A Happy Marriage (22 page)

The move to the bed had reawakened his consciousness of what he was about to do. He was anxious for them to be naked and to get it over with. He pulled at her sweater and searched underneath, skimming with his fingertips the soft silk of her belly. She hummed at this touch and opened her denim hips wide enough to capture his leg, pushing her sex against the hard post of his skinny thigh. She rubbed on him with the yearning and independence of a cat, arching and making low sounds, using and wanting him, yet somehow also not needing him. When his hands reached the thin fabric of her bra and moved under it effortlessly so that his palms slid rapidly over her hardened nipples, she grunted as if he’d punched her. She pushed her lips, her groin, her stomach at him as if intending to burst through his skin and into him, and abruptly she was sitting up, pulling off her sweater, and rising to undo her jeans, stepping out of them, and tugging at the blanket and undersheet, pulling them down so that Enrique had little choice but to get up and strip to his underpants. He hurried as if he had to be somewhere else, all the while wishing he could slow down.

Margaret shivered as she got under the covers in her bra and panties, and she curled into Enrique’s skinny body, then arched away to place her cold feet on his thighs. “You’re so warm,” she said, burrowing her head against his chest and climbing up into his neck, biting him again, and farther up to his mouth, while she wrapped her thighs around his right leg to ride it. Through the black fabric of her panties, he could feel that she was wet and completely married to her desire. Enrique, however, was divorced from his body which, to his surprise, remained hard all over, his erection seemingly enormous against the thin membrane of cotton that separated it from her cool skin.

Since she could feel pleasure happily, he lowered his head and began to journey and explore, but he didn’t get far. As soon as he
arrived at her breasts and tried to unfasten the bra’s clasp, she sat up, undid it herself, dropping it onto the parquet floor, and then reached below with both hands, pulling off her panties, and flipping them away from the bed as if tossing a hat. He did the same with his underpants and felt profoundly naked. He couldn’t remember if he had ever felt so bare of protection. As she retook him into her arms, pressing, sliding, urging him against her now warm skin, delicate fingers curling around his stretched and aching cock, he felt as bewildered and as tender as a newborn.

Again he lowered his head to make love to her body with his mouth, but she pulled him up as if she were too excited to tolerate more excitement and rolled onto her back, pulling him onto her. He was wood hard, as rigid there as he was everywhere, and so it made sense. But as soon as he was above her, he lost all sensation below; he couldn’t feel his sex. He thrust at her because he was supposed to. He bounced off where there was supposed to be an opening, like a weakly thrown ball. Not a deadly ricochet, but a dribbling bounce.

He was overwhelmed by sadness. He felt grief at what he would lose because of this inexplicable failure. Just when it seemed that all the hard work was done, to have found his harbor and yet not be able to dock there, to be so proximate to contentment and to understand, in agony, that he was doomed never to penetrate its mystery. He thrust again. But he knew, even before he was crushed by the wall of her body, that he would fail.

Margaret frowned, puzzled. She reached down, taking hold of his penis. It was softening and getting softer at her evaluating hand. Disgusting to the touch, Enrique was sure.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and he was. Sorrier than he had ever felt, a deep regret at the lifelong happiness he had lost.

She rolled to her side, dumping his disappointing body. Enrique flopped off, a gasping fish, losing contact with her alto
gether. In that rejection, he felt how painful this abandonment was and would be—an orphaning worse than anything in Dickens.

But she didn’t let him go. She snaked back into his arms, kissed him lightly, and whispered into his ear, “Let’s sleep.” Her fingers brushed his clenched back in long, soothing strokes. “Let’s just lie here and go to sleep.”

“I’m…,” he began, in wild pain, to excuse his failure. He managed to pronounce only a single word: the sound he made was like the howl of a lost creature. Margaret was quick to cut him off.

“Shh,” she soothed, running the flat of her small hand up and down the hollow of his back. “Close your eyes,” she said, and he dropped from cold terror into warm fatigue. His muscles were aching as if he’d run a marathon, and his eyes were burning as if he’d walked through a fire. He shut them, and that was a relief.

His thoughts also subsided. They fell from the fearful landscape of her bed onto a beach. He sank deep into the hot sand and watched an undulating sea stretch into an endless blue horizon. She mumbled, “Let’s sleep,” and he let go. He let go of expectation, he let go of self. For the first time in all the hours he had spent with Margaret, maybe for the first time in his long life of twenty-one years, he let go of the worrisome and ambitious future.

T
HE DAY AFTER
Margaret’s parents agreed to honor her funeral and burial desires, the Cohen family appeared again en masse at their apartment. Her brothers and their wives had separate audiences upstairs with Margaret, presumably to say their good-byes. The sisters-in-law left ahead of their husbands, so that each brother had some time alone with her. Dorothy and Leonard also went upstairs by themselves but with no plan, it seemed to Enrique, to have a defined last talk. In fact, they seemed to hint that they were planning to drive in from Great Neck every day until the end. Enrique expressed his concern about this to Margaret during one free moment they had together. She raised her painted-on eyebrows and declared, “No way. Don’t worry about that.”

But he did. He worried more with each passing hour about how little time he had left to be alone with his wife. Giving up a
second day to her family meant that, except for a few whispered exchanges of affection before Margaret took her dose of Ativan to help her sleep, another day and night with her was gone. The evening before, four old friends had come over for a final downing of champagne and caviar with Margaret, and then stayed late. Tonight Lily and Paul would come, another emotional and difficult farewell that Enrique knew would drain Margaret and make her long for a sedated sleep. In effect, today would be another day, one of only eight left to them, when he would be near but essentially separated from his wife.

Instead he found himself alone with her kid brother, Larry, now a balding, middle-aged man. Twice, while Margaret babysat him, he had been damaged: a concussion when she tried to teach six-year-old Larry to ride a bike; and a broken arm from an ill-fated roller-skate on the access road to Utopia Parkway. Enrique believed that taking care of Larry, no matter how calamitously, had helped teach Margaret to be a cheerful and energetic mother of young boys. When he noticed the camp counselor spirit that animated her while she tussled with his toddler sons, and how easily she jollied his sometimes dour boys into giggles, Enrique fancied that he was meeting the adolescent girl whose idolatrous kid brother forgave her for all his wounds. He dreaded the sorrow that lay ahead for his sons and feared he would be unable to console them. He soothed himself with the hope that a permanent deposit of those carefree hours playing on the hardwood floors with their mother—not a memory of happiness but an unremembered absorption of her joy at having created them—could provide a lifetime’s buoyancy that would eventually lift his sons’ hearts above the cruelty of losing her.

Enrique had been raised by an unhappy, anxious, and fearful woman. He wondered if providing for his sons a more nurturing mother than his own had been part of the motive for his falling in
love with Margaret. It appealed to his literary imagination, the notion that he had selected her not only for her white freckled skin and brilliant blue eyes—signals that she would have different immunities than those granted by his olive complexion and brown eyes—but also because he had noted her affectionate account and easy acceptance of disaster while babysitting young Larry. At interminable Cohen Seders and Thanksgivings, he had observed Larry’s continuing loyalty to and love for Margaret. He wondered if the middle-aged Larry understood that he had inadvertently contributed to Enrique’s progeny. And he wondered if Margaret’s kid brother could comprehend more easily than Enrique what it must feel like to his boys to lose a mother so vigorous, gregarious, and brave.

Enrique searched for a question that Larry could answer without too much effort, and that would also acknowledge his special role in his sister’s life. “So—have you forgiven Margaret for breaking your arm and giving you a concussion?” he asked, and thought it a feeble solution.

For a moment, Larry didn’t seem able to answer. Then he did with an open heart. “She was a great big sister to me. She was so much fun.” Tears appeared and dripped down his face as if he were still a little boy, access to his feelings a routine accomplishment. “I know we joke about those accidents, but they weren’t her fault. The truth is, I always felt safe when I was with her. No matter what. I just loved being with her,” he said, his face collapsing in pain. Enrique hugged him hard, patting his back until Larry was calm enough to draw easy breaths.

Another flood of emotion came from her father half an hour later. Leonard, his shoulders bowed, moved with pained slowness across the length of the living room to corner Enrique in the kitchen, easy to accomplish in that small, windowless space. Enrique, fighting both fatigue and a headache, was brewing his
sixth cup of coffee at one-thirty in the afternoon. Leonard appeared beside him at the stove and laid his hand on Enrique’s forearm, a cue that this would be an important matter. “I don’t want to intrude, but how much is the plot at Green-Wood?”

“At Green-Wood?” Enrique stalled, to prepare for what was coming. A protest that it was too much? An offer to pay? He had to say no to both, but without delivering another cut to this wounded man. Leonard was the patriarch, unquestioned even by his older son, who had surpassed his father in eminence. But the approaching death of his beautiful daughter had run Leonard through; he looked paler and weaker by the hour, as if he were bleeding out grief.

At times, studying his father-in-law’s forsaken face, Enrique worried that Leonard wouldn’t survive Margaret by more than a few weeks. In these two days, the acuteness of her parents’ suffering was made more tactile and vivid to him than at any time during the two years and eight months of Margaret’s illness, and not simply because she was near the end. Until now their visits had been carefully confined on both Margaret’s and her parents’ side to lengths they could all tolerate. He had sometimes resented and scorned Leonard and Dorothy for their brief comfort, an unreasonable complaint since Margaret wanted them to keep away. But Enrique had to admit that now he was grateful Dorothy and Leonard had spared him from watching up close their agony at this hollowing of their hearts.

Enrique’s mother had not. She demanded attention for her pain. Each Saturday morning, when he visited Rose in Riverdale at her assisted-living home, he was obliged to hold her hand while she wept over Margaret’s illness, and to reassure her that he and the boys were all right. “How could you be?” she would comment, stubborn in her gloom. Comforting the inconsolable Rose was routine, the role he had played with his depressive mother all his
life. During this crisis, though, the effort left him screaming in the isolation of the glass enclosure of his car ride home, and desperate to find time for a nap before returning gratefully to the success of being good-humored with his dying wife. The contrast of these parental reactions allowed Enrique to appreciate that his wife’s family had helped him, in their roundabout way, to provide the kind of solace for Margaret that they could not. Dorothy and Leonard—like his parents for him—were not all Margaret wished they could be, but they had found a way to send the aid she required across the embargoed borders of their hearts.

“It’s not much money,” he said to Leonard, hoping to avoid whatever the broken man wanted to fix. Leonard had taken care of problems for his wife and children and grandchildren all his life. There was nothing he could repair now.

“How much?” Leonard said in a stern tone.

“Ten thousand,” Enrique reported.

“Really? That’s all?” the microeconomist wondered aloud. “Even though there are so few graves available?”

Enrique, although usually of a satirical cast of mind, didn’t find it funny that Leonard bothered to think about supply and demand. It was his way of negotiating the world. If he couldn’t soothe himself with such considerations at this time, when could he? “Well, I guess people want to be able to buy large plots, not just a single grave here and there,” Enrique offered, thinking of Dorothy, who would never dream of choosing a solitary grave with only nineteenth-century goyim for company.

Leonard looked thoughtful, studying the pricing issues, Enrique assumed. Under normal circumstances, his father-in-law might ask to see the brochure or the website, and muse on the relative cost of the mausoleum spaces in the new area of Green-Wood, as opposed to spare plots squeezed between landmarked graves in the old section; and then he might speculate about the
inconvenience of Brooklyn for buyers from well-to-do places such as Long Island, and sundry other factors. Enrique could imagine Leonard concluding that Green-Wood’s managers ought to charge more. Certainly he would announce with pride that his daughter had found a bargain. But Enrique had misunderstood the way his father-in-law’s mind worked. “I don’t mean to pry,” Leonard declared at last, “but is ten thousand a lot for you?”

Dorothy appeared without warning, talking as she entered the crowded kitchen. “Are you having more coffee? Isn’t that too much? I guess you need it.” Uncharacteristically, she kissed Enrique on the cheek. “Are you getting any sleep?”

“Dorothy!” Leonard said sharply.

“What?” she said, knowing from over fifty years of marriage his tone meant she had interrupted. She pretended she hadn’t. “I just wanted to know what you’re talking about. Not that I’m nosy,” she added with a delighted, self-knowing laugh.

“I was asking Enrique about the cost of the plot. He said it’s ten thousand—”

“Ten thousand?” she said with the same ambiguous shock she had expressed on hearing that Margaret’s Rabbi was a Buddhist. Did she agree that ten thousand seemed low or, given that she would never select so lonely a grave, too high?

“I was asking Enrique if that’s a lot for him.”

“We don’t mean to pry!” she exclaimed, as if she’d been accused of doing just that. “We just don’t want you to spend too much. We want to help.”

“No, it’s not too much,” Enrique said. There had been many times after his first movie was made, and he was finally solvent, when he had wanted to inform Leonard and Dorothy that he was no longer a broke writer. But Margaret had forbidden him to discuss money with her parents. When he asked why not, she’d say, “They won’t understand,” which seemed preposterous given
that Leonard understood more about money than almost anybody on the face of the earth and that Dorothy also seemed to have an exceptionally good grasp of the consequences of monetary policy on the stock market. But Margaret insisted, “They won’t understand that it’s feast or famine for you and that what just happened to something you wrote has nothing to do with what’s going to happen next. They’re like everybody, Enrique, they don’t understand the craziness you’re dealing with, they won’t understand that it has nothing to do with how well you write.” She sighed, as if exhausted by having lived in such close proximity to his career. “Anyway, it’s not their business!” she concluded in an exasperated tone that he knew not to disobey. They were her parents, and she was in charge of his relationship with them.

However, her injunction had been made when she was well and alive; now that she was dying, he couldn’t, in good conscience, allow her parents to think ten thousand dollars was more than he could afford. “Listen,” he announced, “let me explain about my situation with money—”

Dorothy cried out in a panic, “No details! Don’t tell us any details! We don’t want to pry—”

“I don’t mind,” Enrique said, not believing her. Indeed, she immediately fell into a deep and attentive silence, and that was rare. “We have a little over two million dollars in stocks and bonds. The house in Maine is worth around a million, and we don’t have a mortgage. Now I haven’t worked for a while, and I probably will have trouble making a lot of money from here on because most writers, once they pass fifty, earn much less unless they’re world famous, and sadly I’m not. But at sixty-six I’ll get a pension from the Writers Guild—” He paused here to check on their silent faces. Their lips were sealed, eyes attentive, bodies still, as if he had cast a spell. “I’ll have a pension of about one hun
dred thousand a year, so with what we’ve saved, even if I don’t make any more money, I should be able to live comfortably. Especially if I stop living like a king.”

There was a long pause. Leonard blinked and sighed. Dorothy finally broke the silence: “Two million.”

“A little over two million in stocks and—”

She cut him off, “Two million’s not a lot of money. That’s not a lot of money anymore. And you have no idea what your income’s going to be. Hollywood is unreliable,” she declared and kissed him on the cheek again, a remarkable act of random affection. She added in her brisk, have-to-catch-a-train tone: “Don’t worry. Margaret asked us to promise to take care of you, and I told her we think of you as our son. Of course we’ll take care of you.” She turned away abruptly and called out, “Rob? Are you still upstairs?” She disappeared from the tiny kitchen, calling, “When you’re done I want to ask Margs something. Rob, are you still up there?”

Nonplussed, Enrique looked at Leonard who, it turned out, was studying him. His wan eyes seemed to be waiting for Enrique to speak. Enrique had more in common with his mother-in-law than he would care to admit, granting great power to the subject of money, especially regarding others; convinced, for example, that the price of the plot was more important to Leonard than it was to Enrique, although there was no proof of that. He assumed Leonard still required reassurance about the cost of the grave and stated the obvious, “Anyway, the ten thousand isn’t a lot to me. Margaret asked me to get the plot for her, and it means a lot to me—maybe it’s a meaningless distinction—but I’d like pay for it.”

Leonard nodded with so ponderous an air of gravity that Enrique thought he was reluctant to agree. “You know,” Leonard began, but he had trouble getting the words out. He paused to clear his throat. “One of our friends asked me, ‘Are you reconciled to this?’” He stopped and met Enrique’s eyes. There was an emo
tion revealed in them that Enrique had rarely seen in his father-in-law: anger.

“Reconciled?” Enrique said, taking a moment to adjust to this shift in the conversation. “Reconciled?” he repeated in a puzzled tone, although he knew what was meant. “Reconciled to what? Margaret dying?” he added with contempt.