A Happy Marriage (26 page)

At long last, after decades of fussing, having watched his father die slowly, and now the mother of his children waste away, he was convinced that death was more than the neatest way to resolve a character’s story, that death was, in fact, real. He understood, right into the nucleus of every one of his brain cells, that he and everyone on the earth would soon be gone. With that knowledge beside him all day and every night, it rang false to stay angry about anything, including death, since death was, after all, the most evenhanded consequence of being alive.

He lay beside Margaret, basking in the glow of her praise, happy to have his frail wife warming herself on him as though he were a comforting fire, and felt ready to begin to say good-bye himself. It wasn’t time for their last conversation, but he had a preliminary speech. First, he wanted to thank her for saying that what she would miss of life above all was being with him and his sons. And then he wanted to say something that might sound cruel at first. He wanted to tell her that, until the week she was diagnosed, he didn’t know for sure if he was in love with her. He had met her so young, they had had children so young, he had been so unhappy with himself when they were young, and he’d had no way of know
ing how much was love and how much was the lazy drift of daily life. He had assumed he loved her, but he hadn’t known to a certainty until he was faced with the terror, the fact, and the drudgery of her illness. Only then did he know, by being presented with the immediate, tactile reality, that he would do whatever was necessary to keep her alive, including giving up his precious writing, and sex, and money, and what was left of his vanity. He would have surrendered all, except their sons, to keep her with him. “Mugs,” he whispered and drew a deep breath, prepared to be honest and risk frightening her for a minute about the ignorance in which he had lived. Then he heard his half sister, Rebecca, call from downstairs: “Enrique? I’m sorry, Enrique? Are you up there?”

“I’m here,” he said. “What’s the matter?” Rebecca had taken excellent care of them during the illness and especially during these last weeks. She had stayed in the spare bedroom, spelled Enrique, comforted Margaret, provided soothing company for Max and for Margaret’s family. Her consideration for their feelings was precise and thoughtful. She wouldn’t interrupt them unless something was wrong.

It was his brother, she explained from the base of the stairs, or rather her brother, his half brother. Leo had called to say he was coming by in fifteen minutes with his son, Jonah, Max and Greg’s seventeen-year-old cousin, so that he could say good-bye to Margaret. “Oh my God,” Margaret mumbled in despair.

Enrique gently untangled from his wife so as not to tug on her stomach PEG. He walked to the head of the stairs. “What?” he asked, looking down at his sister. “Why the hell is he coming?”

Rebecca, abashed, stammered, “I’m sorry. I couldn’t stop him. He wouldn’t take no for an answer. I even lied and said it was Max’s time to be with Margaret today, but he said it’ll only take ten minutes.”

“Leo’s already said good-bye,” Enrique complained. “Every
body else gets one good-bye, he gets two? What is this, some kind of competition? Most deathbed visits—and the winner is Leo Rosen.”

Rebecca laughed at Enrique’s mockery of their brother’s self-importance. From the bed he heard Margaret release a staccato burst. In their entire marriage he had rarely succeeded at getting her even to smile thinly at one of his witticisms. The few belly laughs he’d won were in reaction to genuine pratfalls. Once he’d slipped on the recently waxed living room floor while carrying a glass of Diet Coke. The glass flew out of his hand and he landed flat on his back. From his prone position, he managed to catch the glass, an impressive save but for the fact that he had snagged it upside down. The fizzing contents emptied on his face. She laughed like that now.

Rebecca tried, as always, to make the best out of a bad situation, “I guess Leo thinks it’s important for Jonah to say good-bye. I mean, I know it’s sentimental, but that’s who he is, he’s very sentimental—”

“Jonah barely knows us,” Enrique complained. “He sees us once a year. Tops.”

“It’s okay,” Margaret called out.

“Do you not want me to let him up?” Rebecca offered. “I can tell him she’s asleep or Max is with her.”

“Yes, tell him to go away! Tell him Margaret’s with Max,” Enrique said. He wanted to return to his wife’s side and tell her how much she had ameliorated his life’s disappointments, how much of its daily pleasures she had granted him, and how much of what she had done for him he had taken unacknowledged; and that in the last decade, especially during these years while she was in remission and while she was ill, he had come to love her more deeply than ever; that along with their children she was what he most valued in life.

The intercom buzzed. “He’s here already?” Enrique asked, close to tears of frustration.

“He said he was fifteen minutes away.” Rebecca stamped her foot. “But you know Leo. He’s always half an hour late! I can’t believe this time he isn’t exaggerating.” She stood at attention. “I’ll tell him whatever you want.”

“For Chrissakes,” Enrique whined like a child, “he visited us in the hospital twice in three years.” He announced this complaint as if it were shocking news, although both Rebecca and Margaret knew it very well. “Now he’s come twice in two days to say good-bye?”

Margaret appeared in the doorway. Traveling the ten feet from the bed had exhausted her. She propped herself on the doorframe and gasped for breath: “Puff,” she pleaded. “Let him up.” The intercom buzzed again. He wanted to fight with her about this. His brother had deserted them at a time of their greatest need, as he had during other, albeit less painful stretches of Enrique’s life; and now he was stealing precious minutes of the time Enrique had left with her. His wife’s way of dealing with Leo’s narcissism—she would be chilly and excessively polite—was ineffective. The truly self-absorbed, like his brother, didn’t notice subtle cues of rejection; they required a punch in the nose.

Besides, with death only a few days away, why was she bothering to be civil at all? Enrique wanted to ask. He looked at her—eyebrows gone, hair a scouring pad, the bones of her elbows poking the skin, her left hand carrying a bag with the contents of her stomach, her right hand leaning on the wall as if she could hardly stand up—and he felt, as he had so often, that he was powerless to defy her. “I’ll get rid of him fast, Puff,” she tried to reassure him. “This time I won’t hide. I’ll stand up so he can see all of me. He won’t stay long, I promise you. Okay?” She sighed, exhausted, while the intercom buzzed a third time.

Enrique instructed Rebecca to let them up. He stood aside, a sentry in the corner. From the shock on Leo’s face, it was clear that Margaret had fooled him thoroughly when she’d prettified herself for his first good-bye. Leo averted his eyes from Margaret’s punctured torso while he delivered the sentimental speech that he had obviously prepared hours ago, and equally obviously felt vain about delivering. Enrique could tell, in the way Leo puffed up as he made his declaration, that he was looking forward to recounting to others the moving remarks he had made to his dying sister-in-law, and how loving and thoughtful Jonah had been in accompanying him. Leo told Margaret that he had been saying to Jonah how much he admired the way Margaret had raised Jonah’s cousins; that of all the mothers he knew, she had the most consistent and encouraging style, allowing Greg and Max to be independent and bold thinkers. It didn’t worry Leo that, by testifying to Margaret’s superiority, he might undermine his own son’s confidence in how well he had been raised by
his
mother. On the contrary, that was his gambit: he would get credit for praising a dying woman while launching a covert attack on his ex-wife.

Leo’s convoluted spitefulness would have been amusing to contemplate if Enrique weren’t so tired—in his flesh, in his bones, in his head and heart and soul. So tired that he forgot exactly what he had intended to say to Margaret other than how much he loved her, and that he hadn’t realize how much he loved her until he was about to lose her. Was that really what he wanted to say? It suddenly sounded stupid and cruel.

Margaret listened politely to her brother-in-law, gently lifting and tugging on the bag of green and orange stomach fluid to speed up the draining process, thereby calling attention to the repulsive liquid. The mixture was green from bile, orange from a frozen fruit bar and looked like radioactive waste. The way Leo’s eyes fled from the sight was laugh-out-loud funny, but all
Enrique could think about—instead of reconstructing the beautiful and truthful feeling that he had earlier wanted to proclaim to Margaret—was that this was what he had to look forward to: a world missing his controlled and controlling, beautiful and brave, fun and demanding, loving and reserved wife; but chock-full of needy narcissists like his brother, who, even at Margaret’s imminent death, was too busy settling scores to say a simple and loving endearment.

Was that the flaw in what he wanted to tell Margaret? he wondered as he accepted an awkward hug from his brother and nephew, escorted them downstairs, and held the front door open to make sure they left. Was he mired in the convoluted, self-referential posturing of his clever but useless family? Why not just say, I love you, I will miss you more than anything in life, and thank you for managing to love me, the difficult, childish, malformed me, thank you, thank you, thank you…

He didn’t get to say that either. The phone rang. Rebecca tried to handle it, and then Max appeared from his bedroom. Enrique had thought he was out, and was doubly surprised to see that a young woman was with him. She was introduced as Lisa. Max had referred to her a lot lately, although always as part of a group he was going out with. Enrique had never asked if they were a couple. He didn’t have to after this hello. Lisa looked up at Enrique with very large blue eyes in the center of a cheerful and kind face. He wanted to say “Congratulations,” to his son. Instead, like the dreary nag he had become, he asked, “I’ve reserved time for you with your mom tomorrow at noon. Are you on for that?”

Max nodded. He had raccoon eyes from lack of sleep, and his shoulders were always hunched these days, as if a perpetual cold wind were blowing on his back. “We have to go now,” he mumbled and tugged Lisa’s hand. She twirled happily, pleased to be his dance partner. She followed him out. “Nice to meet you,” she
called to Enrique with a smile that seemed to be apologizing for the brusqueness of Max’s pain.

In his heart, Max was still fighting his mother’s illness, but he had agreed to say good-bye at last. Enrique could tell that it remained a defeat his younger son would never fully accept.

Enrique had done his best to keep Margaret in the dark about Max’s reluctance, but she had sensed it anyway. He knew from the way she’d remarked with relief, “Good.” She’d whispered, “I hope I can keep it together with Maxy. It’s so hard with him, because I couldn’t finish”—her voice had broken—“because I couldn’t help him get into college, I couldn’t do anything for him. It was too hard.”

“You did more than enough for him,” Enrique had said, kissing her forehead.

“You did, Puff. You took great care of him.”

“I didn’t do shit,” Enrique’d said. “He did it. He did it all on his own.” Father and son had had a frank talk about a month into his mother’s illness, a conversation that he had never relayed to Margaret. Max was not an obedient boy like his older brother: he argued and teased his mother into keen irritation when she nagged him; and he didn’t have the slightest fear of her temper. In ninth grade he’d seemed to be preparing to give her hell through all of high school. The battle lines had already formed. She knew Max was every bit as smart as his older, straight-A brother, and Max knew that Margaret possessed the faith of all Jewish mothers that getting top grades was the best measure of a successful education. Max struck a series of ghastly blows at his mother during that spring term: he received two B pluses, putting his Ivy League future at risk. Then, a month into tenth grade, they were given early warning that his work in two courses was lax: he failed to hand in a paper in English and was unprepared for a test in math. Margaret was diagnosed a week later.

During the second week of his mother’s first course of chemo, Max took his father aside and asked how he could help. “Okay. I’ll be honest,” Enrique said. “I love your mother, you love your mother, but we both know she is insane about grades. She believes if you’re getting straight A’s, you’re okay. You could be mainlining heroin and burying bodies in your bathroom wall, but while she’s fighting to stay alive, if you get A’s she will believe that you’re okay. If you want to help me take care of her, you’ll do your schoolwork as well as you can.” That was the end of Max’s B pluses. Enrique believed that part of the reason Margaret could bear to face her death with grace and calm was that Max had gotten into Yale.

Lisa’s existence was the other news of Max that Enrique brought Margaret after he dealt with the phone call, which was from the hospice nurse, who wanted to move up his visit to check on Margaret and their supplies. Enrique didn’t say any of those grand things he was fussing about in his head. He informed his wife about Max’s girlfriend. For a little while they talked as if life was normal, Margaret grinning when Enrique reported that Lisa had big blue eyes. He managed to coax a second laugh out of her that day by adding, “They’re not as beautiful as yours.”

“But she’s nice? She’s sweet to him?”

“Yes,” Enrique said, although he knew nothing about her, and wasn’t even sure she was Max’s girlfriend. The hospice nurse arrived. And then Rebecca had to go home for a night and wanted to say good-bye just in case. And then Greg returned. And then Enrique gave his wife an intravenous dose of Ativan and prepared her for sleep. Greg woke him after he’d nodded off in front of another Mets loss on TV and said, “You’d better go to bed, Dad.” He got in beside his heavily asleep wife, kissing her head gently so as not to rouse her. And soon he woke up, as always, at five in the morning, feeling as though he hadn’t slept at all. He show
ered and shaved and ate a bowl of cereal and let Lily in for her morning visit. During this last week, Lily had dropped by on her way back and forth to work. Enrique went out for coffee and a stroll.