A Happy Marriage (31 page)

He couldn’t give up. That was the truth, wasn’t it? These maneuvers were selfish. He couldn’t stop grabbing for more of her. That’s why he had failed to say good-bye. It wasn’t the hordes of visitors or the evil arrival of this infection or toxic assault, whatever was tormenting her. He had told himself over and over: she is dying, my wife is dying, Margaret is dying. The other day she had spoken of herself in the past tense. “Remember how I loved to get lost in the car with you and the boys? I loved it when you called me Adventure Girl, remember, Enrique? I was your Adventure Girl,” she said, as if she were a ghost visiting him. “Help me do this,” she had begged him in the hospital. “You’re so strong, Enrique,” she had said. “I want to die at home in peace. You can do it for me.” He couldn’t disobey her. The antibiotic wouldn’t prolong life, but the hydration would. Over the years he had learned to protest her autocracies, and she had been gracious enough, occasionally, to let him think he could prevail. Although she was unconscious and dying and incapable of resistance, it was nearly impossible to disobey her. “Okay, you ready?” Enrique asked Rebecca and slathered the suppository with lubricant.

His sister lifted the quilts from the bottom. Margaret’s feet pulled up at the air but only a few inches. He parted her buttocks with one hand and invaded his wife’s body with his right index finger. “I got used to losing all my dignity as a patient a long time ago,” Margaret had commented when Dr. Ko proposed the fever-relieving suppositories as a way of circumventing the fact that Margaret’s stomach was being drained. She clenched at the assault and moaned, but Enrique was out and the covers back within a second. She immediately quieted and didn’t stir again. He leaned over and kissed the hard top of the lump where her head was hidden. Feel better, my love, he thought and looked at the clock. Three hours from now would be nine o’clock. Around then, he hoped. Perhaps then she would shake the delirium and come to consciousness. He wouldn’t hesitate the next time. My wife is dying, he said to himself, in a scolding tone. Your wife is dying, he chided. Say what you have to say or she will never hear it.

Enrique woke up in Margaret’s bed. Scared, he nearly jumped right out. Her big eyes were open, staring at him. They were inches away and filled his vision. He pulled back to gain distance on her, but his skull bumped into the wall. “Ouch,” she said, as though she sympathetically felt the blow. But he noticed something chilling in her eyes—an absence of affection, an evaluating and cold attitude.

Waking quickly, he understood. Of course. She hated him because of his failure. His pathetic sexual failure had disgusted her. He had fallen asleep like a lamb, a romantic fool, trusting that after sleep he would find their love intact, and instead, in the brilliant crosshatched sunlight flooding through the blinds of Margaret’s studio apartment, last night’s carnage was revealed:
Enrique and his ineffective cock had disappointed her beyond all hope of recovery.

What would she say? The truth? I want you out of here, you wimp! Or a polite lie: I have to get ready to go to my New Year’s party; let’s talk after the holiday. And when he called, she would be busy for the rest of the century.

She opened her mouth to speak. He had a desperate thought: kiss her, silence her, and take her, take her fast and make her come hard and his miserable performance would be erased. He didn’t do that. In fact, he had no idea how to do that. He waited, dreading her words. At last she said, “I’m going to make coffee. Want a cup?”

Was this her way of telling him that she didn’t want to try to have sex again? Or her way of signaling that he was welcome to linger and have breakfast, that there was all the time in the world to prove he was man enough for her? Or her way of getting him up and out of her bed, and then up and out of her life? Or maybe this was her way of telling him that she wanted a cup of coffee.

He said, “Sure,” and contradicted the request, or at least its immediacy, by draping an arm over her shoulder, sidling closer, and moving toward her lips. She waited, neither resisting nor opening to him. He kissed her tentatively, lips hardly touching, with a wariness more appropriate to bussing a shark than embracing a woman you had lain with all night.

Her lips were cracked and dry from the New York City winter and her apartment’s heat. So were his. They both tasted of stale cigarettes and coffee. His eyes lit on the radio clock beside her bed; it was eleven-thirty. They had slept for less than four hours. It was no wonder their tongues were furry and his body ached all over, and not from lust’s yearnings. There was no sense attempting a longer exploration under these circumstances. He did anyway. Her breasts were firm and warm on his skinny chest. His left hand
roamed down her smooth, strong back. His right cupped the side of the smooth column of her neck. He was hard. As hard as he had ever been, although every other part of his body felt exhausted and weak. He pressed against her while they kissed, each time deeper and longer, familiar with each other’s rhythm from last night’s explorations. The stale tastes dissipated, replaced by something sweet from inside her that he decided was her essential goodness.

He was like a horny dog, feeling stupid about his eagerness, his left hand grabbing a globe of her behind, squeezing urgently. I need to do this now. Get it over with. Prove to her I’m worthy so I don’t lose her. Because that would be a disaster. He had slept beside her in utter trust. Her smell, something between the spray of a lemon and a warm bagel, infiltrated his skin. While looking at her and listening to her, he wasn’t aware of his own awkwardness, of the world’s obstacles, of the ceaseless competition of his gender, and best of all, the puzzling feeling of being adrift all the time. Despite Enrique’s identifying labels—Jew, Latino, New Yorker, high school dropout, novelist prodigy—and despite all the large presences in his childhood—bullying, passionate father; needy, intelligent mother; greedy, gregarious half brother; fearless, righteous half sister—he felt that he was without someone who knew his real self, that he was without a place to rest, without, in a word, a home. He had been unaware that he felt unknown and lost in the world until he met Margaret. The feeling didn’t make sense to the twenty-one-year-old Enrique, but he did know that while gazing into Margaret’s eyes he felt safe.

So he pushed his cock at her, to get inside, to unite with this heart, this spirit, this body, to be lost in her beauty and her certitude. He bumped and ground against her and felt her spreading moisture and an opening in what moments ago had been sealed. He thought himself unpleasant and disgusting, but longing over
whelmed that judgment and pulled his muscles so tight he felt they could snap.

“Wait,” she said.

He withdrew as if shot.

“I have to reload my diaphragm.” She skipped out of bed, and he saw the lovely sight of her breasts bouncing free as she disappeared into the bathroom. He had forgotten all about birth control. What the hell was the matter with him? And he had a thought so crazy that he discounted it, namely that he wouldn’t care if she got pregnant. He had never wanted a child. For a literary novelist, having a baby would be a particular disaster—he could never hope to support a family. Besides, when the hell had she put in a diaphragm last night? The answer came to him: the bathroom visit at three in the morning. She wanted him. It was obvious. Even Enrique had to admit, this woman wanted him.

When she returned, scooting back under the heavy quilt in a flash of white and a black triangle of sex, he smelled the residue of spermicide on her right hand as she pulled him toward her. He was, of course, no longer hard, but he assumed a few minutes of kissing and they would be back in business, especially now that he understood he was welcome.

He was wrong. The same kisses, the same smells, the same touch, the smooth and sweet of her skin did not return him to the oak-hard readiness to be inside her. This was more severe than last night’s nervous impotence. This was being a eunuch. He felt like a little boy who had no concept of an erection, for whom this warm and fertile creature was alien and terrifying.

She reached down and tugged at his infant member. Dimly he could feel her fingers, but the tiny, shrunken, useless thing didn’t seem to belong to him. The look on her face was worse than the numbness. Her great eyes stared through him, picturing the failure below, dismay welling like sorrow. She let go.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Don’t worry about it,” she answered in a clipped tone that did worry him. “I’ll make coffee.” She slid out of bed, grabbing discarded panties and bra, and disappearing into the closet next to the bathroom. She reappeared in jeans, T-shirt, and sweater, only to vanish again around the corner of the L, heading toward the kitchen.

Despair didn’t overwhelm him. He suspected that would come later. He had failed her, that was clear from the haste of her departure. It was a sad fact that at twenty-one he was accustomed to failure. His novels weren’t bestsellers, why should he be a man? He stumbled around on her parquet floor, assembling his black armor, trying to get his legs into the black denim and his arms through the black cotton of his turtleneck. It was odd that he did not feel suicidal, knowing he had met the woman of his dreams and had lost her. He had confirmed through long conversations that their connection was profound and had managed to succeed in convincing her to take him to her bed, and then he had thrown all that away with his dismal lack of masculinity.

A rational response would be to defenestrate himself. He could do it there. Get a running start, jump over the glass dining room table, and shatter her wall of windows, falling through the frigid air to be impaled on the scrawny tree below, his entrails sizzling from its sad Christmas lights. When
The New York Times
interviewed Margaret for a brief news item noting the passing of this peculiar adolescent novelist, he was confident that, out of respect for him, she would suppress the information that his cock didn’t work, and it would be supposed by readers that he was a rejected suitor, a much more respectable cause of death. Possibly the publicity would help his forthcoming novel. Hanging around for publication date wasn’t necessary, since his fucking publisher never got him any interviews anymore. He certainly didn’t have an idea
for a fourth novel, and he doubted he ever would, now that he was facing a lifetime of being unable to have sex. How had he managed to become a Hemingway hero without fighting in a war?

“Do you want a bagel?” Margaret asked, reappearing from the kitchen. Her manner was efficient. Not cool, but guarded. Of course, he thought, she’s creating distance so that we can both pretend it isn’t about the fact that I’m a lemon, a car whose engine sputters out when it should hit cruising speed. He admired her for this, the grace and elegance of her rejection, her valiant attempt to ignore his humiliating failure.

“No, I’m fine. I should go, get showered and shaved for this New Year’s party.” He leaned toward her, and she looked alarmed by his movement. She’s probably afraid I’m going to kiss her again, inflict my false promise of a body on her. “Listen”—some part of him was behaving with a weird confidence, bringing up the unmentionable—“I’m sorry about my not being able—”

Margaret stopped his apology. “Don’t worry about it. I’m not.”

He didn’t believe her, but a self-assured Enrique burst through his skepticism, an Enrique that he didn’t know and couldn’t access at will, an Enrique who took hold of her with an easy confidence, leaning down to kiss her once, twice, three times, lingering to whisper, “I really want to make love to you. I’ve been so nervous about it. I guess I’m scared because I love you.”

She pulled back enough to turn on her searchlights, blue and bluer as they bored into him, as if he were a riddle she had to solve. After a long pause, she spoke in a conspiratorial whisper. “Don’t say that. That’s what’s making you so nervous. We’re just getting to know each other. Relax.” She lifted her face to his, kissing him once fast and then longer, staying with it. He hardened below. She pushed him away. “Let’s not get you revved up again,” she said with a sly smile. “What are you doing New Year’s Day?”

“Nothing,” Enrique said, infinitely relieved that she seemed to want to him see again.

“Want to have brunch with me and three other women?”

“Sure,” he said. He would have said sure if she had proposed brunch with the Gestapo.

“No men,” she added. “Just you and the girls. Sure you can handle it?”

“I like my odds,” he said and moved in for another kiss.

She pushed him away, both hands on his chest. “Go. We both need a rest.”

He was exiled to her street, the oasis of beautified Ninth in the wasteland of bankrupt New York. He trudged past the homeless, the strung out, and the odd wary, respectable worker, too poor or powerless to get New Year’s Eve day off.

His brand-new apartment looked tiny and soulless. The sight of his Selectric typewriter atop his oak desk made him feel like he was a secretary, not a novelist. He was so exhausted he undressed, flopped onto his narrow bed, and tried to sleep. He couldn’t. He couldn’t shake a vision of Margaret and her white form hurrying to get beneath the sheets with him. He masturbated as an exorcism more than anything else, annoyed that his cock seemed to work just fine when there was no one around to impress. He showered and shaved and put on black jeans and a blue work shirt and made coffee and waited, drearily, to attend a New Year’s Eve party at a friend of Sal’s where he had been told there would be eligible women. He couldn’t see the point of meeting anyone else. He had found the girl of his dreams, and, in reality, he couldn’t sleep with her.

E
NRIQUE HAD NEVER
looked at a dead body. Not a fresh one. He had been able to tolerate no more than a glance before he shunned his grandmother’s embalmed remains, appalled by her eighty-five-year-old face smoothed to marble: lips sealed, eyes shut like iron doors. That mortician’s sculpture of his father’s mother, his storybook
abuela,
had no life in its death. No hint of the ebbing human, of the soul just fled.

This dead body, lying in a Beth Israel hospital, this six-foot-three stillness, cheeks gaunt, jaw slack, this flesh of his father, although cool when he kissed its brow, still possessed the temperature of its life. And the lines of Guillermo’s face, the sag of his neck, the slight parting of his bloodless lips, did not seem thoroughly absent the life of his spirit. Enrique’s father was not there, but he was not gone from the room.

Enrique whispered to him, in case the nurse at the station could overhear. “I’m sorry, Dad. I’m sorry I wasn’t here.” He couldn’t say more, dismayed that there would be no reply. All his life Enrique had cared deep into his bones, and resented that he cared deep in his blood, what his father thought of how he spoke, how he looked, what he hoped, and what he wrote. Not a quarter of an inch of Enrique had escaped his father’s assessment. No habit, no taste, no ambition had formed in Enrique without either surviving the gauntlet of his father’s condemnation or marching in the parade of his approval. He had lost his compass.

It was sixteen minutes after three o’clock in the morning. Even the hour evoked his father. “In the dark night of the soul,” Guillermo liked to quote Fitzgerald, “it is always three o’clock in the morning.” And Enrique found himself thinking about the fact that his father believed Fitzgerald was overrated, and wondered whether that opinion was envy or aesthetic, or both—and then he was back, standing at the foot of a hospital bed, staring down at the gray lips of his dead father.

The Beth Israel hospice nurse’s phone call had startled Enrique out of a deep sleep at 2:37 am. “I’m sorry, Mr. Sabas, but your father has passed,” she said and added that the body had to be moved to the morgue in two hours. If he wanted to spend time with his father, he would have to come over right away. Enrique phoned his half brother and half sister to tell them the news, and Margaret held and kissed him in their bed while he stared at the two boxes of light, the Twin Towers, centered in the windows of their dark bedroom, stunned that his father’s death, which for a year he knew was coming, had actually happened. He didn’t want to see his father’s dead body, but he felt compelled to go. Was he merely obeying a convention? Or was there something to see in death?

He dressed quickly, and Margaret walked with him down
stairs. Eleven-year-old Max appeared from his room, asking if something had happened to Grandpa. Both he and his older brother were very close to Guillermo. Their grandfather babysat for them at least once a week and spoiled them shamelessly, filling their heads with his praise and big ambitions and wit. Max hugged his daddy, squeezed him tight in his small arms. Enrique asked, “The call woke you up?”

Max said, “I always know when there’s something wrong in the family.” He added with the confident solemnity of the prepubescent child, “Grandpa loved you, Dad.”

Margaret smiled ruefully at Enrique and proudly at Max, then took her younger son by the hand and led him back to bed. Enrique thought of that sight, his wife and his son, safe and waiting for him to return, while he stared at Guillermo’s body, lying faceup, large, hairy hands folded across his chest, his strong features not asleep, because sleep is full of animation, but still as stone—and silent. More silent than even those angry months of Enrique’s early adolescence, when they lived in bedrooms ten feet apart and his father refused to speak to him.

He wanted to tell Guillermo about Max hearing the bell of the hospice phone call and claiming to be the family guardian. “You have played perfectly the role of the Latin son,” his self-conscious father had said to him three months ago, when ceaseless pain from the spread of his prostate cancer into his bones began to overwhelm his doses of morphine, and their conversations increasingly acknowledged that they were reaching the final curtain of their drama. “You know that, don’t you? You’ve done everything a Latin father would want a son to do.” The grandsons Enrique had given Guillermo were part of that achievement, and just as great a part was the mother he had provided for them. Margaret pushed and protected her boys with ferocity and tenderness and an absolute sense of what was right that Guillermo cherished. “Your
grandsons will grow up to be fine men,” Enrique had said in answer to a regret Guillermo expressed that he wouldn’t get to see them in full maturity. “Oh, I know that,” he said. “I have no worries about the success of my grandsons. Margaret will make sure they conquer the world.” He laughed. “Or else.”

“I’m sorry,” Enrique said to the dead body, a second attempt at apology. “I’m sorry I wasn’t…” This time he couldn’t manage the entire sentence. While Guillermo had been comatose for the previous three days and nights, Enrique had failed to keep a vigil. On the first day, he left after three hours. He stayed for two on the second. Before going on the third day—yesterday—Enrique had leaned over the bed, kissed his father’s wrinkled brow, and listened for a while to the rapid breathing that he had been told was a consequence of the ascites, cancerous liquid created by the prostate tumor, filling Guillermo’s abdominal cavity and pressing on his lungs. Eventually he put his mouth to his father’s left ear and whispered, “It’s okay, Dad. You can go now. Everything is taken care of.” He listed all the things his father had told him that he was worried about: confirming that the deal with a university press to reissue all his novels had been closed; that Enrique would look after his half sister, Rebecca, and her children, and last, “I’m fine, Dad. Margaret is well. Your grandsons are well. You can go. It’s okay for you to go.” He was following a hospice booklet’s advice about what to say to a dying comatose patient. He didn’t believe for one second such speech was recommended for the patient’s sake. He knew in his own heart, as he spoke the odd words, that they were comforting to him. They provided a lovely illusion that Enrique was willing to let his father go.

Why not? he had thought walking back home to dinner with Margaret and his sons, only hours, he now knew, before his father’s last breath. It was time for Dad to go. Guillermo had lived a successful life, he had caused more than enough trouble and more
than enough inspiration. He had brought the Sabas name a great distance from the obscurity and poverty of his fatherless childhood in Tampa among the cigar makers. I’m forty-two years old, Enrique thought, I am happily married, I have two sons, I have published eight novels and written three movies. I am ready for my father to die.

Brave thoughts, but at the reality of the end, Enrique sagged at the foot of the hospital bed, dropping to his knees, ashamed that he had abandoned his father to hospice workers, that he had gone home to cheerful Margaret and his energetic boys and let his father die alone among strangers. I wasn’t the perfect Latin son, he felt. He tried to apologize for the third time to a dead body. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here, Dad.” He heard nothing back, no sarcasm, no forgiveness, no rage, no bitterness, and no love from that great slab of a father; the apology was worthless. He had failed at the very last moment, in a lifetime of striving to be fairer to his father than his father was to him; he had scurried away, too frightened by death to take a last look at life.

He spent another ten minutes of awkwardness with Guillermo’s body, like a shy man at a cocktail party of strangers. Having no words of good-bye, he kissed the cold forehead of what used to be his father, told the empty vessel that he loved it, and walked home through the same streets that he had walked after the birth of each of his sons at Beth Israel, the same streets he would walk five years later, when Margaret, late at night, would be diagnosed and he had to hurry home to pretend everything was all right while waking up Max for school. In that predawn twilight, returning from his father’s death to the life of his wife and children, he had a dim consciousness, saw a faint outline of the rampless bridge between birth and death, and death and birth, that people traverse all their lives convinced they are on a highway to somewhere new.

The telephone rang all day. Margaret, as she had throughout his
father’s illness, took over many of the errands of his father’s death. She and Rebecca went to the funeral home and made arrangements. Margaret answered most of the phone calls. Enrique listened to her tone of regret, leavened with kind sentiments. “Poor Guillermo,” she said with genuine affection, “he was suffering so. It was very hard to see him in pain. He was such an enthusiastic man, he enjoyed being alive so much, and he wanted so much to have a good time. It’s better he’s out of it.” She had organized the mess of his father into these easy sentences, bundling into a neat and soothing package all the crazy things his father had done in old age—divorcing Guillermo’s mother after forty years of marriage, stubbornly living alone, although many women would have been glad to take care of him in exchange for the pleasure of hearing the booming music of his personality.

He’d moved into a studio apartment two blocks away, becoming a daily adjunct, and sometimes a burden to Enrique’s life. For the last five years, Enrique had had lunch with his father once a week; Guillermo babysat for the boys another evening each week, which always entailed a debriefing. Father and son spoke on the phone nearly every day. Following Enrique’s adolescence, which had been a daily war of fighting or not speaking at all, of wariness at his father’s demands and longing to meet his expectations, they had become almost a single individual. Listening to his wife effortlessly sum up the long columns of Guillermo’s irrational numbers was comforting, and annoying.

The day of the funeral Enrique found himself alone in their bedroom while downstairs Margaret supervised the dressing of her sons and also, tirelessly and in good humor, made calls to his extended family, raising their ragged sails to make sure they would arrive in the correct port at the correct hour. At last she came up to check on Enrique.

The middle-aged Margaret was, as always, put together.
Although dressed in her grimmest outfit, gray skirt, white blouse, gray jacket—almost a business suit—she was light on her feet and still as pretty as a girl with her thick black hair, round white face, lively blue eyes, and welcoming smile. She inspired confidence. She was suffused with brilliance and spirit, imbued with matchless good cheer.

“How’s this?” Enrique asked about his Armani suit, black and elegant. He had chosen a maroon tie. “This too much? Should I wear a black tie?”

“You don’t have a black tie, “Margaret said with her usual precision. She adjusted his knot. “You look great,” she said. “Guillermo would be proud. He liked you to dress up. He once told me I always dressed you perfectly. That until you met me you were a slob.”

“You hated his taste in clothes,” Enrique said.

“He had terrible taste,” she said and laughed as though that was one of his charms. “Remember that suit he bought for you!” Twenty years ago, to make up for a last savage argument, a disagreement, of all things, about a movie, Guillermo had bought Enrique a three-piece suit at least two sizes too large for Enrique. The forty-six long fit his narcissistic father to a T, and was cut in a boxy shape that didn’t flatter the skinny Enrique. Besides those flaws, it was a strange green color that Margaret said made Enrique look as if he were suffering from a stomach flu. “Hysterical!” She laughed gaily at the memory. Guillermo was vain about his taste in clothes. Margaret was sensitive to that and never mocked him for his working-class affection for colors that were too loud, or his yearning for a WASP dowdiness in style that, at its best, ended up with the Latino Guillermo buying peacock colors at Brooks Brothers. In them he looked not so much like a man who lived in Westport as like an exiled Latin American dictator who had found refuge in Greenwich Village.

Margaret’s prompting of that memory didn’t evoke for Enrique the comedy of his father’s sartorial sensibilities. It brought back ugly words from that last fight, unrestrained verbal abuse, like all their battles. With Greg’s birth, they had agreed to a cease-fire. They had never made a true peace. Rather, they had decided not to kill each other and formed a strategic alliance for the greater good of the Sabas name. He had never told his father he loved him without a trace of irony, or without the excuse of a good-bye or the farewell of a letter. He hadn’t understood, or truly believed, that one day such an opportunity for Dickensian earnestness would be forever lost.

“I’m sorry, Puff,” Margaret said, presumably seeing that sadness in her husband. She stroked his cheek and got up on tiptoe to kiss him softly and add in a whisper, “I’m sorry your daddy’s gone.”

The surging tide of all that he was holding down rose up, pushing out of him through his eyes and squeezing his chest in its hurry to escape. He jackknifed over, as if someone had whacked him in the stomach with a two-by-four. He felt Margaret’s hands on him, trying to gather him to her. He pushed her away, hiding his face, angry and ashamed. He felt it was her fault: his betrayal of his family, the mockery of them in his head, the fake peace that Margaret had demanded he sustain with his father, his half brother, and mother, so that family gatherings with her children wouldn’t be even crazier. It was all her doing, including that he had failed to stay by his father’s deathbed. It was Margaret who told him that there was no point in sitting up all night at the hospital, that it would worry Greg and Max, and exhaust him and make no difference. “He’s in a coma,” she said. “He doesn’t know who’s there.”

He curled up on their bed. She hovered above him, trying to get into his arms, to hug him to her, but he rolled his six-foot-four
frame up into a ball so tight that she was longer than he. He felt her breath on his cheek as she tried to get her lips near his and instead kissed his brow, whispering, “Baby, poor baby,” desperate to console him. But it was her fault, all of it, the betrayal of everything his father wanted him to be—a great artist, a bold teller of truth—all thrown away to live in the bourgeois squalor of endless purchases and the cowardice of security. The truth, the bitter truth: