A Happy Marriage Read Online Free PDF

and his sons, especially to see these white-coated grandees of medicine, accustomed to patients accepting their rationalizations as incontestable, finally give way to her insistence on the value of the operation to her. “Even if it means I can have just one more meal with my husband,” she explained, lying in a bed at Sloan a few days later. She was addressing the chief of oncology, ablood cancer specialist who had treated a celebrity friend of Enrique’s. He had taken a fancy to Margaret two years ago, when they were introduced shortly after the start of her treatments, enjoying the apparent paradox of her cynical evaluations of the abilities of her various doctors with a sweet optimism that their treatments would succeed. He was an administrator powerful enough to make a Sloan-Kettering surgeon do almost anything. He listened to Margaret’s plea, then turned to regard Enrique, squinting hard, as if peering through a microscope to discover what made having dinner with this bald, middle-aged writer worth enduring an abdominal surgery that was unlikely to work.
    “I don’t think having dinner with me is the crucial part,” Enrique explained. “She’d be happy to have dinner with anyone.”
    Margaret laughed, although tears were running down her face, and added, “That’s right. I don’t care who you invite to dinner, I just want to have dinner.”
    The head of oncology told her that he and the Iraqi Jew would get her a surgeon, but first he had to provide cover for them all by bringing in the psychiatric department for a consult.
    Enrique listened while she explained her desperate logic to a thoughtful shrink with a salt-and-pepper version of Bozo the Clown’s hairdo. He nodded sympathetically as she said, “I had a life. I had a husband and children and friends. Now I lie in bed all day and I can’t think. I can’t even read a murder mystery. All I can do is watch stupid fucking episodes of Law and Order. ”
    “There’s nothing else on television,” the somber Bozo said. After a silence, while Margaret wiped tears off her cheeks and blew her nose, the psychiatrist added, “I guess people like the show.”
    “Because it’s about death with no emotion,” Enrique mumbled. Used to her husband’s cranky cultural observations, Margaret ignored him and repeated, “It’s stupid. It’s such a stupid life.It’s not living. I want my life back,” she cried out and heaved with sobs. “I don’t care if I die trying, I don’t care how long it lasts. I don’t care if it’s only for one day. I want my life back.”
    The psychiatrist prescribed Zoloft and affirmed that she was of sound mind to make an informed decision. The chief of oncology and the Iraqi Jew persuaded the ruddy-cheeked colleague to perform the surgery—although in return for this concession they all insisted that Margaret also agree to the PEJ, inserting a tube into her small bowel, so that they could improve on TPN’s intravenous method with an upgrade to enteric feeding if the rerouted plumbing of her stomach didn’t work. Enrique wondered whether Dick Wolf, executive producer of all Law & Order s, would be bothered to learn that a team of medical experts had concurred with Margaret’s judgment that watching his creations did not constitute having a life.
    That’s what had brought them back to Sloan in late May. The end-to-end anastomosis had failed. Using the PEJ for enteric feeding had also failed. Resuming TPN was her only option. She had lain these past three days, the first three of June, with Ativan’s glazed eyes, pupils dilated, staring with an inconsolable sadness that he had never seen in her before. Not when she turned to him on their terrace two years and nine months ago as the first mushroom cloud from the World Trade Center blossomed in their direction and said, “We’re watching thousands of people die.” Not when she was first told that she had cancer, or that it had come back, or that it had come back again, or