A Happy Marriage Read Free

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 looked for the one made out of clear glass bought at Lamstons, around the corner on Sixth Avenue. He was pleased and proud of the relentless newness of everything in his apartment. He cherished the butcher-block kitchen table, and his long desk accommodated eight for poker, positioned under the studio’s two windows facing noisy Eighth Street. He adored the Trinitron placed between it and the fireplace, and relished the kitchen’s new and unused pots, pans, cutlery, plates, and bowls.
    As he disappeared behind the kitchen’s jutting three-foot wall, which housed his stove, it occurred to him that he was a host. “Anybody want something? Wine? Coke? Coffee?” And he added doubtfully, looking toward his garbage can, considering what could be rescued from the Chinese delivery and its supplementary offerings, “Tea?”
    “Beer,” Bernard said.
    “Beer,” Enrique repeated, opening his refrigerator. He looked inside although he knew the answer. “Sorry. No beer. Wine?” he reoffered since he possessed a bottle of Mateus, a cheap wine his ilk liked because its unconventionally shaped flask could be converted into a candleholder, dried wax forming a monstrous shawl down its slumped shoulders.
    “Scotch,” Bernard said as if that settled it.
    “No scotch, Bernard. How about a vintage Mateus?”
    “Mateus?” Margaret cried out in what could have been amazement or disdain.
    Enrique leaned back from the fridge, reconnecting himself visually to his guests, to ask Margaret if that meant she wanted a glass. He was unsettled to discover that the blue-eyed beauty had removed her right leg from its perch on the chair’s arm, to shift ninety degrees leftward to observe his movements in the kitchen, incidentally making what appeared to be an uncomfortable cradle out of the director’s chair. Her back was no longer resting on the canvas sling but leaning against the right arm; somewhat painfully, Enrique assumed, although the pine edge was cushioned by her down jacket. Her legs were draped over the left arm, pointing slim hips, cute butt, and smooth pelvis toward Enrique. In his feverish imagination, she was offering herself to him—though Bernard was between them in this configuration and could claim Margaret meant the invitation for him. She raised her right arm to idly tuck a pretty mass of tight black curls behind her perfectly formed ear. Her hair was straight everywhere but at her temples, he noticed, too unsophisticated in feminine ways to distinguish whether that was natural or not. Gazing at the girl spread across his chair in a posture which defied its design, Enrique couldn’t remember what he had intended to ask her.
    Margaret smiled broadly and fully exposed her teeth for the first time,