A Happy Marriage Read online

  Enrique had no idea what Max meant. Margaret’s cancer had taught him that making assumptions or deductions could easily lead to error, that it was always prudent to ask questions, so he asked his baby boy what fat pads are. “Fat pads, Dad, like this one.” Max grabbed a hunk of fat near his father’s hip and lower back that Enrique hadn’t realized was there. “Hers are gone,” he said and frowned.

  “Well she’s always been thin—” Enrique began.

  Max shook his head. “No, Dad. You’re skinny and you have fat pads.” Max pinched the lump of flesh again, painfully, and Enrique twisted away. “Sorry,” Max apologized for hurting his father. “Fat pads are for storage, Dad. You only use them when you’re starving. Mom doesn’t have any left.”

  After that exchange, Enrique stopped wondering why Margaret’s expeditions consisted of nothing more adventurous than a slow walk around the block. For a woman who had relished fast-paced hikes, hours of tennis or painting in her studio, a morning at the Met for inspiration, an afternoon at Costco for toilet paper and cans of tuna, a day of gossiping and volunteering with other mothers at her sons’ former or current schools, for that energetic Margaret, who would hop on the balls of her feet with sheer pleasure if you proposed doing something entertaining, an out-of-breath stagger didn’t seem like activity.

  For Enrique, TPN felt like a full-time occupation. Supplies were delivered to their apartment building twice weekly, always on time, although Enrique waited for them with an anxious uncertainty, betrayed by the ferocity with which he immediately tore open the boxes to make sure everything was there. In their bedroom, the stuff lined a six-foot-long wall to a height of three feet. Enrique walked to Staples on Union Square and bought a half dozen stackable plastic file-storage units. He threw out the folders inside, using the units as bins to sort and store the bags of saline hydration, the requisite packages of sterile tubing, sterile gloves, sterile syringes, sterile caps for the plastic attachments to her chest port, the sterilizing sticks to clean its see-through adhesive bandage, and a dozen other bits of paraphernalia that produced two bags of garbage he carried to the hall chute each day. There were three bins for the TPN tubing and various bottles of antacid and vitamins that Enrique had to inject into large, translucent bags of nutrition. He stored them in a small refrigerator he bought at P.C. Richard on Fourteenth Street, nodding pleasantly at the salesman’s assumption that Enrique was purchasing it for his son’s NYU dorm. By then, their bedroom, with its IV pole and sterile packages, looked as much like a home as Sloan’s imitation of a luxury suite resembled a hotel.

  The labor of being a TPN nurse was both dull and terrifying for Enrique: the meticulous hand washing, the weird hot and slimy feel of the gloves, the care to make sure he didn’t puncture the bag or himself when adding ingredients or attaching the tubing, the danger of contaminating something in the dozen or so steps that required sterility since Margaret could easily end up with a one-hundred-four-degree-plus fever. He was vigilant, although he no longer feared that a repeat of one of her infections would kill her, as he had in the early days of her fight, when cure was a real possibility. The end was inevitable and very near. She had to die of something because cancer does not kill alone. It kills with accomplices, so why not a sepsis? The reason he continued to dread an infection as the particular assassin was that he could not bear to watch her once again shiver and bake, eyes dulling, soft moans for rescue escaping as her brow broke into a fine sweat, her mind melting into delirium.

  That was a death to be avoided, he thought, although what death to hope for he did not, and could not, imagine. That subject was as great a taboo as any Enrique had lived with in his fifty years. He didn’t think about her dead; he didn’t contemplate a future without Margaret. He understood that she would die, and die soon, but he also knew that he didn’t truly believe her life could end. He had waited a year for his father to succumb to a terminal cancer, and he had learned from the surprise he felt at the event that no warning of the incredible fact of mortality could adequately prepare the primitive brain nature had given him to comprehend its finality.

  Five months into the TPN routine, her days were spent lying on the living room couch watching Law & Order reruns, punctuated only by ventures to the bathroom, pushing the aluminum IV pole with its liter bag of hydration as if it were holding her up; nights she was plugged into the pump of milky fluid entering her veins. On May 10, Margaret greeted Enrique on his return from the supermarket with tears running down her face. He had bought frozen fruit bars so she could have the pleasure of tasting something sweet that wouldn’t clog the narrow passage of her stomach PEG. He had already opened the package to offer a choice of orange or strawberry, but he was silenced by the sight of her despair. Though her tears continued to flow, her voice rang with conviction: “I can’t do this. I can’t live like this. I can’t go on being tethered to a bag for half the day. I can’t stand not eating with you and the boys and our friends. I know it sounds so stupid, so trivial, so small, but I can’t live like this.”

  He felt the box begin to drip on his jeans. He wanted to put the bars in the freezer because if they melted he didn’t know if he could summon the energy to walk to the supermarket again. But he couldn’t turn away from this statement. He had known for over a year, when her cancer returned in March, that she was almost certain to die. Last September, on hearing the news of her second recurrence and that there were no therapies with a promise of success, Margaret had decided to stop seeking experimental treatments, to try to enjoy whatever time she had left. He had agreed with her decision and felt a guilty relief that at least some of the horrors of the hospital could be skipped. There would be time, perhaps a few months, to commune with their sons, to sleep once more in their summer house on the Maine coast, to visit with friends somewhere other than waiting rooms. They tried to plan what final things to do; and then, on the sixth day, she changed her mind. She couldn’t give up; to live without hope wasn’t life. “I don’t want to do a farewell tour,” she said.

  Enrique agreed instantly to this reversal, this time relieved that they wouldn’t be passing up a chance for a miracle. In truth, he could find no comfortable place to sit in the company of her illness. He would feel guilt and shame no matter how he behaved. She was going to die and he was not; in the undeclared war of marriage, it was an appalling victory.

  Since September he had lived with a modest hope: to assuage the keen awareness that she must let go of all the things and people she loved. Nothing grand, or as preposterous as the luminous conclusions of sentimental movies. His ambition since last fall had been to lift a single grain of the tonnage of her grief at saying good-bye to life. Listening to her while the red-and orange-colored frozen fruit bars melted onto his blue jeans, he knew he would fail.

  She asked him to call her various doctors and push them to attempt something, no matter how dangerous, to restore her to normal eating.

  Enrique made his rounds. Her urological surgeon, usually accommodating, begged off with the reasonable excuse that it wasn’t his specialty. The Iraqi gastroenterologist refused to recommend anyone from his department, stating nothing could or should be done; he insisted she could survive on TPN indefinitely while they searched for a new drug to cure her. Her oncologist did consult with the appropriate specialist, but came back to report that the only possible procedure was unlikely to relieve her gastroparesis. The end-to-end anastomosis he cited certainly sounded like a desperate improvisation: attempting to circumvent her blocked digestive tract by taking a lower, cleared loop of bowel and hooking it up to her stomach. Besides, as each specialist implied with the sentence “It wouldn’t be addressing her disease,” what was the point of a risky surgery to restart her digestion when she would die whether or not they succeeded?

  Margaret wore them down. For Enrique it was a grim amusement to watch her work her formidable will on men other than himself and his sons, especially to see these white-coated grandees of medicine, accustomed to patients accepting their rat
ionalizations as incontestable, finally give way to her insistence on the value of the operation to her. “Even if it means I can have just one more meal with my husband,” she explained, lying in a bed at Sloan a few days later. She was addressing the chief of oncology, a blood cancer specialist who had treated a celebrity friend of Enrique’s. He had taken a fancy to Margaret two years ago, when they were introduced shortly after the start of her treatments, enjoying the apparent paradox of her cynical evaluations of the abilities of her various doctors with a sweet optimism that their treatments would succeed. He was an administrator powerful enough to make a Sloan-Kettering surgeon do almost anything. He listened to Margaret’s plea, then turned to regard Enrique, squinting hard, as if peering through a microscope to discover what made having dinner with this bald, middle-aged writer worth enduring an abdominal surgery that was unlikely to work.

  “I don’t think having dinner with me is the crucial part,” Enrique explained. “She’d be happy to have dinner with anyone.”

  Margaret laughed, although tears were running down her face, and added, “That’s right. I don’t care who you invite to dinner, I just want to have dinner.”

  The head of oncology told her that he and the Iraqi Jew would get her a surgeon, but first he had to provide cover for them all by bringing in the psychiatric department for a consult.

  Enrique listened while she explained her desperate logic to a thoughtful shrink with a salt-and-pepper version of Bozo the Clown’s hairdo. He nodded sympathetically as she said, “I had a life. I had a husband and children and friends. Now I lie in bed all day and I can’t think. I can’t even read a murder mystery. All I can do is watch stupid fucking episodes of Law and Order.”

  “There’s nothing else on television,” the somber Bozo said. After a silence, while Margaret wiped tears off her cheeks and blew her nose, the psychiatrist added, “I guess people like the show.”

  “Because it’s about death with no emotion,” Enrique mumbled. Used to her husband’s cranky cultural observations, Margaret ignored him and repeated, “It’s stupid. It’s such a stupid life. It’s not living. I want my life back,” she cried out and heaved with sobs. “I don’t care if I die trying, I don’t care how long it lasts. I don’t care if it’s only for one day. I want my life back.”

  The psychiatrist prescribed Zoloft and affirmed that she was of sound mind to make an informed decision. The chief of oncology and the Iraqi Jew persuaded the ruddy-cheeked colleague to perform the surgery—although in return for this concession they all insisted that Margaret also agree to the PEJ, inserting a tube into her small bowel, so that they could improve on TPN’s intravenous method with an upgrade to enteric feeding if the rerouted plumbing of her stomach didn’t work. Enrique wondered whether Dick Wolf, executive producer of all Law & Orders, would be bothered to learn that a team of medical experts had concurred with Margaret’s judgment that watching his creations did not constitute having a life.

  That’s what had brought them back to Sloan in late May. The end-to-end anastomosis had failed. Using the PEJ for enteric feeding had also failed. Resuming TPN was her only option. She had lain these past three days, the first three of June, with Ativan’s glazed eyes, pupils dilated, staring with an inconsolable sadness that he had never seen in her before. Not when she turned to him on their terrace two years and nine months ago as the first mushroom cloud from the World Trade Center blossomed in their direction and said, “We’re watching thousands of people die.” Not when she was first told that she had cancer, or that it had come back, or that it had come back again, or that there was nothing else to be done. There had been the flint of anger on those occasions, a willingness to engage and contend with the future. But this morning, this gloomy morning when she knew that her stomach would never work again, that there was nothing to do but lie there and die, her big blue eyes gazed at him from her narrow face and revealed a look of pure pain from deep in her soul, a nakedness more profound than flesh. “I need this to stop,” she whispered to him without a hello or a preamble. “I can’t do it anymore. I’m sorry, Puff,” she said using the endearment she had invented for him in the first year of their love. “I can’t do this anymore.”

  He knew what she meant, but pretended he didn’t. “Yeah.” He kicked at the pump and its narrow tubing filled with last night’s backed-up gruel. “This is done. We’ll go back to the TPN.”

  She shook her head. “You have to help me. Please.” Tears fell without effort or interruption, as they did these days, water running from a faucet. “I want to die. You have to help me die.”

  He couldn’t answer right away. And in that paralyzed silence, he realized there was something in his brain which—despite all the hours spent learning about survival rates and the nature of metastasis, despite closely watching his father die of prostate cancer—he hadn’t known he would lose, this something in his head that had been present since Bernard Weinstein rang his doorbell twenty-nine years ago. In this silence of her silent, flowing tears, he realized that it was something essential which soon would be gone, and that it was more than simply the expectation that Margaret would stay alive. He had no word for it. A note of music, perhaps it was his name being called, something he didn’t always enjoy, something he had grabbed for rescue, something he had possessed with pleasure, something he had resented with anger. In the carpeted silence of this luxury room of disease, he felt it depart for a moment, a preview of his robbed future, and he understood that this was real in a way nothing should ever be real, that their marriage was a mystery he was going to lose, despite twenty-seven years living inside it, before he understood who they were.

  chapter three

  Public School

  IT OCCURRED TO Enrique, sometime around five in the morning, that although the package was enticing and in excellent condition, Bernard had failed miserably in his role as a deliveryman. He had failed in this crucial respect: by not departing. It was clear—at least to Enrique—that there was an almost palpable current of excitement running between himself and Margaret, that something had kept her talking long after Saturday Night Live. If that weren’t enough of a clue, when they ran out of cigarettes and Mateus at four-forty-seven in the morning, and Margaret greeted Enrique’s suggestion that they walk over to Sheridan Square for breakfast at Sandolino’s with an enthusiastic, “Great idea! I can be decadent and have challah French toast,” surely then it ought to have been clear to Bernard if he had any novelistic feeling at all for subtleties of character, that this woman, with whom Bernard had had a handful of dinners since their graduation from college three years ago, all ending well before midnight, had been lured not by French toast, no matter how blessedly Jewish the bread, but by Enrique. Surely if Bernard had any grace he would excuse himself and let Enrique journey with Margaret to Sheridan Square as rosy-fingered dawn crept into lower Manhattan, casting Enrique, he hoped, in a romantic light.

  But Bernard leapt at the opportunity for a predawn breakfast, and that made them a party of three—not that they had to wait for the scarred surface of one of Sandolino’s pine tables at five-fifteen am. There were only six other customers present, although this twenty-four-hour comfort-food establishment was convenient to the pre-AIDS gay bars and clubs to the west, NYU students to the east, artists to the south, tourists to the north, and depressed writers from all directions.

  Annoyed and disappointed that he had failed to jettison Bernard, Enrique nevertheless remained hopeful, having faith in his conversational endurance and especially comforted by the geographic logic of their eventual farewells. Their way home from Sandolino’s put their apartments in this order: Bernard’s first, at Eighth Street near Sixth, then Enrique’s close by, but still somewhat farther east, at Eighth Street near MacDougal, and Margaret’s last, at Ninth Street east of University Place. They would say good-bye to Bernard, whereupon Enrique would gallantly offer to escort the single girl to her door and make evident that his interest had gone well beyond establishing the mere existence of Marga
ret Cohen.

  Enrique and Margaret kept up a lively dialogue while Bernard said little. When she had dispatched three-quarters of her challah French toast, she pushed the plate to the side and leaned forward to resume her mock interrogation, abandoned over five hours ago, about the extent of Enrique’s education. She asked whether he had completed elementary school. Enrique triumphantly announced that he was a graduate of P.S. 173.

  “What! Nooo!” Margaret shrieked, extending the o to indicate amazement while her delicate fingers touched the dark hairs on Enrique’s left forearm, which rested on the distressed wood table between his coffee mug and hers. Her tips brushed his hairs lightly and remained hovering just above. Enrique felt as if each follicle was standing on end, pitifully pleading for continued and firmer contact. He looked down to see what was actually happening. This evaluating gaze caused Margaret to appear self-conscious about having touched him. She raised her eyes to look into his, and for the second time Enrique felt a shock of sensation, something more than sexual excitement. She must have misinterpreted his look, because she immediately withdrew as if he’d rebuked her. “That’s impossible,” she declared.

  “Me going to P.S. 173 impossible?” Enrique wondered aloud. “Not only possible. Really easy. I lived across the street.”

  “But I went to P.S. 173!” Margaret declared, the elongated oval of her face framing the purer ovals of her astonished eyes. This was a look he would witness countless times, Margaret peering in wonderment at a fact which confounded or delighted.

  Enrique said nothing for a moment. Margaret and Bernard had been in the same class at Cornell, which meant that she was three or four years older than precocious Enrique, who had left home at sixteen. He became friendly with people who were between four and eight years older than he because he had little choice; his contemporaries were in high school for at least two more years and away at college for another four. With more years of experience at living a so-called adult life, Enrique ought to have felt surer of himself; but he still possessed the skittish insecurities of an adolescent. Females were utterly strange to him, despite his having lived with a woman for over three years. He had read all of Balzac’s novels, so he did know that no matter how young the woman, it was never correct to remind her that you were younger. He tried a neutral remark: “Um, so you were at 173 at the same time I was?”