A Happy Marriage (21 page)

He continued to try to hit her pleasure center with more praise about her pictures, but she deflected additional flattery and turned the subject to his persistence. “You said your second novel did badly and got some really mean reviews. But you started your third book right away. How did you stop from getting discouraged?”

By then his insight into the profound logic of their connection was lost, obscured by a collage of lust and anxiety: wondering if under her wool sweater there were freckles trailing down to her perky breasts; if her nipples would harden; if she would prefer to be encircled by his tongue or teased, or first one method and then the other, and underneath all those tantalizing plans and visions he worried, the way a fearful flyer dreads takeoff, whether his penis was going to work. If it didn’t, would he lose everything? Would all they had said, all they had exchanged count for nothing?

So he talked passionately, something he could easily do because, whatever his cock was or wasn’t up to, his heart and mind were full of passions. He described the sensation of power and grace writing granted him, the great accomplishment of finally, after days upon days, weeks upon weeks, months upon months, at long last finishing a novel, arriving at the very spot you had planned to reach, a
satisfaction that was undiminished even if the book didn’t turn out as intended. Nothing could lessen his pride at creating something straight out of his head, from the immaterial to the concrete. There, held in his hands, was his universe, as alive and as vivid to Enrique—at least sometimes—as the real world. He unashamedly confessed to the deep self-gratification there was for him in the process of writing. He didn’t resort to the fashionable complaints of novelists: the pain of producing it, the nagging feeling of inadequacy, the frustrating search for meaning and innovation. He admitted that he often felt he was bad at writing, that he had yet to accomplish all he had hoped to in any of his novels, but he emphasized that those failures didn’t spoil the pleasure of the attempt. He was so proximate to the prison of dullness from which he had escaped: he still woke up each day and thanked fate with earnest gratitude that he didn’t have to go to high school anymore, or to some boring job. When he told her the embarrassing truth that holding the finished typescript of a novel suffused him with a warm sensation of achievement, nearly a sufficient reward unto itself, she beamed with approval.

He worked up the nerve to ask if the painting in the bathroom was hers. “Yeah…,” she said with a shrug, hiding from his searching eyes. “I don’t know what I’m doing with that.” She smiled at him bashfully. “But I wish I did. Photography’s fun, but I’d like to paint.” She looked pensive in a way that he had not seen before, then returned to him with her big eyes as if checking on what he thought.

He was overcome by the urge to touch her animated lips and encircle those slim arms and proud shoulders. Without warning or any physical segue, he dived at her as if she were a pool, and they kissed for the second time. On this occasion, she opened to him longer and he fell in deeper. While submerged, much to his relief, the one part of his body that until then had had no strength
or yearning, crawled to attention in his underpants and pushed up to his belt, as if petitioning for freedom.

Thank God, he thought, I’m not going to be impotent like the last time, when his attempt at a one-night stand had ended as a fifteen-minute collapse. That failure loomed in his memory like the traumatic flashback of a near-fatal car wreck. The whole bottom half of him had been numbed with that girl, but not this time, not with Margaret. I’m going to be all right, he thought.

And with the arrival of that soothing prediction, he inexplicably lost all confidence that it was true. Panic flooded his brain. Nor was it quelled when the warm kiss ended, and she pulled her legs up, squatting on the couch so that she was taller, smiling down at him with utter self-assurance while she draped her arm around his shoulder possessively. Although he felt the head of his cock continue to swell, squeezed by the elastic of his underpants and thoroughly blocked by his belt, he worried about its stamina. His fear made no sense since his condition seemed irreversible. He wished he could reach in and push the demanding thing toward a pocket where there would be room for it to expand, but he didn’t have the nerve to acknowledge the existence of his erection to Margaret. Why he should be ashamed of his lust for her he didn’t know and he didn’t wonder. Instead his mind was preoccupied with a scenario wherein the constriction of his leather belt might cause a permanent impairment and he would become, like the sad hero of
The Sun Also Rises,
unable to consummate with the love of his life; in Enrique’s case not because of an emasculation inflicted by a war wound but thanks to a no less devastating necking injury.

Bravely, he risked further damage and slid up the length of her draped arm, as if riding a rail, to kiss what had tempted him for hours—the smooth tenderness of her neck. She allowed him to nestle there, although she shivered when he pressed his coffee-warmed lips in its hollow and tasted the dessert of her skin with
a flick of his tongue. She nudged him away with her chin, causing alarm for a moment, but it was to make her assault, swooping down, biting his lower lip before she covered his mouth with hers, skinny arms pulling him up with surprising strength as if to swallow him whole.

Even to the profoundly insecure Enrique, this seemed a clear signal that she wanted him. She was willing right now. Besides, he had to change something, at the very least make an adjustment in his pants. The discomfort had become actually painful, and he truly did fear, unless he conquered or abandoned the field at once, that more than an imagined literary harm might befall his least understood and most demanding body part. He had to proceed and risk losing all that he had painstakingly accomplished with this undiscovered genius of a beautiful girl, this endless source of good cheer, this black-haired, blue-eyed, ice cream white gift that some novelist who was much more generous to Enrique than Enrique was to his characters had plunked down like an oasis in the middle of his desolation.

Margaret hovered near his lips. She regarded him with a characteristic look of expectation that he assumed had to do with the newness of their acquaintance—she must want him to reveal something. Her emotions were unreadable to him and broadcast two distinct and confusing messages: that she desired everything he could give and that she was equally prepared to be horrified or delighted.

He felt overwhelmed. And he heard himself say, without having first reviewed the wisdom or lack thereof: “I’m scared.”

She nodded as if she had known all along he was going to say that. “Me too,” she said, as if what they were scared of had nothing to do with them, was outside lurking in the unchanging black of New York.

“What are you scared of?” Enrique asked. He couldn’t imag
ine anything frightening about this situation for her. He was completely in love with her and, although he might not jump out the window if she asked him to, he would certainly think about it seriously.

“You know,” she said with a frown as if he were teasing her.

What the hell did she mean? Not sex? She couldn’t be scared of that: it was all on him; she was delicious and beautiful; all she had to do was lie there while he, sensitive to her cues about how he touched her, proceeded to excite her masterfully to liquid receptivity and swelled into a powerful state himself, yet taking care not to become so thrilled that he ended their union prematurely. He’d done it right plenty of times with Sylvie, but only after several disastrous inaugural attempts. What if Margaret was less patient? What if this fantasy she had constructed about him, that he was passionate and confident and determined, what if she never forgave him when she discovered it was false? Wasn’t she going to be disgusted when she learned that he was, despite his three and a half years with another woman, still, at heart, a virgin? “I don’t,” he said. “I know why I’m scared, but I have no idea why you are.”

Wariness and annoyance crept into her tone. “You know…I’m scared of what everyone’s scared of.”

He laughed. He was being stupid beyond belief, and that struck him as funny. “What the hell is everyone scared of?”

She grimaced as if he’d poked her with a sharp stick. “Well…” She hesitated. “What are you scared of?”

He wanted to say “That my penis won’t work or that it will work too quickly,” but he wasn’t
that
committed to truth. “Me first, huh?” he stalled.

At that she laughed with delight. “Yeah. You first.”

“That you won’t like me…you know…” And, overwhelmed by shame, he nodded toward the foot of the L, almost entirely filled by her queen-size bed.

She blinked in astonishment. Not once. Not twice. But three times, as if her brain were a cash register unable to ring up his words. “You mean”—her face collapsed into doubt at the answer she had discovered—“sex?”

Apparently this possibility was so far from her mind that Enrique had to conclude he had made a ghastly error in placing it there at all, much less so prominently.

“Why?” she demanded with her ability to shift directly from sympathetic delicacy to cool sarcasm. “Is there something disgusting about you?” She seemed to regret the harshness of that. “Your kiss isn’t disgusting,” she added and, to further soften the blow, kissed him, lingering on his lips and making a soft hum of pleasure before she leaned back to restate her question: “What scares you about going to bed?”

She had covered her shock and dismay, but that glimpse of her true reaction of contempt frightened him. His mind scanned frantically for a plausible lie. What came out, paradoxically, was his real feeling. “I’m so nervous about it being our first time and I’m so in love with you that I’m scared I won’t get an erection and you’ll kick me out and I’ll never get to see you again and that’ll be”—his voice wobbled with the sadness of it—“so fucking terrible.”

As he feared, she blanched. Something this awful had never occurred to her. The surprise and disappointment could be read clearly on her face. She had praised him only hours ago for being a man among boys, and here he was, in a high, querulous voice, admitting to—well, it was an excellent word for it, precise and resonant—his impotence. He met her eyes, glaring blue amazement, and he saw that he had made a fatal error. “I guess I’d better go,” he mumbled and cast his eyes down to the parquet floor, overwhelmed by shame.

She was on him before he could raise them. She was crawling
inside his arms, kissing his neck, his lips, his right eyelid, which he shut in the nick of time to prevent blindness, up to his forehead and around to his left eye, his left cheek, and reprised his lips, where she paused and blew words from her mouth into his, a hot breeze. “You don’t have to say that.”

Her eyes were so close to him, large and drowning in feeling, that he had no sense of himself anymore and fell inside her, speaking to her as if she and he were one individual and these were thoughts they shared. “But it’s true,” he said. It would be terrible never to see her again, he thought, and didn’t know if he had spoken aloud, so he said: “It would be terrible never to see you again.”

“You’re going to see me again,” she whispered, then kissed him angrily, before she angled below and bit his neck hard enough that he almost yelped. She returned to his field of vision, filling it, and saying, “Just do me a favor. Don’t say that again unless you mean it. Really mean it.”

Enrique’s body was thrilled, but his head was confused. “I don’t understand,” he blurted out, unable to think while being flooded by the light of her eyes.

“We’re going to see each other. Don’t worry about that. And don’t worry about the sex. Just don’t say
that
”—she emphasized the word with the contempt impotence deserved—“unless you mean it.”

Enrique, hopelessly lost, asked in his bewilderment, “You don’t want me to say I’m going to be impotent unless I’m really going to be impotent?”

All night she hadn’t laughed at a single one of his witticisms; with this innocent and honest question, he scored. She threw her head back, gap teeth exposed, her vulnerable neck bared, and trilled through her laughter, “No…no…no…” She sighed with relief, her lips pecking at his in between whispering, “Don’t say you love me until you really mean it.”

“I do mean it,” he complained, hurt. He didn’t understand that they had been talking at cross-purposes.

She stated in a firm corrective tone, “You like me.”

“Yes!” Enrique affirmed, not understanding her distinction.

“I like you,” she said.

“Good,” Enrique said, still dense. “I’m glad,” he added.

She pressed against him, her mouth nearing his right ear while her left hand covered the bulge in his black jeans. She whispered, “Let’s just say that,” and the thought seemed to be injected directly into his consciousness. All he truly understood at that moment, while she stroked him, and her odd vow of like, not love rattled in his head, was that the distinction meant something to her. He knew, however, that it was meaningless to him, that progressing from liking Margaret to loving her was seamless.

He didn’t have to think for a while, anyway, as they awkwardly necked and probed each other’s flesh through their respective wool, cotton, and denim obstructions. He floated away on the undulations of teasing sensations and the fascinating discoveries of where she was strong and where she was soft, of how she opened to, and when she was worried by his touch. Eyes closed and entwined in her arms, he had forgotten his name and where they were when she took his hand and rose.

His eyes must have been shut for a long time, because the opaque darkness of New York had turned a hopeful, deep blue, and toward the east he saw an orange glow of the sun’s fire. He saw her block naked: the street cleared of cars and people, trees bare of leaves, windows dark. A garbage truck cleared its throat at the corner, a cock’s crow that the city was about to awaken. Fully clothed, Margaret pulled him onto the bed, and they lay for the first time length to length, her feet stopping at his knees, Enrique’s running over the bed’s edge. His sneakers dangled in the air. He kicked them off while they resumed kissing.