A Happy Marriage (35 page)

Her right hand lifted, in a blind way, without her eyes moving from a fixed point. She did appear to see something. She stared into the middle distance and touched her lips. “Dree,” she said and he knew she meant drink.

“You want some water. Okay.” He poured bottled water into a plastic cup and tilted that into her mouth. Her lips were cracked and dry. She gulped at the water and swallowed hard. “Unhh,” she said, which sounded like gratitude. Then she slumped over, so intent on sleeping again that she put the side of her face into one of her smears.

“Oh, Mugs,” he said, sorry for her. He lifted her gently by the shoulders to move her head onto a clean portion of the sheet. She groaned in protest but settled quietly when he had shifted her.

He hurried downstairs with the bag of soiled linen and knocked on Rebecca’s door. She appeared, half-asleep but dressed,
while he explained the situation as quickly as he could and asked her to load the two sets of sheets into the washing machine.

He fished down the last set of queen-size sheets and went upstairs. This time the looser and heavier concentration of stool in one area of the bed had soiled the mattress pad as well. Rebecca arrived just as he made that discovery. He paused in despair, trying to remember if they had another somewhere. At the sight of what he was dealing with, his sister came to a halt and said, “Oh.”

“Any trouble with the machines?” he asked. She shook her head. “The mattress pad is soiled,” he said. “Wait here while I look for another.” He found one on a shelf near the sheets. Margaret had reorganized all the closets while in remission, throwing out some of the accumulation of their married family life while saving memorabilia and making their photo albums current. He’d suspected at the time that part of her motivation was to recall the span of her life as an accounting of what she had to live for, and that another part of her wanted to curate in case it turned out that she had reached the end of her journey. She had faced her death. Why couldn’t he?

With Rebecca’s help he was able to finish up quickly, and soon Margaret, or her body, since that was all that seemed to be left, was peaceful under a sheet and a blanket his sister had brought up from Greg’s room. He double-checked the pump to make sure that she was receiving a steady dose of the sedative. She was. How she had managed to be conscious at all was remarkable. The distress inside must have been tremendous. Was he really soothing and helping her depart, or was it all just a show at her expense so everyone else could feel better about what was happening? Whatever the truth, he believed he ought to raise the dose and end her torment now, not oblige her body to breathe for a few more insensate days.

He didn’t go back to sleep. He made himself coffee and poured
a bowl of cereal, but had no appetite. He did want to take a shower. When he mentioned that to Rebecca, she asked, “Can I knock on the door if she wakes up?” which meant that she was too scared to be left in sole charge. The visiting hospice nurse would be coming at eight am to check on Margaret, so he didn’t say to his sister: She can’t wake up, and yes you can knock on the door. Instead he said he would wait until the nurse arrived to wash himself. To wash himself clean.

Margaret was laughing. She tilted her head back and blew out the puff of smoke she had just inhaled from her cigarette.

Since she was enjoying it, he continued with his absurdist vision of their future. “We could spend the rest of our lives together and never have intercourse, right? I mean, I can take care of your needs without my penis, and I know I can masturbate.”

Her head snapped to look at him. Exquisite blue eyes enveloped him with their curiosity. She demanded, “Did you masturbate on New Year’s Eve?”

Well, he was telling her everything, he might as well continue to fess up. “Right after I saw you. I was so pissed off that it worked.”

Margaret pressed out her Camel Light, turned on her side, tenting the lower half of the sheet, which provided a thrilling view of her slim hips and the patch of her sex. “Me too,” she said with a sly smile. “What a waste.” She pulled the bedsheet off him to expose his lower half. “Let’s see you do it now.”

“What?” he stammered.

“Go ahead,” she said, nodding at his equipment, which, oddly, was halfway there already. “Show me.”

She moved her round, merry face to within an inch away, kiss
ing close, her great blue searchlights blinding him. “Here,” she whispered, her cool fingers snaking around his growing manhood. “I’ll get you started.”

For an hour and a half Enrique waited for the hospice nurse to arrive. Margaret didn’t move other than the rise and fall of her chest beneath the blanket. He left her side only when her mother called to announce they would arrive before noon, which really meant eleven. Enrique found himself, in the tradition of his wife’s family, downplaying the events of the night. “She had some fever, but she’s comfortable now,” he reported. “Oh good,” poor Dorothy said in a voice taut with sadness and dread. After hanging up, Enrique lowered his head, shut his eyes, and breathed slowly until the desire to run and scream and bang into things passed. He had worked so hard to make this ending as graceful for everyone as possible, and he liked to believe that he had succeeded for the others. But not for himself and Margaret. Their indirect good-byes in between her heartfelt farewells to the rest of the world weren’t what he wanted, and the mess and agony of last night felt like a great failure, a failure to which he would never be reconciled.

He returned to her bed, nodding when Rebecca whispered that Margaret had stirred while he was downstairs on the phone. He could see that she had shifted from her right side to her left. Her face was exposed. The lean angles of her starved features were beautiful. The translucence of her skin, the blue and green veins, the whiteness of her forehead, were otherworldly. Her eyes were shut, her mouth set, lips sealed. There was something embryonic and intense beneath the surface peacefulness of her pose. She looked as if she were being born into another life, but he didn’t believe in that comforting illusion. He checked the Ativan pump.
It was functioning properly. He wondered how she had managed to move at all.

He discussed that with the hospice nurse when she arrived ten minutes later. “Really?” she reacted with surprise after he reported that Margaret had managed to sit up and sip water despite the heavy dose. “I’ve never seen that happen before,” she claimed. Enrique wasn’t all that impressed by her being impressed. Although medical people were supposed to be ruled by science, in his experience they were often hyperbolic in their statements. If you were to believe Margaret’s doctors and nurses, she had displayed at least a dozen exceptional symptoms and reactions to medications. The superstitious and histrionic side of Enrique’s personality was vulnerable to that sort of talk. As he undressed in the bathroom, he warned himself not to be mystical about what lay ahead. She was astride the doorsill of death, and everyone, including the medical personnel, was likely to find meaning in banalities. He shed his clothes, got under the hot water, soaping himself up, glad to be scrubbing off the memory of last night’s dreary horror. He put his head under the cascading water, shut his eyes, and lectured himself. The Margaret I know is gone. The Margaret I love is gone. All that remains is the husk of her physical body. The light inside her no longer shines and I can no longer feel its warmth or bask in its illumination.

The banging on the bathroom door wasn’t comprehensible at first. He thought something might have fallen in the upstairs apartment. Then he heard Rebecca, her voice frantic. “Enrique! I’m sorry! Enrique! I’m sorry!”

She’s dead,
he thought.

“Margaret’s upset! I’m sorry. We can’t deal—Can you come out?”

He stumbled out of the shower stall and grabbed a towel. Margaret was awake!

He jerked the door open. Rebecca and the hospice nurse were attempting to prevent Margaret from rising to her feet. She had somehow managed to sit on the edge of the bed. She was nude but for her black panties. Her head was pointing in the direction of the hospice nurse, but her eyes were shut.

“Margaret, I’m just checking your port,” the nurse said in the unnaturally calm monotone of the caretaker of a deluded patient.

“No!” Margaret said in a clear, loud voice. She reached blindly into the air.

Enrique moved toward them awkwardly on his wet feet, holding the towel at his waist. “She started fussing—” the nurse explained in a defensive tone. In the background, Rebecca was adding some piece of information, but he couldn’t hear over the nurse, who continued, “And I noticed her shirt was stained, so I started to lift it off—”

“I think we need to leave her alone. Just leave her alone,” Rebecca said, also with an unnatural calm, hers layered over anger and agitation.

Margaret lurched forward. Alarmed, the nurse took her hands. “Margaret, do you want to get up?”

And then it came. Loud and clear, as though she were fully alive.
“No!”
she shouted. She opened her eyelids, but her eyes looked unfocused and wild. She pulled her hands free and slapped at the air.
“No!”
she announced again, a statement of identity, more than an argument.

“I don’t know what you want,” the nurse cried out. Enrique let go of his worry about slipping on the floor and losing his towel. He managed to reach his wife, both of them more or less naked, her body, like his, wrinkled and wan from the fight. He took hold of her heartbreakingly small wrists in each of his hands and knelt on one knee, so that his face would be exactly on her level. “Margaret,” he said to her roving and angry eyes.

She stopped trying to stand. She looked through him, as if she were blind, as if she were searching for something or someone else. He didn’t know what she wanted, but he gave her what he had to offer.

“I’m here, Mugs,” he said and moved close, putting his lips to hers, although they were not ready for a kiss. “I’m right here.” He pressed his mouth on hers, touching teeth as much as anything else.

Her face relaxed. Her shoulders subsided. Her cheeks widened in a smile, and she brought her lips together, puckering them, eyes shut, searching—it was clear even to the doubting Enrique that she was searching for him.

He kissed her, and while their lips met, she hummed. When he moved off, she made a contented noise, “Mmm,” and puckered again. He kissed her again, his arms going around her thin shoulders, and she hummed throughout, vibrating with pleasure.

After he broke off contact, Margaret sighed with relief and leaned back onto the bed. He helped her down, easing her onto the mattress, arranging the IV line so that it wouldn’t tangle beneath her.

She didn’t return to her fetal position. She lay on her back, eyes shut, mouth closed, stretched out to her full length as if going to her final rest. He pulled the sheet up to cover her and then grabbed the towel to cover himself. Her breathing had changed. It had become rapid and shallow, as the hospice had told them it would when the final phase began. Soon she would lapse into a coma. He glanced at his sister, whose face was awash in tears. “She wanted you,” Rebecca said with a gasp. The hospice nurse touched him, a light tap on the shoulder as if she were knighting him.

He had been wrong all along. Margaret had meant to say good-bye. She had made certain to say good-bye, an eloquent good-bye.
She had managed to tell him, despite all the obstacles nature and the human world had put in their way, that her love and his love had survived.

Soon, so soon, within a minute, within less than a minute, in seconds, in a single second Enrique was plunged into excitement. His head was drunk from her touch and his heart was full of her sea-blue eyes, drowning him. He no longer remembered that it was January first, the start of a new year. He no longer remembered that the sun was shining or that he had had a scallion omelet for brunch. He no longer knew her name or remembered the parquet floor. He no longer remembered to be afraid.

She was underneath him. He didn’t understand how she had managed to get him on top of her without lifting him. Her smiling face filled everything he saw and became the world. He followed it like a compass or a hypnotist’s wheel. She never let go of his sex. She aimed it at herself and before he had a chance to think about what could go wrong, she spoke.

“You’re not going to be able to do this,” she said.

“I’m…not…?” he stammered in surprise.

“Because if you go inside me, you’ll never get away.”

“I won’t?” he asked with the wonder of a child.

“No, you never will,” she said and tugged. He felt warmth at the tip and was terrified that he would disappear. “After this, you’ll be trapped.”

“I will, won’t I?” he said with a grin.

A hand landed on his ass and urged him on and there was no wall, there were no obstacles, there was only the sea of Margaret, the hot bath of her enveloping love. She put her lips to his ear and whispered warm while cool hands pressed on his back and steered
him all the way into her. “You’ll never get away. You’ll move in with me, we’ll get married, we’ll have children. You’ll be here forever,” she whispered, and in the ocean of her being, he let go of the frightened air trapped in his heart, he exhaled the despair of his soul and he thought with glee:
I’m home! I’m home! Thank God, I’m home!