A Happy Marriage (7 page)

This circuit of the Strand and his journey of feelings—from nostalgia for the books that he grew up with on his parents’ shelves, to intellectual inadequacy, to sorrow and pride over his family’s impressive shelf of disappointments, to his tangle with jealousy of his betters—had lasted only ten minutes, and he still needed to kill at least ten more. He could have gone back and showered and discarded two or three sweaters in all this time. He felt stupider by the minute.

And yet, when he found himself half a block north of Ninth Street on Broadway, trying to make his steps as small as possible, he glanced at his Timex watch, saw that it was only five minutes before seven, and hurried, as if, with only half a block down and half a block across to go, he might somehow manage to be late.

When he finally confronted the sour-faced doorman, it was 6:58. He had to say his name twice. “Henry—what?” the doorman asked at the first hearing and retracted his head as if Enrique had just slapped him.

He repeated slowly and clearly, “En-ree-kay Sah-bus.” Shame and the heat of his sweater caused his skin to release another misting underneath, and he felt utterly beaten. For a moment he wanted to flee.

He had fled from high school, of course, but Enrique had also several times come down with a last-minute flu to avoid a social occasion, including one at his editor’s home that he absolutely ought to have attended if he cared at all about his career—and he cared very much. He’d been overcome then with a panic less severe than what he was feeling in Margaret’s lobby, and he had canceled from a phone booth three blocks away, coughing unconvincingly like an inept actress playing Camille. “Are you sure you can’t make it?” his editor asked with the tone of a teacher giving a pupil one last chance to avoid an F. “Everyone is very excited about meeting you. And there are important people here.” But he made his voice weaker and added a fever to his symptoms, convinced that someone at his editor’s party would make him ill indeed.

The doorman lifted a large, heavy black intercom receiver—it looked like something a Gestapo officer might use in
Casablanca
—and pressed a button embedded in a box attached to the lectern. Margaret’s cheerful “Hi!” issued from the intercom’s phone. The doorman said, “A Mr. Ricky Saybus is here to see you.” He put an emphasis on the article
A
as if there were something fraudulent about the name that followed. Sure enough, Enrique heard Margaret exclaim with confusion, “A who?” and the doorman glanced at him with a self-satisfied smirk.

Enrique, bathed in sweat and misery and rage, spoke in his father’s voice: resonant, commanding, and murderous. “Enrique!” he snapped. “Not Ricky. Enrique. Sabasss,” he said, hissing his name with a snake’s fury.

Say what his ex-girlfriend Sylvie might about anger, that did the trick. The doorman abandoned his sneering manner and pro
nounced the correct first name. Margaret responded clearly through the World War II device, “Oh, Enrique. Sure, sure. Send him up.”

The elevator was too quick to allow him to fantasize about making a run for it. When it opened on the fourth floor, he stepped out to discover that he was facing the door to Apartment D, that it was ajar, and that he could see Margaret’s profile as she said to someone inside, “I think two and a half boxes will be enough!” Then her cheerful face appeared, flushed from the heat of cooking. “You’re incredibly on time!” she said. “This is hysterical. I can’t believe how on time you are, and everything is a mess!” And that was followed—there it was again—by a truncated laugh, clearly at herself, pleased and embarrassed by her behavior all at once. It happened too fast—he had assumed an anxious walk down a long hall—and he found himself talking without thinking, without his buddy Raskolnikov sniping at every word.

“I know,” Enrique confessed easily, “I’m hopelessly nuts. I arrive everywhere too early. It’s humiliating.”

Margaret swung the door fully open to reveal a sprite of a young woman in a bright red apron peering up at Enrique with an expression of delight. She was so short, little more than five feet, he guessed, that she made the smallish Margaret, at five-six, seem tall. She had a thick, curly mass of brown hair, warm brown eyes, and a welcoming smile full of correctly sized teeth. The rest of her was so far below Enrique’s eye line that he had no idea of her figure, and anyway she distracted with this flattering pleasantry. “You’re on time! That’s not humiliating. You’re doing the right thing.” She gestured as if calling up to an audience in the balcony for agreement. “Everyone else is late. They should be humiliated.” And she stood there, arms spread to the ceiling, with a confidence that those on high would agree.

Margaret, meanwhile, was urging him in, waving a large metal
spoon. She too was wearing an apron, hers suburban goofy, illustrated with a black-and-white drawing of a harassed father-chef at a backyard barbecue, talking to his concerned wife, concerned because he appears to be unaware of the fact that, although he hasn’t succeeded in getting his grill hot, the plate of hamburgers on a table next to it has somehow caught fire and now threatens to immolate him. “Don’t worry, dear. The coals will be ready in ten minutes,” read the ballooned dialogue.

Enrique obeyed the spoon’s directive and stepped into the parquet floor of the L-shaped studio while Margaret confirmed her friend’s reassurance. “That’s right. You’re the well-behaved guest. The rest of them are dopey—Where is it?” she abruptly demanded. In one sweep he noticed that her closet-size kitchen was immediately behind the front door to the left, that within two steps he was already in the heart of her living room, that a long glass table by the row of windows at the far end of the box was set for what looked like too many people for Enrique’s comfort, and that on the wall running from the front of the apartment to the windows was the exact same shelving he had had in his teenage bedroom in his parents’ apartment. All along its length were adjustable brackets hooked onto metal strips screwed into the wall. They supported four-foot-long wood shelves, their heights varied to accommodate tall art books or stunted paperbacks. At one point she had created enough vertical space to fit in a phonograph and speakers and what looked like a couple dozen albums. The Beatles’
Revolver
peered out from the nearest end. His mind was busy trying to understand her demand, “Where is it?” while the red-aproned sprite offered a surprisingly large hand for so small a body, saying, “I’m Lily. Sorry. My hand is wet.”

“I’m Enrique,” he said.

“Oh I know
that,
” she responded with a funny emphasis as if he had accused her of gross stupidity.

“Sorry. I’m so rude,” Margaret said. “Enrique Sabas, Lily Friedman. Where’s the case?” Margaret continued, with a mischievous look on her face.

Enrique felt the floor wobble as it occurred to him what she meant. “The case of Mateus.”

Lily trilled with laughter. “We were hoping you’d bring a different vintage, but—”

Margaret finished. “Not a case, that would be hysterical. But we don’t have enough wine!” she exclaimed pointing to the table set for ten. “I just have two bottles. We need at least two more.”

“Not that we’re alcoholics or anything,” Lily said and shook her head, making a mass of brown curls bounce.

“Good-bye,” Enrique said and turned on his heel.

“No,” Margaret cried out. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“We’re fine,” Lily said and waved away all worries. “I’ve got to dry my hands,” she added and ducked into the kitchen, one step away, to grab a paper towel.

“Red or white?” Enrique asked, a hand on the door. He had no idea how this confident man had suddenly taken possession of him, but the general who was now in charge didn’t seem to mind that his foot soldier Enrique was a bundle of nerves with a propensity for making a fool of himself.

And the recently elected commander in chief had guessed right that Margaret didn’t mean to absolve Enrique of the task so easily. “Red?” she said uncertainly toward Lily, who had dried her hands.

“Don’t be silly,” Lily said. “Someone will bring wine. Somebody always does.”

“We’re having shrimp in our pasta, but it’s a red sauce, so I think that’s red, right?” Margaret said, cocking her head at him.

“Mary McCarthy told my father,” Enrique said, shamelessly dropping a name that he knew young women were sentimental
about because of
The Group,
a book he had never read and never would, “that if the wine is really good, no matter what the color of the grape, it will go with any meal.”

“I love that,” Lily praised, another bright smile beaming out of her low frame. Margaret’s big blues, however, stared through him as if he had spoken in a foreign language. Perhaps the name-dropping displeased her.

“My theory,” Enrique said, moving his gaze away from that disturbing examination into the welcome of Lily’s browns, “is that Dad had brought Mary McCarthy the wrong wine and she was being incredibly polite.” He opened the door. “Screwing up the wine,” he called out as he left. “It’s a family tradition. I’ll be back with two bottles of red.”

He heard them laugh through the closed door, and he felt a satisfaction about himself that was unlike anything he had experienced except when he got his rave in the
New York Review.
He was still humiliated. He knew that when he finally removed his huge green Army coat, disaster awaited. He could tell, from the distinctive odor of wet wool wafting up from his damp neck, that his sweater had been penetrated by perspiration, so the shirt underneath must be sopping. He had no idea where to find a liquor store, he had no idea what kind of wine to buy, and he doubted that he had enough cash to pay for two good bottles. Yet he would go back. He knew he would go back to the Orphans’ Dinner in this state of disarray, with bad wine if necessary, and if they laughed at him, and when they laughed at him, as long as those lively girls were doing the laughing, he knew he would feel no pain.

H
E TAPPED THE
calendar icon on his color Treo (what a marvel of compression, what bliss of technology!) as he talked into a tiny microphone that dangled midair on a wire connected to the base and to his left ear. The headset allowed him to check the electronic organizer function while simultaneously discussing with Bernard Weinstein’s wife, Gertie, when he could schedule them for their farewell to Margaret. They had made the cut, and so would be allowed to say good-bye face-to-face, although they were on the B-list, which meant a fifteen-minute afternoon audience. Those closest to her would enjoy a last supper.

Scheduling and restricting access to Margaret for her last two weeks had been less troublesome than Enrique had expected. Not all were eager to sit opposite death. Enrique could imagine the rationalizations of those residing in the suburbs of Margaret’s
affections. “We’re friends but, you know, more friends through our kids,” they reassured themselves. “I’m not sure we would have given each other the time of day if…” So they eliminated themselves.

Margaret had shortened the potential list anyway, lopping off acquaintances and a few good friends from her many incarnations: the butch girls of Kittatinny summer camp; the good Jewish girls of Francis Lewis High School; the Marxists and earnest feminists of her Cornell radicalism; the guilty working mothers she shared cabs with; the frustrated artists; her chatty Monday morning tennis foursome; and the shortest list, the advanced cancer support group. That Margaret eliminated most of her compatriots was not what Enrique had expected, because she had always preferred a gathering that included as many as possible, and yet it was consistent with the duality of her nature and the vulnerability of her current circumstance.

Despite her fearless and merry ability to introduce herself and chat up strangers in the most forbidding of situations, usually Margaret preferred to stay home and dine with their sons. Afterward, she was content for an evening to consist of reading a genteel English village murder mystery, glancing up from her cozy position on the couch at TV shows Enrique watched noisily, nodding with affectionate and polite boredom at the rant he delivered about this or that travesty of culture or politics or baseball mismanagement. She remained serene, lying in wait for sporadic appearances by her sons as they sought snacks and breaks from homework, ambushing them with interrogations or hugs.

In her cave of males, she could happily hibernate for weeks, but when Margaret roused herself to entertain, she preferred an event both large and casual. She had invited well over a hundred people to her fiftieth birthday, held six months before her diagnosis; a good portion of the guests were little better than acquaintances, a
few she had met only once. She insisted that she, Enrique, Max, and Gregory do all the cooking and catering themselves; Enrique had had to browbeat her for a week to agree to hire a lone bartender. She had been the same about the party they hosted when their new house in Maine was finished. People appeared whom they knew only by sight, and Margaret lost sleep the night before learning how to make sushi, introducing a different kind of crab roll to Blue Hill Bay.

She was a mix of hermit and social butterfly, and if he had been asked before her illness how she would say good-bye to the world, Enrique would have guessed that she would want to see many representatives from her diverse constituencies. But he wasn’t surprised when she restricted the number of final visitors, just as she had severely reduced her contacts when first diagnosed, and only resumed swimming in the Olympic pool of all her friendships during the year of her remission. Once she metastasized, she limited her socializing to intimates.

The whimsical and unpredictable choice of Bernard as the exception to this rule was more typical of her at her healthiest. She had never been close to Bernard. There had been a half dozen casual contacts in the previous two decades, and except for one phone call, Bernard had ignored them during her illness—and why not? They weren’t friends, and anyway she had never taken Bernard seriously. He was, as she had put it, “a drip,” and she hadn’t revised her opinion upward now that the world regarded him as a gusher.

Bernard did not fulfill his ambition to be a novelist. In the past quarter of a century, he had evolved into one of the country’s leading cultural critics, and certainly its most visible. He had reviewed books for the daily
New York Times
for ten years, movies for
The New Yorker
for five, was still a columnist for
Time
as well as the author of two bestsellers of general cultural musings. Ten
years ago he had become a regular on
Oprah
as a sort of literary educator at large, and he had subsequently morphed into his current incarnation as host of a middlebrow weekly interview show of cultural icons, over whom, it seemed to Enrique, he merely fawned. “You’re kidding,” Margaret reacted when Enrique told her that Bernard had e-mailed, writing that he’d learned the terrible news and wanted to see her. So Enrique didn’t reply. Within a day, Bernard’s assistant left a message in a bored monotone on their home voice mail that Mr. Weinstein would be honored if Margaret had time to see him.

“Honored?” Margaret repeated in her faint, hoarse voice, wearing a crooked smile. She was en route from her bed to her closet, pushing her pole of hydration with profound weariness. She was hunched over, wigless, without makeup, looking like a frail old woman. To be seen in this state would have horrified her until recently, and did still dismay her. “I look like an old crone,” she had said to Enrique two months ago while he helped her undress for bed. Although she kissed him and said, “Thank you,” when he told her that she was still beautiful, he knew that she didn’t believe him. Or rather, that it wasn’t enough of a consolation. The mirror she looked into was the reflection that mattered.

Six months ago she would have worked for hours to make sure that no one, including Enrique, saw her so bereft of vanity. On this first day of her public dying, she had no energy for such niceties. All reserves were gone. It looked as if a breeze could kill her. She had to struggle to push the IV pole, albeit weighed down with a fresh bag of hydration and a smaller dose of liquid steroids. Those palliatives were new, prescribed by Natalie Ko, the hospice doctor who was supervising her home care, to boost her energy for her week of farewells. They hadn’t kicked in yet. Margaret moved as if each step cost her a precious last bit of vitality. Every couple of minutes she paused to dab at her eyes and her nose with a balled-
up tissue. After she’d started taking Taxotere the previous summer, she’d sniffed from a continually running nose and tearing eyes. For a while she had been prescribed various antihistamine remedies, implying the side effect was an allergy. But when Margaret became exasperated that they weren’t drying her up, one of the residents at Sloan had finally explained that the tears were caused by the body expelling Taxotere’s lingering toxins. He said they would finish leeching out three months after she stopped the drug. Her last dose was two months ago. These tears would outlive her.

“I’ll tell Bernard we don’t have time,” Enrique said, too drained to make fun of his pompous request.

“No, no. Bernard can come,” Margaret said. “Just for fifteen minutes. It’ll be amusing.”

“Why? Because he’s famous?” Like most New York hostesses, Margaret liked to add a celebrity to her gatherings. Enrique had supplied a few of the famous, the odd movie star or director, for her parties over the years. Evidently Bernard had made such a shiny object of himself that now his pale slab of flesh was believed to brighten a room.

Margaret wasn’t offended. She knew that Bernard’s great success was an irritation to her husband, a man disappointed in his own career. That made Bernard’s celebrity a joke of fate, as if God had stuck out his leg and was laughing at Enrique sprawled on the floor. “He introduced us,” she said, shrugged, and blew her dripping nose delicately. “I don’t know. Just seems…like…it makes sense, right, baby?” she appealed to Enrique, her chin quivering with memory. “He brought me to you.”

There were times, this was one of them, when Enrique would not breathe or speak for a moment, afraid that he would shake with the sobs he sometimes indulged when he was alone. Overpowering sadness rose and crashed within him, a wave that thun
dered and drowned him, and soon disappeared without a trace on the flattened sand. He said in a voice that warbled from the troubled sea inside, “
I
made him bring you to me,” he corrected. “If it were up to Bernard, I never would have seen you again.”

“I know, baby,” she said, attempted a soothing smile that came out slanted. “But if there’s time, let him and Gertie come. Just for fifteen minutes. Okay?”

So Bernard was granted a precious fifteen minutes from the short supply that remained for Enrique. The schedule had been set the previous night, when Dr. Ko presented alternatives to the method and timing of Margaret’s death.

“I’ll give you steroids and full hydration, you know, potassium, all the basic nutrients, for as long as you feel you need to say your good-byes,” the hospice doctor had explained. Dr. Natalie Ko was a nice Queens girl like Margaret, only her successful immigrant grandparents were Chinese. At least both had escaped the borough. Ko lived in Brooklyn Heights now. She arrived at their apartment at the end of a long day, wearing a brown suit over a plain white blouse. She was Margaret’s age and, like Margaret, had a high school senior at home. They had several friends in common and had met socially once or twice in healthy days. Enrique noticed her glancing at the art books on the shelf above Margaret’s desk, and then down to the photos of the boys. Several times during her examination of Margaret, she peered up at the large painting above the bed that Margaret had done of Gregory and Max: a seven-year-old boy and his three-year-old brother hugging each other in Superman pajamas. When she finished, she draped her stethoscope around her neck, adjusting the collar of her suit so it would cover the black rubber, and sat on the side of the bed, one hand gently resting on Margaret’s leg through the thin white cotton blanket they used in summer. But for the stethoscope necklace, she could have been a friend from college days come to say farewell.

“A week,” Margaret said, looking at Enrique. “A week is enough,” she repeated in a tone that was nearly, but not quite, a question.

“Two weeks?” Enrique suggested. “A lot of people want to say good-bye.” He averted his eyes from the doctor. Over the past two years and eight months, they had discussed everything about Margaret’s body with medical personnel, including reconstructive surgery on her vagina. Her tumor had grown so large as to abut it, and routine precaution against metastasis had demanded that half of it go. Resection would make intercourse impossible or very painful, and Margaret was insistent, much to Enrique’s surprise, that an alternative be found. He had not flinched or blushed during any of those discussions, but that he wanted to coax his wife to live longer did flush his cheeks and pull his eyes to the floor.

“Can I really be on steroids for two weeks?” Margaret asked.

“You can be on them as long as your body can stand it.”

“Won’t I get an infection?”

“Eventually, yes. That’s one option of how to end it. If you develop an infection, we could leave it untreated—”

With a spasm of horror, Margaret said, “I don’t want to die of an infection.” Three times she had suffered through the shaking chills of one-hundred-and-five-degree temperatures. The doctors had claimed she wouldn’t remember much of those delirious nights; some part of her seemed to remember clearly enough.

“Then a week of full steroids is probably about as long as you should go. But you would still have energy for another week, because I’ll step you down gradually.”

Margaret shook her head. “Do you have to?”

“No. We don’t have to do anything you don’t want us to. You’re in charge.” The doctor’s eyes strayed again to the picture of a lively Margaret, blue eyes sparkling, surrounded by her men. Their doorman had taken the photo nine months ago, at Mar
garet’s request, on the day they told their boys that she was terminal. They stood outside their building: a mother, her husband, and two grown sons. The young men looked straight at the camera without sorrow or tears, defiance or resignation. They seemed to be standing ready, come what may. Enrique’s right arm draped down Margaret’s left, his fingers caressing her wrist protectively, a forced smile on his face. She was also smiling, but without effort, a pleasant, patient, loving, and utterly convincing smile. An intelligent eye could spot that she was wearing a wig. Otherwise this prosperous, slim, handsome, middle-aged woman appeared content and untroubled.

“After I see everybody…” Margaret swallowed hard and reached for a glass of cranberry juice. Her mouth dried out frequently, despite sipping sweet liquids for the pleasure of their taste. The fluorescent, bright fluid appeared a moment or two later in the translucent bag at the end of the tube exiting her stomach. To spare her visitors the sight of the odd and disgusting mix of bright red juices and black-green bile, it was kept inside a small shopping bag from L’Occitane, resting on the floor. Enrique drained the bag every few hours into a white plastic pitcher that he carried and emptied into the toilet. Mouth moistened, she finished her sentence: “After that week, I want to stop everything.” She gestured at the IV pole on the other side of her bed. Two bags were hanging, one for hydration, the other an antibiotic for her latest infection.

The thin line of Dr. Ko’s eyebrows furrowed, and her lips pursed dubiously. “Everything at once?”

Margaret nodded. “Everything,” she whispered firmly.

Natalie Ko seemed to ignore that request. “You have a couple of alternatives as to how you withdraw hydration. After the first week, I’ll stop the extra nutrients, of course. But as for hydration itself, you’re getting three bags now. The second week you can go
down to two, then the third week one bag—” She stopped because Margaret was shaking her head from side to side, slowly but emphatically.