A Happy Marriage Read Online Free PDF Page A

bathroom, pushing the aluminum IV pole with its liter bag of hydration as if it were holding her up; nights she was plugged into the pump of milky fluid entering her veins. On May 10, Margaret greeted Enrique on his return from the supermarket with tears running down her face. He had bought frozen fruit bars so she could have the pleasure of tasting something sweet that wouldn’t clog the narrow passage of her stomachPEG. He had already opened the package to offer a choice of orange or strawberry, but he was silenced by the sight of her despair. Though her tears continued to flow, her voice rang with conviction: “I can’t do this. I can’t live like this. I can’t go on being tethered to a bag for half the day. I can’t stand not eating with you and the boys and our friends. I know it sounds so stupid, so trivial, so small, but I can’t live like this.”
    He felt the box begin to drip on his jeans. He wanted to put the bars in the freezer because if they melted he didn’t know if he could summon the energy to walk to the supermarket again. But he couldn’t turn away from this statement. He had known for over a year, when her cancer returned in March, that she was almost certain to die. Last September, on hearing the news of her second recurrence and that there were no therapies with a promise of success, Margaret had decided to stop seeking experimental treatments, to try to enjoy whatever time she had left. He had agreed with her decision and felt a guilty relief that at least some of the horrors of the hospital could be skipped. There would be time, perhaps a few months, to commune with their sons, to sleep once more in their summer house on the Maine coast, to visit with friends somewhere other than waiting rooms. They tried to plan what final things to do; and then, on the sixth day, she changed her mind. She couldn’t give up; to live without hope wasn’t life. “I don’t want to do a farewell tour,” she said.
    Enrique agreed instantly to this reversal, this time relieved that they wouldn’t be passing up a chance for a miracle. In truth, he could find no comfortable place to sit in the company of her illness. He would feel guilt and shame no matter how he behaved. She was going to die and he was not; in the undeclared war of marriage, it was an appalling victory.
    Since September he had lived with a modest hope: to assuage the keen awareness that she must let go of all the things and people she loved. Nothing grand, or as preposterous as the luminous conclusions of sentimental movies. His ambition since last fall had been to lift a single grain of the tonnage of her grief at saying good-bye to life. Listening to her while the red-and orange-colored frozen fruit bars melted onto his blue jeans, he knew he would fail.
    She asked him to call her various doctors and push them to attempt something, no matter how dangerous, to restore her to normal eating.
    Enrique made his rounds. Her urological surgeon, usually accommodating, begged off with the reasonable excuse that it wasn’t his specialty. The Iraqi gastroenterologist refused to recommend anyone from his department, stating nothing could or should be done; he insisted she could survive on TPN indefinitely while they searched for a new drug to cure her. Her oncologist did consult with the appropriate specialist, but came back to report that the only possible procedure was unlikely to relieve her gastroparesis. The end-to-end anastomosis he cited certainly sounded like a desperate improvisation: attempting to circumvent her blocked digestive tract by taking a lower, cleared loop of bowel and hooking it up to her stomach. Besides, as each specialist implied with the sentence “It wouldn’t be addressing her disease,” what was the point of a risky surgery to restart her digestion when she would die whether or not they succeeded?
    Margaret wore them down. For Enrique it was a grim amusement to watch her work her formidable will on men other than himself