A Happy Marriage (9 page)

“Sure.” Embarrassed and overwhelmed, Gertie hurried to agree. “Sure. Of course. We’ll get there at three-thirty and we’ll be gone in fifteen. Can we bring anything? Do you need anything?”

Enrique felt his eyes burn, perhaps with longing to ask her if she could bring a cure. Or perhaps he, too, was leaking toxins. “No, we’re fine. See you Monday at three-thirty.”

Enrique had conducted nearly twenty such conversations and exchanged another thirty or so e-mails that day and the day before. Most were not irritating, and few brought out this streak
of sadism and self-pity in him. The people who loved Margaret and were close to her were easygoing with him. His half brother and mother were more difficult. Leo, having been physically and emotionally absent for the dreary days of Margaret’s illness, seemed to be abruptly excited by this dramatic finale and wanted to be there as much as possible, while Enrique’s aged mother insisted on showing up with a heartbroken face, pitying looks, and bulletins about her distress. “I can’t bear this,” she informed Enrique regularly.

But those were old snakes, long ago drained of their venom in therapy. Enrique was too sad and exhausted to fight about the morbid grandiosity of his narcissistic family. He was past complaining, as well, about the shallow emotional support Margaret’s parents could offer. Dorothy’s and Leonard’s terror when they came into her hospital room the first day after their daughter was diagnosed had depleted him of that expectation. They had stood ten feet off, by the door, not offering a hug or a kiss. Enrique accepted that he was the family’s emotional resource for this scary and miserable event, the one called on to provide strength and calm when life got too raw, just as he accepted that he had drawn on Margaret’s parents for money and stability, and had absorbed from his mother and father and half brother and half sister ambition and inspiration.

He was fifty years old, and no one he knew could claim the heroic nature of characters in so many contemporary books and movies, least of all Enrique. Writers were liars, it seemed to him, when it came to such things, making black villains of those who disappointed or slighted them, and heroes of themselves. Enrique knew that he wanted to feel superior in how he cared for Margaret and his sons, and how he faced her death. He wanted to praise himself and feel scorn for everyone else. Didn’t he deserve to believe in this pathetic vanity as a consolation for what he had
lost, was losing, and would lose forever? His half brother would fuck tonight the woman he loved, or failed to love, as was more often the case. Margaret’s parents had two other children and eight grandchildren, whose births and achievements they had lived to celebrate together. Months and probably years after Margaret’s death, Dorothy and Leonard would have each other, a sixty-year marriage still thriving in its routine of bickering and ocean cruises and profound, loving dependency. Enrique was losing the partner of his past and his present and his future just when he most desired her choreography. When Gregory or Max married, he would celebrate alone, or with a stranger to their creation as a partner. When Margaret’s grandchildren were born, he would have no one to share the miracle of their baby having a baby. Yes, he resented them all for asking him to make them feel better that a part of their world was ending, when the very center of his was melting in his palms, slipping through his fingers, spilling onto the floor. Soon, very soon, only a puddle of his heart would remain.

But no, he had no desire to complain while Margaret was dying, and no illusion that anyone who had failed him, anyone who had betrayed him, anyone who had willfully misunderstood him would now, out of pity, develop insight about themselves and apologize to Enrique for demanding he put Band-Aids on their scrapes while he was bleeding to death. Bernard would arrive and be celebrated and make Margaret’s good-bye an incident in the bestselling memoir that he would someday write, and in his popularizing, sentimental words, Enrique and Margaret would be distorted into the kinds of people who can reassure and flatter readers. So what? Did that really make losing the love of his life any worse? “I am fortune’s fool,” Enrique quoted silently in the style of his grandiose and melodramatic family. With Bernard and Gertie filling the last free line in his Treo’s calendar, his gloomy
task as appointment secretary was complete, and it did mean something precious to him that in this he had not failed his wife. The people she wanted to see, she would see. The people she didn’t, he had kept away. Could the wildly successful Bernard Weinstein claim that he had done anything so hard and done it so well?

E
NRIQUE THOUGHT IT
lucky that Margaret lived only three blocks away from his apartment for many reasons, but especially after he purchased two bottles of Margaux for the extraordinary sum of twenty-seven dollars and eighty-nine cents. Enrique had never spent more than five bucks on alcohol in any form. He was left with a single faded, tattered dollar bill in his wallet, and a dime and a penny in the pocket of his black jeans. At the end of the evening, he would need the economy of walking home free of charge.

He was relieved to have overspent for a pair of reasons. He liked the sweet pun buying of Margaux for Margaret. And the high price of the bottles alleviated his worry, acquired from his proud, working-class-born father, that he might pick something gauche and inferior. Enrique understood that cost didn’t equal
quality (as a writer whose books didn’t earn much, he had little choice about that conviction), but he also knew that in 1975 an expensive French red, whatever its actual value to a sophisticated wine palate, would display to Margaret and her friend Lily, as well as to the other mystery orphans, that although he might be ignorant, he was not a cheapskate. It seemed unlikely to Enrique that a desirable woman would be interested in a thrifty man.

He had one hundred and sixteen dollars to his name in all the world, but he did not for a moment consider buying something less expensive. He rationalized that in three months he would receive the money owed to him on the publication of his third novel. True, that princely sum of two thousand five hundred dollars was more than half spoken for already, because he had borrowed a thousand dollars from his equally strapped novelist parents six months ago, and would be taking another five hundred from Sal on Monday next. Since he’d left home at sixteen, this had been the rhythm of his finances, borrowing against his publisher’s advance so that, by the time a check arrived, he was well on his way to being broke again. At ages seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, this constant state of indebtedness, impoverishment, and brief states of cash-flush was tolerable, but Enrique knew that, once he married and had children, this pattern of debt to advance to debt while struggling to write masterpieces would shed its romance and be revealed as misery. Worse, he had watched close up at ages ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen how not being able to pay the month’s rent diminished to silence the booming voice of his Latin father, how, for the proud son of Spanish peasants and Cuban cigar makers, lack of money was a humiliation as intense as the suicidal shame of a ruined aristocrat.

In spite of his extravagance, or perhaps because of it, Enrique considered impoverishment to be his likely future. Certainly more likely for him than for anyone else at the Orphans’ Dinner. He sus
pected that Margaret’s other guests, though parentless this Christmas, would be well-provided-for, either through that financial arrangement known as a “trust fund” or because they were college graduates and presumably could become, or had already become, lawyers, doctors, or the like. Enrique, besides having written three slim novels, had no training or experience at anything of true use to the world. Thus his fear of destitution seemed to him real and imminent. He assumed this dread originated in his own breast. He was too young and unanalyzed to have the wit to blame his mother, Rose, as the inspiration for his fear of poverty.

She often spoke of financial disaster. She harped on it no matter how prosperous her current circumstances, presumably because she had been unsettled as a child by her father’s multiple grocery store failures, and the family’s abrupt moves from the Bronx to Brooklyn and back again as they skipped out on back rent during the Great Depression. Enrique did not recognize that he had been influenced by his mother’s evocations of such calamities. Although his freelance parents lived with a modest mortgage in a small, renovated, eighteenth-century Cape on the coast of Maine, and his mother was working on a novel with a one-hundred-thousand-dollar advance, her nightmares of future homelessness—an isolated and personal bankruptcy that no modern FDR would save them from—were always present, anguished visions she often articulated vividly to Enrique, thanks to her expressive and imaginative powers. His mother would have made an excellent saleswoman, provided, of course, that her product was sadness and loss. Without paying attention to the terms of the contract, Enrique had signed up for her entire catalog of defeat and its tragic accessories. Her anxious talk and his father’s almost perpetual state of being broke since quitting his day job and becoming a full-time writer had cooked Enrique into an odd soup of a middle-class, young American who had
never wanted for very much and yet lived in a state of constant worry that he would end up poor.

He remembered how his mother took him aside when he started seventh grade to explain that she and his father would pay for his first year of college, as they had for his half brother, and would have for his half sister if she had gone to university. Paying for the remaining three years would be up to him. At the age of twelve, Enrique hadn’t been aware that college cost anything. He had no notion of how he would both go to school and pay for it. He was alarmed. He went so far as to research how much a university would cost, which increased his distress considerably. He lived for a couple years in a puzzled state—until he began cutting high school and thus no longer cared—as to how he was going to pay for Harvard (where his father wanted him to go) from his one wage-earning activity of delivering the Sunday
New York Times
to neighbors in his parents’ apartment building, especially since he made only ten cents a week and hadn’t convinced more than five people to sign on. He used to make his mother laugh by coming home Sunday afternoon singing his version of the classic song he had learned from her—“Ten cents a week, that’s what they pay me, Gosh how they weigh me down!”—and never once told her that he didn’t think the whole situation was a laughing matter. He understood the full implication of his mother’s college message, quite different from his father’s grandiose promises about the fortunes he was going to make and leave to Enrique. His mother was warning him that the life of a writer, namely Guillermo’s and Rose’s lives, was to cling to driftwood in a sea of indebtedness, half-drowned in hunger and homelessness. She made it clear that he could not expect them to help him survive once he jumped ship—and certainly not if he stayed on their leaking dinghy.

When Enrique announced that he wanted to drop out of out high school to finish his first novel (he had written half), he
expected his mother’s response to be a simple scream of “No!” Instead, she said, “If you want to be a writer, that’s your choice. I would never argue with what a soul wants to do in life. My family did that to me and it was terrible. A terrible thing. Something you never entirely get over. So if you feel you’re a writer, then you must try to be one. I would never discourage you. But you’ll have to support yourself while you’re doing it. That’s very important too. Being a writer isn’t a hobby. It’s a job.” Despite her heartfelt statement that she respected his soul’s ambition, Enrique suspected that she thought earning a living would prove to be too daunting a requisite.

If so, his mother had miscalculated. Enrique’s dread of poverty was irrational in more ways than one. It did not, for example, include a fear about earning money as a writer. The world—at least at first—seemed to agree. His first novel earned him eleven thousand dollars, enough to live on for three years in those happy bankrupt days of New York, when rent on a railroad flat on Broome Street and Sixth Avenue, the location of Sylvie’s apartment, was sixty-eight dollars a month.

To Rose’s credit, she stuck to her word: that he managed to earn a living as a novelist did seem to satisfy her. She didn’t plead with him to apply to universities that had signaled they were prepared to accept him, albeit on academic probation for a term since he hadn’t finished high school. She did not worry aloud that a teenager trying to make a living as a writer might be too much pressure, or suggest that more education might prove useful to a novelist. It was 1971, well before the word
yuppie
had been coined, or wide acceptance of the principle that monetary success and value were synonyms. Yet in a perverse way, evolving naturally out of her left-wing cynicism, Rose managed to arrive in one respect at the same standard for an artist’s success that Donald Trump would harbor. Making money seemed to be, in some sense, his
mother’s sole criteria as to whether one could claim to be an artist. To be sure, she sneered at hacks, at novelists whose work seemed calculated to sell books, but that only increased her respect for making money itself, particularly if the writing was, as she liked to say, “serious.”

Until this recent loan from his parents against his advance on his novel, they had not helped Enrique financially in any way, not even as creditors. He felt no resentment about this. He would have been surprised at the suggestion that such a feeling was reasonable. Enrique believed himself to be the luckiest person he knew when it came to parents. He relished their entertainment value, their vigorous and firmly held opinions on everything, such as whether any writer without a sense of humor, including one they admired as much as Dreiser, could be considered great, or whether Jerry Lewis was a genius clown or only a dumb clown, or whether an armed uprising against an imperialist American state, although moral, was wise. Most precious of all was their consistent and unstinting praise of Enrique’s writing, which seemed to him a treasure beyond any valuation. Enrique could make fun of and tease his parents, and dismiss their extreme opinions so colorfully expressed, but it was the adoring mockery of a fanatic adherent. Money was a great evil in the world, Enrique believed, and thus the natural enemy of his brave and talented parents.

So Enrique was an unstable compound of doubt and arrogance as he once again, sweating in his sweater, was screened by the dyspeptic doorman. At 4D, this time he was greeted by a true shock—an angular, handsome, bearded, and confident male who said, “Who are you?” as he swung wide the door to reveal Margaret and Lily and one other unknown male talking in a loud, self-assured voice. Two peacocks had arrived while he was buying wine. He didn’t recognize their colored feathers as displays that he had already faced, but he felt sure that both plumages had the
plentiful green of young men with trust funds. The pained spasm he felt inside of an anxious and soon-to-be homeless failed artist was, however, completely concealed by a self-possessed smile and steady gaze as he answered, “I’m Enrique Sabas,” a statement of identity that he was also confident would one day require no further explanation as to who he was or what he did for a living.

“Oh yeah, I know who you are,” the dark and rude young man admitted as he shut the door behind Enrique, confirming that Enrique was on his way. “You’re the prodigy who’s up Bernard’s ass, right? You published a book when you were twelve or something, right?”

Enrique had been a prodigy for five years. At first he had expected the world to applaud him without reservation. That illusion had died fast and hard. Then he’d flailed at the teasing, resentment, and outright hostility which came his way. Such a combative response hadn’t served him better, considering that his goal in life was to be universally admired and unconditionally beloved. In the hopeless quest to achieve said goal, he knew now to raise his shields instantly, unsheathe his sword beneath his cloak, all the while making every attempt to disengage and avoid battle. This was not cowardice but a humanitarian gesture. He did not think that even a handsome peacock, such as this one, with a trim beard and a warrior’s voice, was a match for one of his angry displays.

“I’m just an old has-been now,” Enrique continued and held out his vinyl bag from University Wine and Spirits to Margaret, white freckled cheeks flushed into two distinct red circles, stirring a large aluminum pot filled to the rim with gently bubbling red sauce in her tiny box of a kitchen. She turned, wielding blue eyes and a wooden spoon, and the most gleeful gap-toothed smile he had ever seen on a grown woman. Exhausted, sweated-through, and wary, Enrique instantly absorbed her delighted energy. The
entire troublesome world, including its nettling competitors, seemed to fall away. Enrique found himself talking to her with a confidence that a moment ago was beyond his grasp. “I don’t know anything about wine, but I bought these in honor of your name.”

He executed this flirtatious parry with ease. Though when Margaret’s beam was extinguished by a frown, his épée drooped. “What?” she said in an annoyed tone of confusion. As thirstily as he had drunk in her confidence, he tasted her dismay and lost the nerve to explain his romantic pun.

The neatly trimmed warrior intercepted the package and pulled out one of the Margauxs by its throat. He read the label with the air of an homicide detective. “Ah, Margaux.” He glanced at Enrique. “Very funny,” he commented. “Get it?” He nodded at Margaret. He didn’t offer his hand, both being occupied with Enrique’s purchase, but he did say, “I’m Phil.” His eyes trailed up to the ceiling with an air of thoughtful consideration, and he announced, “Wait a minute. Does Margaux really mean Margaret in French?” Enrique noticed that this bearded, dark-haired tiger with a skinny face and long jaw had blue eyes. Nothing like the huge violet beams of their hostess Margaux; the warrior’s eyes were pale, almost colorless, narrowed into a perpetually skeptical squint. “Hey, Sam,” Phil called toward the dining table, where sat another example of this confident male species. Sam was currently engaged in making Lily laugh. Her delighted trill caused Enrique to wince with jealousy, although she was not the object he was pursuing. Dismayed, he watched his bottle of Margaux being waved in the air by Phil like an exhibit in a murder trial. If there were anything stupid or embarrassing about the purchase, it was going to be exposed. “You’re fluent in French. Does Margaux mean Margaret in English? Isn’t it Marguerite?”

“Marguerite is French for Margaret,” answered Sam. He spoke
in a bored, offhand drawl, implying that the question was unworthy of him. He had a bush of kinky hair at the top of his head but no chin. He was tall, perhaps taller than Enrique, although that was impossible to determine because he was tilted back in a gray metal folding chair, which he had pulled away from the glass table and placed against the windowsill so that it commanded a complete view of the studio apartment. He stretched out his very long legs beside the five-foot-tall Lily, seated perpendicular to him, in a chair properly positioned for eating. In this odd arrangement, Sam’s extraordinarily large feet encased in work boots, at least size fourteen, were directly in the line of Lily’s vision, as if to display their length and width for her to admire or possibly to consume. Even on so long a frame, they looked like clown’s feet which, with his bushy head and caved in chin, gave him a generally goofy appearance that, like a clown’s, was slightly intimidating.