Authors: Rafael Yglesias
And yes, of course, without question, he would be turning his back on everything that he had been raised to believe in: his parents’ obsolescent faith in the literary novel, their ethical disapproval of Hollywood’s imperative of pandering to the audience, and, from the way they spoke of their divorced friends, the moral disapproval he could easily imagine Guillermo and Rose would feel for a son who valued sex above all else in a relationship, and who would abandon their grandson to be raised by his maternal grandparents in the easy material comforts but timorous values of that least adventurous and most cynical of bourgeois cultures—Long Island Jews.
His parents’ disdain for the world of the Cohens long predated his meeting Margaret. Guillermo and Rose had rejected the middle-class ideal of the upwardly striving, conventionally religious, culturally dutiful, intellectually tame, and politically cautious well before Enrique was born. In their youth they had worked for and put their lives at risk in support of their belief in a workers’ revolution, which would have destroyed that comfortable world. The revelations of the horrors of the Soviet Union in the late 1940s didn’t convince them that they had been mistaken, only that Stalin was evil. In the post-Vietnam, Reagan era of unself-
conscious pursuit of money and the idealization of America into the Good and the rest of the world into the Bad and the Weak, his parents had modified their extreme talk, but not their basic disapproval of a life lived for selfish material gain, and especially their contempt for artists who cared more for public approval than for revealing their world as honestly as possible.
Twenty-eight-year-old Enrique believed that his parents approved of him making a living for the sake of raising their grandchild. Although they claimed they wanted him to return to writing his serious novels, they also recognized that he drew a bright line between cheapening his writing of books and pandering in the screenplays he wrote with his half brother. They regretted, but applauded, that he had refused to tailor the ending of his fourth novel for a publisher, preferring to write dumb scripts. And they seemed to understand that in choosing Margaret he had chosen a good mate, despite her conventional idea of how they ought to live: in a doorman building, intending to send their child to private school, expecting Enrique to find a way to write his novels only after he had managed to make enough to pay for their Manhattan expenses.
In no way—that he was conscious of—did they make him feel ashamed of marrying her. On the contrary, his father adored Margaret, with her laughing blue eyes, her teasing mockery of Enrique, and her close attention to Guillermo’s anecdotes. In turn, Guillermo performed his trick of flattery on Margaret, his standard exaggerated praise of anyone who showed the slightest inclination to be creative, proclaiming her photographs and her paintings to reveal extraordinary talent, and insisting that she ought to devote more time to her art, that working at it was all that stood between her and worldwide acclamation. He conveniently ignored that Margaret had no spare hours to become Mary Cassatt; she had barely half an hour to get her hair done, much
more crucial than aesthetic fulfillment for a New York career woman.
Rose also liked Margaret, or at least as well as she could like any woman who took primacy in the heart of her son. And his parents were pleasant, although insistently condescending, about the Cohens. “They’re really smart, much smarter than they allow themselves to be,” his father would say, and Enrique knew he might as well be speaking of educating the working classes to revolt. “And like all Jews,” his backhanded anti-Semitic father added, “they’re very good about culture. Go to all the museums, see all the serious plays, buy all the important books. Don’t know if they read them, but they buy them. God knows what they get out of all of it, but they support the arts and God bless them for that,” he said with the approval and affection one might express for a faithful family servant. “They’re really generous to Margaret,” his mother would comment with a wan smile, as if it had been an exhausting search to come up with this compliment. “That’s a wonderful quality. Lots of people with their kind of money are stingy with their children.” And then she couldn’t resist adding, “Her mother is one of those women who likes to remain young, you know? Pretend that she’s still a girl? I don’t really care for…” Another wan smile as she failed to finish that characterization. “I think it’s important to accept your age,” she added instead and smiled with rueful beneficence, as if this insight, although painful, was a gift to be treasured and not an expression of her envy that Dorothy hadn’t been obliged to put her dress size in a time capsule.
Enrique did not see through his parents’ condescension to its origins in their insecurities. He absorbed their view of the Cohens with the unthinking fidelity of a Communist Party member. But whatever he thought in his head, in his heart he felt that there was a struggle going on between the in-laws for the soul of his mar
riage. For him to succeed as the perfect son, although it was forgivable that his wife worked at
Newsweek
and he was writing screenplays, they were supposed to evolve into a brilliant novelist and an exquisite painter, a marriage of artists, like Guillermo and Rose. And he knew as well that for Margaret to succeed as the perfect daughter, Enrique would have to earn the kind of money that would impress Dorothy and Leonard’s friends at their golf club, not the eighty thousand dollars a year he was wowing his fellow freelance writers with, but the millions that caused heads to turn at Temple Beth-El. He was at least supposed to earn enough money for Margaret to stop working if she wished, although he suspected that the socially conventional Dorothy would top all the mothers in Great Neck, feminist or not, if her daughter managed to have a second child
and
get promoted to art director of
Newsweek.
It was Sally—wacky, laughing, big-lipped Sally Winthrop, whose family had come over on the
Mayflower
and down the generations had not once dreamed of changing American society—it was she alone who seemed to have a vision for Enrique’s future that would slake his parched longings. She offered sex, money, fast cars, and a life free of diapers, free of Communist and Capitalist cant. It was, however, free of something else, namely his son, Gregory. He wasn’t much in size, Enrique’s twenty-month-old son. A heated bundle of soft flesh, a Michelin baby chewing on a pacifier, a tiny sumo wrestler stamping on his turf in the Washington Square sandbox, a round-faced innocent with huge blue eyes, a baby who had begun talking at an early age and who seemed, incredibly, already to have started to recognize letters. It was all Enrique could do not to bellow the bragging fathers into the monkey bars with accounts of his son’s nascent genius. But that was merely the Sabas grandiosity and family pride. He wrote that off. He wrote off, as well, that he felt deeply comforted whenever his
son was in his arms, or pressed against his chest in the Snugli, or curled into his shoulder for a nap. Lately Gregory had taken to sitting beside Enrique on the living room rug and playing patiently with his wooden blocks while his father raged and cheered at the annoying Knicks. Gregory would look up curiously at the television and, based on whether Enrique screamed or clapped, comment, “No good” or “Is good!”
That was funny and charming, but the deeper pleasure for Enrique, something he had not expressed to anyone, including Margaret, was coming back from another desperately stupid day of writing down, down, down in order to meet the subterranean simplicities of the motion picture business, entering in despair covered in the muck of clichés to a home of sexless drudgery, and there, for his labors, he would be handed a tired Gregory, who’d lay his sweaty head on Enrique’s chest and sigh with relief and gratitude. Or he would enter and hear from the bedroom his son’s high voice ring out with gladness, “Daddy!” followed by the thump of his sumo strides as he rushed to be picked up. It did not occur to Enrique that this was a manly feeling. It embarrassed him, seemed more maternal than James Bond. What he understood was that Gregory loved him in a way no else did, or ever could—or, for that matter, ever would.
He said to Sally, “I don’t know if I can leave my son.” But that noble sentiment wasn’t what he felt. There was something physical about the connection, this umbilical bond with his still stumbling, fussy, sweet, diapered, and brilliant heir. Those hours he spent alone taking care of Gregory, including the drudgery that he liked to believe excused his gross betrayal of Margaret, had stored up a faith in something he couldn’t name or account for, and also didn’t trust. Did he propose to become the living embodiment of the Jewish joke about the ninety-year-old couple seeking a divorce after seventy years together hating each other? When asked why
it had taken them so long, they explained they wanted to wait until the children were dead. Could he really tolerate a life without love or lust solely to preserve his son from the trauma of parental separation? Could he really live a lifetime with a woman whom he would leave now without a second’s thought but for the miraculous child she had created?
He could make a new family in L.A. with Sally and, like millions of other divorced parents, they would share custody of Gregory and it would be better for all concerned, including Margaret, who obviously didn’t love Enrique and certainly wasn’t being made happy by him.
But. But. But, he worried, would it all come to the same in L.A., behind his sunglasses and his tinted Beemer’s windshield, beyond his parking space on the Warners lot, and behind the shaded windows of his bungalow office? Would Sally blow up and expel a child and get bored with his career ups and downs and become obsessed with the metal fatigue of strollers and which Beverly Hills nursery school would be the fastest route to Harvard? Was there an escape from the internment of marriage other than staying single? Had any great artist ever been happily married? Had any second-rate artist, for that matter? Was the hidden, simpler truth that he was attempting to live a life he didn’t want on any coast? Where was the reckless high school dropout who cared for nothing but his art? Was he—the prodigy novelist long orphaned—was he the prisoner who now rattled Enrique’s cage?
Sally made him face these questions. She was, as always, funny and blunt and honest and sympathetic and greedy and somehow, like her body, soft and hard, giving and taking all at once. “It’s great for you. I wouldn’t want to give anything up, either. You’ve got two great women in love with you, you’ve got your mistress out here in L.A. when Warner Bros. flies you in first-class to call you a genius, and you’ve got your successful, beautiful wife in
N.Y. raising your beautiful boy. I wouldn’t give it up if I were you. But lookit: I don’t have any self-esteem, but I’m in love with you and I want you, I want all of you or I’m going to have to find some other good Jewish husband, or at least a half-Jewish husband—’cause I’m through with WASP men, they’re all alcoholics and they don’t make sure you have an orgasm before they come. They’re so polite about everything except sex! So you have to choose. I want you to marry me and worship me the way you worship Margaret, and I want you to make me rich and fuck me and give me children and be a great father to them the way you are to Greggy, and if you won’t, okay. I understand. You shouldn’t. You probably shouldn’t. I mean, lookit: it’s horrible what I’m doing! I love Margaret. She’s one of my best friends and she’s always been good to me—well, actually, she’s kind of a bitch to me sometimes, but that’s because she thinks I’m self-destructive and she’s right, I am! Anyway, that’s no reason for me to be sitting around wishing she was dead. That’s horrible. Am I a monster? I can’t go on feeling this way about her. I can’t go on feeling this way about you. I can’t go on feeling this way about me. You have to leave her. I can’t believe I have no scruples at all, I always thought I was a good girl, but I’m not. And it doesn’t matter, none of that matters, because the truth is you’re miserable with Margaret and you’re ecstatic with me. Isn’t that right? Tell me. Isn’t that right?”
This was a phone call. Sally was in a new sublet in Santa Monica and he was in his office in Manhattan staring at a page of dialogue about nothing. Maybe it would divert someone. A moron, no doubt. “Yes,” he answered her admirably direct question. He had to admit the simple and human truth of the situation: he was always happy when he was with Sally. She could irritate, but she never made him feel inadequate.
And so he took the first step toward divorce, the stride of a
coward, but a forward movement nevertheless. He waited until he had put Gregory down for the night after a long Saturday of caring for him so that Margaret could recover from her late hours at work, walked into their bedroom, where his wife was lying fully dressed on top of the bed reading a murder mystery, sat down close enough to brush against her legs, and stared at her. When she looked up at him with those great blue eyes and asked, “Everything okay?” he sighed. A long, heavy sigh. Some part of her must have been worried all along underneath her chatty, demanding surface, because she put the book down, straightened to a seated position, and asked, “What’s wrong?”
He attempted to make a speech, a heavy, awkward speech. He felt he could easily cry, as if he were the one whose heart was breaking, which made little sense to him because he believed that he was the bad guy here, a mean and weak man. Perhaps he was scared of her reaction. He had pushed Margaret only a few times when she didn’t want to be moved, and the effect was daunting. Her arms flailed, and she screeched hyperbolic proclamations of emotional distress. They were perfect demonstrations of hysteria. His immediate reflex was to redact everything in order to restore her core. It appeared, otherwise, that she might fly apart, never to be reconstituted, that he was—in actual fact—destroying her by refusing to go to Yom Kippur services with her parents the first year they lived together; or by staying out late gambling at the local backgammon club; or by sleeping until noon day after day when his fourth book was rejected again and again. “I can’t take this!” she would exclaim. What struck him as especially infuriating was that in every case Enrique thought the opposite was true. He was the one who couldn’t bear it. How could she expect him to pretend to believe in a religion he didn’t? How could she expect him to give up something he enjoyed because it didn’t interest her? But most of all, how in God’s name did she
expect him to be cheerful while his life’s dream of being a novelist was destroyed?