Authors: Rafael Yglesias
“Uh-oh!” she said, making a scared face like a little girl.
Puzzled, he peered into her eyes, saw adult terror, and was
confused. He still wasn’t sure how to broach it. “No, nothing terrible. I just want to ask you if I’m the reason, or part of the reason, you’ve stopped painting.”
She blinked, confused. He hadn’t framed the question properly. On the boat and during their walk, he had been reviewing what happened three years ago, when she’d finally directed her energy into painting without distraction. She had put in long hours at the studio every day, at night wearing the abstracted gaze of an artist whose work has taken up full-time residence in her head. Unlike during earlier bursts of effort, this time she finished painting after painting. More surprising was that she brought home four of them and hung them for all to see. They were confident works, massive paintings of their sons from photographs she had taken. The paintings were full of her clear-eyed acceptance of the illusion and longing for attention in children, blown up so that you could see that, in their gleeful and poignant narcissism, adulthood—including disappointed adulthood—loomed.
Friends were impressed, and they asked to commission portraits of their children. She smiled but never accepted. Only after Enrique pressed her to the point of irritation did she explain. She didn’t want to paint to order, she said. Eventually a friend of a friend, who ran one of New York’s premier galleries, came over to see the paintings she had on display in their apartment and then went to her studio to see the rest, and told her the work was excellent and commercial and should get a show. It was too much to expect to start at the top, so she offered to recommend Margaret to a dozen of the hottest smaller galleries in SoHo and the Lower East Side. She advised Margaret to send out a portfolio of slides of her paintings, and she returned to the studio a second time to help her select the best. Margaret followed up immediately, displaying no signs of her usual reluctance and wariness of pushing her work. She mailed the slides to the galleries as soon as possible. The
energy and excitement which infused her body during the week that she waited for responses was startling and significant to Enrique. While he listened to her enthusiastic plans for a new and different series, he concluded that all those years of diffidence about being an artist had been self-protection. It was apparent that she wanted, as much as he did, to be recognized.
The rejections arrived slowly at first. By the second week, she had gotten three. They were, as Enrique well knew, the kinds of rejections beginning artists long for. Not form letters but thoughtful explanations as to why her series, although provocative and well-executed, didn’t fit into their notions of what their clients were seeking. Some offered to recommend her to other galleries; one suggested she take commissions for portraits and gradually build a following. All asked her, if she moved to another subject, to please show her new work to them first. “Someone will take them,” Enrique encouraged her.
On Tuesday of the following week, he came home to have lunch with her. She had already picked up the mail. He found her lying on the chaise under the stairs, where she liked to read murder mysteries in the afternoon. Her face was awash in tears. Tossed on the floor were eight rejections. She answered his question, “What’s the matter?” by pointing to them. He read them. Each was encouraging, regretful, making suggestions about other venues, many repeating the advice that she take commissions to do people’s children and build a following that way. All requested that when she tried a different series, not portraits, she please come to them first. “Margaret,” Enrique said and meant every word, “if I had gotten these rejection letters when I was starting out, I would have been thrilled. They genuinely like your work. They took time to write these letters. If they thought you were wasting your time and theirs, they would send out form letters. They don’t think they can sell this, but they want you to keep
going, and eventually one of them will take you on. Don’t be discouraged. I know it seems like I’m bullshitting when I say this, but these are great rejections.”
The tears had stopped. Her eyes were sad and bereft and, oddly, loving. She said nothing for a moment. He feared she was going to lapse into her typical reticence and refuse to reveal her private thoughts. But she did speak. “I’ve watched you,” she said and paused.
“What?” he asked, confused.
“For twenty years I’ve watched you take this”—she gestured at the rejections—“and keep going, and I don’t know how you do it. I can’t. I just can’t. I’m sorry. I’m not strong enough.”
He lifted her from the chaise, her arms limp with defeat, held her, and whispered, “Then just paint. Don’t show the work. If you can’t take it, just paint.”
She agreed. For a while, she did paint, beginning the new series that, to his surprise, was better, more confident, more accomplished, as if the rejections had strengthened her. But they hadn’t; or something else sapped her strength. The energy to fight was short-lived. Fewer canvases came home, and soon none did. After six months she stopped going regularly to the studio, and, while they were in Maine during August, she mentioned that she planned to allow the lease to lapse in December.
The anticipatory look of terror at what he might say had left his wife’s face. She snagged her champagne glass and smirked. “You? I didn’t stop painting because of you. Why would I have stopped because of you? It has nothing to do with you.”
This thorniness was why he feared talking to her about this subject or any other that she had quarantined. “Wait. Slow down. You don’t understand.”
“What?” The thorn bush waggled at him. “What don’t I understand?”
“I’ve had a lot of setbacks in my career. A lot of times I wanted to quit, and you’ve always encouraged me and kept me going. Even when I got us into debt you backed me up. But when you had that one disappointment because of the galleries passing on your series and you stopped, I didn’t—”
She cut him off. “It had nothing to do with that.” Their first course arrived, and they fell silent while the dishes were maneuvered in front of them. He had ruined the mood. Her girlish smile, her naughty laugh, her gleaming eyes had fled. This had been a mistake. The hurt was too deep. When the waiter departed, she said, “Let’s not talk about this.”
“I’m sorry I brought it up, but let’s try to finish now that—”
“I don’t want to,” she snapped, refusing to look at him.
He was beaten.
Do I really love this woman?
he wondered.
I need her. She is my life. But do I love her—her privacy, and her fussy, controlling nature? I hate that she won’t give an inch.
He poked at the first course, ravioli stuffed with tuna—enough food for a full meal—and felt glum. He heard a bee buzz past and a low murmur of English accents from the old men nearby. And then he heard his wife speak, in a sweet, conciliating tone:
“I’m not like you. I don’t need to do it to be happy.” He looked up into her great blue eyes, paler than usual in the bright sunlight of the perpetual springtime of Torcello, gazing at him with an open plea for understanding. “And what bothers me, what I always feel from you, is that I’m not good enough for you unless I’m an artist. Sometimes I think you won’t love me unless I’m an artist.”
Enrique was astounded. He had no inkling she felt this from him. But he didn’t deny it right away.
“In your family there’s a kind of craziness about it. They all have to be artists or they’re not good enough. I like painting. I like taking photos. But I don’t want to make a career of it. Trying to
make a career of it made me miserable. I’m not like you. It took me a while to find out. I don’t need to paint to be happy. I’m happy. Here. With you. Doing this.” She gestured at the garden, at the old English people, at the bees, and the October flowering bushes, at the waiters in their black suits, and at last at Enrique. “I’m happy,” she said, merriment spreading her plea into a smile. “If you’re happy with me, like this, then I’m happy.”
He knew that her accusation had merit. He had spent years in therapy trying to be free of his parents’ prejudices, gripes, snobberies, ignorance—she must have suffered during that struggle. But he didn’t offer that excuse. He swore to her, until he felt sure that Margaret believed him, that he didn’t care if she never touched a brush or picked up a camera, that she was everything he wanted.
And for a moment, in the amnesty of their anniversary, he understood his marriage. That sunny afternoon in Torcello he understood that he lived in awe of her contented place on earth; that she embodied what had endured for him: that his father was gone, his vanity was gone, his belief in art was gone, and that what he had extracted of true value out of life was the life she had given him.
“
W
E DON’T HAVE
a marriage. We’re just people doing errands who share an apartment. We hand off Greg to each other. That’s the most contact we have. I come home, he hands me the baby—”
“I don’t hand you the baby when you come home.” Enrique couldn’t stop himself from interrupting, although he assumed Dr. Goldfarb would object now that, as requested, Margaret was expressing her feelings about their marriage. “You come home at two o’clock in the morning! I don’t hand you—”
“I mean on Wednesday.” She didn’t glance his way. Her sunny face was shining on the marriage counselor, on the marriage counselor alone. “And on the rare Thursday Enrique doesn’t go to a screening with Porter.” She added, “He’d much rather spend time with Porter than me.”
The psychiatrist shot him a look. What does that sourpuss mean? Enrique wondered. Does he think I’m gay? Porter doesn’t fuck me either, but at least he talks about something other than the durability of strollers. “Who is…Paula?” the shrink asked in a lugubrious basso.
“Porter,” Enrique corrected.
“Porter Beekman. The critic,” she announced, as if introducing him at a dinner party. She was sitting ramrod straight, her teeth—newly bonded to a gleaming white and correct proportionate size—were on display thanks to a beauty-queen-wide smile. “The
New York Times
movie critic—”
“Second-string movie critic,” Enrique corrected. “And he’s a novelist also.”
“Second-string?” Goldfarb said. “I know his name. But I don’t know what that means…second-string?”
Enrique gave a rough explanation that the first-string critic took his pick of what to review and the second-string got the leavings, all the while wondering what the hell they were doing paying one hundred and twenty dollars an hour to explain the intricacies of journalism’s hierarchy.
Meanwhile Margaret continued to sit smartly and beam at the gloomy psychiatrist as if he were the head of a co-op board and she needed his approval to move into the apartment of her dreams. The cheer flowing out of her and disappearing into the black hole of his Freudian silence seemed heroic, and crazy too, like the charge of the Light Brigade. When he asked her, “Why do you feel En-Ricky would rather spent time with Porter than you?” she answered in a hearty voice, as if announcing that she had won the lottery, “He’d rather spend time with anyone other than me.”
Enrique shook his head at Dr. Goldfarb. He didn’t want to interrupt again but couldn’t bear to let that pass. She was the one who didn’t want to be with him, his evidence being that she
never wanted to have sex. On reflection, he was glad that he didn’t pipe up with that proof, since no doubt Margaret didn’t think having sex and spending time together were equivalent. It might fail to persuade the fish-eyed shrink as well, since many people seemed to believe fucking was somehow less intimate than dinner at a three-star restaurant. How he loathed the bourgeois jail he had sentenced himself to. How he loathed what he was doing at that very moment, sitting in a Park Avenue psychiatrist’s office waiting for the right moment to say, “Look, I’m not even asking for a blow job. This marriage would be fine if she would only spread her legs more than once every two months!” But his vanity would never allow him to be that crude and that honest. Besides, he was sure he’d get a scolding, either feminist from Margaret or Freudian from the psychiatrist. Considering how crucial intercourse is to the continuation of the species, it seemed remarkable how little public support there was for the sexual act.
“Are you jealous of this…Porter?” the analyst asked, hesitating over the WASP name as much as he did over the Latino Enrique. I guess he can only pronounce Jewish names, Enrique thought bitterly, convinced the old fart was a waste of time. But that was a perverse complaint: Enrique had asked for counseling as a passive and hypocritical way of getting out of his marriage; incompetence could prove useful.
For a moment Margaret hesitated. Jealous of Porter? Does
she
think I’m gay? Enrique wondered, outrage beginning to well at the idea. First, she stops fucking me. Second, she decides I’m a fag. One of your best friends definitely doesn’t think I’m gay, he sniped back in his head.
“No. It’s not that. I don’t care who his friends are. I just don’t feel that Enrique wants to spend any time with me. He’d rather go out with our friend Lily and listen to her dating disasters—”
What is she talking about? Enrique wondered. Lily is practically engaged; she’s not having dating disasters anymore.
“He spent a whole year, right after we moved in together, gambling until all hours at a backgammon club and sleeping all day so I never saw him.”
“I stopped!” Enrique squealed, voice in a prepubescent climb. “That was six years ago. Before we even got married.”
“He only stopped because I threatened to leave.” Although she didn’t look Enrique’s way, she paused long enough to establish that he couldn’t contradict her. “There’s always something he’d rather do than spend time with me,” she resumed her indictment. “When we’re home alone, he stays up late watching television. He never goes to bed with me—”
“I’m not tired, and you never want to make love. What am I supposed to do? Lie there in the dark?”
Margaret smiled broadly, but her voice got louder and more strident. She sounded like her mother, trying to dominate conversation at the long, crowded Passover table. “That’s all I feel Enrique is interested in from me. Having sex. If he wants to talk, he calls Porter or his brother or his father. He’d rather talk to Lily than to me.” Goldfarb raised his eyebrows at this second mention of Lily. Margaret explained: “She’s my best friend. Enrique loves to call her to get advice about his career—”
“Lily’s an editor, I’m a writer—” Enrique began to object, but Margaret talked right over him.
“I can’t think of anything he likes to do with me. He never wants to go anywhere, just the two of us. And when we finally go to a party—and he never wants, never ever wants to go anywhere—Enrique leaves my side immediately and talks to other people. He has lunches every day with his friends and tells them everything. His parents come over all the time, and he’s always happy to talk to them. They’re great babysitters, and I don’t mind
when they’re around, but I feel like he’s closer to his parents than to me. I don’t think he wants to spend time with me, or talk to me, or that he cares about how I feel about anything. He’s only interested in fucking me.”
Enrique was tongue-tied by anger and shame. He was outraged by her presentation of the facts. Whether he could dispute that they were accurate, however, was another matter. Of course, after seven years of living together, he didn’t want to spend all his time with her. Of course, he liked to be with friends and family and to talk to them about his feelings. Of course, he wanted to have sex with his wife rather than with his father. He was profoundly loyal to Margaret, it seemed to him, forgetting, for the moment, that he was having an affair with one of her closest friends. He wanted to refute her. He wanted to point out that their not having enough sex had been going on for years, and that he had accepted this deprivation with hardly a whimper. He had been much more patient than, say, his unfaithful half brother, who screwed around every week, not once in seven years. But that distinction would entail confessing to the affair. Instead, he stared at the psychiatrist and hoped he would set her straight.
“Margaret,” the dour analyst began. She nodded eagerly, on the edge of her chair, an attentive student. “You’re very clear about what you feel. And you’ve expressed it very clearly. But here’s what puzzles me”—ah, Enrique thought with some satisfaction, he’s going to hit her with how unreasonable she’s being—“you’re saying all these things about how unhappy you feel with a big smile on your face and in an excited way, like it’s all good news. Why is that? These are sad feelings. Don’t you feel sad about them?”
Enrique turned to look at her. He agreed. Her party manners while unburdening herself were odd. It pissed him off that she was so loud and boastful about her complaints. Her smile was gone.
The shrink had dumbfounded her. Enrique was gleeful. He lost arguments with his wife because of this trick she had mastered: she flipped his criticisms of her into what she didn’t like about him. Look at the jujitsu she had just pulled off: the problem in their marriage is that Enrique wants to have sex with his wife. Disgusting! Maybe, just maybe, this sluggish fish of a marriage counselor will show her how bizarre her thinking is.
Margaret faced the windows. A block away, the sun slanted over Central Park and crossed the Fifth Avenue rooftops, filling her sea blue eyes. The beams pooled, overflowed, and began to fall—blue and yellow skating down her cheek. It took Enrique a moment to realize those were tears, not sunbeams. “I am sad,” she said, the harsh, anxious voice gone. This was the tender tone she used with baby Gregory to soothe him, or to whisper endearments when she was pleased with Enrique. “I’m very sad,” she repeated, teardrops clinging to her chin before they fell into her lap. “I love Enrique and I don’t think he loves me anymore. We’re strangers. He doesn’t want me, he doesn’t want to know me, he doesn’t care about me, I’m just a drag for him.” Her face shimmered with sorrow, and she sobbed. As if anteing up poker chips, Dr. Goldfarb used two fingers to move a box of Kleenex from his side of the desk to hers. She blotted her face, said, “Thank you,” and blew her nose.
Enrique wanted to hug her. He wanted to assure her that he loved her. But he didn’t move or speak. Wasn’t this why he had come? Hadn’t he hoped that through these sessions she would accept that he no longer loved her? Then he would be free to leave the marriage and live happily with Sally, who opened her full lips every day to kiss him and volunteer that she loved him without prompting from a psychiatrist. Sally was funny and demanding and giving and told him every single thought that came into her head. Sally, in some fundamental way, was much easier to love than Margaret. Although he felt miserable and unworthy—a villain
who should be hissed in a movie, a coldhearted guard in a concentration camp, the shallow, materialistic boy whom the heroine is supposed to fall out of love with so she can find the right, warm-hearted, nurturing man—although he knew he was bad and unworthy and that he ought to apologize, he said nothing.
Margaret was silent too. She wept steadily, small and still in her chair, a heartbroken little girl. That he continued to say nothing, not a word of reassurance, appalled even him. He assumed she must also be shocked and deeply hurt that he hadn’t declared his love for her. Dr. Goldfarb, like a rhinoceros, maneuvered his great bald head and fixed his dead eyes on Enrique. Not with challenge. Or disgust. With faint curiosity. “How do you feel about that, En-Ricky?” he asked. “How does what Margaret is saying make you feel?”
“Well, of course I love Margaret,” he said in an aggrieved tone. “I married her.” Another sob burst out of his wife. She grabbed more tissues and brought them like reinforcements to her mouth, damming up the hurt feelings. She glanced at him, and he caught her eye, the first direct look they had exchanged since meeting in the waiting room. Her normally bold gaze was in a chaos of acute pain. The wince and wound of this contact was startling. She couldn’t look at him that nakedly for long. She shifted away from him, staring into a corner, at empty carpet and a wicker wastebasket. She cleared her throat and got herself under control. Observing this struggle, he realized, for the first time in the seven years he had known her, that her cool manner—the clipped and strident voice, the alert girlish posture—was a shield and a disguise. “I didn’t know she felt this way,” Enrique told the doctor. He turned on the hard wood chair to address Margaret’s dignified profile. “I didn’t know you cared about me that much.”
“What!” Margaret snapped, the scolding second-grade teacher restored to her tone, ice freezing her eyes. “That’s ridiculous.”
“I didn’t,” Enrique said to her. She kept her face averted from him. He pleaded to Goldfarb, “I didn’t. I feel like she doesn’t want to be with me. Part of that’s sex, yes. But I think she’s bored hearing me whine about my career and bored by…” He recounted a litany of facts—that she didn’t seem to like Porter; that his closeness to his mother and father, so different from her alienation from her parents, seemed to irritate her; that she was bored with his unhappiness collaborating on screenplays with his half brother; that she hadn’t wanted to make love for years, not simply since Greg was born.
From the very beginning of their relationship, Enrique told the doctor, she had tried to control every aspect of his behavior. “Every single thing we do, from the friends we see, to the parties we go to, to whether we have sex, she decides.” Margaret had changed his quotidian behavior in the years before their son was born, insisting that Enrique stop behaving like a child, playing games late into the night, sleeping half the day, dropping his clothes on the floor, leaving dishes in the sink, sulking at home, watching baseball rather than going out and enjoying the world. She had mothered him out of adolescence into adulthood, and in the process she had controlled him. An investigation by a crack detective couldn’t have disproved his statement. Nevertheless, Enrique felt his testimony amounted to a monumental lie. In fact, he was glad she had nagged him to grow up. If she hadn’t, how would he ever have persuaded Sally to fall in love with him?
Apparently it was a convincing lie. Margaret seemed to want to believe how unhappy he was about his work and that he thought she was bored with his despair. The shrink too, when Enrique complained about Margaret’s controlling behavior. But Enrique hadn’t fooled himself. The truth was that he didn’t love her anymore. She wasn’t the problem in the marriage. He was. She wasn’t the cause of his feeling oppressed by his parents’
expectations, by his half brother’s lack of talent and irresponsibility. She wasn’t responsible for the fact that he was too passive about his career, unlike Porter and the other writers he knew. She wasn’t the sole cause that in every area of his life—family and work—his days were unsatisfying. It wasn’t her fault that only in Sally’s arms did he feel alive. If he could escape from the cell of his New York existence, from his family, from his career, from his own expectations, he could be happy. Walking out on Margaret, and on all of his past, and fleeing to the sun and pleasures of L.A. would solve everything. It would all be so simple, really, if it weren’t for Greg.