A Happy Marriage Read Online Free PDF Page B

that there was nothing else to be done. There had been the flint of anger on those occasions, a willingness to engage and contend with the future. But this morning, this gloomy morning when she knew that her stomach would never work again, that there was nothing to do but lie there and die, her big blue eyes gazed at him from her narrow face and revealed a look of pure pain from deep in her soul, a nakedness more profound than flesh. “I need this to stop,” she whispered to him without a hello or a preamble. “I can’t do it anymore. I’m sorry, Puff,” she said using the endearment she had invented for him in the first year of their love. “I can’t do this anymore.”
    He knew what she meant, but pretended he didn’t. “Yeah.” He kicked at the pump and its narrow tubing filled with last night’s backed-up gruel. “This is done. We’ll go back to the TPN.”
    She shook her head. “You have to help me. Please.” Tears fell without effort or interruption, as they did these days, water running from a faucet. “I want to die. You have to help me die.”
    He couldn’t answer right away. And in that paralyzed silence, he realized there was something in his brain which—despite all the hours spent learning about survival rates and the nature of metastasis, despite closely watching his father die of prostate cancer—he hadn’t known he would lose, this something in his head that had been present since Bernard Weinstein rang his doorbell twenty-nine years ago. In this silence of her silent, flowing tears, he realized that it was something essential which soon would be gone, and that it was more than simply the expectation that Margaret would stay alive. He had no word for it. A note of music, perhaps it was his name being called, something he didn’t always enjoy, something he had grabbed for rescue, something he had possessed with pleasure, something he had resented with anger. In the carpeted silence of this luxury room of disease, he felt it depart for a moment, a preview of his robbed future, and he understood that this was real in a way nothing should ever be real, that their marriage was a mystery he was going to lose, despite twenty-seven years living inside it, before he understood who they were.

chapter three
Public School
    I T OCCURRED TO Enrique, sometime around five in the morning, that although the package was enticing and in excellent condition, Bernard had failed miserably in his role as a deliveryman. He had failed in this crucial respect: by not departing. It was clear—at least to Enrique—that there was an almost palpable current of excitement running between himself and Margaret, that something had kept her talking long after Saturday Night Live. If that weren’t enough of a clue, when they ran out of cigarettes and Mateus at four-forty-seven in the morning, and Margaret greeted Enrique’s suggestion that they walk over to Sheridan Square for breakfast at Sandolino’s with an enthusiastic, “Great idea! I can be decadent and have challah French toast,” surely then it ought to have been clear to Bernard if he had any novelistic feeling at all for subtleties of character, that this woman, with whom Bernard hadhad a handful of dinners since their graduation from college three years ago, all ending well before midnight, had been lured not by French toast, no matter how blessedly Jewish the bread, but by Enrique. Surely if Bernard had any grace he would excuse himself and let Enrique journey with Margaret to Sheridan Square as rosy-fingered dawn crept into lower Manhattan, casting Enrique, he hoped, in a romantic light.
    But Bernard leapt at the opportunity for a predawn breakfast, and that made them a party of three—not that they had to wait for the scarred surface of one of Sandolino’s pine tables at five-fifteen am. There were only six other customers present, although this twenty-four-hour comfort-food establishment was convenient to the pre-AIDS gay bars and clubs to the west,