Authors: Rafael Yglesias
Their conversation became a tête-à-tête, removed from Phil’s relentless assault on bourgeois values—which had evolved into an argument between him and Margaret and Lily. Pam’s life story was sufficiently banal to allowed Enrique to eavesdrop on the main conversation without losing track of her narrative. He heard Margaret challenge Phil. “Of course most doctors, maybe all of them, want to make money. That’s not so terrible. But some, like Brad Corwin, really care. He’s doing that program in rural Virginia, right, Lily?”
Enrique’s attentiveness to Pam did fail when Lily insisted that there were even lawyers who do good. “Like you, Phil.
J’accuse!
” Lily said with a flourish, raising her hand in the sweeping gesture that was becoming familiar to Enrique. “You’re a legal aid lawyer. You defend the poor for way less than you could get for defending the rich.”
Amazed, Enrique interrupted Pam to ask her, “He’s a legal aid lawyer?”
“What?” Pam said. She had been explaining that the main problem in teaching wasn’t unruly students, poor supplies, or overcrowding but all the time she spent herding the kids.
“Phil works for legal aid?” Enrique whispered past her to the skinny man dressed in black who was not Bernard. He nodded. Enrique said to Pam, “I’m sorry. Herding—that’s funny. You’re right, that’s all I remember from first grade. Lining up. And I was always last.” Until that moment, a corner of Enrique’s mind had been comforting him with the thought that, although Phil might
have the inside track, or all of Margaret’s tracks, Enrique could contend with this half-assed lefty. Yes, Phil was more handsome than Enrique, more self-confident. He had probably conquered Margaret already, but Enrique had felt sure that he was the person engaged in the more noble endeavor. Now he knew that was not so. Phil wasn’t a poseur, he provided actual help to the oppressed. Indeed, Phil was someone Enrique felt compelled to admire as much as his own half brother, Leo, once the Students for a Democratic Society steering committee leader of the Columbia University strike and now dedicated to supporting the Panthers in their various trials. More than Phil’s easy familiarity with Margaret’s hips in the kitchen, the weight of this revelation crushed Enrique. Phil was simply the better man.
Yet defeat, certain and absolute defeat in a triviality like love, didn’t feel like disaster to young Enrique. It was nothing compared to the shame of a second novel that received fewer reviews and achieved half the sales of his first. Yes, the cheerful girl with perfect thighs and laughing eyes was a prize. But not the important one.
It had all become clear. The comforting omniscience of a third-person narrator was restored to his anxious head. The true objective of Margaret’s Orphans’ Dinner appeared out of the fog and loomed like a forlorn lighthouse: she wanted to fix him up with the pleasant and dull Pam. He ceased perspiring underneath his wool sweater tent. The cotton cloth of his Brooks Brothers white shirt came unstuck from his skin and began to dry. His breathing deepened and eased. His legs and back relaxed from their alert crouch in the male jungle, fearing an attack while planning one. He could see his place and his path. He gave his attention to the chatty Pam, shifting his shoulders to face her as squarely as he could, bearing down with his brown eyes—what Sylvie, in an ardent moment, had called doe eyes—deaf and blind to Margaret
and her warriors. He glanced away only once, reaching for his wineglass to drain the last drop of Margaux, and caught Margaret peering at him and Pam with satisfaction—he presumed—that her plan had succeeded.
He returned his attention to Pam with the dismal thought that his hostess was correct. This was the sort of lackluster and harmless girl he deserved. Real men of action and good deeds, such as Phil, merited what was so far away at the end of the table, so much farther than the six feet itself: that gleaming white skin and its adorable sprinkling of freckles, the laughing mouth and bold voice, those dancing blue eyes and the blue jeans their owner filled so nicely. And it was not so bad, really. It would make very little difference to his life, to his real life—the conquering of literature—that this was the last evening he would spend with Margaret.
M
ARGARET WAS NOT
the first to ask where she would be buried, or to raise the subject of what arrangements would be made for her funeral. Her parents did that, shortly after they gave up protesting against her decision to stop all treatments.
They came to Sloan-Kettering to make their case the morning after Margaret announced she wanted to die. Because her release had been delayed overnight to set up her home hospice care, they hoped to convince her to stay and resume her desperate measures. Their arguments were washed away by Margaret’s flash flood of tears and pleas that they not fight her. She recited the medical procedures that she had endured in an attempt to extend her life, and illustrated the misery of her current enfeebled and joyless existence by lifting her white and powder blue hospital gown to reveal the hole in her belly where a thick, clear tube emerged,
about an inch and a half in diameter, and a second wound for the insertion of another tube into her small bowel. This was an act of cruel immodesty that she had previously spared her parents. Dorothy and Leonard had not cared for her physically during her long illness. Because Margaret had insisted they stay at their winter home in Florida during her surgical recovery and for the harshest of her chemotherapies, they didn’t know her struggle as a visual. Enrique—not to be sadistic but to prepare them for the shock of seeing her—had been e-mailing descriptions of her procedures for nine months. Nevertheless, the sight of the bare, battered flesh of one’s child, albeit a fifty-three-year-old woman, had an effect.
Although Margaret covered herself up quickly, Enrique felt sorry about the pain in her father’s collapsed cheeks and the horror on her mother’s frozen face, her head held high and still. Tears appeared in their blue eyes. Both had contributed to their daughter’s brilliant sum: Dorothy shared Margaret’s round shape, yet her color was paler; the deeper violet hues of Margaret’s eyes loomed beneath Leonard’s soulful lids. Because she couldn’t eat at all, Margaret had finally managed to sustain a thinner figure than the lean racing form of her mother. Cancer had also narrowed Margaret’s version of her father’s round face, and she had lost his still thick, curly hair. As always they were well-dressed, with a touch of formality compared to most hospital visitors. Dorothy stood in her gray wool skirt and taut black cashmere top beside Leonard in his beige trousers, white button-down oxford, and blue blazer—neat and as attentive as scolded schoolchildren. While their daughter continued her lament, they listened in mute anguish with quivering chins, moist eyes, and paralyzed chests, as if they weren’t drawing in any air. They were trying hard not to weep, presumably in the belief their tears would make Margaret feel worse, although they would, in fact, have made her feel loved.
Enrique searched their faces to see if that need had dawned on them. Finding only despair and dread, he wondered if, for the first time in his thirty-year relationship with Dorothy and Leonard, he dared speak with utter honesty about how they should treat her. Margaret didn’t want them to argue about her decision to die, or to maintain this forbearance to show their grief. What she longed to receive from them was acceptance and admiration. When his wife finished her monologue, exhausted, she hid in the crook of Enrique’s arm (she had asked him to lie beside her when her parents entered) and peered out from this shelter, a wary animal. It was Enrique who was left to study her parents.
Although Leonard’s and Dorothy’s emotional responses often seemed somewhat childlike to Enrique’s intricate and unsentimental mind, he knew her parents were exceptionally smart. They did not repeat their clichéd and well-intentioned pleas for her to continue “the fight” when confronted with overwhelming evidence that there was no fight to fight. They dabbed their wet eyes—Leonard with a handkerchief fished from his back pocket, Dorothy with a tissue she pulled out of a box on the bedside tray—in a chastened silence. Dorothy walked over stiffly and gave her daughter a hurried and awkward embrace, afraid she’d lose the composure that she seemed to think she ought to display. They were overmatched by the situation and ill-equipped to comfort her, but they loved their daughter and were too intelligent to fuss.
Enrique felt deep sorrow for them, for the first time without a mixture of annoyance at their clumsiness. Of course he had often felt sorry for them during the two years and eight months since, confused and terrified himself, he had phoned with the scalding news. But there was usually an aftertaste of resentment that they couldn’t help him soothe Margaret; that other than financially, they were unhelpful. And yet their money had been a powerful
tool, more useful in the world of illness than in daily life, and in its way as soothing as love. At least they had not, as had his mother, burdened him with the additional task of comforting them.
Enrique knew that Dorothy and Leonard would never thoroughly understand him. Just as he could not thoroughly understand them, or rather how they had lived so long, learned so much, seen so much, and yet reacted to feelings as if they were brand-new purchases that didn’t fit inside the room for which they were bought. Enrique had accepted that he was an odd fellow in general and an even odder fellow to people as reserved, cautious, and practical as Dorothy and Leonard. He could tell that they had been surprised by his devotion to their daughter during her illness. That meant they had underestimated his feelings for her in the first place. Perhaps they had always believed that for Enrique it was a sensible, not a passionate marriage: Margaret raised by a stable, well-to-do family, while he came from a reckless, divorced, impoverished knot of neuroses; Margaret quitting work to raise his sons, painting only occasionally, and allowing Enrique to command the stage as the family “artist.” Perhaps they assumed that he would have a hard time putting her first. Perhaps they had not understood that for a long time she had come first with him, that for many years she had been his heart’s home and his mind’s anchor and that fighting to keep her alive was essential to preserving his own soul. In this hopeless and clumsy silence, they, the adults who loved Margaret more than anyone, had something in common so profound that for the first time Enrique felt in his blood, rather than in the empty phrases of marriage toasts, that these once strangers had become his family.
His new bond lulled him into a gross and unprecedented error with Leonard a few minutes later. When Margaret announced that she had to go to the bathroom, Dorothy uncharacteristically
offered to help her out of the bed, which entailed moving the various bags to the IV pole, an unsightly chore. Margaret, in turn, uncharacteristically agreed. Leonard was kicked out into the hallway, presumably to spare him the sight of his daughter in immodest garb. Enrique, at a nod from Margaret, trailed after her father, recognizing that his wife wanted to welcome her mother’s exceptional offer to be a nursemaid. Margaret had rejected all offers by her mother to be an attendant for the discomforts of recovery and treatments. She did so to spare her mother the sight and sound of her pain, and to spare herself the exertion of resisting Dorothy’s anxious need to control the planning and handing of every situation. “I have Puff. He’s all I need,” she would say. “And he can take it, poor baby, he’s as strong as an ox,” and thus at once ennoble and pity him.
Following Leonard’s hunched back and tortoise pace out into the carpeted elegance of the nineteenth floor, Enrique was amused by the realization that he had been momentarily transported into the duties of the previous generation of men—allowed to leave and discuss the great matters of the world while urine bags and soiled gowns were emptied and changed by women. Once they were clear of being overheard, Leonard turned toward him with a little stumble, catching Enrique’s forearm to right himself. From the firm set of downturned lips and the intent look in his soulful eyes, he signaled that he was about to raise an important matter. Invariably that meant something financial. Enrique instantly feared it would be about their apartment.
Eighteen years ago, at the birth of their second child, Margaret and her parents had insisted (without a strenuous objection from Enrique) that they move from their affordable, rent-stabilized, nine-hundred-dollar-a-month two-bedroom, into a three-bedroom, so they wouldn’t add to the insult of their four-and-a-half-year-old losing his only-child status with the injury of sharing his
space. A few years before, Leonard had sold the business he’d founded and reaped millions. He and Dorothy offered to buy a condominium Margaret wanted that, at eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars, was out of reach for Enrique. Indeed, when Leonard asked if they could afford eighteen hundred a month to cover the maintenance, and Margaret said yes, Enrique knew her confidence was overstated, given the vicissitudes of his career. Margaret had a steady job that paid well, eighty thousand, but wasn’t enough to cover all their expenses as it was, and certainly not if they more than doubled their monthly charges. Enrique thought that it was wrong for them to live in a place her parents owned, that they ought to get a mortgage, albeit with Dorothy’s and Leonard’s cosignatures, since no bank would approve otherwise. But that was pride, not sense talking; there was no hope he could pay both the expenses and a loan. Margaret dismissed his feint toward self-reliance. “This is my inheritance,” she said. “I’m just getting it early.”
Her mother discreetly echoed that view of their generosity by saying how wrong she thought it was “for rich people to hang on to their wealth until they die. What for? Do they want their children to be looking forward to their death?” She laughed, as if this were a punch line, rather than a psychological insight worthy of a perverse Balzac. This view of the situation overlooked the fact that the money wasn’t being given to Margaret; the use of the property was the gift, but the property itself remained in Dorothy and Leonard’s possession, and Enrique knew why they wanted it that way.
He had turned thirty, their marriage was seven years old, and the careful, pragmatic, and cynical Dorothy and Leonard must have been aware that this union, despite its happy issue of two grandsons, could end in divorce. It would be better for the apartment to be kept out of contention in whatever greedy acrimony
might result. Enrique approved of their caution, because as a novelist he admired the weight given to such considerations of unromantic materialism by Zola, Dickens, and Balzac. He envied nineteenth-century writers for having lived in a time that permitted literature to be detailed about such concerns. Considering himself from that literary vantage, Margaret’s parents shouldn’t trust him. A gangly, broke, egomaniacal novelist working in Hollywood could easily get a swelled head and a swelled member at the flattery and fresh skin of an ambitious actress, or a devious development executive, and leave their daughter saddled with two children. He might, if the apartment were in both their names, claim he owed her less alimony. God only knows what maneuvers a divorce lawyer might dream up.
Dorothy and Leonard didn’t know that Enrique was incapable of making things so acrimonious for the mother of his inheritors. Pride in his sons and fear of damaging them would stay his hand. That his wife’s parents didn’t automatically understand this facet of his nature didn’t hurt his feelings, although it was a blow to his ego. Even more to the point, they could not know, nor did Margaret, that by thirty Enrique had already survived an emotionally dangerous affair. He had been crazy with desire. He had stared long and hard at ending his marriage because of the liaison. He had made a deliberate choice to reject both passion and action, the most painful decision of his young life. He alone knew, as best as one could know the future, that his marriage would not end that way.
When the boys were eleven and seven and their father thirty-eight, Enrique finally had a financial success. He adapted his seventh novel into a screenplay that was shot by one of the world’s most talented directors, and that led to more lucrative deals and four more films being produced. In spite of the steep increase in New York real estate, Enrique could afford to buy the apartment
from Dorothy and Leonard for the two million or so it was worth, although the purchase would have emptied his bank accounts, and added a large mortgage. He proposed to Margaret that they offer to buy it. She repeated her logic: “No, this is my inheritance. It doesn’t really concern you, Puff. They’re giving it to me. This is their way of doing it.”
Until Margaret was terminal, none of this mattered much to Enrique, though he was aware of the psychological component of two adults being “infantilized” by living as tenants of their parents, no matter how generous the terms. In the eight months following Margaret’s second recurrence, however, it had come into Enrique’s mind that he was going to be a widower living in his dead wife’s parents’ apartment.
He didn’t see how he could extricate himself from an arrangement that had anticipated all sorts of unhappy endings to his marriage except the one that was about to occur. He couldn’t simply move out. Max, their youngest, would be going to college in the fall, only eight weeks after his mother’s death. He would return home for five months each year. He had lived his entire life in the apartment. He was about to lose his mother. Should Enrique move him out of the only home he’d known?
Enrique could offer to use all of his savings to buy the place, but he hadn’t worked for most of the previous three years because of Margaret’s illness and he had just turned fifty, the age at which most screenwriters begin to see a rapid decline in their incomes. His career as a novelist was shaky in general and held no promise of wealth. Margaret’s expected inheritance, whether it was the apartment or some sum of money, would go directly to his sons. Enrique knew, no matter what he might feel or declare to them, that Leonard and Dorothy would expect a fifty-year-old widower to remarry. Their prudent cynicism, not to mention evolutionary imperatives, would dictate that their money circumvent him to
their bloodline. Enrique wanted it that way as well. He wanted to be free, should he ever fall in love again, to let his new wife be as greedy as Margaret in her love, and expect him to take care of her. The rights to his books and his parents’ books, and the house in Maine that Margaret and he had bought and built together, he would leave to his sons. That such an inheritance was not worth much in dollars would be made up for by their maternal grandparents’ wealth. The idea of putting all his money into a three-bedroom apartment in order to preserve an illusion for Max worried Enrique. This combination of financial pressure and the calamity of Margaret’s death felt like a huge stone on his shoulders. Could he carry that weight at all, much less for years? It was a question he didn’t contemplate for more than a few bewildered seconds because it was premised on an event that, no matter how imminent, still seemed unreal. Life after these next, last two weeks of Margaret’s life had no shape or sound. Rather than contemplate being either homeless or broke, Enrique stopped thinking about the future at all.