A Happy Marriage (17 page)

Margaret grew solemn. He worried she was about to protest his sneaky maneuver. “Poor little Larry. I loved babysitting for him,” she said with wistful affection. She crossed the street and headed toward Ninth. “He was such a sweet boy.”

“Was? Now he’s a serial killer?”

“Oh, he’s still sweet. Just a little…”

She became pensive and settled into a careful think. He enjoyed this pause in their conversation. Ninth, although taxis were rattling by, was much quieter than raucous Eighth. A few of the town house trees had Christmas lights; most didn’t in those bankrupt, vandalizing days. He could smell logs burning in the fireplaces and imagine the cozy happiness of the families within. He no longer understood what he wanted out of knowing Margaret. He had no nerve for a conquest, that was clear, but he didn’t want to be friends. He didn’t really know what he would do with a young woman as a friend. Go to a museum? Learn to crochet together? But this silence among the town houses and brown-stones where Henry James and Mark Twain and Eleanor Roosevelt
and Emma Lazarus and dozens of shrinks and their miserable analysands had talked themselves blue, this wait for Margaret to tell him some secret of her heart, this calm of walking beside her, this he could do with contentment.

“Larry should be an architect,” she said at last.

“He’s also an economist?”

Margaret frowned. “Not yet. My parents—my mom mostly—they’re nagging him to become an economist. She thinks being an architect is too risky.”

“What!” Enrique laughed. To his high school dropout ears, architects were as likely to find work as economists. Besides, his friend Sal, scratching out a living designing offices and loft spaces, claimed it was his lack of an architectural degree that was the obstacle to his making a fortune.

“Well, it is much harder to make a living as an architect. But when Larry was little, he liked to draw. He still does. He said at Thanksgiving his art course was his favorite. And his drawings were good, really good. That makes my mother very nervous. He’s got real feeling and talent for it, but that’s—” She shook her head and said softly, “Being an artist. That’s not okay in my family. Not for the men, anyway.”

They reached the elegance of Fifth Avenue, and they took in a sweeping view south of the Washington Square Arch and beyond, the bright boxes of the World Trade towers; to the north, the antenna of the Empire State seemed to yearn for attention, as if unable to accept that it was no longer the tallest building in Manhattan. “But it’s okay for you to be an artist?” he asked.

She turned, to regard Enrique with disappointment. “I’m supposed to get married and have children,” she said with the lilt of “isn’t that obvious?” suffusing every word.

Suddenly Enrique felt as if he were the villain in a novel, the potential bad guy of her story, the destroyer of a young woman’s
hopes to realize her talent. His melodramatic mind saw the plot: Margaret, thinking she has found an artist who will support her in breaking free of the Buddenbrooks-like oppression of her bourgeois parents, falls in love with the long-haired prodigy; instead of writing her great novel, she becomes little more than a glorified scullery maid of a wife, harried in a Lower East Side tenement apartment, raising Enrique’s brats while he writes failing books and cheats on her with actresses and poetesses. Eventually the selfish flop abandons a middle-aged Margaret without a dime, for a young Upper East Side heiress who thinks the ageless Enrique to be an undiscovered genius, upon which calamity Margaret finally writes a searing play about the plight of obedient Jewish girls that wins the Pulitzer, the Tony, and the Nobel. He would have further elaborated this soap opera, only he had to answer her to avoid the impression that he was an idiot. “Of course,” he said. “You’re supposed to marry a nice Jewish boy and have three kids.”

“Two kids!” Margaret cried out. “Give me a break. I think even my mom would be satisfied with two.” The light changed, and she strode across the street, definitely en route to her apartment. He had wondered if she would notice that they had overshot his building, and inform him that he didn’t have to walk her home, but no. She moved toward University Place with her rapid walk, so full of energy that it was difficult, despite his long legs, to keep up without exerting himself. He hustled, grateful that he wouldn’t have to make the decision to extend the evening. She would either invite him up or not. “And? Have you decided to have them?”

“Decided to have what?” she asked, as if they hadn’t been discussing anything in particular. “Kids?” she added abruptly with astonishment. “Oh, I don’t think about that. I don’t think about that at all.”

“You don’t care—you’re not worried about fulfilling your mom’s expectations?”

“Well, I care. A little. I guess. I don’t know. I don’t think about it. I know I’m going to disappoint and worry my mother no matter what I do.”

That seemed to him a very sad remark. Enrique felt that, along with his parents’ resentment at not being more successful, along with their never being satisfied by the praise critics granted Enrique’s work, along with their claims that his publisher was incompetent and that was why he failed to sell more copies of his novels, the one constant was their admiration for the quality of his work and their unflinching insistence that he must continue to write no matter how discouraging the world’s reaction to his books. Not to have that bolstering from parents, he felt, would make everything about being an artist too difficult. Yet he knew otherwise. And he said so. “Well, most of the world’s great artists had parents who didn’t want them to be artists.”

“I’m not a great artist,” Margaret protested without heat. “I’m not an artist at all. I don’t know what I am,” she commented. She sounded like a wondering child, seeing a future both mysterious and possible. “Did you always know you wanted to be a writer? I guess you did. You started so young.”

“No I didn’t. There were a couple other things I wanted to be before I wrote my novel. Until I was eleven, I wanted to be President of the United States.” She laughed. He leaned her way to emphasize his sincerity. “No, I really did. I subscribed to the
Congressional Record
and ran for student council, and it wasn’t until the father of a friend of mine said, ‘You’ll never be elected president. Not in a million years. You’re half Spanish and half Jewish—you couldn’t be elected dogcatcher in this country.’ That’s when I gave up.”

Margaret touched his arm. “That’s terrible,” she cried out, as
if the wound was still bleeding. He stopped walking. They were a half block from the dreaded farewell in the sight lines of her censorious doorman. He faced her, enjoying the feather weight of her hand on his arm. It lingered before sliding off while she commented, “What a mean thing to say. Why was he so mean to a little boy?”

“He was right,” Enrique answered. “Maybe I could be a senator from New York—at best. Not even that, with my parents’ politics. Cuban exiles would sooner kill me than elect me.”

He was about to make fun of his fantasy life of political success when Margaret, empathetic a moment ago, did the job: “You’d have to finish high school before they’d bother to assassinate you.”

“That’s why I dropped out. Why finish high school if you can’t be president?”

Her lips formed a crooked, close-lipped smile that he had noticed twice before when he said something she enjoyed. It was more pronounced this time: sly smirk, gleeful eyes, an evaluating tilt of her head, full of amused affection; and there was a delicious trace of the pride of ownership in her attitude, as if Enrique was her very own private source of pleasure, available to no one else. Once again he knew that he ought to kiss her, but he remained frozen until she said, emphasizing each word: “You really wanted to be president?”

“I thought I could change the world,” he answered.

She released a single report of delighted laughter. “I can see that. I can see the little boy who thought that.” She turned to walk the last half block, which would decide all, he believed.

He asked another question, what exactly her father was doing for AT&T, hoping talk would distract both of them from the good-bye decision. While explaining that her father often testified in court and before Congress on their behalf, which sounded very
corrupt to the left-wing Enrique, she threw in, “You want to come up and have some coffee? Or some wine or something?”

“Sure,” he grabbed at the offer. Immediately, in his mind, this was a date again, and his stomach churned.

She kept talking while they rode up in the elevator, entered her apartment, and shed their coats. She asked if he wanted coffee, and he said yes. She vanished into her closet of a kitchen.

Her living room, or rather the sitting area of her L-shaped studio, was defined by three objects of furniture: a small black and white striped couch, a black leather Eames lounge chair, and a low, plain pine coffee table. The couch was more of a love seat in length, and, if he sat there and she chose to sit beside him, they would be practically kissing every time they looked at each other. The Eames chair was a tempting cowardly alternative, but he made the brave move and settled on the couch. He found it to be very uncomfortable, too low for his long, skinny legs. Nor did he have room for his feet, because the coffee table’s base had a shallow shelf that prevented him from stretching out. As a consequence, his knees rose higher. He felt like a praying mantis, or an abandoned puppet collapsed into an awkward jumble of confused limbs. He wanted to turn sideways, put one knee up on the couch to have more room to extend his legs, but that would force Margaret to sit all the way over on the Eames chair, which, for kissing purposes, might as well be across the Atlantic Ocean.

Then it occurred to him that his selection of the couch wasn’t the end of the issue: What if she sat in the Eames chair? At that moment she appeared to say, “The water will only be a couple minutes. Do you take milk?” She made a worried face. “I don’t think I have any.”

“No milk?” Enrique was surprised. Milk was about the only thing he had in his refrigerator.

“You take milk with your coffee,” she deduced and ducked
back into the kitchen. He heard the
whoosh
of the refrigerator unsealing its vacuum. “Shit. Sorry. I have some vanilla ice cream. Should I put it in your coffee?” Her top half reappeared, leaning out with a pint of Breyers in her hand, a blue-eyed, freckle-faced girl eager to please.

“You drink your coffee black,” Enrique told her. She nodded warily. “You
are
macho. You are one macho girl.” He laughed at his own line, pleased in general and with himself. He could hear in her tone and see in every gesture how easy she felt about being alone with him. He relaxed and enjoyed a leisurely survey of her cheerful and puzzled face. He didn’t think he had the nerve to test whether she would recoil in horror at the touch of his lips, but he calmed down anyway.

“That doesn’t really make sense,” she said. “Macho girl?” She shook the pint. “My fingers are freezing. You want the ice cream?”

“I’ll take mine black. I can be just as tough as you.”

She disappeared again, returning without the ice cream, and ended the suspense of where she would sit. She didn’t choose the Eames chair or the couch beside him. Instead she perched on the small sofa’s free arm, the one nearest to the kitchen, presumably to be ready to finish making the coffee. Or maybe she liked the novelty of looking down at the tall Enrique. Either way, in his new optimistic turn of mind, he laughed out loud at his absurd calculations over something that was supposed to be accomplished with romantic grace. “Did I say something funny?” she asked.

“No.” He confessed the simple truth: “I’m having a really good time.”

For a long, disquieting moment, she gaped at him, great eyes round and startled. Her silence went on long enough that he wouldn’t have been surprised if she announced that actually she wasn’t all that entertained. He had forgotten what he’d learned about her; there would be no snappy comebacks. After careful
consideration, she said, “Me too. It’s really easy talking to you.” The kettle whistled. “That’s pretty rare,” she added as she left.

She emerged with a pot of coffee and cups, and at long last settled exactly where Enrique had hoped and feared, beside him on the couch, available to be kissed. Their talk resumed its steady and easy flow. When she asked him a question about his past, as an autobiographical writer he found it an easy matter for him to repeat set pieces while his mind was occupied with what truly fascinated it—the almost invisible row of freckles under each of her exquisite eyes, the slight pout of her pale pink lips, the quick way her chin could soften from a stern angle with a smile. When she turned to sip her coffee, talking before and after a swallow in her eagerness to tell him something, he could almost feel his hungry lips nestle in the soft hollow of her white neck and climb, kiss by kiss, to those sly lips to quiet their restless language.

On his side, he had a last question to ask her. It wasn’t a question he could ask with words. The worry of receiving the wrong answer mounted and mounted until, although it made no sense given what they were talking about—the Black Panther takeover of the Straight at Cornell on her side, Enrique’s attendance at Bobby Seale and Erica Huggins’s trial in New Haven on his—when there was a pause, he shifted his whole body on the sofa, moving a few inches toward her until their thighs touched and leaned in.

He halted halfway to his goal. Margaret fell silent. A sober darkness came into her bright blue eyes. She gazed down at his lips as if evaluating how they might taste. He had gone too far to retreat. He moved in close, scared to breathe. She didn’t encourage him. She offered no clue as to whether she would part her lips in welcome or open them wide to scream.

He touched them tentatively and with exquisite gentleness, as if they might attack. He shut his eyes, overwhelmed to be so close
to her depthless oceans, and pressed harder now that no violent resistance had occurred. Her body yielded, lips parting, the liquid of her mouth bathing his in a brief immersion, only to seal up again and press back. He shifted closer, one arm maneuvering around her slim shoulder, his nose brushing against hers as they opened to each other in unison and, in a wonderful illusion, seemed for a split second to no longer have a beginning or ending. Their mouths shut, satisfied by their brief unity, and he moved off, a smile blossoming. She was not smiling. She regarded him with solemn contemplation. He waited for an answer to his question: May I continue?