A Happy Marriage (4 page)

“Wait!” Margaret thrust her hand out as if she were a school traffic guard saving them from crossing on the red. She peered beyond Enrique while she remembered, “You’re right. I wrote my name on the top line, then my class, and then below—‘P.S. 173, Queens’! I wrote ‘Queens.’ I just thought…” And she stalled out, staring into the middle distance, as if someone had removed all her batteries.

Enrique found himself leaping in after that unspoken thought, trying to swim in her head, “…that it was borough pride and not an important distinction. P.S. 173 Queens, P.S. 173 Manhattan: that’s why we both grew up with enough number two pencils.”

Her eyes settled on his. She smiled, showing off those less than perfect teeth, too small and with gaps, undermining her otherwise commanding beauty just enough so that Enrique could manage to look at her without a gasp of awe. “Anyway,” she added, “we had to buy our own pencils.”

Bernard was unwilling to give up. “No,” he said. “I don’t believe it. The city isn’t capable of that nicety. You made a mistake,” he mumbled at Enrique, reaching for his decellophaned cigarette pack to begin a tapping concerto.

“About the name of the school I went to for six years?” Enrique said, catching Margaret’s eye and lifting his brows to imply that they were in agreement about the idiocy of Bernard’s logic, although he was perfectly aware that it had been her position. “I’ll tell you what,” Enrique offered. “We can hop on the IRT here at Sheridan Square, get out at 168th Street and Broadway, walk the six blocks to P.S. 173, and you can show me how wrong I am about this central fact of my childhood.” There was a little too much
anger in the final sarcastic phrase, “this central fact of my childhood,” the sort of prideful humor he had learned from his father, who would manage at once to mock himself for his grandiosity and let you know that, should you test his greatness, it would flatten you.

Margaret had had enough. She yawned. “Not me. No subway ride for me.” Little tears had formed at the corners of her eyes and she picked one off with the tip of her index finger. “I have to go to bed. I’m too old to pull these all-nighters. I’ve got to crash.”

This was gladdening news to Enrique, because his geographic calculations about their good-byes would now come to fruition. Spirit renewed, he copied his expansive father in a way that did not involve temper, although it did display Sabas pride, by picking up the check, which paralyzed Bernard and seemed to astound Margaret.

As he held the restaurant’s massive double-width wood front door—a remnant of its origin as a carriage house stable—for Bernard and Margaret, he winced at the cold December sunlight. He was warmed, however, by the thought that when they said good-bye he would have his chance to obtain Margaret’s phone number. He didn’t think he would have the nerve to attempt, nor did the ménage-à-annoyance of the evening seem to warrant, a kiss. But the five-minute journey from Eighth and MacDougal to Ninth east of University would give him time to make his intentions clear with a lingering gaze and a sweeter tone than he dared in the Weinstein presence.

The fatigue of their all-nighter settled into their bones and lulled their walk into silence. The city was rising, although slowly on a Sunday. The streets were empty except for the odd dog walker, a deli owner cutting open bundled sections of the Sunday
Times
for rapid assembly by his son, and one old man in a black coat on his way to Saint Joseph’s.

“I should get a
Times,
” Bernard said.

“I get it delivered,” Margaret said, adding, “By Alpert’s,” as if there was something magical about the service’s name. Although Bernard whistled sarcastically, the silent Enrique was genuinely impressed. It delineated for him what until then had been a vague feeling, that there was something solidly bourgeois about this young woman, something grown-up about her underneath the girlishness that scared and excited him.

He didn’t have long to reflect on her social class. The time to jettison Bernard was finally at hand. Margaret certainly seemed ready to let him go. As they approached the five painted black steps up Bernard’s brownstone apartment, she pursed her lips to kiss him good-bye on the cheek. Enrique was too thrilled by the prospect of having her all to himself to bother to feel jealous when, instead of relishing the warmth of her lips on his frozen cheek, Bernard—that most lethargic of men—volunteered that he wasn’t tired and would walk Margaret home.

Enrique couldn’t catch himself from blurting out, “Don’t worry about it. I’ll walk her home. I’m going that way.”

“You’re going ten steps that way,” Bernard said and knocked Enrique as he brushed past. That he made contact at all was unprecedented and irritated Enrique almost to the point of physical violence in response. Margaret let go of a laugh, a burst of amused sound that she released and immediately reeled back in, as if hoping no one had noticed. Her staccato of delighted laughter was truncated, it seemed to Enrique, by a supervisor’s imposition of propriety and reserve, which seemed to contradict her bold stare, tomboyish body language, and teasing manner. It was as if a scolding voice offstage had cautioned her not to be loud and indiscreet. She said, “It’s very sweet but nobody has to walk me home. I’ve been walking home alone since first grade.”

They both insisted, however. They weren’t concerned about
her safety but whom she was safe with. So this, Enrique’s first attempt to have Margaret to himself, ended in failure. And for his pains he didn’t even receive the cheek kiss Bernard had squandered. When they turned onto Ninth Street, a cold wind struck them. They were more exposed thanks to the unusual postwar apartment complex with a setback deep enough to allow something rarely seen in the city and especially rare in the Village—twenty feet of landscaping. All this elegance, only one block from the tawdry noise and cheap storefronts of Enrique’s Eighth Street, confirmed the impression of comfort and bourgeois ease surrounding a woman who had her
Times
delivered. In December, however, this elegance increased the wind’s bite. Margaret made a chattering sound and called out to them, “Thanks! Good night, boys. I mean, Good morning,” as she rushed into her building, shouting back, “I’m freezing!”

Enrique said nothing to Bernard during their three-block return trip, mumbling a good night at his door, tramping up the five flights to his bed, and collapsing into sleep with neither the initiative nor the energy to masturbate. Four hours later, he staggered up from the defeat of his solitary twin bed, groggy and sullen and determined to win the next round. He had to do something about his longing to be with her. Although he couldn’t remember a single image, he felt as if he had dreamed of nothing but Margaret. He paused long enough to brew a cup of coffee in his new Chemex pot and down it before calling Bernard. He said to the faint hello, “You awake?”

“Oh, I was up early. I couldn’t sleep for long,” Bernard answered in a pregnant tone, as if that fact were significant.

“Yeah, I feel like shit. Like I’m hungover.”

“Fuck, you really can’t drink,” Bernard mumbled.

“No, I don’t mean…Oh, forget it. I was calling for Margaret’s number. What is it?”

There was a silence. Enrique was poised with a number two pencil (the irony amused him) and his favorite pad, a National brand notebook with lined, pale green pages. He looked at the lead tip and listened to the phone’s quiet as if it were a code. “Bernard?”

“Why do you want it?”

Enrique didn’t bother to consider why he was being asked so foolish a question. “I want to ask her out.”

Another silence.

“Bernard?”

“Um…I…” Even for laconic Bernard, the pauses were remarkable. At last he finished in a rush, “…don’t want to give it to you.”

“What?” No response. “Why not?”

“I don’t think you should date her,” he said so matter-of-factly that Enrique hesitated to answer. He tried a laugh because it seemed to him a real possibility that Bernard was teasing him.

“Bernard?” he said in a singsong attempt to be light. “You’re kidding. What’s…? Come on, what’s her number?”

“I’m not kidding.”

“You won’t? You really won’t give me her number?”

“No.” There was a remarkable absence of emotion. A simple statement of fact.

“Why not?” Enrique whined, unmanned somehow by the confidence of Bernard’s no. “Are you planning on dating her?”

“No. You know that. I explained my relationship to Margaret. We’re friends.”

“So what do you care?”

“You shouldn’t go out with her. She’s out of your league.”

Enrique repeated each word as if he were learning a new language: “She’s—out—of—my—league?”

“Uh-huh. I have to go, Enrique. I’m writing. I’ll see you at poker tonight, okay? Seven?”

“You won’t give me her phone number, but you expect me to let you play poker at my house?”

“Uh-huh. See you later.” And he hung up.

Enrique held the phone to his ear for a moment as if waiting for Bernard to get back on and say he was joking, then slammed the phone down so hard that the receiver bounced off the base, skidded on his desk, and dropped off the edge, leaving a black mark on the glossy sheen of the recently polyurethaned wood floor.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” he announced to the room and wondered how this could have happened to him. Four years ago he had been interviewed by
Time
magazine, and
The New York Review of Books
had declared his first novel to be one of the best on adolescence in literary history. How could a girl from Queens who did freelance work as a graphic designer be considered out of his league? And how could an unpublished slab of gray flesh make such a judgment? And since when were there leagues when it came to men and women? Is this nineteenth-century England? Am I Pip and she Estella? Bernard and Margaret, according to last night’s conversation, were members of Students for a Democratic Society in college. Margaret said she supported the Black Panther takeover of the Straight at Cornell, at least their aims if not their methods, although she didn’t flinch at the sight of their guns. She said they looked “scary and beautiful.” What bothered her was that they declared the Panthers to be an all-black movement and threw out all the white SDS kids. How could this woman, who was radically committed to the principles of integration and equality, who wanted an end to American racism and imperialism, regard as beneath her the half-Jewish, all-published Enrique? And Bernard? That socialist? That decrier of materialism who believed in civil rights and self-determination for the Vietnamese? He didn’t think Enrique Sabas should be permitted to date Margaret Cohen?

Enrique would have laughed at this grotesque hypocrisy, called everyone they knew in common to tell them the hilarity of it, if it weren’t for the fact that in some place inside himself, and not very deep down, he agreed with Bernard’s assessment. He was out of her league. She was beautiful, he was awkward. She was cheerful, he was in a rage. She was obviously sexually confident, he was secretly terrified. She was outgoing, self-assured, well-educated, and evidently had normal parents. She could parry with grace from her side of a conversation, although she didn’t know how to tell a story as well as Enrique, but so what? That was what he worked at night and day. If he didn’t best her at storytelling, he might as well put a bullet in his brain.

Yes, she was beyond his reach, Bernard was right. But agreement on that didn’t persuade Enrique that Bernard’s stated reason was the thwarted novelist’s true motivation for withholding Margaret’s number. Bernard wanted her, and knowing he would never have her, he wanted to be sure Enrique didn’t either.

Although he was shyer than ever of women after his recent rejection by Sylvie and his failure at his sole one-night stand, Enrique’s political outrage and competitive instinct overwhelmed modesty and fear of rejection. He knew Margaret lived on Ninth Street. He hadn’t noticed her street address, but he could go look at it. In extremis, he could stand in her lobby and wait for her to appear, though he doubted he would have the gall for such a romantic vigil. From the lowest of his new shelves, he grabbed his new white pages, supplied by NYNEX’s installer with his new phone and its new number, and looked up Cohen. He knew that single women in New York, to thwart heavy breathers and obscene talkers, either paid to have unlisted numbers or used the initials of their first names—although the latter precaution seemed likely to fool only the stupider breed of pervert. Her home delivery of the
Times
suggested to Enrique that Margaret might
spring for the extra charge of being unlisted. So it was with trepidation that he ran his finger down the plentiful supply of Manhattan Cohens until he reached the
M
s, and by God! What joy! There were five M. Cohens, two on the Upper West Side, two on the Upper East Side, and one, a single lovely
M,
on Ninth Street. There she was, M. Cohen, 55 East Ninth Street.

He reached for the phone and felt his stomach slip all the way to the floor. He swallowed hard, but that didn’t alleviate his queasiness. He dialed M. Cohen. He knew if he allowed himself to think, even for a second, he would quail.

She answered on the third ring, just as he was about to give up. Her voice was hoarse, presumably from their marathon of Camels and conversation; still, she sounded bright, eager to talk. He said, “Hello, Margaret, it’s Enrique Sabas. We haven’t spoken in so long I thought I’d call.” Nervousness making him loud, he fairly shouted this unoriginal witticism, the best he could come up with in the aggrieved state of mind Bernard had provoked.

“That was crazy,” she said in good cheer, as if
craziness
were a synonym for
fun.
“I haven’t stayed up yakking like that since college. And believe it or not, I have to run out to a brunch at my friend’s now for more talking. Can I call you back? What’s your number?”

“Oh, sure. I was just hoping we could, uh, I don’t know, go to a movie or—”

“I’m glad you called,” she interrupted him. “I was going to ask Bernard for your number.” Hearing this, Enrique’s heart, a tiny, huddled creature in his skinny chest, leapt, but it instantly crumpled when she added, “I think I should try to have an orphans’ holiday meal for everyone who can’t be with their families. You inspired me with your complaint that your mom and dad and brother and sister deserted you.”