Authors: Rafael Yglesias
Because they were meaningless concessions, she claimed. All she asked was that he behave like a responsible grown-up and, besides, she knew that he would be happier if he did things her way. She was selfish in the only effective way people can be selfish, by acting out an earnest conviction that their way of life is superior. Every attempt he had made to modify her rules she transformed into a whirling dervish of fragile and frantic feelings that allowed no discussion, much less compromise. And whether he raged, or sulked, or consoled, or hid under the bed like a frightened dog, after the storm passed, his buildings were leveled and hers stood tall. He was frightened she would react the same way now, only now he would not be able to contain his rage, because he knew for sure that she was wrong: he was not happier living her way.
And that’s what he said, sitting beside her on the bed in a choked, hardly audible, hoarse voice. He told a lie of omission. He said nothing about Sally or their affair, but he did state the truth of his feelings: “I’m not happy. I can’t”—the words were so laden he had to stop and inhale to push them out—“I can’t go on living like this.”
“Can’t go on living like what? What are you talking about? Sex? Is this about sex?” she said, as if the word itself were contemptible. “I’m tired, for Christ’s sakes. We have a baby, I have a job. I can’t just turn it on and off like you. I’m not a light switch—” He could hear the exasperation that would soon swirl and become a tornado of “I can’t”s, laying waste to his needs and desires.
“That’s bullshit,” he said, not frightened anymore by her darkening skies and the threat of eighty-mile-an-hour emotions.
“What?” she said, startled.
He repeated quietly, “That’s bullshit. We don’t have sex because there’s something really wrong with our marriage. And either we deal with it or it’s going…” He sighed again, feeling so sad and scared that he was light-headed and wondered if he might faint. “It’s going to end,” he said with firm regret.
“It’s going to”—she hesitated—“end?” she repeated, more in disbelief than in anguish.
He met her big eyes. They often looked startled. Only now, when he had finally made a truly startling statement, she didn’t look surprised. Instead, they went dark with anger. He didn’t flinch. He said, slow and steady, “It’s going to end. I can’t do this anymore. I really can’t.” He had resolved that much: at least he would be honest about the stakes.
He had frightened her, all right. Frightened her to the depths, so that sobriety replaced hysteria as her response. She reached for her pack of Camel Lights—she had stopped smoking for a while when pregnant but returned to it after only a few months—took one out, lit it, and sat up, retracting her legs so that they were no longer close to Enrique. She glared at him, mouth set, chin thrust forward, cold with rage. “What is it? What the fuck do you expect me to do?”
Sally—Enrique’s mistress, Margaret’s friend, his love, her rival—had suggested the solution, the cowardly compromise that she wisely estimated Enrique would have the nerve to propose: marriage counseling. He had seized on the idea because it would stall for at least a couple of weeks his having to make this terrifying choice that Sally was forcing on him. Enrique had no illusions about why Sally suggested this temporizing move. He knew the statistics: most people who went into marriage counseling ended up divorced. It was a halfway house for the emotionally retarded: people like Enrique, too timid to tell the truth without a referee. He understood that Sally was calculating that, though it would
delay his decision, it would mean his choice would be more likely to come out in her favor.
Margaret had never been in therapy, but she was, after all, Jewish and could hardly refuse to see a doctor for help with a problem. She did say, “What are we going to talk about? Changing diapers?”
“That’s the problem,” Enrique said. “That’s all we talk about.”
“You think that’s my fault?”
“Let’s talk about that with the therapist,” he said and stood up, ending further conversation, a first in their marriage.
True to form, however, Enrique let Margaret find and choose the therapist, a Dr. Goldfarb. He was recommended by a friend of Lily’s who reported that Goldfarb had saved their marriage. Margaret must have been impressed by Enrique’s demanding speech and subsequent silence. She made the appointment for that very week, Tuesday, when she was obliged to go into the magazine for only a few hours.
They arrived separately, which seemed appropriate to the situation, meeting in Goldfarb’s hushed waiting room with its ubiquitous Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition poster and obligatory wicker magazine holder jammed with issues of
New York
magazine and
The New Yorker.
Margaret picked one up and flipped through it violently, as though its editor had personally offended her. She did everything, and had done everything since their bedside chat, in stiff, angry motions, her mouth thin-lipped, her blue eyes glacial. Everything about her scolding and cold manner confirmed that not only didn’t she love him but she didn’t approve of him. Despite all her condescending talk about her brothers, and complaint that her father was too timid to contradict Dorothy’s arrangements and rules, Margaret expected the same obedience from Enrique. He was allowed to be the free-range artist that she had adventurously married—except with her;
she
wanted him trussed up like a roast.
Soon they were called into Goldfarb’s office. They sat uncomfortably in its pair of nude hardwood captain’s chairs on the patients’ side of the desk; Goldfarb was behind it, in a leather-upholstered, high-backed swivel chair, which looked considerably more cozy. The heavy bags under the psychiatrist’s bulging eyes and their dull, flat gray color made him appear to be on the verge of sleep. Dr. Goldfarb explained that, although he was a traditional Freudian, obviously couples’ therapy didn’t permit him to be silent, and so he conducted these sessions somewhat differently. He added, however, that he still preferred to listen to what they had to say rather than hear himself talk.
He took down their vital information, including insurance, and then looked balefully, first at Enrique, saying, “So what brings you here?” He turned to Margaret before an answer could be made, to add, “What’s going on in your marriage?” leaving it up to them to decide who should respond.
Margaret smiled broadly and artificially at Goldfarb, a cocktail party smile, and said nothing. Goldfarb returned his gaze to Enrique. “What are you feeling, Ricky?” Margaret corrected him before Enrique could. “Enrique,” she said. Goldfarb appeared to be deeply bored by this. “I’m sorry. En-ricky,” he said, continuing to Americanize the second syllable. “What’s going on that brings you here?” he asked.
I’m not in love with her, Enrique wanted to say. In fact, I don’t even like her. How do you fix that? Unable to express those feelings out loud, he looked away from the psychiatrist’s fish eyes at the profile of his pretty and cold wife. She was beaming with her newly bonded teeth, perfect in proportion and brilliantly white, hiding her disapproval and rejection of him behind her cheerful and thoroughly superficial party manners.
There was a long silence. Enrique looking at her, Margaret looking at the doctor, the psychiatrist studying them both. “He
seems to want you to start, Margaret,” Goldfarb said, speaking slowly in a droll tone. “Are you willing?”
With a shock, Enrique realized he didn’t know what she was going to say. He assumed she was unhappy, but had she said so? He assumed she would complain about him, but he didn’t know for sure. He knew what she thought about the plays and movies they had seen. He knew what she thought about their friends, their families, and Gregory. He knew what she thought about Ronald Reagan and the pooper-scooper law. He did not know what she was going to say about their marriage. He was eager now to hear, afraid now to hear, and afraid now to make any motion or noise lest it startle her real feelings away.
But she didn’t speak. Margaret stared at nothing, like a cautious New Yorker on a subway pretending her fellow passengers didn’t exist. Enrique felt panic at her statuary silence. Goldfarb, however, wasn’t impatient. He settled deeper into his soft chair, apparently prepared to hear a long story, and made a request that the young Enrique never had: “Tell me, Margaret. Tell me how you feel about your marriage.”
A
T FIVE O’CLOCK
in the afternoon of the third day after Margaret stopped taking steroids and intravenous hydration, Enrique showed the last of her friends upstairs. Diane, a member of Margaret’s advanced cancer support group, wasn’t strictly speaking a friend, but Margaret felt she couldn’t deny a fellow combatant the chance to stare down what she might soon confront. Enrique immediately returned to the living room, having resolved, after eavesdropping on Margaret’s talk with Dorothy, to thoroughly respect the privacy of her farewells. At most she had five days left to live. Her family, her closest friends, and her sons had all said good-bye. That evening would be their first alone since she had announced to Enrique that she wanted to die as quickly as possible within the strictures of the law. She was noticeably weaker and sleepier than the day before; soon she would lapse
into a coma. He settled on the couch to wait for Diane to depart in half an hour, when his turn would at last arrive.
During the past week, he had done what she had asked of him, helping her manage the painful good-byes of family and friends. He had not, except for one brief outburst, obliged Margaret to comfort him. And he hoped to avoid exposing her to the dread he felt at living without her. He certainly hoped to say nothing that would hurt her, although he wondered if they could have a satisfying good-bye without both of them taking that risk. Whatever they did say to each other, it would be the end of the conversations they had begun when he was twenty-one and had continued, for good or ill, until he was fifty. He longed to penetrate the mystery of how they had managed to live a life together while they were so different in their natures and in their expectations of one another. And if there was no answer to be found in a last talk with his wife, at least he wanted to tell her what she had meant to him, and to hear what he had meant to her, because soon there would be only the loneliness of monologue.
A lot that had worried him about these final days had been accomplished. Gregory and Max had said good-bye to their mother. Both farewells had been characteristic of her different relationships with them and their different experiences of her illness. When Margaret was diagnosed, Gregory was twenty and in college. On graduation a year later, while his mother was in remission, he took a job at a liberal magazine in Washington, D.C. Within months he established himself as a young star in political journalism, particularly as a blogger, which also led to appearances on radio and TV, so that his proud parents were able to enjoy his precocious success from his mother’s hospital bed. Because he had to travel to see Margaret, nearly all of Gregory’s audiences with her were scheduled ahead of time. She could prepare herself, disguise as much as possible the ravages of her illness and the strenuous
treatments that she had endured to stay alive. Twice, a crisis serious enough to bring Gregory to New York had exposed him to the unadorned patient: wigless, insufficiently covered by a hospital gown, too feverish or weak to summon her usual conversational energy, too saddened by the knowledge that she wouldn’t live to see her firstborn grow fat and bald and eminent. Gregory looked bewildered when his mother sometimes cut their conversations short, but Enrique understood why. As hope for a cure waned, it had become impossible to gaze at her sons for long without tears darkening her bright eyes; she wanted to spare them the only thing she could of her death—her grief at leaving them.
Greg had been brave when he glimpsed his mother at her lowest in those two medical emergencies. So had his brother, Max. But because Max lived with his parents throughout the entire course of her illness, he had been obliged to be stoic about such sights, and worse spectacles, far more often. Margaret’s bouts with severe infections and the growing crises of her digestive blockages had forced Enrique to take her to Urgent Care at Sloan-Kettering in the middle of the night at least a dozen times, abandoning their teenage son with little or no warning. Each time Enrique left a note to be found in case Max woke up, or he whispered a quick explanation at his son’s bedside if his light was still on, or gambled that he would get back before Max’s alarm clock blared at seven am. Gregory had had a healthy mother for his miserable years of high school. For better and certainly sometimes for worse, he had had the complete attention of both Enrique and Margaret during the weird stress and excitement of applying to college and leaving home. Max had lost his mother’s attention for those years, and the lion’s share of his father’s as well.
Neither boy complained to Enrique about their mother’s decay. Their statements were brief and inarguable: “It sucks. I hope she feels better soon.” They asked simple and direct ques
tions about her medical care: “Can’t her doctors do anything about her not being able to eat or drink?” And the hardest one to answer accurately: “Is she going to be okay?” until last September, when Enrique had explained that, as far as science was concerned, she could never be cured.
In style and content, the two sons had always reacted differently to their mother. Gregory had been an obedient boy, so intimidated by Margaret that if she said his namely sharply, he would jump an inch in the air. When he disobeyed her, he did it in the way that Margaret disobeyed her own mother. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” he would say and sulk, refusing to engage in further discussion. He resorted, if possible, to an invisible act of defiance or passive inaction, in order to keep confrontations to a minimum while also refusing to surrender. When he chose to collapse his will and do her bidding, he did so with the same begrudging expression that shuttered Margaret’s face when she felt bullied by her mother. Gregory wanted, as did Margaret with her mother, for their relations to be pacific and loving.
It seemed fitting then that yesterday, after Gregory had spent five and a half hours upstairs alone with his mother, he trudged down the steps and appeared with a peaceful look on his face. He stood in the dining room area, a good distance from his father’s position on the couch, regarding him with what appeared to be patient contemplation through his hip rectangular glasses. Relieved to see him so calm, Enrique walked over to embrace him. Close up, he saw that he had been mistaken. His son’s blue eyes, although dry, were swimming in pain.
Greg averted them to the floor and released a sigh of utter despair. Wanting to send grief packing, Enrique attempted to hug his son. Greg had grown nearly as tall as his father, and thicker in the chest and shoulders than Enrique had ever been. Margaret had liked to call him Little Bear when he was only a
warm muffin of a baby, but these days there was something bear-like about his appearance: big, gentle, and thoughtful. He could roar too, he’d proved that as a writer. But now Gregory pressed the top of his skull awkwardly against his father’s chest, as if he wished he could burrow inside. His strong arms came around and locked across Enrique’s back, not so much embracing his father as attaching himself.
In this half hug, Enrique couldn’t see his son’s face or pat his back. He could kiss the top of his head, the way he used to when carrying baby Gregory in his seersucker Snugli. He kissed him twice and whispered, “You okay?” although it was obvious that nothing about this was okay or ever would be. He had made this hopeless inquiry so many times that one sleepless night he thought about why he kept asking so impossible a thing of his children. He decided it was because, despite all the evidence to the contrary, he thought there must be a way for him to make it okay. Enrique felt contempt for himself that he was indulging in such grandiosity. What desperate vanity made him think he could transform their mother’s death into something good—or bad? He was astonishingly irrelevant. He was stumbling around outside, unable to find the key that would let him enter the room of his sons’ loss. Their father ought to be the person who could best console them, but Enrique felt that he was considerably less helpful than their friends, and Lord knows what else they sought as balm, certainly alcohol and—Enrique hoped and prayed—comfort in the arms of loving young women. Whenever he tried to soothe them, they seemed to feel worse. He repeatedly tried to reassure them that they were being great about their mother’s illness, that Margaret and he were very proud of them. Although never truer, every word sounded hollow and false. Many times in life Enrique had felt stupid, foolish, inept, clumsy, but never so thoroughly useless.
Gregory mumbled something in a teary voice.
“What?” Enrique whispered into his son’s ear. Greg brought his head straight up and whacked his father’s chin hard enough to send him back a step.
“Sorry,” he said, reaching for Enrique, massaging his father’s shoulder.
“I’m okay.” Enrique laughed at their clumsiness before he asked again, “What did you say? I couldn’t hear you.”
Greg shook his head, chin wobbling. Enrique put an arm around his boy and maneuvered so they were shoulder to shoulder, bearing each other up. “Tell me,” he pleaded.
“It’s so sad,” Greg whispered before his throat closed and he had to shut his blue, bespectacled eyes against the tears. Enrique mumbled, “Yes,” and had nothing more to say. Gregory could not fight this loss; it overwhelmed him. Enrique pulled his child into his arms and fully embraced his great sorrow. He wanted to soak up every drop of his son’s grief. He realized that this was what a father should be able to accomplish: to physically eradicate his son’s unhappiness. After all, he and Margaret had created the tragedy of Gregory’s pain in the first place. His suffering belonged to them. It felt to Enrique, while Greg quaked in his arms, that his boy’s agony ought to be something that he could erase with inarticulate love.
When Gregory left for a walk, Enrique climbed the stairs, expecting to find his wife sobbing. Margaret was sitting up, her wig discarded beside her on the bed. It resembled a furry animal with a broken back. She gazed out the wall of windows at the June blue sky of southern Manhattan with a contented look. Tears shimmered, but that was a constant these days, most likely from chemo. “How was that?” he asked.
She turned to Enrique, a wistful sadness mixed with satisfaction on her face. “He let me baby him,” she confessed, as if to a guilty pleasure. “He let me sew his button on his shirt, and tell
him to get his hair cut, and just act like a dumb mom, and he didn’t fuss at all. He was so sweet.” Drops of water rolled down her cheeks, but there was no distress in her voice.
He got into bed beside her, careful to snake around the various medical attachments, and cradled her in his arms. She had always been physically much smaller than he, although in every other way she seemed bigger, especially in spirit. She was smaller than ever, less than a hundred pounds, the fine bones of her face outlined like tent poles against her almost translucent skin. She was fading away. Not elegantly, like a dissolve in a Hollywood film; elegance was spoiled by the tube draining the contents of her stunned stomach and the catheters above her right breast. But there was great beauty in the deep sea-blue of her eyes, made larger by a narrowing, delicate face. She looked quite different but was easily recognizable as the same beauty when young and healthy—ghosts lingered of the vigorous good cheer of her high cheeks and the sparkle of her laughing, azure eyes in a setting of white skin and black hair. “You’re so warm,” she whispered, kneading her head, with its thin layer of postchemo fuzz, into the crook of his shoulder. She shut her watering eyes. Strength, he realized, as he felt her frailty all along the length of his body, strength was what he had always obtained from this small woman. Illness had taken that from him, reversing the polarity of their marriage.
In his presence five weeks ago, Margaret had said to Lily, “Enrique is strong. He can carry any weight,” after recounting how she had instructed him to fight with her doctors to agree to a desperate operation, and had asked him to explain why to her agitated and confused parents. “Those are tall orders,” the sympathetic Lily had commented to Margaret, that being her gentle way of making a plea on his behalf that perhaps her best friend was asking too much of Enrique. “He bears every load I put on him,”
Margaret answered, and both women gazed at him as if he were a familiar and pleasing landmark. He suspected Margaret hadn’t felt that confidence in his strength before her illness. He certainly hadn’t.
After a silence in each other’s arms, Margaret exclaimed, “I love being with you and the boys,” as if she were confessing to an affair. “That’s what I’m going to miss,” she said. “I’m not scared of dying.” She lifted her head up to look at him. Tears were flowing, but she smiled through them, impossibly free of bitterness or regret. “I know that sounds crazy, but I’m really not. What’s so hard, what I’m going to miss is hanging out with you and Greggy and Maxy. I have so much fun with all of you. I’m going to miss you so much,” she whispered, making no philosophical sense of life and death but all the sense in the world about her feelings. “That’s what makes me sad. Giving up you and the boys,” she said in sweet notes of utter love.
He was dumbfounded, comforted to his core to hear that being with him and his sons was her great joy in life. If a stranger had asked him, at any point in his marriage including that day, what he had given Margaret as a husband, the pleasure of his company would not have been his guess. He supposed that it made sense, since she had chosen to live her life with him, but it had never occurred to him because he so often was irritated and unhappy with his career, worried over the simplest social plan, asked if he looked good in this sweater or those trousers, picked his teeth after meals, never forgot the slightest slight from the slightest of friends, and sometimes raged in political arguments at people he loved as though they were members of the Nazi Party. He felt he was quite unpleasant to be with, and he ought to know since he was stuck with himself twenty-four hours a day. How had Margaret, living with him for almost three decades, missed the obvious fact that he was a drag?
Perhaps she’d forgotten what a misery he used to be. Her illness had changed something basic in the mechanism of Enrique’s head and heart. After the shock of her diagnosis, when she was well enough to go to a movie or a play, he no longer cared whether it was any good, or if some hack who was making ten times what Enrique could command had gotten away with inept dialogue, sloppy plotting, rickety characters, and a dishonest story. He no longer cherished his resentment of friends who had begged for a copy of one of his novels and then never made a comment. Nearly all of them had been kind and loving to Margaret in her sickness, and he wouldn’t trade that compassion for fulsome praise of an out-of-print novel.