A Happy Marriage (27 page)

While he was gone, Margaret picked out the clothes she wanted to be buried in. It hadn’t occurred to Enrique that Margaret would want to choose the outfit for her last social event, but it should have. She had chosen the cemetery, the temple, the Rabbi, and the music. Lily, consistent with their long history, helped her. They had shopped together as young women, they had advised each other about wedding dresses, and Margaret had handed down her children’s clothing to Lily’s daughter and son. They had conferred before any significant social event about what to wear. They had even discussed what their husbands should wear. It was a logical final collaboration for the two best friends.

Lily was gone when Enrique returned to find his wife sitting in a chair, still in her nightgown, gazing at a large box on her bed.

“My last chore,” Margaret said. She pointed to the box, its cover off, that had once contained a favorite pair of black boots she had bought while she was in remission, embarrassed by their price and in love with their luxurious leather. The boots were standing on the floor. In the box was a white silk blouse, a long black skirt that used to cling to her slim hips and elegant legs, and a favorite textured gray wool jacket with flecks of yellow and black. “I’d like to be buried in those. Okay, Puff?” She smiled. “And the boots.” Enrique nodded. She looked shy. “And one more thing, I hope you don’t mind. I know it’s a terrible waste, I know you spent a lot of money, but would it be okay if you buried me with the earrings you gave me?” She opened her hand to reveal the small velvet box that contained the first gift he had selected for her that she liked. “I love them so much. I know it’s crazy, just a crazy waste of money, but will you make sure I’m wearing them?”

“Of course it’s all right,” he blurted out before a river of water in his head could flow. “I’ll make sure. Don’t worry.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Okay. That’s it.” She offered him the box. He moved to the chair, kneeling to be on her level as if he were proposing to her, and took the velvet box. “I got it done,” she commented with a little girl’s shrug and a demure smile, as if she were seeking his approval. “I’ve done my last errand.” She rested her head on his shoulder, and they stayed in the embrace for a long time. Enrique wanted to speak but was unable to manufacture a word. Holding her frail body in his heavy arms, he couldn’t stop himself from doing what he had promised he wouldn’t. He allowed himself to feel what he was losing, and sobbed in his wife’s arms.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he mumbled.

She caressed his right cheek with her hand, and that made him weep more. He covered his eyes until Margaret said something sweet and silly. “Thank you, Enrique. Thank you for making my life fun. I would have lived such a stupid life in Queens, or somewhere boring. Some dumb life, just a stupid boring life without you.”

“That’s not true,” he said, because it was untrue.

“Yes, it is. You made it so much fun.”

He stopped arguing with her. He knew she was trying to make him feel better, forgiving him for what he couldn’t forgive himself for, all the times that he had not made life fun for her. “Would you help me get dressed and fixed up for Maxy?” she asked.

He helped her shower, bagging the tubes to protect them from the water, adjusting her wig, bringing her a bra and a white T-shirt, helping her step into jeans that were swimming on her and a belt for her to cinch them tight.

Enrique sat downstairs during the three hours his younger son spent with his mother and realized a very sad thing, so sad and so
unacknowledged by him that he almost raced upstairs to interrupt before his tired brain forgot. Margaret had just said good-bye to him. Asking to wear the earrings forever was her farewell, her way of telling him that he had satisfied her as a husband. Instead of bawling, that was when he ought to have said his piece. Well, it’s all right, he told himself. I have tomorrow. I have all day tomorrow.

Max appeared, storming down the steps and rushing to the front door, calling to Enrique, “I have to go.”

Enrique raced over before he could leave. “How was it?”

“How was it!” Max answered as if the question were worthy of a lunatic. There was still the reflex of fight, the loathing to let her go.

“Sorry.” Enrique realized that he was coaxing pain from his child.

“I guess it went okay,” he said. “I don’t know.” He gasped with a sob, “What am I supposed to say?” Enrique tried to hug him. “Okay, okay,” Max said, pushing his father away, although his chest was shaking and tears flowed out of his blue eyes. “I have to go. I have to meet Lisa. This was good, talking to Mom was good, but I have to go.”

Enrique released him. There was a brief opportunity to ask Margaret how it went for her. She reported that Max had been loving with her physically, as always, snuggling and showing no fear of her ill body. But he couldn’t say much, his pain made him mute. “He told me about Lisa, though,” she said. “I was glad he was willing to tell me about her. And I got to hold him for a long time,” she whispered, grateful.

And then Diane arrived, the last person to say good-bye. Enrique banished himself to the living room, to wait through this final interruption. He watched the clock on the cable TV box turn to 5:26 and thought, Four more minutes and she’s mine.

That was when Diane called out, “Enrique? Can you come upstairs? She’s not feeling well.”

Panicked, he took the stairs two at a time. When he entered the bedroom, he couldn’t see Margaret. Diane was inclined over the bed but turned at his approach. “I’d better go,” she said and disappeared out of view. Margaret was huddled in a fetal position, buried from head to toe under a quilt that he had folded at the foot of the bed now that it was June. She must have asked Diane to cover her with it.

Before he pulled the quilt down enough to see her face, he knew. He knew from four other bouts of severe infection and high fevers, he knew from the trembling of the covers, and he knew from her desperate cries when he tried to pull them away.

“No, no, no,” she said through chattering teeth. “Don’t take it off. I’m freezing,” she pleaded. He disobeyed, lowering the blanket to climb in with his long body that she liked to praise for its warmth. As fast as he could, he pulled the covers up to his chin, leaving only the top of her head exposed. He put his arms around her and pressed against her quaking body and prayed the shaking would stop. If not, he would be forced to call the hospice doctor and ask what drugs he should administer. But he hoped it would not come to that. Margaret had forbidden all measures to extend her life. If he called, Dr. Ko would instruct him to eliminate Margaret’s awareness of what was happening—put her into a coma if necessary. The drugs would make her comfortable, which of course he wanted, but that meant there would be no more conversation, no last words from Enrique to thank her.

She cried out, “The blanket, the blanket!” Enrique pulled it over both their heads, sealing them in a hot cave. In the dark, she said through chattering teeth, “I feel so bad. I feel so bad.”

“I’m sorry,” he whispered and clutched her tight. “I love you.” And he prayed, although he was a Godless man, that those weren’t the last words she would hear him speak.

E
NRIQUE WOKE UP
beside his wife, a gradual and easy awakening. He rolled onto his back and stretched, as drowsy as a sunbather, gazing at the blue predawn light glowing from the open window. He listened to water slap softly at the piles of the Hotel Danieli. Venice really
is
a drowning city, he thought. The October air wafting in was mild, and Enrique wasn’t troubled that it came through the most expensive window he had ever paid for. He felt thoroughly becalmed. This contented absence of expectation or worry was rare, almost unique in his life, and for a month he had been feeling only its opposite.

During the weeks before Margaret flew from New York to meet him at the Frankfurt Airport so they could travel together to Italy, he had slept in a clenched fetal bundle, as if he were enduring bombardment in a trench. Each morning he had woken
up with his jaw and gums hurting, which he knew from his dentist’s grim warnings meant he was grinding his teeth, and there was the familiar stomach pain of career anxiety—but not last night, his first in Venice, not this dawn in the Danieli.

He had spent three days at the Frankfurt Book Fair to promote the German publication of his eighth novel, which had been published unsuccessfully in the United States a year and a half before. The source of all those agonized nights of sleep was the old discouragement at the world’s reception of his writing, the profound reverberation of failure. Thinking in this vein about his career, he could hear his good friend and fellow novelist Porter complain, “You’re not a failure, Enrique. You’re confusing money with quality.”

Porter Beekman, a bastion of New England piousness and cynicism about literature, was no doubt correct in drawing that distinction, but it failed to comfort. True, years ago Enrique had felt like a complete bust when the commercial disappointment of his novels forced him to confront his buried belief that they weren’t good. But the poor sales of his last book had not shaken his own satisfaction with the work. No, its failure to capture a large audience left him in despair precisely because he believed he had done his best. Not the melodramatic, grand emotion—I’m going to kill myself—of his youthful disappointments. This was like hearing the sentence of a court of last appeal, a submissive acceptance of aging and death.

He had aged; he was forty-three. He’d lived through the death of someone he loved, who represented all that was vigorous in life to him, his father. He had seen that handsome and vibrant face immobile and bloodless. He had heard the resonant voice, angry or ecstatic, stilled forever. And eight months after the loss of his progenitor, Enrique had passed through the death of his ambition as his most ambitious novel came and went with little notice. He
knew that whatever he might achieve in the future, it would never come near to the dreams of his youth.

For well over a year he’d told himself that his general despair was temporary, the natural process of grieving for his father and for a book that had demanded so much of him. The novel had taken two years to research and almost as much time to write, and there was another year of necessary interruptions to do movie scripts, which paid for the literary enterprise. Even more significant than the investment of five years in the book was how spent he felt—the nine hundred pages were closer to three novels than to one and seemed to have exhausted all of his knowledge of people and the world. Be patient, he told himself, and you’ll get over both loss and defeat.

However, they were not temporary feelings of abandonment and discouragement. Well before he flew to Frankfurt he knew why. The loss of his father, the engine of his career, was a permanent and irreplaceable loss. If anything, Guillermo had been too devoted a fan. When Enrique, in an effort to spare his dying father such trivia, stopped relating accounts of his script conferences, Guillermo immediately complained. “You think it’s your business. But I think you and I are the same person,” he said with a knowing wink at his narcissism. “By not telling me what’s happening in your meetings, you’re cutting me off from my career.” And, although he was proud of his long novel, Enrique believed that it was his crowning failure. That when so ambitious a book falls short of establishing its author as central to his generation, it becomes a final assessment of the limits of a writer’s talent, especially to himself.

He wondered how he could live the remainder of his life and manage to feel inspired, engaged, and hopeful. He could, of course, live through his children, and presumably destroy them, since, he had concluded based on his own experience, there is no
greater likelihood of disappointment than being colonized by a parent’s ambition. Perhaps that was blaming his father for his own deficits. After all, Freud had observed that “the man who is the undisputed favorite of his mother carries within him always the feeling that he can conquer the world.” Evidently Enrique had had the wrong parent rooting for him.

On the surface, he ought not to have felt anxiety about the book fair. His German publisher was simply being gracious in flying him over to do press for their edition; little was expected of him or his novel. Unfortunately for Enrique, the trip caused him to relive the disappointment of the U.S. publication like a shattered war veteran flashing back to his most traumatic memory, and to feel keenly the absence of his father’s partisanship in body and soul, particularly when he tried to sleep. Worse, whatever suppressed hope Enrique might have had that Germany would see his book differently than his own country had been deflated by a prominent and dismissive review on the day of his arrival. He sat in the wreckage for three days, droning on through meaningless interviews to small outlets, and waited to join Margaret for a celebration of their twentieth wedding anniversary in Venice.

They arrived on the morning of the actual day, October 15. He had no expectation that he was going to be good company or much fun and less expectation that he was going to enjoy himself. He was wrong.

They took a nap after checking into a rambling, high-ceilinged suite: a grand and foolishly elegant sitting room, sofa and wing chair gilt-edged and swathed in yards of maroon velvet; a sedate, gray-carpeted bedroom, dominated by a large lead-glass mirror hanging over a modest fireplace and a romantic and classic view of the Gulf of Venice. When they woke up, she surprised him by escalating from snuggling into full-blown lovemaking. Years ago they had thoroughly talked out that his constant sexual eager
ness only pushed her deeper into reluctance. He knew it was unwise to propose sex when it was already in the air, and especially on their anniversary. He had assumed she would wait until after dinner, because naps blanketed her in a grouchy fog until she had coffee and was left alone for an hour. Her lustful awakening was a gift.

And it wasn’t typical of their lovemaking. She languished, stretched and arched like a cat, whereas usually she had a tighter, athletic feel to her movements, a resistance to surrender to pleasure. Her body felt liquid and welcoming until her climax, which didn’t build slowly but this time arrived without warning. She grabbed him as if to hold him in place, dug her fingernails into his back, and bit his shoulder right before her orgasm, and yet she also found room in the middle of ecstasy to shoot her husband a sideways smile and comment as if they were taking a stroll, “Guess I’m hungry,” instead of remaining solemn and silent during intercourse. And it was different for him. His release wasn’t as spasmodic, more like a tap opening and flowing. While Margaret and Enrique took their daytime swim on the Danieli bed, they were oddly calm in the midst of their excitement.

And then they had espresso, as tourists are supposed to, in the Piazza San Marco, and made sure, along with dozens of other couples, to watch the clock tower strike, and walked through the old, narrow, and comforting streets to the restaurant where his L.A. agent, Rick, had arranged for them to celebrate their anniversary. Margaret had warned Enrique that Venice was notorious for poor food. Rick had volunteered that he knew the chef and proprietor of a great restaurant in Venice and would organize a special meal for them.

When they arrived, the allegedly fine restaurant looked too modest to Enrique. It was hardly more than an empty storefront—ten small tables and without so much as a pull-down shade to con
ceal its patrons from prying eyes. The bare wood floor and painted white walls suited Margaret’s taste perfectly, precisely because the room was casual and blended with the narrow cobblestoned street they had reached by following the route their concierge had drawn for them on the hotel map. The restaurant was full of customers, and there was a line of people waiting outside, which quickly transformed Enrique’s skepticism into anxiety about their reservation.

He needn’t have worried. They were seated ahead of the others at the one free table, in the quietest corner of the lively restaurant. The round-faced, red-cheeked chef came to shake his hand and kiss Margaret’s and to announce, in stumbling English, that they didn’t have to decide anything, all was arranged. Could you select the wine? Enrique asked, and the owner nodded as if anything else would be absurd.

That food and wine appeared and plates were cleared in rhythm with their appetites and the flow of conversation, that the close quarters were absent formality, made it seem as though they had been welcomed into a friend’s home. There was no sense of being strangers here. And that they were the only diners speaking English lent the evening a feeling of privacy as well as family, a magical and impossible combination.

Their waitress, the owner’s wife, beamed at them between courses and managed to convince Enrique that the spectacle of a middle-aged couple being romantic wasn’t laughable. They held hands walking back, arms swinging in a childlike rhythm, until they reached the Piazza San Marco, where a breeze chilled Margaret. He gathered her to him, and they walked as one across the square, listening to the echoes of a group of young people shouting and singing, chamber music drifting from a window, wind whispering through the tunnels of narrower side streets, and water lapping over the seawall. It was the season of
acqua alta,
high water. Wood planks, elevated two feet, had been put over the cob
blestones leading to the Hotel Danieli, and their shoes clattered as if they were on horseback.

There was a fax waiting for him at the hotel. It was from Rick, relaying an offer from a studio to rewrite an adaptation of what in Enrique’s childhood had been called a comic book but had been promoted to graphic novel as they neared the millennium. Margaret didn’t frown as she normally would have at the lack of boundaries in the movie business. It was 1997, and Enrique didn’t yet have a cell phone that could be used in Europe; if he had, Rick would have interrupted their anniversary dinner. Of course, Enrique was a grown-up and could ignore the call, or for that matter throw this fax into the garbage, but Margaret and Enrique both understood that he was addicted to writing and this, adapting a comic book for a movie that might or might not ever be made, was what was left to feed his addiction.

“Sorry,” he said as he took the fax, and the brass skeleton key to their room, from a courtly man at the front desk.

“It’s okay,” Margaret conceded. “Dinner was great. Rick’s got credit with me.”

Enrique opened the fax while they climbed the carpeted golden staircase, passing under Gothic arches up to the third floor, ascending almost to the glass ceiling of this part of the hotel, its oldest, a fourteenth-century converted palace. He had read in the hotel brochure that the French novelist George Sand had stayed there with her lover Alfred de Musset. These four days in Venice were going to cost well north of ten thousand dollars, booked over Margaret’s thrifty Queens girl objections. “We can be funky and cheap while we’re there,” Enrique said, “but I didn’t write all this crap for all these years to fly coach and stay in a Days Inn.” She laughed and said, “Venice Days Inn,” as if the idea were delightful. She agreed to all his travel extravagances and initiated her own, including tomorrow’s Locanda Cipriani lunch on Torcello Island, where
Princess Di and Hemingway—and some other person who seemed unlikely to be linked with Papa and royalty, Madonna or Stephen Hawking, he couldn’t remember which—used to go.

When they got to their room, he read the fax carefully. The studio had agreed to pay him his last fee, his “quote” as the business liked to call it, with the condition that he say yes or no on Monday so that he could fly to L.A. by the end of the week to get started with the director and the studio’s notes. Notes prior to his writing. That was one of Hollywood’s brilliant innovations, criticizing a writer before he starts. They needed a script fast, they claimed, in order to begin shooting after New Year’s. He wasn’t impressed. Studios always demanded that the writer hurry because shooting was imminent, and then, after receiving the script, progress slowed to a crawl.

“They’ve agreed to my price,” Enrique said lugubriously.

“Good,” Margaret said, compressing the word into little more than a chirp, a signal that she didn’t want to discuss it.

“They want me to fly to L.A. next weekend for a Monday meeting.”

“We’ll be back Wednesday.” She shrugged. “You’ll have plenty of time to pack.”

“You think I should do it?” he asked.

“Do what you want.”

“Come on,” he pleaded. “Tell me. What do you think?”

She ignored him, standing in the center of the maroon sitting room, looking back and forth between an uncomfortably small divan and a sumptuous wing chair, as if the choice between them was not obvious. “It’s crazy, but I’m going to take another bath,” she announced, making it clear that bugging her about his career was unromantic. But he hated making these decisions without her. “Should I take a bath with you?” he asked, not sincerely.

“You won’t fit, Puff,” she said, laughing. “Didn’t you see what
a tiny tub it is! I barely fit.” She walked up and caressed his cheek. “Poor baby,” she teased. “You’re too big for this world.”

He undressed, put on the Danieli’s thick robe, and settled in the wing chair. He listened to the water slap softly around his wife and reread the fax. It was quite a small piece of driftwood the current of his career had deposited at his bare feet. He didn’t feel sorry for himself; he felt embarrassed. He had been given so long a lead, publishing a novel at seventeen, and despite the consoling speeches of Porter, Margaret, other family and friends, what nagged him, truly bothered him, was that he suspected he had earned his fate.