A Happy Marriage

A Novel

Rafael Yglesias

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781439109816
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

A Happy Marriage is both intimate and expansive: It is the story of Enrique Sabas and his wife, Margaret, a novel that alternates between the romantic misadventures of the first weeks of their courtship and the final months of Margaret's life as she says good-bye to her family, friends, and children -- and to Enrique. Spanning thirty years, this achingly honest story is about what it means for two people to spend a lifetime together -- and what makes a happy marriage. Yglesias's career as a novelist began in 1970 when he wrote an autobiographical novel at sixteen, hailed by critics for its stunning and revelatory depiction of adolescence. A Happy Marriage, his first work of fiction in thirteen years, was inspired by his relationship with his wife, Margaret, who died in 2004. Bold, elegiac, and emotionally suspenseful, even though we know what happens, Yglesias's beautiful novel will break every reader's heart -- while encouraging all of us with its clear-eyed evocation of the enduring value of marriage.

chapter one

Take-out Girl

HE HAD ORDERED her in. While he waited for the start of Saturday Night Live on his new Trinitron (what vivid colors and definition, what bliss of technology!), he had ordered in the Dream Girl he didn’t know he had dreamed until her great blue eyes, streaming tears from December’s cold, examined him with a startled and amused stare.

The deliveryman was a close friend, the half-hated Bernard Weinstein who, with typical gracelessness, mumbled their names at the floor, “Enrique—Margaret. Margaret—Enrique,” and rudely preceded her into the new studio apartment. New, that is, both to Enrique Sabas and to the world. The fifth-floor walk-up on Eighth Street in Greenwich Village had been gutted, and the renovations were completed two months ago to justify rebooting rent-controlled numbers to market level. Enrique had moved in a week after the last bathroom tile was caulked. So all was new in Enrique’s life, from plumbing to TV, when this new girl entered, walked to the apartment’s single luxury asset, a working fireplace, and released a burst of jet-black hair from the suppression of a red beret. She then turned her back on faded brick and pale marble mantel, kept her tearing searchlights on Enrique while she unzipped a black bubble down jacket, and revealed a fire engine red wool sweater tight to her trim, small-breasted figure. This bourgeois striptease shot a current through Enrique which felt as palpable as if he had ignored the posted warning, opened up the back of his new Trinitron, and stuck a finger where it shouldn’t go.

Her wet blue eyes remained fixed on him while she dropped into a director’s chair beside the fireplace, wriggled her skinny arms out of their down cases, and shrugged off the bubble’s torso with a dainty lift and twist of her slim shoulders. She proceeded with a tomboy’s physical confidence to sling a taut thigh over the chair’s arm as if preparing to mount it; instead, she remained thus perched, her legs wide open, exposing the faded denim of her smooth pelvis. Enrique couldn’t sustain a long investigation of that region. His eyes dropped involuntarily to what he would one day learn was a triple-A foot dangling in the space between them. He didn’t know that her narrow size was very troublesome to a woman who loved shoes, or that the black suede boot swinging toward and away from him had been anguished over because of its high cost. To his male and ignorant twenty-one-year-old eyes, the delicate foot, thus encased, was merely provocative; not for its dainty dimension but for its restless kicks at him, as if they were intended to rouse him to do something to impress her: Perform! Perform! Perform!

He couldn’t complain about this demanding presence because he had ordered her in, just like the take-out Chinese from Charlie Mom’s whose remains were now stuffed into his red garbage pail under the stainless-steel sink. It would have remained stainless anyway because he had hardly cooked in the new kitchen that was one step up from but open to the narrow bedroom-living-working area of this apartment that he couldn’t afford and that represented, although his third residence since leaving his parents’ domain, his first true place all to himself, the previous two having had roommates—the first someone with whom he slept, the second not. He looked away to glum Bernard to obtain some sort of clarification because, yes, he had selected her from his friend’s menu, but he hadn’t expected noodles this spicy.

Although Bernard had proclaimed Margaret’s extraordinary qualities, he had done so with characteristic and maddening vagueness. In his elaborate descriptions of Margaret, Bernard had failed to mention the extraordinary big and vivid blue eyes that rivaled the impact of Elizabeth Taylor’s, or the ice cream smooth whiteness of her freckled skin. Nevertheless Bernard was a heterosexual male, and he might have mentioned that she had perfectly proportioned legs, that she was skinny without being flat-assed or flat-chested, and that for the brief moment Enrique allowed himself to look, the spread of those trim and yet rounded thighs was an invitation too overwhelming to contemplate without losing track of everything else and so merited, for God’s sakes, some warning.

Enrique had dared Bernard to produce Margaret during one of their afternoon breakfasts at the Homer Coffee Shop when, once again, Bernard couldn’t shut up about his remarkable female friend from Cornell, the amazing Margaret Cohen, but wouldn’t agree to introduce her. (Margaret Cohen, Enrique complained, what kind of Jewish family names their daughter Margaret? A complaint which might have seemed more reasonable coming from someone other than a person named Enrique Sabas, who was himself Jewish, thanks to his Ashkenazi mother.) Bernard explained that he had a dread of intermingling friends from different ghettos of his life.

“Why?” Enrique demanded.

Bernard stonewalled him with a laconic shrug. “I’m neurotic.”

“Bullshit,” Enrique said. “You just don’t want to blow all your carefully wrought observations at one dinner party.”

“Dinner party?”

“Okay, bowl of chili. Anyway, by seeing all your friends separately you get to repeat one of your ideas seven times.”

Bernard reacted with a wan smile. “No, I’m afraid if my friends meet they’ll prefer each other to me.”

“You’re afraid you’ll be a third wheel?”

“I’m afraid I won’t be any wheel.”

Enrique could well believe Bernard’s explanation, but thanks to his own feelings of tortured self-love, he thought Bernard’s paranoia applied solely to him because he was the novelist Bernard could only claim to be. By the unusually early age of twenty-one, Enrique had had two novels published, with a third soon to come, while Bernard at twenty-five possessed merely one endlessly rewritten manuscript to justify his also wearing Enrique’s artistic uniform of black jeans and wrinkled work shirts. Proud Enrique believed that Bernard had kept him from meeting his other friends, particularly the women, because if the world were to see the two young novelists side by side, the pretender would be unmasked by the true crown prince of literature.

Still refusing to arrange an introduction, Bernard continued to extol unspecific glories of Margaret. “She’s really, really extraordinary. I can’t express it in mundane terms, but she’s strong while being feminine, smart without being pretentious. In many ways she’s like the heroines of 1930s American movies, particularly the noir films, but also the Sturges comedies,” and so on, in a maddening drift of praise that surveyed every possible quality without settling on a particular trait. The messy description seemed to Enrique evidence of why Bernard was a bad novelist. Not one of his stories about Margaret came to a climax (sexual or other) or revealed her allegedly extraordinary character. After downing five cups of Homer’s coffee on Monday of Thanksgiving week 1975, having endured nearly a year of dismal celibacy, Enrique hit on the strategy of insisting that she didn’t exist. He declared her a construct, a punitive fantasy that Bernard had created to torment the lonely and horny Enrique.

Bernard blanched—something of a feat given his immobile and bloodless face. Bernard was five feet, eight inches tall and his frame slight, but his big head and halo of kinky black hair enlarged his presence, especially in a coffee shop booth. It bobbed for a moment before he protested that he wouldn’t torture a comrade (meaning a fellow single male). “I’m sparing you.”

“Sparing me what?”

“She’ll never go out with you.”

Judging this the Perry Mason confession he had been seeking, Enrique turned up a palm and gestured to an invisible jury, inadvertently summoning the attention of the Homer Coffee Shop waiter, who raised his rambling Greek eyebrows and asked, “Check?” Enrique shook his head and returned his attention to his infuriating friend. “You tell me about this beautiful—”

“—I didn’t say she was beautiful,” Bernard was quick to object.

“So she’s ugly?”

“No!”

“She’s plain?”

“It’s not possible to describe her with clichés.”

“But Bernard, I’ve got a clichéd mind, so use clichés with me. Is she tall? How are her tits? Is she fat? If she exists, you could tell me these things.”

Bernard regarded Enrique with disdain. “That’s silly. If she were a product of my imagination, I could easily make up those details.”

“Could you?” Enrique shot back with unpleasant sarcasm. “I doubt it. I think imagining breast size may well be beyond your creative powers.”

“Fuck you,” Bernard said and meant it, too. In Bernard’s rule book of their friendship, his potshots at Enrique’s talent were amiable pokes, since Enrique had been published, while return fire was cruel and deadly.

“Well, fuck you for saying she would never go out with me,” Enrique answered and meant it, because in his heart he feared no desirable girl would ever go out with him. This dread was exacerbated by his unusual combination of sexual experience and inexperience. He had already lived with a woman for three and a half years, having obtained a book contract and a live-in girlfriend at the same early age, sixteen. Before the start of his relationship with Sylvie, he had had intercourse once (the classic quick release of virginity, as brief and solemn as a late-night public service announcement on television), and since their breakup eighteen months ago, Enrique had found himself naked with only one other woman—with whom he had failed to consummate. Although he had made love many times, he had had only two sexual partners, tied with the number of books he had published.

What made him feel sexually doomed was that Sylvie had ended their relationship by having an affair. She told him that she was moving out for a few weeks so they could “take a break from living together.” Enrique reacted by wildly accusing her of “fucking someone else.” To his horror, she admitted that his guess was correct, but insisted that she still loved him as much as his rival; she claimed she needed time to figure out whom she loved more. Enrique was too half-Latin to agree to a competition and too half-Jewish to believe in Sylvie’s assertion of ambivalence. He thought that she was unwilling to be their relationship’s executioner, that she wanted him to do the dirty deed, which he promptly did, walking out of the apartment after shouting ultimatums (“It’s me or him!”) to sob alone on the streets of Little Italy.

It did not occur to Enrique that Sylvie might feel he didn’t love her. He was exasperated when she asked whether he did, her face streaming confusing tears, fifteen minutes after confessing that she had cuckolded him. He gave no credit to her feelings of rejection since the news that she was cheating on him had made him wish to curl up and die. He didn’t even bother to answer that he loved her because, considering the severity of his pain, it was obvious that he did and that he had loved her all the while they were together. He was the victim and she the killer, a distinction Enrique was young enough to believe had moral significance. She had lived with him for three and a half years, virtually all of his adult life assuming you could consider sixteen through twenty to be adult years; she had gotten to know him inside and out, and was now discarding him as inferior and outdated, like last year’s black-and-white TV. In short, he had been dumped, and despite his public explanation that their breakup had been caused by intellectual and emotional incompatibility, in the dark night of his soul he believed she preferred the other guy’s cock. Just as his second novel had garnered less attention than his first, and much poorer sales, his love life had suffered a steep decline that seemed to augur a desolate future.

“She doesn’t exist, Bernard, that’s why you can’t describe her,” the bleeding Enrique snarled from his corner of Homer’s red vinyl booth. “You’re so bad at making up characters you can’t even invent the ideal woman.”

Bernard’s long, pasty white face stared without expression into the distance. This was his typical affect while listening and speaking, except for a slight curling of his upper lip when he declared the bankruptcy of traditional forms in the novel, such as realism, chronological structure, or third-person narrative. “Ideal woman,” he mumbled contemptuously. “That’s absurd. There’s no ideal woman.”

With five mugs of coffee in him, Enrique pounded the Formica, rattling number six. “It is not absurd!” he yelled. “I mean—ideal to me! Relatively ideal!”

Bernard sneered. “Relatively ideal. That’s hilarious.” Enrique knew, in some calmer and wiser part of himself, that he ought not to be so easily agitated by Bernard. He also knew that Bernard was preposterous, and believed that any reasonable person would agree with him. So it seemed unfair that, at the moment, he would have to admit that he had succeeded in topping Bernard at foolishness.

Bernard, pleased with his victory, removed an unopened pack of unfiltered Camels from his work shirt’s pocket and began an elaborate ritual. He rapped the pack on the counter at least a dozen times, not once or twice, which was sufficient for Enrique to tamp down his unfiltered Camels. (They were riding the same express brand to lung cancer.) Then followed a slow ballet of Bernard’s yellowed, tapered fingers unpeeling the cellophane cover. Not content with removing the strip which Philip Morris had marked with a red line to ease exposure of the pack’s top, he stripped the package naked, which struck Enrique as so disgusting that he demanded: “Why do you take off the whole covering!”

Bernard replied in an overly patient and condescending modulation, “So I know this is my pack. We’re both dromedary men.” He nodded at Enrique’s cellophane-encased Camels.

“Now I’m a moocher!” Enrique cried out, banging the table again. “You’ve made this Margaret up! That’s why I didn’t see you with her last month at the Riviera Café. Not ’cause you were on the other side of the restaurant! You were never there with her ’cause she doesn’t fucking exist!”

Bernard put the cigarette between his thick, dry lips and let it hang there. “You’re being childish,” he mumbled, unlit Camel bouncing in the air.

Overwhelmed by caffeine and loathing both for himself and for Bernard, Enrique dug out his wallet from the back pocket of his black Levi’s and removed its sole currency, a ten-dollar bill, easily four bucks more than his share of the breakfast plus tip. Latin pride held sway over thrift, or perhaps Jewish righteousness triumphed over socialism, or more likely a fondness for drama trumped the tedium of math and, with an awkward bang of knee on table, and a sweep of Army greatcoat across vinyl, and a stray sleeve upending the full ashtray, Enrique hurled his money at Bernard, shoving his right arm into the left arm’s hole, and announced, “Breakfast’s on me, you fucking liar.” Although he had to walk out with his coat only half on—and backward at that—Enrique still thought he had made a good exit, and believed his judgment was confirmed when the following day, at the end of a call to confirm Bernard’s attendance at that week’s poker game hosted by Enrique, Bernard said, “Are you going to be home this Saturday?”

“Yes…,” Enrique said, drawing the word out warily.

“I’m having dinner with Margaret. I’ll bring her by your place after. Around eleven? That a cool time?”

“I’ll be home,” Enrique said and held his laughter until after he hung up.

And so Enrique’s charge of a fictionalized Margaret had been the perfect bait. She was certainly real, so terrifyingly real that although the suede-clad foot kept piercing his peripheral vision, he maintained focus on Bernard. His annoying friend had seated himself at the small, round butcher-block table to the right of the fireplace. He had kept on his too skimpy (for this weather) black leather jacket and now reached into its inner pocket to remove a fresh pack of cigarettes. He began the infuriating cigarette ritual, using the blond wood as a drum to beat out his Bartók concerto for unfiltered Camel and cellophane.

With his guests settled, Enrique sat on his bed-couch, currently in couch incarnation thanks to two long foam pillows with blue corduroy covers. He realized immediately that this position was untenable, since he would have to choose whether to look straight ahead at Margaret astride his director’s chair or twist his neck to the right to see Bernard the modern nicotine composer, it being a wide-angle impossibility to keep both in his range of vision and disguise his real interest.

He bestirred himself as part of a maneuver to adjust his line of sight on his guests. “Need an ashtray?” he asked, moving behind Bernard and up the step to the kitchen area. He look...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Colophon
• Also by Rafael Yglesias
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Chapter One: Take-out Girl
• Chapter Two: Fatal Vision
• Chapter Three: Public School
• Chapter Four: Anhedonia
• Chapter Five: The Orphans’ Dinner
• Chapter Six: The Last Schedule
• Chapter Seven: The Competition
• Chapter Eight: The Good-bye Land
• Chapter Nine: First Date
• Chapter Ten: The Perfect Gift
• Chapter Eleven: First Kiss
• Chapter Twelve: Family Feeling
• Chapter Thirteen: The Great Seducer
• Chapter Fourteen: A Mother’s Love
• Chapter Fifteen: Lost Love
• Chapter Sixteen: Last Words
• Chapter Seventeen: A Happy Marriage
• Chapter Eighteen: Loveless
• Chapter Nineteen: Love Interrupted
• Chapter Twenty: Grief
• Chapter Twenty-One: At Last
• Acknowledgments