A Happy Marriage (32 page)

“You don’t love me,” he blubbered, a grief-stricken and vicious animal. He poked his head out from his fetal hiding place to snarl: “You don’t love me!”

“What?” His wife looked bewildered.

He tried to run away from the storm of confusion in his head, stumbling out of the bed without getting to his feet first, and staggered—he heard Margaret cry out as he flopped onto the narrow oak floorboards. Somewhere in the middle of that clumsiness he yelled, “You don’t love me.”

She touched him on the back and hooked his shoulders, trying to help him up, asking, “Are you okay? Did you hurt yourself?”

He jerked away and stood up, moving to the windows, fleeing to the cityscape, to get away from himself, get out of this head that never left him alone. I’m mad, he decided, a clear judgment cutting through the thicket of disorganized thoughts crowding his skull. I’m losing my mind.

Margaret appeared in his vision, ducking under his arms, her happy face shattered into lines of confusion. “Enrique,” she pleaded, “what are you talking about? I love you. Don’t you know I love you?”

“No, you don’t,” he said, sobbing, no longer able to keep his brain in charge. He bawled and listened to himself repeat, “You don’t love me, you don’t love me,” as if he weren’t speaking those words but overhearing a mad stranger.

She held him, declaring, “I love you so much.” She leaned back in his arms to look him in the eyes and confront him: “How could you not know I love you?”

He sagged onto the couch under the wall of windows. She sat beside him, caressing his hand, kissing his cheek, trying to soothe him while he trembled like a leaf in the wind. For a moment he was still. Then he shivered again and moaned. “Shhh,” she said. He put his head on her chest and shut his eyes and tried not to listen to himself whimpering. The shaking stopped. When his brain also stopped its frantic noise, its wild attempt to crash out of his skull and flee into the sky, he thought:
Where did that come from?

Once he was quiet, Margaret lifted his head, kissed him on the lips, and asked softly, “You know I love you. Right, Enrique? You know I love you more than ever?” She looked at him, only inches away, with the Pacific Ocean of her eyes washing him clean of the craziness. “You know that. Right?”

“No,” he said. Just as a fact.

“How could you not know that?” Wonder filled her voice. Her lips parted in astonishment.

“I’m crazy,” he said. “Your husband is crazy.”

“It’s okay to be sad about your father.”

He grabbed her, and it came right out, although he’d never formed the thought before. “I’m scared you’ll stop loving me. I’m so scared you won’t love me anymore.”

“I’m never going to stop loving you,” she said as easily as if she were ordering a meal. “You’re my life,” she said simply.

He squeezed her small frame as hard as he could. She grunted at the pressure and mumbled, “Unless you break my back, then I’ll stop loving you.” But he didn’t relax the tension in his arms and she didn’t squirm or complain again. He wished he could push her inside himself and incorporate her spirit. He felt relief,
a long sigh of gratitude that the race had been run, that for all his mistakes, for all his failures, for all the wear and tear he had doled out, for all that he had smashed and given away of love and good intentions and grand ambitions, for all his errors there had been an unexpected mercy, and he had not been punished. Life had given him Margaret to make him whole.

T
HE FEVER ABATED.
Margaret wasn’t in a coma, but she didn’t rouse to full consciousness. At nine o’clock Enrique removed the quilts and checked to see if she needed another Tylenol suppository. She responded with a slight shake of the head when he asked whether she felt cold or hot, and mumbled a sleepy “Okay” when he offered water. She opened her mouth greedily for the cup, keeping her eyes shut, as if determined not to see or hear the world. She barely lifted her head off the pillow to drink, expending as little energy as possible. As soon as she could, she curled back into a fetal position and a stillness that resembled hibernation.

She wants to go in an oblivious peace, he thought, looking down at the profile that appeared above the sheet’s edge. That morning an alert Margaret had announced that she had completed
her last chore, choosing her burial clothes. He understood now that when she had asked to go to her grave wearing the earrings he had bought for her birthday, she meant that to be her good-bye to him, her last words of approval and gratitude. She had spoken and he had not answered. He looked up at the June evening sky, streaked from the west by Homer’s rosy fingers, and felt a premonition of what would soon be his life. This feeling of aloneness was quite different from loneliness. This was a kind of solitary confinement in his own skull and heart that he had not known since he was twenty-one. He had been walking blithely in the world all these years, believing that he was an independent creature who just happened to be married to Margaret. The true nature of this separation was revealed to him as they neared final departure. Part of his self belonged to her and so would travel with her. Abandoned. That was the word. Enrique, watching from the dock without waving a good-bye, was being left behind by Margaret and also by himself, the man she had created out of her love.

He hung the second bag of cefepime, able to disconnect the old dose and add a new one without disturbing her because the line hung outside the sheets. He couldn’t waken her to life with these human remedies. She wanted to diminish like a summer’s day, a gradual and lovely vanishing into the blue-black night. Something much larger and unfathomable was calling her. His eyes strayed to the forbidden bags of hydration lying in a brown box next to the small refrigerator. Sleepiness was part of the dying process, he had been told. A liter might act like a cup of strong coffee and bring her back to indulge his selfish need for her. And he was a greedy man, wasn’t he? Hadn’t he taken and taken from his wife? Hadn’t he and his sons drained her life? Hadn’t he bullied her into putting up with his useless parents and his grasping half brother? Hadn’t he let her languish in the pessimistic prag
matism of her own family instead of nagging her into the confidence to produce her art? And what little she had been allowed to create in between his self-important, endlessly discussed novels and scripts—her frank photographs of people going about their lives with friendly and brave determination; the paintings of children with their heartbreaking bravado in the face of a world too big and cruel to satisfy their naïve ambitions; her last paintings of elegant cattle awash in brilliant reds and yellows—had a spaciousness and generous acceptance of life which didn’t exist in Enrique’s competitive and angry head.

He honestly didn’t see how his poverty-stricken heart could afford to lose the currency of her loving nature. Was there any buoyancy to his spirit without the elevation of Margaret’s azure gaze and the confidence of her belief in his strength? He wasn’t strong really. Without her he was simply confused. Look at what was happening to him at that very moment—deprived of his task as appointment secretary and losing his job as nursemaid—without her as his conduit to the world, a way of being, he had nothing to do but stand stupidly and watch the sunset over Manhattan with sadness rather than amazement at its grace. How could he delight in its beauty? He knew the city’s buildings, no matter how tall, were not permanent, and he knew the tastes, the sounds, the touch of life were not forever. His head was always in the future or the past, whereas Margaret resided in the present. She was life, so life was dying.

He resolved not to attach a bag of hydration. He could justify what he had done so far, controlling the fever with an antibiotic, but not prolonging life. The process was probably irreversible anyway. Without hydration and nutrition for four days, she was drifting into the weakness that would precede a final coma. He decided to hope that if he stayed by her side for every second, he would be granted a break in her sedation, that she would be suf
ficiently conscious so he could tell her, not these fears about his future without her, but how great the gift of her time and her affection had been, and how grateful he was to have had her, not only for all of his adult life but even for a single day.

And if not, if he had lost his chance to say a proper good-bye, at least he had not been pointlessly cruel to her. She would die without knowing that he had betrayed her with one of her friends. Sally had gotten back in regular touch with Margaret after she fell ill, e-mailing or calling every few weeks from London, where she lived with her English husband and blond twin girls. She had crossed the Atlantic for a visit a year ago, spending a couple of hours alone with Margaret—and then Lily had joined them for lunch, the trio reunited. Enrique had made sure to stay away. Not to minimize awkwardness; he and Sally had been in groups at a landmark birthday or two, and those encounters had been friendly and easy. He wanted them to enjoy recapturing their manless youth.

Sally was an awkward artifact. In the deepest sense, their affair was irrelevant to his marriage. Yet he had no illusion that Margaret, if she found out, would still be keenly hurt and enraged. He could never have explained that the unfaithful Enrique was deader than the affair itself. As for Sally, content in her twenty-year marriage, the episode was a profound embarrassment that she would have gladly forgotten. He had no fear she would talk of it.

Lily had reported to Enrique how heartbreaking it had been to help Margaret pick out her ensemble for the grave, and also how sad to bring Margaret her laptop so that she could compose a farewell e-mail to a few other friends to whom she couldn’t say good-bye face-to-face, Sally among them. It was a shocking reminder to Enrique of how weak and stupid he had been, how close he had come, for example, to not creating their son Max, to
not discovering the true love of his mature married life, or to failing to become the man he now was. And there was relief, for once, that Margaret was at the brink of death, that his fear she would one day unnecessarily learn of his betrayal could be buried as well. There was something good in this finality.

He went downstairs and informed Rebecca of Margaret’s status and thanked her for agreeing to sleep over in Greg’s empty bedroom in case he needed her. He reached Max on his cell phone. He was out with Lisa and told Enrique that he wouldn’t be coming home tonight but that he would be sure to return by noon in case his father needed him. Enrique checked in with Greg, who would be returning tomorrow to keep vigil, and gave him a report on his mother’s condition. “She’s comfortable now,” he said accurately, although he felt false saying it. He repeated that strange statement to Leonard in his daily report to Margaret’s family, gathered in Great Neck. Leonard said they would be coming in tomorrow after having kept away for two days. Enrique was unable to muster the courage to ask them not to. What if she became lucid just when they decided to be at her bedside? He resolved that he would ask Rebecca, or whoever else was around, to keep Dorothy and Leonard busy downstairs.

He inflated an air mattress because he was afraid of becoming entangled in either the tube draining Margaret’s stomach or her IV lines. He pushed the mattress to within an inch of the foot of their bed, so that while he slept he would be sure to hear any distress. After a few minutes of trying to read, his head hit the page. At nine-thirty he turned out all the lights and lay in the dark, listening for the sound of Margaret breathing.

He woke with his heart pounding. Moans were rising from Margaret’s bed. They were strange, unhappy sounds. He turned on the light. He didn’t understand what he saw. A large green and white snake was undulating sideways across the mattress. It
seemed to be dragging something that it had killed. He stood stupidly for a moment and rubbed his eyes. He looked again. Margaret was tangled in the top sheet and a green blanket that he didn’t remember spreading across her. She twisted in discomfort, towing the thick tube and the stomach drainage bag.

He had trouble locating her head. Although her legs were uncovered, her torso was in a confusion of sheet and blanket. While he unwrapped her carefully, he worried that she was being strangled. She didn’t seem to know what he was doing or where she was. She moved blindly, eyes firmly shut, although she seemed to be seeking something that she expected to find in the bed, since she was crawling all over its surface. He couldn’t imagine what, even in a delirium, she might hope to find in between the sheets. He asked her, “Margaret, what do you want?” and got no reply. He tried to cover her, but she crawled away, toward the foot of the bed. “Do you want to go to the bathroom?” he asked, not knowing why he was making so unlikely a guess, and then realized he was smelling excrement. He pulled the top sheet off her, and the mystery was solved.

She had soiled the bed with a pasty diarrhea. Her movements had mashed it into her panties, the back of her T-shirt, and most of the middle of the fitted bottom sheet. She was trying to get away from the discomfort and smell, probably, but wanted to go on sleeping. “Margaret, I’ll be right back. Don’t move too much,” he said, worried that she might fall out of bed, a useless admonition, he assumed, because of her semidelirious state. Maybe it would sink into some part of her unconsciousness. He had little choice but to desert her in order to clean things up. “Margaret, I’ll be right back, okay? I’m here. Don’t worry.”

He ran down the stairs two at a time, forgetting that he was barefoot and the steps were slippery. Where the staircase turned ninety degrees, his right foot shot into the air. He was about to be
upended when his left shoulder whacked into the wall. That smarted but gave him a chance to regrab his lost hold on the banister and stop himself from tumbling down the remaining five steps. He landed on his ass, which jarred him right through his skull. Nothing felt broken. From the scare of thinking he was about to fall headfirst, his heart raced and thumped, hard enough for him to feel it through the wall of his chest. He scolded, “Don’t have a heart attack now. Wait until next week.” He called out, “Rebecca?” in case she had heard him smack into the wall, half-hoping she was awake to help him. He could see the kitchen wall clock. It was only twelve-forty-five am, and she might not have gone to bed yet.

There was no response. He had to hurry to return to Margaret. He got to his feet. His back and right thigh were sore. Touching his leg hurt so much that he wondered if he had broken something, but he had no trouble walking to the hallway outside the boys’ bedrooms. Rebecca’s light was out. He opened the squeaky linen closet door as quietly as he could, removing two complete sets of fitted and top sheets. Based on previous experiences with infections, he had become adept at anticipating trouble. If one accident had occurred, another was likely.

He didn’t wonder about how there could be was anything for her bowels to move since she hadn’t digested food since February. That mystery had been answered months ago by one of Margaret’s doctors. The lining of the intestines shed every few days; in addition, little bits of food could manage to get past a stomach PEG and into the thoroughly blocked digestive tract. During the past week, she had chewed and swallowed all of her favorite foods. From the kitchen he gathered two plastic garbage bags, two rolls of paper towels, an extra box of wet wipes, and carried them up the stairs, his back and thigh aching.

Margaret was still struggling to get away from the smell and
the smears. He turned on all the lights to see what he needed to clean up. Her eyes remained shut. “Margaret, I’m going to strip the bed and clean you, okay? You can’t get out of bed, right?”

No response. He put on latex gloves. He removed her panties and T-shirt. She made sounds but didn’t react otherwise. He was dismayed to discover that the sticky excrement covered most of her buttocks and lower back, hence her feeling that she couldn’t escape it. “Margaret, the wet wipes may feel cold. I’m sorry, but—” An alternative had occurred to him. “Wait,” he said pointlessly, since she continued not to react to him. He rushed to the bathroom, found a pair of washcloths, and soaked them in warm water in the sink, peering out to check on her. She looked perilously close to crawling off the far side of the bed under the windows. He hurried back.

The warm washcloths didn’t disturb her at all. They weren’t sufficient, however. There was too much shit wadded, and it had dried into a resistant spread. He had to use the wet wipes. He held them briefly in his hands to warm them. Although he was wearing latex, they still felt cold. Margaret moved at their touch and made a guttural noise, but she wasn’t conscious. Her insensibility was at least as depressing to him as the smell, the mess, and the indignity of what was happening to his beloved’s body. Why was this disease making it so hard for her? he wondered, baffled by its cruelty. “She’s beaten,” he said aloud, as if cancer were standing at the door looking on with pleasure at its work. “Leave her alone.”

Once she was clean, he rolled the fitted sheet on one side up to her body, nudged her over its speed bump and onto the mattress pad. He removed the soiled sheet and checked whether diarrhea had leaked onto the pad. Fortunately not. He lay down a new fitted sheet, repeated the technique of rolling it up to Margaret’s body, pushed her onto it, and then spread the sheet the
rest of the way. He checked her again—she seemed to have fallen back into deep unconsciousness—found two spots that he had missed, cleaned them, and put fresh panties and a new T-shirt on her. He did the latter awkwardly, losing her head for a while before getting it through the hole. Even those clumsy maneuvers didn’t seem to bother her. He checked the quilt, saw that it was soiled in one corner, cursed that fact, and found that the other quilt was clean. She wasn’t shivering, so one would suffice. When he spread a laundered top sheet over her, followed by the spotless quilt, and kissed her on the forehead, he had a deep feeling of satisfaction and relief. She lay quietly and comfortably. He had fixed it. He had understood her mute distress and made things better for her.