

“But I went to P.S. 173!” Margaret declared, the elongated oval of her face framing the purer ovals of her astonished eyes. This was a look he would witness countless times, Margaret peering in wonderment at a fact which confounded or delighted.

Enrique said nothing for a moment. Margaret and Bernard had been in the same class at Cornell, which meant that she was three or four years older than precocious Enrique, who had left home at sixteen. He became friendly with people who were between four and eight years older than he because he had little choice; his contemporaries were in high school for at least two more years and away at college for another four. With more years of experience at living a so-called adult life, Enrique ought to have felt surer of himself; but he still possessed the skittish insecurities of an adolescent. Females were utterly strange to him, despite his having lived with a woman for over three years. He had read all of Balzac’s
novels, so he did know that no matter how young the woman, it was never correct to remind her that you were younger. He tried a neutral remark: “Um, so you were at 173 at the same time I was?”

“No!” Exasperated at not being understood, Margaret gave her head a firm toss, like a horse shaking off a fly. That too was a gesture he would come to know well. “In Queens. I grew up in Queens. I went to P.S. 173, but it was in Queens!”

“Uh-huh,” Enrique said, confused by her annoyance. “Well, I guess we were fated to meet,” he said, trying to turn a dull coincidence to romantic advantage.

“There can’t be two P.S. 173s,” Margaret declared and looked to Bernard for confirmation.

At last, after taking a conversational drubbing for hours, as each topic introduced seemed to enliven Margaret and Enrique while further whitening Bernard’s pastiness and deepening the gloom of his sullen silence, Bernard brightened. He straightened his narrow, slumped shoulders to an artificial stiffness while his great head and unruly halo of tight curls wobbled. The impression this change of posture gave was of a puppeteer alerting the audience it was time for the dummy Bernard to speak. “Yeah, that can’t be right. No way the city would have two 173s.” His small brown eyes, bloodshot at the moment, fastened on Enrique disdainfully as he mumbled with certitude, “You must have your number wrong.”

Enrique then revealed something to Margaret that he would rather not have, his short temper. “I don’t have it wrong!” he snapped and tipped violently on the wooden chair. He grabbed the pine table for balance, sloshing coffee over the sides of their white mugs. An image of Guillermo, Enrique’s father, a man too big in size for many rooms and too big in spirit for all, came into his mind while, out of the corner of his eye, he saw Margaret grab her coffee mug to prevent it from upending and reach for a napkin
from the adjoining table to mop up the overflow. Her movements were an obvious warning that he was displaying too much anger to remain attractive to any woman, much less one so cheerful. Her good humor was remarkable. They had been talking for almost eight hours and she hadn’t so much as frowned, a streak of pleasantness which was extraordinary considering that she wasn’t an idiot. But fear of losing her admiration didn’t restrain his vehemence: “Jesus, Bernard, I lived across the street from 173! I went there until sixth grade. I was the first student council president, for God’s sakes. I haven’t made a mistake about the number!”

Enrique had a deep and resonant voice, a lucky asset considering that although he was tall, six foot four, he weighed a Buchenwald one hundred and thirty pounds beneath his too long, straight black hair, which often fell across his face like a drape, narrowing it even more. It was hard to see past all that thinness, hair, and large tortoiseshell glasses, to his warm brown eyes, high cheekbones, strong chin, and full lips. The voice was his sole attractive feature that was also manly enough to excite. But when he was angry, its muscular pronunciation made him sound intimidating and full of contempt. It led Sylvie’s list of what she didn’t like about living with him. He apologized profusely for his verbal fits and proclaimed that he wanted to curb his temper, but the truth was that he remained essentially blind to how scary and excoriating he could be.

It baffled Enrique that his barbs drew blood. He felt his attacks were rare and always occasioned by self-defense. Perhaps if his victims had prior notice that the seemingly charming and agreeable Enrique was also armed and dangerous, they wouldn’t have been so hurt. But warning was hard to come by when the attacker went to such pains to conceal his grievances.

Enrique took a deep breath to shut himself up and anxiously glanced at Margaret to check whether his flash of fury had revealed
that he was the sort of angry man who could drive his live-in girlfriend into the arms of another. At the same time, Enrique was confident that if Margaret was provided the right information to challenge Sylvie’s accusations of “adolescent rages,” she would see the error of that characterization. He told himself that if Margaret had heard Sylvie state that Enrique was “too involved with his parents,” Margaret would conclude, as he had, that his ex-girlfriend was repeating the canned wisdom of a bourgeois shrink. A shrink Sylvie needed, in Enrique’s view, because her parents had divorced when she was six, permanently damaging her; and she was blocked as a painter, unable to produce a canvas for months on end, another proof to the prolific Enrique that her judgment of him was distorted. Yes, his carefully reasoned conclusion was that Sylvie and her friends had deserved each and every one of his denunciations; that, although he was intemperate, he was also correct.

Bernard identified Enrique’s flammable condition and tried to light a match. He tipped backward in the uncomfortable Sandolino’s pine chair until it hit the wall behind him, and he looked down his nose at Enrique with the same air he adopted at the poker table when he was about to turn over the winning hand. He smiled his version of a smile, a sneering curl of one side of his lip, as if he were a Jewish Elvis Presley. Then he mumbled, “Oh, I’m sure you’re right, Ricky,” he said, the anglicization signaling that Bernard felt secure about the likelihood of triumphing in this dispute. “After all, you’re never wrong about anything.” He glanced at Margaret and said in a confiding tone, “You don’t know this about Ricky, but he’s never ever wrong.”

“What the hell does that mean?”
Enrique shouted before he could remember not to. He tried to convince himself that all he had done was make use of his vocal resources, projecting like any good stage actor, and that was why six heads at the other tables had swung his way to stare at him.

But when he looked at Margaret, he quailed. Her shimmering blue eyes were drinking him in with a deep look of shock and an even deeper look of calculation. She knows. Enrique’s thoughts collapsed into a black hole of self-loathing. She knows I’m a crazy box of frightened tinder, an assessment that, coming from anyone else, he would have considered a calumny.

After a moment of terrible suspense, during which he sat up straight and didn’t draw a breath, Margaret said in a pleasant and relaxed tone, “But you have to be wrong.”

In his turmoil Enrique forgot for a moment what the hell was in dispute. Was it the degradation of imperialism, the open wound of racism, whether the Knicks could win without a true center, or that Faulkner is impenetrable? At that moment he didn’t care. Let the Vietnamese fry in their skins, let blacks languish as economic slaves, let the Celtics win eighteen more championships, let the pretentious insist that to be unreadable is genius. Let the deluge come, just so long as this delectable creature doesn’t turn away from me. Admitting this to himself—that being right didn’t matter compared to making love—managed to calm him down. Of course the dispute was beyond argument. He had attended P.S. 173 for a full six years. He had written 173 on every piece of homework, every test, every science project; as president of the student council he had put 173 on the telegram he sent to Senator Robert Kennedy inviting him to address their class graduation; and it appeared below Enrique Sabas’s name on the return telegram from that glamorous and ultimately tragic political figure, a missive made no less thrilling by the text of its polite decline. P.S. 173, P.S. 173, P.S. 173—say it soft and it’s almost like praying. It was more likely that he hadn’t written his novels than that he had mistaken his elementary school’s elegant name. Nevertheless, to ingratiate himself with this lively, good-humored beauty, he nodded thoughtfully while Margaret said, “New York can’t have two 173s.
It would make a mess,” she said, ostensibly to Enrique, but there was a special pleading in her manner and tone, as if she were addressing a higher authority who was always checking on her to make sure her thinking proceeded in an orderly fashion.

“A mess of what?” Enrique asked.

“A mess of…” She seemed to come to a complete blank. She stared at Bernard as if he had the answer.

Bernard, much to Enrique’s dismay, did: “A mess of ordering school supplies.”

“Right!” Margaret said, delighted. “One of the P.S. 173s would get all the number two pencils, and in the other the poor children would have nothing to write with.”

Enrique’s mood was lightened by her gaiety. He was happy to join her at this mystical place of make-believe reason. “Are you sure it
is
a citywide numbering system, and not borough by borough? They were pretty proud of us being in Manhattan. It said P.S. 173 Manhattan on everything. In fact, we had to write it on every piece of homework just like that, P.S. 173 Manhattan.” Of course, making his case with deductions like that was silly. But he had intuited right about what might convince Margaret. She furrowed her brow and looked off while Bernard let his chair tip forward with a thud.

“You’re making that up,” Bernard complained. “I didn’t write Queens below the name of my school.”

“Well, that’s because you went to a fancy Forest Hills school,” Enrique said. He remembered that earlier Margaret had identified Bernard as having been raised in the “fancy” part of Queens as opposed to her “tiny and ridiculous part,” an important distinction in the odd reverse snobbery of their antiwar, antimaterialist youth. Indeed, Bernard tried to squirm out of the characterization, claiming Forest Hills wasn’t fancy. “Oh, yes it was,” Margaret insisted with a mocking smile that made Bernard flinch. “My neighbor
hood in Queens is so dreary they don’t even have a name for it. It’s just called Adjacent,” she said, one of many comments that Enrique found fascinating because they smacked to him of the sort of dispassionate and witty observation that a writer might make.