A Happy Marriage (14 page)

“Yeah, you’re pretty intimidating.”

“You don’t seem intimidated at all,” she parried.

They had reached Waverly and Sixth. The light was red. He turned to look her full in the face. “Oh, I am. I’m terrified of you. It would be so much easier to pretend I wasn’t interested in you at all than to have to act like I’m totally cool with us just hanging out. That’s what’s going on with Bernard and Phil and Sam. That’s why they don’t call—they don’t want to risk getting rejected. So, in the excitement of being with you, they say they’re going to call, realize that would mean finding out whether they have a shot with you, and then chicken out. “Articulating the madness of his sex and acutely aware of his own crazy standards of status (what lunacy had provoked him, even for a second, to consider the Italian pants?), he relaxed. He watched those depthless ocean blues soak up his restless thoughts.

The light turned green. She didn’t budge. He waited patiently because he could tell that, unlike almost everyone he knew, Margaret was digesting what he had said without at the same time deciding what she ought to answer. He had thought of her as another verbal jouster, but now he understood her silences during the long night of conversation with Bernard weren’t breakdowns of her inability to come up with a witty reply. He imagined he could follow, like a road on a map, the progress of her careful dissection. She was discarding the flattery and possible exaggeration in his words. How could he know if Sam was attracted to her? Perhaps Phil was a flirt and thought her beneath serious pursuit. Stingy Bernard might want to keep Enrique from obtaining a pretty and vivacious girlfriend, whether or not he desired Margaret
for himself. By the time the green light had turned to flashing red, she had deconstructed his fragmentation bomb of flattery, confession, seduction, and surrender. “Bernard? Sam? No, there’s something else going in the heads of those crazy boys,” she insisted. “And you’re not terrified of me,” she said with a sly smile, his explosive defused, and stepped onto Sixth Avenue, hurrying across.

Her meticulous answer unmanned him all over again. He had momentarily mastered his nerves by confessing his intentions, but the anxious currents of longing and fear returned in full force. He was too insecure and excited to put words to his confusion. If he could have, he would have asked what she could want of him other than admiration and desire. What else could he provide?

He hurried across Sixth Avenue and continued west beside her in silence, or rather in a state of stymied speech. He considered several replies, the first being “I
am
terrified of you,” but terror didn’t appear to describe his behavior, since, rather than flee, he was doing everything he could to remain in her presence. He could insist that Phil, Bernard, and Sam
did
want her, but why persuade her that better men—well, at least two of them were superior—wanted her? What if she ended up agreeing? On the other hand, to agree with her assertion that his rivals weren’t rivals, that they weren’t attracted to her, seemed unlikely to be a pleasing turn in the conversation for Margaret.

She did seem pleased to have baffled him into silence. She glanced over to him every few steps, and appeared to allow herself a smug nod of congratulations. He tried to smile back with an air of self-confidence, but he felt his chin wobble. As they arrived at the messy three-way intersection of Waverly, Grove, and Christopher, just east of Seventh Avenue, he thought she made a feint toward Christopher and said, “No, this way is faster,” nodding in the direction of Grove.

She frowned. “Really?” she said. “I think that way’s more direct.”

During their predawn breakfast at Sandolino’s, he’d pretended to agree with her about something he knew she was wrong about, the existence of two schools called P.S. 173. This time he did not, although he was still reluctant to offend, and he sensed she was vain about her sense of direction. He shook his head in a gentle but firm no, rather than argue out loud.

She studied the disputed choices. After a shrug, which seemed to concede that he must be right, she stepped anyway in the wrong direction toward Christopher Street. This silent and absolute contradiction, compelling him to go her way, or go his way alone, was so forceful and graceful in its self-assurance that, rather than be angry, he felt all the more that she was too much woman for him. He followed, abashed, and when they reached Seventh and had to turn downtown (making it obvious that Grove was the superior route), he waited for Margaret to admit that she had been mistaken.

When she didn’t immediately, he couldn’t stop himself from looking up at the street sign and then down at her. She understood because she said with a chuckle, an I-told-you-so laugh, “Grove
was
more direct.” That baffled him all the more. Why was she so pleased about being proved wrong?

He grinned back—how could he not?—at her cheerful admission of error. “Yes,” he said and added, to be gracious about her mistake, “Not much of a difference, but a little closer.”

She said with a musical lilt, “Oh, it was definitely closer. That’s the way we should have walked.”

Since she wanted to be so harsh on herself, he shrugged and agreed. “I guess in December every shortcut counts.”

For some reason that he couldn’t fathom, his remark seemed to impress her. She moved closer, her black goose-down shoulder whooshing against his Army green. Despite the bulk of material
between their flesh, somehow a pleasurable sensation of touch was conducted to his skin. She returned to her cheerful chattering. “I don’t know, it’s crazy, but Cornell wrecked me. I hate the cold now. Before I went to college, I don’t remember it bothering me so much. But now? Soon as it’s below fifty, brrr,” she said and pretended to shiver, once again brushing against him. He knew that James Bond would take her mock-discomfort as a cue for action, put his arm around her and pretend to keep her warm. All Enrique could manage was a maneuver whose intent was obscure even to himself. He tilted toward her so their jackets collided more often for the half a block that remained until they reached the Buffalo Roadhouse entrance.

When they walked in, he felt excited and wary, as if they were being announced at a Parisian ball in a Balzac novel, being judged as a couple by a sophisticated and critical elite. He was proud to have Margaret as his date. Indeed he half-expected the hostess, whom he thought much less beautiful than Margaret, to demand what the hell she was doing with a scrawny goofball like him. His self-consciousness didn’t abate, although a quick scan of their neighbors told him that the clientele of a moderately priced restaurant in bankrupt New York City during the week between Christmas and New Year’s, when all the chic and wealthy were in the Caribbean, could hardly be considered the equal of Balzac’s Parisian society at the height of the season. But that didn’t puncture his thrill at being with her, his intense relief that this wasn’t another dreary night eating with Bernard at a bargain Italian pasta paradise, or grabbing burgers with a group before seeing a movie, or sampling some new East Village vegetarian dump with Sal and his girlfriend. He was especially glad not to be hunched over Chinese take-out watching the Knicks lose another game.

He realized, thanks to the amazing mixture of comfort and
excitement thrumming through body and soul, that he had been living with a terrible ache which wasn’t, as he had assumed, merely sexual. His renovated fifth-floor walkup didn’t qualify as an unheated garret, his skinny frame was due more to a diet of Camels and coffee than to starvation—and even at his most caffeinated he doubted that the novel he had coming out was going to be ranked alongside
The Red and the Black
—but he did share the acute loneliness of the young, ambitious heroes of
A Sentimental Education, Lost Illusions,
and
L’Oeuvre
. He had the same hungry heart as those soulful protagonists, ravenous for affection, understanding, and love. This lively girl, with her amused lips and bejeweled eyes, eager to listen to what he had to say, was just a pleasure to be with, so much so that he almost wished his obligation as a male to seduce her weren’t part of the bargain. Especially because, while he watched her sidle out of her goose-down bubble, freeing her elegant, thin shoulders, and while he heard her tell the waiter that she wanted a dry vermouth—a drink which sounded grown-up and sophisticated—observing her ease and confidence out in the world, he thought: She
is
out of my fucking league.

“I’ll have—” he began and realized he had no idea what to have. Vaguely he thought he should order a scotch or maybe a beer, although that seemed too boys-night-out. Was he supposed to order wine? He knew only from books how men were supposed to behave on a date and said behavior existed in a parallel universe which seemed to Enrique to have nothing to do with him and Margaret.

“You don’t have to have a drink,” she said, reading his mind imprecisely but offering the right help anyway. She laughed. “I don’t mind if you stay sober.”

He laughed, too; something about the word
sober,
especially as applied to him, seemed absurd. “I’ll have a Coke,” he said, and the waiter departed with what Enrique decided was a disgusted look.

Having lured him to an honest request, Margaret seemed appalled at the result. “A Coke!” she repeated.

“Okay,” Enrique said in good humor, “I’ll have a real drink.”

“No, no. I’m just jealous you’re having a real Coke. I haven’t had one since college.” She added pensively, “Of course, you’re still young enough to be in college.”

That seemed to be a worry. He didn’t consider the three-and-a-half-year gap between their ages significant at all. Margaret was six years younger than Sylvie. “But remember I left home at sixteen. I’ve been out in the world as long as you,” he said. He knew this meant nothing. The facts were on his side; but Margaret was clearly more grown-up, at ease and adult.

“I can’t believe you left home so young,” she said with sympathy in her voice, rather than the typical approbation his generation awarded him for his rebellious statistics: high school dropout, leaving home, shacking up with a twenty-five-year-old. “That’s cool,” most of the males said. “Wow. Good for you,” said young women. Margaret went further to show her concern. “Was that okay? I wish I could have. By the time I was sixteen my mother was driving me so crazy I could barely stand the sound of her voice. But it must have also been hard.”

This subject could easily have become a conversational land mine. How should he recount the story of his three-plus-year relationship with Sylvie? In his heart of hearts, Enrique believed he had been the underlying cause of its failure. He could make himself out to be entirely the victim with the revelation that Sylvie had ended the relationship by cheating on him, but that hardly seemed a more flattering alternative. Besides, he knew that wasn’t the true cause of their breakup. He had been so angry and sullen and unpleasant to be with for the last year and a half they were together, that it would have been understandable if Sylvie had beaten him to death with a frying pan. Seeking love and orgasm
in another’s arms was a relatively mild reaction. It was hard to say which version he was more embarrassed by, although anything that suggested he was sexually inadequate—at least on a first date—seemed a poor strategic move. “What was hard,” he said to evade the whole subject, “was having to earn a living by writing a second novel.”

“I bet!” Margaret said, with admiration, as if he were a veteran of a war. Enrique felt ashamed that he had elicited false sympathy with his cover story, but he had inadvertently told her the truth, albeit a truth that he didn’t understand until years later. The burden of his situation had been not only the work itself, which was more than enough to overwhelm him, but the additional pressure of money, and the reality that at seventeen he had taken on a career the success of which depended entirely on him, on self-generated work whose value to the world would be created, or not, entirely by his unreliable talent. Margaret seemed to understand much more readily than Enrique how arduous was the path he had taken: “Having to be so self-disciplined as a teenager. And writing novels seems so hard anyway. At any age.”

“Yeah, it’s hard.” Feeling that he was being deceptive, he changed the subject. “So how did you meet Bernard exactly? He talks a lot about you, but he never has any details about anything.”

“I know,” she said. “Bernard is so weird about his friends. He compartmentalizes all his little worlds.” She squared the delicate fingers of each hand into a faux box and then moved them apart to illustrate. Her wrists were barely wider than a matchbook. “You’re the first of his non-Cornell friends he’s ever introduced me to.”

Their drinks arrived, Enrique’s Coke accompanied by a straw. He felt all the more like a child. Perhaps that, or fear of returning to the worrisome topic of his previous relationship, provoked a long satire of Bernard. Enrique recounted how he had challenged
Bernard into introducing them by pretending that he believed Margaret didn’t exist. The story delighted her. She was pleased to be the subject of so much attention between the two men. She was also—he found this reassuring and touching—genuinely surprised. By the time Enrique had finished the entire tale, from the coffee shop quarrel through Bernard’s refusal to give out her number, they had eaten their salads and started on their main courses. “Doesn’t make sense,” Margaret said, cutting into an unappetizing-looking calf’s liver. “Why did he take me to your apartment if he was going to get so crazy about you calling me?”

“I’ve thought about it. I’ve had plenty of time to think about it, and there are lots of possibilities, but the one I decided on is: he didn’t expect you to like me.”

Margaret frowned hard. “No,” she said, dismissing his conclusion. Enrique couldn’t suppress a smile of self-satisfaction at this tacit admission that she liked him. That wasn’t the end of this pleasant surprise. She added, “He introduced me to you because he’s proud of you.”

“What?” Enrique was startled. He was so accustomed to resenting Bernard, bristling at his literary slights, and seething with frustration at their arguments about the merits of realism that the notion that Bernard admired Enrique enough to want to display him as a friend was a shock. That it was a flattering shock intensified its electricity.