A Happy Marriage (23 page)

Leonard nodded with an embittered smile. “‘Are you reconciled to this?’ my friend asked. ‘Have you accepted it?’ he asked me.” Leonard’s eyes filled as he frowned with disgust. “I said, ‘I don’t have a choice. I have to accept it. But am I reconciled to it?’” He shook his head like a bull trying to rid himself of the matador’s sword. “No,” he declared as if swearing an oath in court. “‘No,’ I told my friend.” He pronounced
friend
as if the word meant “enemy.” “‘I am not reconciled.’” He staggered back against the stove, quaking as he stammered out his hopeless defiance: “I am not reconciled to my daughter dying.” Enrique embraced him, almost as much to keep him safely on his feet as to comfort him. He felt intrusive about the physical gesture, half-convinced Leonard might pull away, but the old man let Enrique hold him, and his chest heaved twice with heavy sobs, releases of utter despair. When they were expelled, Leonard pulled away, searching for and finding his handkerchief. “That’s enough,” he declared. He discreetly wiped his tears and blew his nose. “That’s enough of that,” he decided. “I got it out. I’m sorry,” he said.

“Nothing to be sorry for,” Enrique assured him.

Margaret’s father nodded. “I don’t know how you’ve handled all this. I couldn’t have done it.” And for the thousandth time, when paid this compliment by friends or family, Enrique wondered if there was some hidden criticism in it.

Should he have fallen apart? He’d wanted to, often enough, and had in secret, in his office, in the car, and twice in a crowd of strangers on a New York street. But he had sons. Like Dorothy
and Leonard, he had children to see through to the end. He had always assumed that Margaret would do that job, outlive Enrique, and harass the boys through adulthood. That task lay ahead. To his surprise, comforting his sons so far had been straightforward, a matter of managing information honestly and letting them feel free to be sad and scared. Their emotions, although keenly painful to see bearing down on young shoulders, were pure, untainted by the narcissism of people closer in age to Margaret, who felt themselves nearer to the bullet that had mortally wounded her. Max and Gregory were in shock, bewildered by their mother’s illness and dreading her approaching death. Enrique was sure that the acute loss was yet to come: when she no longer answered the phone if they lost their wallet; or their e-mail failed to ping with advice about the big job interview; or when no one warned them to have a jacket ready when they visited their grandparents at the golf club; or when they couldn’t call to hear her say they were handsome and charming after a heartless girl rejected them, or listen to her squeal with delight at a career triumph; when they walked down the aisle to wed their beloved and didn’t see her in the front row; when they held Margaret’s grandchildren in their arms and couldn’t hand the future to her—that’s when they would need Enrique. If he had fallen apart during her illness, he would have failed Margaret and frightened the boys, and after such a disaster, how could he stitch his sons back together? And how could Dorothy and Leonard feel reassured that there was someone relatively sane and loving to care for their grandsons? At last, after years of confusion, he could see that what he had assumed was his strength in life, his writing, wasn’t what he could contribute to the people he loved. That he could accept what they felt, no matter how different from his own nature, this was his real talent.

He carried his coffee to the couch, mentally reviewing Mar
garet’s schedule. Tomorrow was Greg’s day with his mother and ought also to be Max’s last private talk with her. Greg was arriving tonight from D.C., where he had been working since graduating college two years ago. The plan was that he would spend the day alone with his mother. Max, who had been obliged to witness day by day his mother’s illness during his sophomore, junior, and senior years of high school, had yet to declare when he wanted his final hours with her, or if he wanted them at all. At noon, Max had appeared from sleeping off last night’s attempt to blind himself to what was happening. He took one look at the long faces of grandparents and aunts and uncles and headed out, to meet someone, he said. Enrique stopped him at the elevator to remind him that if he wanted some time alone with his mother it should be pretty soon, given that she would stop the steroids tomorrow and then might get very sleepy or fall into unconsciousness. “I’ll tell you later,” Max said.

“Don’t you want to have some time alone with her?” Enrique nagged and wished he hadn’t even before Max’s bloodshot eyes winced.

“I don’t know,” he said, “stop asking me about it,” and rushed into the elevator.

Enrique had to conclude that Max was seriously weighing the possibility of not saying good-bye to his beloved mother. That seemed preposterous. He was devoted to her. During the worst of her illness, Max would climb under IV lines and nestle up to her wounded body, to lie his head on her shoulder. When she got frailer, he placed her head on his growing shoulder and stroked her cheek. Enrique believed this reluctance to say good-bye was anger at death. Max was furious that every effort to stop the disease had failed, and in a deeper rage that all his mother seemed to care about was what college he got into, and what job he would have the summer she died.

Enrique tried to save Max from Margaret’s last attempt to control her baby boy’s life. “I don’t want him sitting around after I’m dead, getting morose and drinking too much,” she declared. She noticed Enrique’s look of disapproval and pleaded breathlessly, “I have to keep nagging him, Puff. I can let go of everything else, but I can’t let go of nagging my boys.” That aborted his attempt at shielding Max. All their marriage Margaret had wielded this sort of emotional imperative to get her way. Enrique would fight back with declarations that she was unreasonable, rattle verbal swords of defiance, and sometimes berate and bully or whine and plead. No matter. All tactics failed. Perhaps once or twice in twenty-nine years after announcing, “I can’t,” she had given way, but he could hardly expect to win this one. He felt equally helpless against Max’s refusal to schedule a time with his mother. And he was afraid of the consequences. Enrique felt pity for Max’s raw and irritated feelings, but an intemperate “No” to saying good-bye to his mother would become a lifelong regret.

And when would Enrique’s turn come to say good-bye? She had only one more day of steroids. Greg would use that up, and then the last group of her friends would take another day, and Enrique hoped Max would take some time. He worried that she would decline more rapidly than predicted and he would lose his precious opportunity. He had to let the others go first, because he was the host of this gloomy party and Margaret had insisted he help her through it. Okay. But they had so much to say to each other. Was there going to be enough time?

Rob, Margaret’s brilliant, distinguished older brother, came downstairs from his audience and strode purposefully across the living room to sit next to Enrique, dosing with caffeine on the couch. “Margaret and I talked,” he said with a kind air and an amused smile. “She asked me to help give her a break from our parents. I’ll get them to stay away for a couple days. It isn’t good for them, any
way. They should be with their friends. That’s who can comfort them.”

“Are you sure?” Enrique asked, wondering about Leonard’s “reconciled” friend.

Rob was certain. “Yes. Janice and I will stay in Great Neck with them. We’ll keep them busy. That’ll give you, Margaret, and the boys time alone together.”

Enrique, said, “Thank you,” in as slow and heartfelt a voice as he could muster.

Rob nodded. “I promised Margaret that you and I will stay in touch. I know you’ll move on, of course, you should move on, we all know that, and we want you to. But if you need help with anything, Max or Gregory, I told her I’m here for you. She doesn’t want you to hesitate to call me. So you won’t, right?”

Enrique was confused for a moment. He wasn’t a widower yet and didn’t immediately understand that “move on” referred to falling in love with another woman. He also assumed that he would eventually live with or marry another woman, given that he liked both women and relationships. Yet it felt bizarre, like being told that all objects, no matter what their weight, fall at the same rate of speed. That was demonstrably true but seemed impossible. After a second’s hesitation, he got what “move on” meant. He had thought about the question of another relationship long enough to have decided that, for his sons’ sake, he would be sure to let at least four years go by before appearing with a replacement, no matter how unthreatening, to their mother. Four years of Max in college seemed the right hiatus. He was about to tell Rob this notion when he realized such a conversation with Margaret’s older brother was preposterous and tasteless. Instead he answered the real question, or the one he thought was being asked. “Of course, I’ll stay in touch. The boys and I will see you at Passover, Thanksgiving. We’ll be at all the family gatherings.”

It was Rob’s turn to look confused. He frowned, head cocked as if trying to puzzle out what had been said. “Sure, but I mean if something comes up I can help with. Margaret wants to be sure that we stay in touch. In case you need anything.”

Only then did the self-absorbed Enrique realize what truly must have been going on upstairs. He had assumed Margaret’s final words to her family were about them. Instead, Margaret was pleading for Enrique and her sons, making sure that whatever she couldn’t take care of herself would be handled by her proxies. She was busy talking about him, for God’s sakes.

Enrique reassured Rob in a hurry, promising that he would call on him if he needed anything, and fiddled with various insurance and other papers from Green-Wood at the base of the stairs. He waited until all of the Cohens, except for Dorothy, had gathered in the living room. He climbed the steps to sit in his home office outside the bedroom, queued up to be next in line after her mother. As he neared the landing, he heard them talking. He softened his tread, hoping to eavesdrop on this postdeath supervision his wife was attempting. What was Margaret charging her people to do for him? See him happily remarried? Supervise his care of the boys? What didn’t she think he could manage for himself?

The pocket door between the alcove of his office and the bedroom was open all the way, but a wall shielded him from a view of the marital bed around a corner. As he neared the door, he wondered whether he should enter and interrupt if Dorothy was saying something bothersome to Margaret. Listening in proved easy. They hadn’t heard his footfall, probably because their voices were not only loud but ecstatic. Dorothy’s was full of warmth instead of her typical brittleness, and a kind of delight as she sang a fugue of praise. “I tell all my friends what a great mother you are, so much better than I was. Max and Gregory are such brilliant young men, so loving and so smart and confident and that’s because you
are such a good friend to them, such a good mother to them. They trust you and they love you and they’re such serious and good young men, they’re going to do good work in the world. I’m so proud of you, Margs, so proud—”

And Margaret, in a voice liquid with love, was talking too, not over her mother, rather in harmony. “That’s because of you, Ma. I learned how to be a mother from you—”

“No, no,” Dorothy was saying. “You raised them your own way. I thought you were crazy to stay in Manhattan and to send them to those schools, that crazy Christian church school frightened me, but you were—”

“Ma, Ma, Ma,” Margaret called out, as if Dorothy had her back turned to her and she needed her attention. “Ma, please listen. Listen. Listen.”

“What, darling?” Dorothy seemed to have made her voice even more gentle, all of her anxious shrillness gone, replaced with breathless ardor. “I am listening,” she said, not in defense but as a promise.

There was a pause. He heard sheets rustling and was curious enough to lean out and peer around the doorway. From there he could see a reflection of mother and daughter in the glass of a framed photograph of Max and Greg as toddlers, hanging on the wall opposite the bed. Margaret had maneuvered to rise to a sitting position and was hugging her mother, not one of their efficient and rigid hugs of alienation but holding and keeping her against her chest, as if Dorothy were her child. She was whispering down past the stiff curve of her mother’s lacquered hairdo, into an ear that was as small and as perfectly shaped as Margaret’s: “I learned from you. Everything I know about being a mother I learned from you. You were my hero, Ma. You were always my hero.”

Dorothy, her head held against her daughter’s heart, sobbed
out her answer like a grateful child. “You’re mine, you’re mine, you’re mine.” Overcome, she couldn’t say more, and Enrique, ashamed, head pounding with tears that were stuck somewhere in his skull, backed away into the windowless desk area to give them privacy. Standing in the shadows, he thought about the withholding wife he had resented so often, the scolding woman he had sometimes desperately longed to be free of, head thumping with words that beat like drums on his soul, as if God were hammering him into the ground:
She is good. She is so good and so kind and I am so mean and so bitter. She is full of love and I am empty without her.

E
NRIQUE WAS IN
love. He couldn’t stop thinking about her. While he typed, while ordering coffee at the deli, while standing under the shower, when lighting a cigarette, when pushing his nearly two-year-old son in a stroller, he thought of tasting her, of how her lithe body bent in his eager hands as if lust had melted her spine, how her taut skin surrendered to his tongue, how all the parts of her, the bright and the dark, tasted sweet and rich as if she were the very soil of mother earth. Her warm and fragrant smell lingered in his nostrils wherever he went, a breeze of perpetual springtime in the raw February slush of Manhattan, and he grinned while changing diapers or unloading the dishwasher at the flashes of tactile memory: how her curved, moist lips opened like the petals of a flower; how her hips rose and her belly arched as she climaxed. He was eager to hear her amusing, scatterbrained
woes, told with delightful wit and self-deprecation, and he was thrilled by her frank longing for sex. He felt encouraged by her vehement partisanship of him against all those with whom he felt powerless: his useless partner of a half brother, his chatty and ineffectual agent, his craven and indecisive producer, and most of all, his demanding and unsatisfying wife.

Enrique was in love with Sally Winthrop. He was brimming with love, a deep, passionate, mature love that also happened to be illicit. This was nothing like that mirage of love he had felt for Margaret, which had soon enough turned into the bourgeois drudgery of a marriage, a humorless schoolgirl’s notion of life: a brutal routine of dawn risings to the stale smell of bottle formula, the slow spooning of pureed vegetables, and then early to bed reeking of the alcohol of baby wipes, relieved only by long hours midday on the phone with his lazy, meandering half brother while they worked on stories so empty of real feeling and difficult conflict, so chock-full of plot clichés and false characters that he sometimes wondered if the impossible dream did happen, and one of these seven screenplays for which he was paid ten times the amount he had received for his three out-of-print novels (and that was only half the total money paid, since he split it, appropriately enough, with his half brother) were miraculously made, he wondered whether he could bear to watch it on the big screen, much less expect strangers to enjoy themselves.

And then there was the painful, stultifying routine of socializing. Dinner once a week with Margaret’s old camp friend, Wendy, and her left-wing husband, who subtly tried to convince you that his toddler was superior to baby Gregory because his genius was already pooping in the toilet, a veritable Einstein of the bowels. And there were long, painful weekends of gazing through bleary eyes at sandboxes, slumped shoulder to slumped shoulder with bragging fathers while Margaret huddled with the mothers. Sit
ting with the daddies, he could overhear Margaret echoing the strident pulse of her mother’s voice at Passover and Thanksgiving, orating at length and in extraordinary detail about matters so dull he sometimes suspected his wife of a new performance art, twenty-four-hour self-satire: “Does Maclaren really expect those cheesy aluminum legs on its fold-up stroller to take the beating of New York’s streets? Or even the suburban thing of being taken in and out of the car trunk? Especially the way Enrique kicks it closed! Soon as he touches them they break. You know what Manhattan really needs? A big box store. Paying Gristedes’ prices for Pampers is just, I don’t know, obscene. And, ugh, God, do I really have to start applying for kindergarten before Greggy is two?”

And following those acute social observations, after Enrique fetched a second cup of take-out coffee, came her diatribes about work, especially the complaints about her bosses, the top editors of
Newsweek,
where she was employed as an associate art director, with their heavy drinking and groping and hideous taste in ties and composition-blind choices in photos, and jarring color schemes for graphs, and their indecisive and constant tearing up of the cover in a hopeless attempt to figure out on Friday what story would still be big by Monday’s release of the magazine, when, my God, wasn’t it obvious that trying to be relevant was pointless, given the new twenty-four-hour TV cable news and the daily newspapers, which would have the latest anyway? All news-magazines could hope especially to provide their readers was an in-depth look at last week’s headlines, but no, they said those covers didn’t sell. The truth, she announced for the ten thousandth time, is that what sells is movie stars. They should just give up and publish only clones of
People
magazine, Margaret declaimed weekend after weekend, winter, spring, summer, and fall.

That she was boring was bad, yet he could tolerate the tedium, he swore to himself, except that she wouldn’t, at the end of six
teen hours of physical and mental drudgery, fuck him. Not even the quick pleasure of a ten-minute screw. No hope for relief from this eunuch’s life of domesticity. No expectation of reward. Except for one begrudged, clinical act of sexual intercourse a month at the very best—and just as often only one night out of every two months. And those rare successes were achieved only after hours of coaxes and pleas. Nearly every night, at the end of all his obeisance to creating a young, vibrant family together, they went to bed like a sexless couple in their eighties. That was the quiet horror he felt as they huddled in neutered bedclothes on the far borders of their marriage bed: this prune of lust she offered to him at the age of twenty-eight as his now and future diet—that was the soul-destroying thing.

And surrounding the pulp of his simmering resentment, like the thick skin of a tropical fruit, was shame at his complaint. He joked with other young fathers about their mutual frustration. Sometimes at dinners of parenting couples, there were coed jokes about their sex-deprived lives. They were a liberated generation, after all, who had fucked themselves silly, and that was exactly what embarrassed Enrique. He hadn’t. He had only fucked himself into seriousness, into the grave work of family life, after entirely missing the psychedelic joys of college. But there was a deeper sense of moral failure in his feelings of woe and anger at his wife’s neglect: he was betraying the political imperatives of his feminist mother and the feminist realm in which he lived. Margaret was a paradigm of the New Mother of the 1980s, a brave example of having and doing it all, working at a high-pressure job, earning nearly as much as Enrique in his new guise as an over-paid, underproduced screenwriter, and she was, relative to most of her friends, a success at getting her husband to share the homemaking duties. Enrique never cooked, but he genuinely cleaned up, not only after himself and the baby but after his wife too, and
he took sole care of Gregory on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday evenings, and all day Saturday, so that Margaret could recover from the magazine’s late closing schedule on Friday, which usually kept her at the office until two am and sometimes until dawn. When his affair blossomed into love, he tried to convince himself that Margaret must be cheating on him, given her lack of interest in sex with him and her late-night hours. Indeed, his paramour, Sally, also wondered aloud about whether Margaret was having an office romance, no doubt to spur him to end his marriage. But even a cursory investigation persuaded him that, although she might have time for a quickie now and then, Margaret’s schedule was too jammed, packed with work and motherhood, to allow for anything like what Enrique was enjoying with Sally. Blond, luscious, randy, Waspy Sally, with her lovely, full white breasts and thick brown nipples, her delighted laugh at his wit, her admiring green-eyed gaze at his brilliant insights into the absurdities of the movie business, and the willing shudders of her orgasms, so different from the reluctant groans of the young mother Margaret, whose grudging release seemed more bullied than seduced.

Enrique, on the other hand, had the luxury of enjoying Sally every night and every morning for as much as a week at a time, their passion comfortably hidden in a four-star L.A. hotel paid for by Warner Bros. or Columbia or Universal, because almost every other month he and his brother were flown out first-class and taken to dinners at chic Spago or old-time Musso & Frank, presumably to soften them up for the bombardment of movie studio notes during the day. Sally had moved out there, abandoning her disastrous early career as an assistant in publishing—more hit upon than discovering a hit—to try her own hand at the crack cocaine of writing: the Hollywood development deal.

Enrique knew Sally well from New York, and it was natural, and presumed by all to be innocent, that they look each other up
while they both happened to be in Los Angeles. Margaret and Lily, and all of Enrique’s friends in New York or acquaintances in L.A., didn’t think it odd because, after all, Sally had gone to college with Margaret and Lily. Indeed, Sally was one of Margaret’s closest friends, the third member of a Cornell trio of young women who had formed a perfumed phalanx to conquer Manhattan. The only reason Sally hadn’t been at the Orphans’ Dinner was that she had gone home for the Christmas holidays. With their profound physical union throbbing in his veins, Enrique sometimes wondered—a thought that seemed to him almost worse than the affair itself, if for no other reason than that it collaterally wished his beloved son Gregory into nonexistence—whether, if Sally had been seated beside him at Margaret’s glass table instead of the dull Pam, he would be married to the lusty Miss Winthrop now, and the whole sad mistake of his marriage to Margaret would never have happened.

This dark pulp of emotional betrayal of his wife, added to the thick skin of ideological shame, made Enrique, in his own eyes, as greedy, as manipulative, and as devious as Iago. It also made sex with Sally—after dinners in Beverly Hills with mutual friends and his clueless half brother (too busy with his own consistent adulteries to notice Enrique’s passionate affair) and after well-acted good-byes at the valet park, and after Sally drove in circles for fifteen minutes before heading to the Chateau Marmont Hotel to knock softly on the door to his suite—it made the taste of every kiss, the bath of each liquid embrace a succulent forbidden fruit. And during the two trips Sally made to New York, she met Enrique each day in his one-room office, a block from where he and Margaret were raising their son. There they covered each other’s mouths as they climaxed awkwardly on his sofa or roughly on the rug, so that the shrinks and their patients in the rooms next door wouldn’t be tempted to investigate libidos other than their own.

For nearly a year, Enrique had all the lovemaking that he had ever dreamed of. More than he had ever dreamed of because that abandon and recklessness included one unforgivable and shameful night (that he gleefully relished) when Margaret initiated sex—an unprecedented postchildbirth event, no doubt unconsciously cued by the dangerous pheromones emitting from her husband—the evening after he had screwed her friend Sally in the afternoon. And the weird thing, an invitation to becoming even more evil, was that he was relaxed, almost bored, while inside his wife that night—no doubt because he hadn’t had to wait two months for this opportunity and thus didn’t care that after Margaret finished executing her perfunctory marital duty, another two months loomed before he would again enjoy with her the intense and calming welcome only a woman could grant. As an act of physical intimacy, that night’s grotesque betrayal didn’t feel wrong at all: they were lovers fucking, instead of business partners doing the books. And apparently Margaret also preferred his lust to be less eager, certainly less desperate. Perhaps because he wasn’t pent up and holding back, because he wasn’t anxious about prolonging the pleasure, Margaret, a rarity since the first year of their relationship, eased into the fucking. She softened and moaned as she used to when they first met, when she loved him, when she wanted
him
—not as the errand-running daddy to her son, not as the trophy husband to unload the stroller at her parents’ house in Great Neck, not as a matching accessory to her cutting-edge life—but as a man.

And yes, thank God, hallelujah, that was why he didn’t hate himself sufficiently to stop his betrayal, his twofold betrayal, because for the first time in the interminable twenty-eight years of his frustrating and ineffective life, at long last he was a real man with a real cock that had found its way into not one but two beautiful women and on the same glorious fucking day. He had failed
as a novelist, he had given up his dream of being a modern Balzac after his fourth book couldn’t find a publisher willing to pay more than five lousy thousand dollars, and that only if he would change the ending to a happy one. What kind of happy ending was five thousand dollars for two years’ work? “If they want me to be a hack,” he declared bitterly, “they should at least pay me well.” He had found that bargain in Hollywood.

And he had found a greater prize there too, this expansive freedom with Sally, both sexual and emotional. She was funnier than Margaret about his script woes, and yet she had no sarcasm in her about his Hollywood jobs, no mockery of the pandering story ideas, no impatience at the idiots he was dealing with, no world-weary looks of skepticism about Enrique becoming a producer or a director, and certainly no opposition to his wondering aloud whether, for the sake of advancing his career in the movie business, he ought to live in Los Angeles. Margaret seemed to be satisfied by the drudgery of their striving family life, despite her playground complaints to her fellow mothers, whereas Enrique, except for the parole of Sally’s arms, was in a prison.

Enrique did not propose that he escape from his internment. Sally did. Approaching the one-year anniversary of their affair, she settled in L.A. for good, having gotten a job on a TV series, a position that came with the promise of writing an episode and, if that went well, being promoted to staff writer. She told Enrique that someone with his experience and skills could have any number of jobs in TV, and that he would start nearly at the top to boot, perhaps not as an executive producing writer but certainly as a head writer and co–executive producer, and soon, with his fabulous ideas, he would be making millions. He had been told the same by less self-interested and more knowledgeable sources: his agent, producers in general, and all the writers he had met out there. It was aphoristic in Hollywood that the screenwriters had the glam
our and rubbed elbows with movie stars, but it was the television writers who had the money and power. Sally’s plan was that he divorce Margaret, end his frustrating partnership with his half brother, move in with her in L.A., and become wealthy as the creator of a television series. As bold, selfish, and meretricious as that course sounded to his soul, it also seemed more likely to make him rich and famous and happy than sulking as a failed novelist in Manhattan. If he stayed put, his only hope of success would be to hit the lottery of getting a script made into a big-time movie in between changing diapers and waiting for his sexless wife to catch up on her sleep.