Authors: Rafael Yglesias
“You’re a real novelist. You’re published. And your parents are both writers. Bernard’s proud he knows you. It proves to all of us skeptics from Cornell that he’s in the game. You take him seriously. You’re for real. He brought me over to show you off.”
Enrique looked away from her big eyes, sparkling in the flickering yellow light of the table’s candle, to give himself a rest from their spell. Her words were a balm to his raw and worried ego. If he had been challenged, he would have guessed that out of earshot
Bernard disparaged him. He didn’t appreciate how bruised he was by the world’s reaction to his precocity, how wary he was of his uncertain future. He was three months away from the publication of his third novel, and he knew its prospects were poor. The first printing was only five thousand copies, there was no ad budget, and his editor no longer took his phone calls because she had handed off the routine tasks of his novel’s publication to a young associate editor, a sign that he wasn’t a star. Most mornings he woke up with intense stomach pain, as if a steel rod had pierced his abdomen. It often took more than an hour of stretching, rubbing, trying to relax his rigid musculature before the pain subsided. He had told no one of that physical symptom of anxiety. He had told none of his friends that he felt no one was on his side, that every writer, reviewer, editor, bookstore owner, and reader was rooting for him to fail, to restore to the world the presumption it cherished, that being a novelist was much harder than it appeared to have been for Enrique. How could he get them to forgive him for his facility? Explain that almost nothing else came easily, that writing his autobiographical and apparently second-rate novels took all his energy, and all the hours of his days? He felt the world was pushing him out the sole door he had managed to open, evicting him from the only home that could keep him safe on the perilous earth.
“Hello?” Margaret had leaned closer and was beaming at him cheerfully. “Where did you go?”
He reclaimed himself, or rather the self she had spoken of, when his eyes returned to the merry light of hers. He smiled as if he were master of the situation. “Now you’re teasing me.”
“Teasing? About what?”
“Bernard? Proud of me?”
She shrugged her thin, elegant shoulders. “He should be proud of you. The rest of Bernard’s friends are tedious and grungy polit
ical bores or they’re still college boys living with roommates, not having real jobs, trying to figure out who they are. You’re a real grown-up. You have a career. You lived with a woman for three years. You’re a man.”
Enrique fell back against the hard wood of his chair. Three things were suddenly obvious to him. One, he had a real chance to make this sweet, smart, optimistic, and beautiful young woman his. Two, Margaret’s view of him, a self-confident artist and a mature man who had been out in the world, was soothing and delightful and woefully inaccurate. And finally that he longed, yes, more than he longed to be in her arms, to become the phantom man reflected in her velvet eyes.
S
TANDING ON THE
grave of a wealthy New Yorker, Enrique realized he would have to make this aesthetic choice for Margaret, the most permanent of all, without consulting her. He had learned through bitter experience that it was foolhardy to attempt to figure out what her preference would be all on his own. It would be romantic to say that he had made no decisions in the past twenty-nine years without his wife’s counsel, but that would be a silly exaggeration. He usually asked her opinion of his writing and his business dealings but couldn’t in the middle of a meeting or under deadline pressure, and sometimes didn’t want to. And there had been other situations when to ask his wife what he ought to do would have been cruel. But this selection required the benefit of her taste. He had no clue as to whether she would prefer to be on the western or eastern edge of a nineteenth-century burial lot,
where room for new graves had been created by eliminating stone pathways between elaborate headstones that had been fashioned for the wealthy families of Henry James’s day. He wanted to ask Margaret whether she would choose to lie in an open patch of ground between two leafy maples or under the boughs of an ancient oak.
There was no time to take photos—although Lily was taking them anyway—return to Margaret’s deathbed to show them to her, learn her preference, and then double back to sign the documents that would give Enrique title to the grave of her choice. He was physically there already, prepared to pay for one of two lots left among the old, graceful headstones. Other potential buyers were wandering even now among the dead. Her wish to be in the older burial grounds was more important than the choice between sun and shade. Conserving his own time was even more important. Buying a grave entailed taking deed to a specific narrow and deep section of land. Margaret had roughly eleven days to live. Getting the deed processed without wasting those precious hours by coming and going between Manhattan and Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn meant deciding today which site was more to her liking without her help—a lonely foretaste of his approaching loss.
As he walked back and forth between the two alternatives, he was disgusted by his dithering. He hadn’t felt this queasy worry that he would fail to make a pleasing choice for Margaret in many years, and he wasn’t happy to feel incompetent once again. When Margaret first fell ill, their roles had changed in this respect. During the early years of their marriage, she had relieved him of most decision making. As a young man, he complained that she had arrogated it with the brutality of a colonial imperialist. Nothing purchased for their home, or the choice of schools for their sons, or whom they saw socially, or where they had dinner, or what movie or play they went to—nothing, including his own wardrobe
if he were honest—was decided by him. All negotiations with the world were handled by his cheerfully aggressive, bright-eyed, no-nonsense deal maker of a wife—except for his own contracts as a novelist and screenwriter. And, even on those exalted documents, she was consulted.
Occasionally Margaret would use Enrique to handle the world, such as when the movers tried to quit before getting their possessions into the new apartment in one day. They announced at six o’clock that they would come back tomorrow, leaving the young married couple and their new baby with only a mattress and a crib for their first night. Margaret sent Enrique out to the truck to confront the foreman and strong-arm his tattooed biceps into finishing the job. Enrique was to come home with their carving knife or on it. But that wasn’t a surrender of leadership; she was sending in her muscle.
Once she was ill, however, managing the outside world became his exclusive task, and they both discovered that he was more than competent at negotiating the byzantine bureaucracies of hospitals and health insurance. Enrique knew that he had won her trust when her cancer went into remission. During those happy ten months, among the most loving and contented of their marriage, she could have resumed her role as commander in chief, yet she continued to allow him to handle her medical affairs. His victory was not total—Margaret’s trust extended only to her health care. Evidently matters of life and death were trivial compared to home decorations, or what Enrique should wear to a dinner party, because she continued her reign over those choices. Still, he had gained ground in all areas. She gradually began to consult him on domestic decisions. In a particularly flattering transfer of control, she asked him to make the final judgment between green and white or brown and white as a combination for a new set of towels. That might have seemed to an outsider like a comically small grant of
suffrage, but for Enrique it was a stunning gain of his civil right to aesthetic decision making. Her glasnost gave him the courage to strike out on his own. Fifteen months ago he had vowed to select a birthday present for Margaret all by himself.
For years he had tried to buy her a thrilling and gratifying birthday gift while relying on his own taste, and he had failed miserably each time. The first year they lived together he tried to copy his father’s gambit of buying jewelry for Enrique’s mother, and also of purchasing gifts well beyond his means. But he did not share his father’s self-confidence in his own feeling for jewelry, so he fell back on his faith in costly brand names and went uptown to Tiffany’s.
At that landmark he felt profoundly out of place with his long hair, black jeans, and scuffed white sneakers. He had trouble getting the attention of the seemingly friendly young woman his age behind the earring counter. Her wares attracted him, in particular a small star-shaped pair with single diamonds set in their centers that Enrique judged would make a perfect fit on Margaret’s delicate ears. The Tiffany employee beamed at suited males and older women, including one so hunched over by osteoporosis that she seemed about to pitch into the glass top. With good cheer and energy, the salesgirl pulled out trays of glittering items for those buyers, and greeted two customers who had arrived after Enrique. She stared past his long hair and pale, anxious face as if he were invisible, until there was no one else in front of her. By then he was dripping sweat into his wrinkled work shirt. She frowned and said, “Can I help you?” in a doomed voice as if that were an obvious impossibility.
She was correct in her snobbish assumption. It turned out the earrings he had fallen in love with were forty-three hundred dollars, more than half the advance for his third novel. When he flinched at the price, her withering sneer propelled him back onto Fifth Avenue without further inquiries.
He wandered into the Diamond District, more at home with an Orthodox Jew for a salesman who recognized that a desperate young man hunting for a gift to please a girl was an ideal buyer on whom to unload something cheap and still overpriced. The fast-talking, devout man persuaded Enrique to buy a pair of earrings after an explanation of the pricing logic of the Four C’s of diamond grading, which was far more dazzling than anything in his inventory. He claimed that he could offer Enrique a bargain on the diamond earrings in question because they were graded in color, consistency, carats, and cut—the Four C’s—right below where the valuation spikes. He assured Enrique that the difference in this lower grade, one down from where prices triple, was too subtle to be discerned by anyone, including the diamond experts who surrounded them at that very moment. The black arms of his suit went up, exposing the salesman’s white sleeves and starched cuffs, as he embraced the whole of the district. “No one!” he promised. “Not a soul can tell the difference! Go! Ask them. Anyone can—I give you your money back.”
These bargain earrings were much cheaper than the pair at Tiffany’s, but at eight hundred dollars they were still a painful stretch of Enrique’s wallet. So when he offered his present with trembling and proud hands to his beloved, he was staggered both by his longing to impress her and by the hefty percentage of his annual income they represented.
Margaret tried. She strained to force her mouth into a smile, and did succeed in producing a sort of grimace of delight. Although a credulous consumer, Enrique was a skeptical lover, and he demanded to know what was wrong. He soon regretted his desire for the truth. He had to stop her from completing her painful recitation of the many deficiencies of the earrings. He did learn a crucial hint for future presents: Margaret did not consider diamonds to be a girl’s best friend; in fact, she disliked them.
“Didn’t you notice I don’t have any?” she asked in an amazed tone, as if making an inventory of your girlfriend’s jewelry was an essential act of survival.
She tried to be gentle. She kissed and reassured him and thanked him for the thought, but as time passed he felt her to be sarcastic and unfeeling about his gift. Two months later he overheard her joking about the earrings with Lily, and he burned with shame. His humiliation wasn’t improved when he noticed that she never wore them, not a single time. He resented her rejection of his present, an embittered feeling that he stored in a secret box for bruises of his pride where they never healed, turning darker and more hideous. He grew more determined to succeed.
For the next birthday he avoided jewelry. Copying another of his father’s ploys in gift giving, he bought her an expensive tool to encourage her as an artist. He admired her photographs, as did others, especially her father the economist. Leonard told Enrique that he had stopped taking photos as soon as he saw Margaret’s snapshots of her high school graduation trip to Europe, using Leonard’s hand-me-down point-and-shoot. Until then he hadn’t considered photography an art, since with automatic cameras and unlimited film, sooner or later a monkey would capture an arresting image. Margaret’s first roll of thirty-six pictures immediately refuted his assumption. More than half were beautifully composed and intriguing. Her facility convinced him that photography was indeed an art and that Margaret had “an eye.” That her work overcame her practical father’s resistance was enough for Enrique to want to encourage her, but there was also her enthusiasm for photography. When they first met, he discovered that she had recently completed a course in developing and printing. Her interest had continued during their first year of living together. Margaret spent her leisure time (she was freelancing as a graphic artist) wandering with a 35-millimeter Olympus in shrinking Little Italy, bur
geoning SoHo, the messy meat market, and dilapidated Union Square, capturing New York’s bankrupt 1970s streets on the cusp of gentrification.
Enrique once again trusted an Orthodox Jew, this time at B & H camera store, where Margaret bought her supplies. He discussed what to get her at length with a young salesman who looked older because of his full beard. His chubby, pasty cheeks wobbled as he suggested what would be an exciting camera for a serious photographer. The answer appealed to Enrique, a Rollei-flex from the 1950s. The dimpled black metal box had the cool retro look and heft of World War II, a romantic time in Enrique’s imagination. The devout salesman explained that “Rolleis” had fine-ground lenses, which could yield the kind of detail an art photographer longs for; and since the camera was no longer being manufactured, a lens with this particular quality could only be obtained by purchasing one secondhand.
It sounded to him like bullshit. Cameras were modern technology. In Enrique’s experience, technology always progressed. He almost didn’t believe the claims of the black-hatted man, who looked, with his payess, suit, and apron also to be from World War II—albeit,
The Sorrow and the Pity
rather than
The Great Escape.
Right up until Margaret opened the lumpy package Enrique had fashioned with happy-birthday wrapping paper, he worried that she would laugh at him for being gullible.
But no. He had not been fooled. No ridicule this time, no complaint about a failure to know her taste. There was a gratifying, eyes-wide look of pleased astonishment, followed by “Oh my God, a Rollei!” as if it were a treasure that she had coveted with such intensity she had thought it wise to keep her craving secret. “Puff!” she exclaimed, using her recently coined nickname for him. “You shouldn’t have!” she cried out, eyes glistening, and hopped to her feet, rising on tiptoe to kiss him with wet, cool lips.
Triumph. A reversal of the previous year’s humiliation. For a few days Enrique was suffused with a feeling of manly success, punctured only by the frown he got when he asked Margaret why she was going out to take pictures with her Olympus and not the fabulous Rollei. “Oh, I have to learn how to use it,” she said with a harassed air, like a student who has a difficult paper to write. Over the following weeks he kept after her. Had she signed up for the course she said she needed to take to learn how to use the Rollei properly? Did she want Enrique to buy the tripod she had told him people require with such a camera? Had she gotten the lens cleaned, since she claimed B & H had sold it without first doing a proper job of restoration? Could he take it back to the salesman and complain? And so on, all asked with the intent to be encouraging, but she seemed to experience as nagging.
To Enrique’s puzzlement and annoyance and eventually keen hurt, Margaret never used the thrilling Rollei, not once. “It’s too much of a pain,” she said when he pushed too hard, eight months after her birthday. “I have to learn and buy all this stuff—also the lens needs to be cleaned. Ugh,” she groaned. “I’d rather just go out with my little point-and-shoot.” By then they were married. Presumably no question of her commitment to Enrique existed anymore, but the rejection renewed with an intensity that he kept hidden from her the question of whether his love provided anything besides the loyalty and comfort of a pet. What use was he to her? he wondered. Why should she love him? Was there anything more to her feelings for him than a biological and bourgeois reflex?
He joked to her, not long after the Rollei disappointment, that he was the perfect husband for a nice Jewish girl who wanted to escape her cookie-cutter Queens home—an olive-skinned man with a Spanish name whom she could bring to Passover and
announce with delight, “He’s Jewish, Ma!” Her nod of acknowledgment and the trill of her cynical laugh echoed down to him through the years. He had a novelist’s belief in the telling nature of such moments, and for a long time he couldn’t hear the music of her feelings for him without a clanging bell of satire.