Authors: Rafael Yglesias
From then on they did close with “I love you” every time they spoke, but Margaret could not and did not make her mother her confidante while she fought for her life. Nor did her mother complain about being left out. The illness didn’t cure them of their differences, but it did, at least, bring peace to their war.
Perhaps that’s why Margaret on her deathbed looked confused by her mother’s question as to why she hadn’t been invited to the studio; she thought it had all been settled. The whole family waited in a hush for her to answer. When she did, there was a disarming truth to it: “I’m weird about my paintings, Mom. I don’t like to show them to people. It’s not you. I just don’t like to show them.” She moved as if to sit up while saying to Enrique, “It’s crazy, but I think my stomach tube is clogged from the hot dogs. They’re backing up.” She pulled the covers off. Her PEG was full of the reddish brown and beige material of the Second Avenue Deli lunch. The Cohens scattered at this frank display.
Enrique and Margaret retired to the bathroom, their first time alone since his conversation with Dorothy and Leonard rejecting their funeral arrangements. They conducted their last postmortem of her parents’ feelings. Enrique described their reaction while standing at the sink, helping Margaret suction out pieces of undigested food that were too bulky to clear the narrow end of the PEG. They were old hands at this. There was a time when the grotesque procedure would have nauseated one or both of them. When it seemed that more hot dog and knish were coming out than had gone in, they began to laugh, and they laughed harder when Margaret said, “It’s like every hot dog I’ve ever eaten is coming out.” Enrique suctioned and Margaret squeezed, and he told her that Dorothy had exclaimed in pain when she heard that Margaret didn’t want to be buried with her family. “You did a good job, Puff,” she judged.
“How do you know?”
“Because she hasn’t said a word to me about it.”
That self-censorship didn’t last long. Dorothy brought the subject up immediately after they had cleared all the Jew food and restored the tube and its drainage bag to their hiding places. The Cohens reassembled around the matrimonial bed. They settled in
chairs, except for Dorothy, who stood behind her older son, the no longer mean Cowboys and Indians Rob, and announced, “You know what, Margs? I was upset you didn’t want to be in the family plot with all of us and I was telling Rob and you know what?” She laughed with delight. “He’s bought a plot in New Haven!”
Rob winked at Enrique, as if they were in on a conspiracy. “Who wants to be buried in New Jersey? Everyone wants to be buried near where they live. Except for my parents. They want to be buried in a state they’ve never lived in and don’t like.”
Leonard said affectionately, “Don’t be a wise guy.”
Dorothy protested, “Papa Sam bought the plot because it was big and a bargain. You know he liked a bargain. And I thought it was nice that we would all be together. And so convenient! Just one stop.” Dorothy laughed at herself. “But it’s not important. We love each other, that’s what’s important.”
“Hey, Ma, you want to be buried with me?” Margaret said with a sly smile. “You can. There’s another grave available at Green-Wood.” Margaret lifted her arm in mock generosity. “We’ll be together forever.”
Dorothy came over to the bed at last—she seemed to have been avoiding close contact all day. She sat beside her daughter and took her face in her hands. “I don’t think you want me living next door for all eternity.” She kissed Margaret hard and fast, her usual briskness, and looked back at her daughters-in-law to inform them, “When Margaret was a teenager, she ordered me not to speak to her before breakfast.”
“Also during and after breakfast,” Margaret said, causing the room to erupt with laughter. “I don’t like to be talked to until noon, right, Enrique?”
“Riiight,” he said, elongating the word. Her family laughed knowingly at his mock-fearful tone. But his comedy was a lie. He knew how to get his wife to talk as soon as her first cup of coffee
was down. She often preferred to be silent and to be alone. There had been many times during the twenty-nine years they had spent together when he understood that his very presence, and the noise and trouble of his sons, and the boom and bust of his career, and the melodramas of his parents made her long to be elsewhere. But even when she felt that deep exhaustion of marriage, in her greatest despair at whom she had chosen to love, even then he knew how to draw her into conversation. He always had.
E
ENRIQUE TOLD
M
ARGARET
everything about himself. He had read the metaphor, “He poured his heart out to her” in Stendhal and Dickens and Balzac and Lermontov and probably sarcastically in Philip Roth’s novels. What came out of him didn’t seem to be his heart, however. He emptied his soul, or his self, or whatever made him think he was unique. He disclosed all of his feelings and life secrets, or believed that he did; and he recounted every anecdote in his twenty-one-year-old life.
During that long night of December 30, 1975, while hours and hours passed into the early morning of a new day, the thick darkness outside the wall of windows behind Margaret’s pretty head remained unchanged, punctuated but not revealed by the amber halos of New York’s streetlights. Inside, there was no dark thanks to Margaret having, like Enrique, bought one of the new
halogen standing lamps. She did not dim it for romance. There were no lit candles or the mellowing intoxication of wine. He was surrounded by a cheerful, searching illumination: intense light bounced off the mostly bare white walls, into her blue eyes and out of her ringing voice. They exchanged life stories like students cramming for a test, emptying a pot of coffee and smoking half a pack of cigarettes each. His body was rigid with tension: alert as a predator and as wary as prey. His anxiety didn’t arise from baring his feelings to this attentive young woman with her depthless and astonished eyes; rather, he vibrated with anticipation that when he ran out of things to say, he was going to have to proceed with making love. Nay, not love alone. He would have to sexually sate this creature, who seemed to him more beautiful and clever with every passing moment, a human female perhaps, but of such a higher order that he felt there ought to be another classification for so superb a mutation of the species.
Enrique had had little time to reflect on what he had learned about Margaret. His sole opportunity came during a bathroom break, when he excused himself shortly after four o’clock in the morning. The accommodation was tiny even by New York City’s standards. There were two feet of cleared space between the tub-shower, sink, and toilet, all squeezed into an area hardly larger than a closet. On the only free wall—the rest being mirror, tub, door—there was an abstract work of art: four thick, broad strokes of black paint on a small white canvas, in the shape of arches or humps, arranged as if they might be clouds floating free or a quartet of angry cats. He looked at it while his bladder seemed to empty ten persons’ worth of urine, a comically long and noisy process, and got nothing from the art, the same nothing he usually got from abstract paintings—he couldn’t help but attempt to decode them, although he knew the proper approach was to “feel” the work. He hoped this innocuous painting wasn’t by Margaret,
although he felt sure it was. Unframed and with two patches of canvas not painted at all, it looked like something by a beginner. He was surprised that she had hung it anywhere.
His ex-girlfriend, Sylvie, was a painter—supposedly. Enrique had his doubts. She seemed to have no vision of what she wanted to accomplish, or desire to develop a vision. She took secretarial jobs hoping to be fired after six months, long enough to qualify for unemployment insurance, which during the recessionary seventies was extended to nearly a year. With all that freedom to do her art, she produced little. During the three and half years they cohabited, Enrique wrote one and a half novels while Sylvie made fewer than ten paintings, most of them not completed. She was, in Enrique’s considered opinion, lazy. And based on the few sketches she made of the human form, he suspected that her predilection for the abstract had more to do with her failure to master drawing people in proper proportions than with having transcended the need to be representational. By what insane bad luck could he have found himself attracted to another so-called Abstract Expressionist? Margaret couldn’t be serious about painting, he tried to reassure himself; he would have heard something about it by now.
Enrique’s understanding of Margaret’s ultimate ambition, at four-ten in the morning of their third encounter and first date, was vague. His original impression from Bernard was that Margaret worked freelance for magazines. Enrique mistakenly assumed she did copy editing or fact checking, like Bernard; during that first night of conversation at his apartment, Enrique had learned that she was a graphic designer. When he said, “You’re an artist?” she demurred, saying, “I do layout and pick pictures. Can’t call that art. Although they do. They call it art direction,” she said and winked as if she were sharing a lewd secret.
Over challah French toast, she had talked about taking a photography course. At the Orphans’ Dinner, Enrique had briefly
noticed two framed black-and-white photographs on the wall above the couch, but he hadn’t had a chance to give them a good look. At the Buffalo Roadhouse, Margaret had mentioned she was taking acting classes. But when he asked if she wanted to be an actress, she said she was just fooling around, she didn’t have the talent or the nerve. She had also mentioned that she was taking tap dancing classes with her friend Lily and was starting a lithography course soon. During their walk to her apartment, when she had reported that her mother didn’t want her younger brother, Larry, to be an artist, and Enrique had asked if her mother would allow her to be one, she’d replied for the second time that she wasn’t an artist. While zipping up, he reassured himself that the mediocre painting in the bathroom had been the product of one of her dilettantish explorations.
Uncertainty about ambition in life, although he knew it was a common condition of his age group, puzzled Enrique. He had burned every bridge that led away from writing novels so he couldn’t give up, no matter how difficult his career became. He knew that if he had something to fall back on, one day he would collapse on it, and fail in his great mission to write a twenty-book series, like Zola’s or Balzac’s, with intertwining characters, an alternative version of the great city of New York inhabited by Sabas men and women, a dazzling tapestry crammed with insightful portraits of his people’s greatness and follies. He didn’t understand how someone as smart, clever, and imaginative as Margaret could live without a passion to achieve something. She was baffling and beautifully strange. That was precisely why the prospect of lying naked with her loomed as both exquisite and terrifying. In truth, although he claimed not to be a sexist, if she were a man, Enrique would have felt nothing but contempt for her lack of a focused ambition.
While Margaret took her turn in the bathroom, he studied the
two photographs above the couch. He had assumed they were by her, but on closer examination he decided that was unlikely. The first was of two men, one elderly, the other in his twenties, sitting on a cobblestoned street with a large fishing net, which they were presumably repairing, sprawled across their legs. Oddly, they were in street clothes: both wore leather jackets, and the young man was in dress shoes. The expressions on their faces were intimate and relaxed and connected to the photographer, as if he were an old friend. The other picture was of three small children standing in a row in the middle of a village street. Like the fishermen, they appeared to be European, as did the background of low, crooked buildings and uneven cobblestones. The children were joyful and sober all at once. One smiled, another gazed with earnest longing, and the last was pensive. All displayed their feelings with utter unself-consciousness. Although they were looking into the camera, and obviously knew their picture was being taken, it felt as though they were peering directly into the viewer’s soul. Enrique felt informed by the work, that he knew them well: this one was always a little sad, this one mischievous, that one loving.
The photographs were clearly by someone who not only had an eye and control over the equipment but loads of experience. The old world setting and the trust that had been gained over the subjects convinced Enrique a middle-aged man had taken them. He worried that his not recognizing these accomplished photographs betrayed his ignorance, that they must be by someone like Robert Capa or an Italian or French genius. He wasn’t sure who was famous for doing what sorts of pictures. He had ignored his parents’ and older siblings’ discussions of Atget and Cartier-Bresson while growing up. Discussions of photography and of movies annoyed Enrique no end, although he enjoyed both media. As an act of self-gratification, going to a movie in the afternoon midweek ranked nearly as high as masturbation, but how could those
mechanical tricks—changing lenses, manipulating light and shadow—compare to what Joyce correctly identified as the highest and most spiritual of all the arts, the novel? Painting, sculpture, theater—they were great art forms—but stuff that comes out of a machine? Enrique loved machines precisely because if you worked at them diligently they would eventually do what you wanted them to do. But his brain? It seemed to him that no matter how many hours he put into writing, he couldn’t guarantee that effort would allow his mind to construct a sound sentence, much less to fully express what was in his imagination.
Still, these photographs were excellent. Enrique wished he could impress Margaret by identifying their creator. Obviously she valued them. They were elegantly framed, with proper borders. She might have no directed ambition, but based on where she had placed the painting and where she displayed these photographs, she knew the difference between her amateurish creation and the products of a dedicated pursuit of perfection.
“These are great,” he said when she reappeared from the bathroom, partly to say what he had been feeling and partly to forestall any suggestion that after four o’clock in the morning he ought to be going home.
“Oh…” She stared at the framed photographs as if she had forgotten all about their existence. “Thanks…,” she said and added, “Italy is great.”
“Italy?” Enrique repeated. Earlier she had told him that she spent a semester abroad living with an Italian family. He had a moment of uncertainty. They were her pictures? No, more likely they were purchased there. He was too timid to admit his ignorance and probed: “So these were taken in Italy?”
“Yeah…,” she said again in a faraway tone, as if dreaming of when she lived there. She resumed her earlier position on the couch, and so did he. “I wish I had taken more.”
They
were
hers. He was profoundly surprised: they were so good; she was proud enough to display them prominently; they had been talking for hours and yet she’d never mentioned photography as an ambition, or even a hobby. “I took a course last summer in developing.” She laughed, glancing at him warily as she confessed why. “You’re going to think I’m a total dilettante, taking all these stupid courses, but they’re fun. I like to try things out.”
“I don’t think you’re a dilettante!” Enrique lied. “I love to learn too. I’m envious.” That was true. He was envious that she had learned about tap dancing, photography, lithography, French, basic acting technique. He too wanted to know as much as possible about how the world worked. Not, however, for something as pointless as having fun. He wanted information to impress readers and to burrow into a character’s inner life. Work was the most invested and complicated expenditure of most people’s time; it bothered him to write about characters and not know, in a tactile and intimate way, precisely what they did each day on their jobs. He wished he had her curious, adventurous nature. Although he believed his utilitarian and purposeful approach to his career was superior to her casual explorations, he recognized that she was more likely to learn the details he needed to make his characters breathe and bleed.
Margaret looked pleased by his saying he envied her. She raised her right hand to her hair and fluffed out the black curls that had flattened above her perfectly shaped ear. “Oh, I just get bored and like to try something new,” she said. “It’s silly. I don’t have your self-discipline. Or my brother’s. It’s amazing to me that you’ve written three novels. How do you do it?”
“By sitting alone in a room for hours and hours,” he said, telling the simple truth. He shifted on the couch and pointed up at the photographs, wanting to make sure. “You took those?” She nodded with a rueful pucker of her chin. “They’re fantastic,” he
said. “I thought they were expensive prints by some incredibly famous photographer, and I was embarrassed I didn’t know whose they were. I mean, it’s really great work. Totally first-rate.” He paused there because he saw that this honest flattery had touched her in some deep location that he hadn’t reached before.
“Oh…” came out of her and nothing more. For the very first time, she looked flustered. The parrying girl, the cool flirt, the evaluating woman, the teasing conversationalist, the sympathetic listener, the independent explorer, the resigned daughter, the pissed off sister, the motherly sister—he had seen and heard all sorts of colors and notes from her, but not before this had he unwomaned her into the blush and stammer of an overmastering pleasure. The effect was so striking, he found himself thinking:
If I could do that to her with my penis, I would be a happy man.
He consoled himself by remembering what Sylvie had taught him out of
Our Bodies, Ourselves
—that he could guarantee the same result with his mouth—but even a callow young man like Enrique understood that what he had accomplished with his honest reaction to her photographs was more likely to be an enduring satisfaction to Margaret than his various body appendages, no matter how skillfully he wielded them.
He saw in a flash—the sort of illumination of understanding he needed to arrive at before he could write a character well—that her angry comments about her mother not allowing her brother to be an architect, as well as her resigned joke that she was allowed to do any sort of work provided she married and had two children, were her indirect way of declaring her true desire. Despite her denial, she
did
want to be an artist. She probably wanted to be a very great artist, he felt, espying a deeper ambition precisely because it was buried. She wanted to believe in her talent, to be like Enrique, someone who could stay at it day after day, devote her life to a gradual refinement of her natural gift until
she produced a body of work that she could display with pride, not above toilets but in the world’s living rooms. For a single exhilarating moment, he saw with Tolstoyan clarity what they offered each other: her self-contentment and pleasure in being alive would prevent him from giving in to gloom and resentment at the world’s disappointments, poisoning his work; and his quotidian and stubborn faith in the ability of art to elevate artist and audience above the meanness of society would inspire her to become the secret Margaret, the great artist whom she had to hide from her pragmatic family and even from her timid self. She had the grace he could never win, and he had the will she couldn’t assert.