A Happy Marriage (34 page)

Without any discussion of where they were going, Margaret remained in the shelter of his arm on the way back to her apartment. She talked the whole way, explaining this and that about Sally and Penelope and Lily, and he listened, soaking in these details because they mattered to her and so they would matter to him. He did his best not to think about what was looming. They got past her disapproving doorman and upstairs into her parquet-floor studio and shed their coats and she made another pot of coffee and settled beside him, with her flouncing hair and her welcoming smell and her white neck and happy breasts, and for the first time since puberty he fervently wished that there weren’t such a thing as intercourse.

He woke with a startle at the sound of her unhappiness, heart pounding, eyes gritty with sleeplessness, head in a fog of despair. He turned on the lamp he’d placed on the floor next to the air mattress. She was crawling again, tangled in the quilt and sheets, undulating in misery across the surface of her bed, desperate to escape while also desperate to sleep. It was an exact replay. He leapt up and said soothing things. “I’m here, Mugs. Wait a second, I’ll help you.” He prayed that it was the Ativan wearing off, not her bowels again.

He saw light brown stains on the fitted sheet. Some looked nearly green, a sicklier hue. He sighed. A slow, heavy sigh. He longed to walk away. To trudge down the stairs and out the front door and let strangers find her and clean her and watch her die. Why do I have to do this? I’m a selfish man, he thought. Why am I being forced to be good?

All that, the loathing of her dying, passed through his body and soul with the inhale and exhale of his despairing sigh, and seemed to evaporate. He moved fast and without thinking. He had to hustle downstairs for more washcloths because the diarrhea was sticky again and difficult to wipe from between her buttocks. His aching thigh and back reminded him not to run this time. After a stop in the kitchen for garbage bags, he moved to the hall linen closet. Margaret had soiled the last clean quilt. He fished down a light cotton blanket from the highest shelf. He noticed that Max’s door was shut. He had come home after all. Did he have a fight with his new girlfriend? Enrique couldn’t speculate about that with Margaret, the first of many things they would no longer share about their children. Rebecca’s light was out. He should wake her. But for what? Company? He had the cleaning up under control.

Once he was back upstairs, however, the chore proved not as simple as before. This time she fought the process. The touch of
everything on her skin distressed her. She squirmed away from the warm washcloths, she grunted and ducked her head when he tried to get her soiled T-shirt off. “Mugsie, I’m just trying to clean you up. You’ll be cozy again in a few seconds.” Cozy? He sounded stupid beyond belief. That must be why so many nurses end up speaking like dolts—how can you intelligently reassure someone cast into the darkness of this struggle? Or worse, explain your tedious and hopeless tasks?

It took longer because she struggled. He had to get two additional washcloths and soak them longer, and use one hand to hold her in place while scrubbing away all of the sticky mess. He studied her face for a sign that she was conscious, but through it all—and it took almost twenty minutes—she kept her eyes shut and didn’t respond to any of his questions. She seemed closer to delirium during this episode. Once he had her back in clean clothes on clean sheets and under a clean cotton blanket, she ceased her audible noises of complaint.

Enrique turned out the lights, got back in bed, and waited for his eyes to adjust. He heard her rustle the sheets and blanket. When he could see, Margaret didn’t appear to be as disturbed. It was two-forty-five am. He could call Dr. Ambinder and ruin the young man’s sleep, but what could the doctor propose other than giving her Ativan IV and Thorazine? That would be Enrique’s good-bye then: not words, hanging a bag of plastic.

The next thing he knew his head was throbbing and his heart was pounding. Someone was there in the dark. “What?” he cried out and reached for the person next to the air mattress. He fell out, smacking his chin on the oak floorboards. It was a drop of only a few inches. He staggered up and turned on the light.

No one was beside him. He gasped anyway. Margaret was sitting up. Her eyes were shut. A hand reached blindly at a mirage
in front of her. He sat down on the bed, facing her. “What it is, Mugs?” She slid down and over, returning to her snakelike maneuvers. He lifted the covers to see if she had soiled things again. The answer was no, but that negative was not a relief. He watched her twist and turn restlessly. He lifted her stomach drainage bag like a wedding train so its tube wouldn’t be strained by her movements. She slithered to the foot of the bed and then around again. “Margaret, do you want water?” he asked. No answer. “Margaret, do you want to go to the bathroom?” No answer. “Mugsie, are you awake? Can you hear me?” She moaned and mumbled gibberish, but not in time or in answer to his questions. In despair, he called Ambinder’s service. After giving his number to the operator, he held the cordless receiver in his hand, watching his wife’s dance on the marital bed. Even in this choreography with death, Margaret remained full of energy, fighting the misery her life had become.

Ambinder sounded like a man trying to keep his head above water. Enrique gave a dispassionate account of the sequence of events. “No fever?” the doctor asked.

“She’s not hot. I don’t think she has a fever. Anyway, I can’t keep her still long enough—” At that moment, as if to illustrate, Enrique had to pause and put out a restraining hand as Margaret launched her head and shoulders past the bed’s left side, about to topple out. “She seems delirious,” he admitted.

“Yes,” Ambinder agreed and floundered, “um…”

Enrique couldn’t wait. “Should I knock her out with IV Ativan?”

“You don’t want to try Thorazine?” Ambinder suppressed a yawn.

“No,” Enrique said firmly. “If the IV Ativan doesn’t relieve her, I’ll go to the Thorazine, but I’d like to try Ativan first.”

“Okay.”

“Giving it to her on the IV pump will put her out permanently, right? She won’t come back to consciousness, right?”

Ambinder sounded more awake. “No, she’s out of it. Won’t hurt her.”

She’s out of it.
Those words echoed in Enrique’s head while he assembled the pump that would deliver a continuous dose of Ativan, enough to keep a healthy person fully sedated. Once everything but the connection to her IV was completed, he carried the pump, the size and weight of a portable cassette tape recorder, to the bed and sat on its edge. Her dance had left her sitting up, eyes shut, head turned to him. “Margaret?” he said into the uncharacteristic blankness of her face. “Margaret, I’m going to give you Ativan on the pump. We talked about this, right? Once I give you this, you’ll be fully sedated. You won’t be able to talk and maybe you won’t know what I’m saying. So this is our last conver—” He stopped. “This is the last time we’ll talk,” he managed to say. “I love you,” he said. His scratchy eyes were awash. He thought he was going to sob if he attempted another word. He took a deep breath. Margaret hadn’t moved. Her head was pointed in his direction, but he didn’t believe that she could hear him. She was seeing and listening to another world. Her hand reached into the empty air, trying to grasp something that didn’t exist. When he tried to take hold, she touched his fingers for only a second and then reached past, as if his presence and his touch were a distraction from her real goal. “I don’t know if you can hear me, Mugs, but I want to tell you that you’re what made my life work. I know when I was young or when I got angry and moody I said things that hurt you. But the truth is that you and the boys are the best people in my life and that you made it worth living.” This is dreadful, he thought. Empty words drained of feeling. So odd considering that his head was drowning with emotion. He wasn’t articulate, after all. The labor of his life, self-expression with words, the language of his heart were proving to be banal and useless when he most needed them. “That’s all,” he said, voice fad
ing in humility. “Thank you. Thank you for everything you’ve given me.”

He wanted to convince himself that she had heard him, but she gradually collapsed onto her right side and went back to slithering and twisting. He found the IV line and attached it to the pump. Before starting the machine, he tried to gather her in his arms. She quieted for a moment, and then pushed at him as if he were an obstacle, not a person. He kissed her lips, but they were dead in response, motionless and cold.

He rose from the bed, placed the pump on the floor beside it, and pressed the large green start button. The LED readout came to life. He watched white fluid begin a halting climb toward her chest port. It took about five minutes before her snake dance stopped.

He arranged the sheet and cotton blanket so they were no longer tangled around her legs. He kissed her cool forehead. After ten minutes, all movement, except for the rise and fall of her chest, ceased. He had said his paltry good-bye and she was deaf to it.

He kissed her. He didn’t want to face the disaster that the kiss would lead to, but he couldn’t help himself. Margaret had just drained a cup of coffee and aptly described her group of friends. “The Disaster Dames. Isn’t it hysterical how they’re so happy about everything that’s going wrong in their lives?” She noticed the odd look on his face, which was passion laced with fear, and misinterpreted. “They were okay, right? They didn’t drive you crazy with all that talk about publishing?”

He kissed her. She was startled at first but then opened to him, and moved into his arms. Her lips were warm, her tongue was hot
and wet, and her hands were cool and soft on his neck. He wanted, so desperately wanted, to be inside her. She pulled back at some point and asked, “Did they?”

“Did they what?” he mumbled, kissing her vulnerable neck.

“Drive you crazy…” She moaned softly when he found the crevasse, the shadowed place, behind her ear. After a beat, she added in a whisper, “About publishing?”

Enrique asked with the wonder of a child, “What is publishing?” He maneuvered to find her mouth.

She reached down and placed her hand on the denim-encased bulge at his groin. She opened her eyes and looked, from only an inch away, right into his soul. “Shall we?” she mumbled.

“It’ll just go away.”

“Why? You seem to want me,” she commented with a sly smile.

“I’m terrified.”

“Of what?” She rubbed the bulge as if to soothe it.

“I don’t know!” he cried out, frustrated.

Margaret leapt to her feet with characteristic energy. “Don’t think about it. Just fuck me,” she said and tugged him up, leading him to her bed as if he were a lost child. She sat on the edge and pulled at his belt. He started to take off his turtleneck. She stopped him, saying, “No. Just fuck me. Don’t make love to me. Just fuck me.”

She pulled his jeans and underpants down to his knees, then opened her jeans and pushed them off along with her panties, the white and black of her sex flashing as she kicked them away. He sat and tugged his bottoms off. His cock poked and bobbed in the air as if trying to launch away from his body, and it all seemed so right, just perfect, as, their bottom halves naked, their tops fully clothed, wool sweater to cotton turtleneck, penis to vagina, he got on top of her, mouths hungrily opening to each other. She reached below, spreading her thighs, and guided him toward her.
It seemed to him that he was hard in her hand as she brought him close to entering her, but no. His mind split off from the tactile pleasures of her scratchy sweater and the hot embrace of her thighs. A part of his self abandoned them both and he thought, It isn’t going to happen. I can’t do it.

She tugged at him to push inside her, and he obeyed, but his cock did not, instead collapsing like an accordion.

“I can’t,” he cried out and wanted to weep. He was so close. So close to finding what was missing in the universe. He had treasure inches away, in his arms, in his heart, and his body wouldn’t let him. He wanted to throttle himself.

“Shhh,” she said. “Relax,” she whispered and rolled him onto his side. Her fingers caressed his cheek. “It’s going to happen. There’s no hurry.” She kissed him. “We have all the time in the world,” she promised him.

The third time her moaning wakened him, he saw light at the edges of the blackout blinds of their bedroom windows. He checked his watch. With the early June sunrise, it was still only a little after five-thirty in the morning. This was Margaret’s third incident in eight hours. He stared at the bed. She was crawling again. Most of the covers were off, and he saw right away, in the better light of the summer dawn, the greenish brown paste seeping through her panties and spreading across her legs.

“No!” he protested aloud, as if the author of all this were able to hear his complaint. “There’s nothing left,” he said, meaning both that there shouldn’t be more in her bowels and that her body oughtn’t to be able to move at all considering the quantity of sedation. No matter how strong the smell and her discomfort, she should be insensible. “This is impossible,” he cried out.

Margaret responded. She pushed herself against the wall and managed to sit up. Stranger and more astonishing, her eyes were open, and she was reaching for him. He was frightened by this impossible show of energy and alertness. Am I dreaming? he wondered. “Margaret?” he called to her. He didn’t sit on the bed. Her stool was loose, almost liquid, and he noted in dismay that the sheets and cotton blanket were soiled. There were no more blankets and only one set of clean sheets. He’d have to wake Rebecca for help. I can’t be dreaming, he calculated. These thoughts are too boring to be anything but real.

Margaret’s eyes were odd. Objects seemed to register, but she didn’t appear able to focus on him, although he was in the line of what ought to be her vision. She made a sound. It scared him. There was more grunt than word to the sound, but there was a lilt to it, as if it were a question or a demand. She was struggling to speak.

“What?” he asked, stupidly.