A Happy Marriage Read Free Page A

revealing a flaw in her beauty. They were too small for her generous mouth and spaced apart, like a child’s. “You really have a bottle of Mateus?” she said, her freckled cheeks full of merriment.
    “Yes, it’s a dirty job, but someone has to buy it,” Enrique admitted, humiliated.
    “No scotch? No Jack Daniel’s?” she asked with a laugh.
    “No hard liquor,” Enrique confessed and hung his head in mock shame. “Just cheap wine.”
    “Told you,” Bernard said to her.
    Enrique shut the refrigerator door, perhaps a little too hard. “Told her what?” he demanded.
    “You don’t drink,” Bernard said, an unlit cigarette bouncing like a conductor’s baton between his lips. He positioned the phosphorescent tip of a match on the rough surface of the striker and lowered the book’s cover over it. Enrique watched as Bernard drew the match out from this hiding place in a slow and graceful motion, igniting it safely in the air. A few months before, over one of their midafternoon breakfasts, Enrique had tried to duplicate Bernard’s enviable method. He lit the match all right, and also the rest of the book, which flared into a fireball, soaring out of Enrique’s startled hand up and away from their booth, terrifying two elderly patrons nearby, triggering a supercilious smile on Bernard’s face, and enraging the waiter, who squashed it out and then cut off that day’s free coffee refills at a drowsy two. Subsequent solo attempts at practicing Bernard’s technique had similarly failed.
    “How come you don’t drink?” the brilliant blue eyes demanded.
    “I drink,” Enrique insisted, bringing an ashtray to his interrogators.
    “He doesn’t drink ’cause he didn’t go to college,” Bernard said, holding his burnt-out match high, a dismal Mr. Liberty, failing to light Enrique’s way to the shores of the Ivy League.
    “Right!” said Margaret, reaching back into one of her jacket pockets to produce a pack of Camel Lights. “Bernard told me you dropped out of college to write.”
    “I dropped out of high school, ” he said, back in possession of the trump suit’s ace, “to write my first novel.” He timed this play ofthe winning card with a gliding movement of white socks on glazed oak floor, arm and hand fully extended to offer Margaret the glass ashtray, a skinny, long-haired courtier in black jeans, asking the princess’s restless suede boot: Good enough? Good enough? Good enough?
    “You didn’t finish high school?” she asked.
    “Didn’t finish tenth grade,” he said, less prideful now, not sure if she was impressed by his reverse achievement.
    “Well, at least you stayed long enough to learn how to smoke,” Margaret commented drily, swinging her boots down to the floor and leaning forward to accept his glass gift—and that did it. That brought those depthless blue eyes within a foot, perhaps six inches, maybe even closer, and something happened inside Enrique, like a guitar string suddenly unstrung. There was a shock and a vibration in his heart, a palpable break inside the cavity of his chest. He had dropped out of high school and never took a class in anatomy, but he did know that the cardiovascular system wasn’t supposed to react as if it were the source and center of feeling. And yet he would have sworn to all and sundry—not that he expected to admit it to anyone—that Margaret, or at least her bright blue eyes, had just snapped his brittle heart.

chapter two
Fatal Vision
    E NRIQUE STUDIED HER sleeping profile, the heavy Ativan unconsciousness she hugged for security against the terror of what she faced alone. All alone, he had to admit, although he had tried hard, and succeeded with a grind’s grade-grubbing anxiety, to be with Margaret for every examination, every CT scan and MRI, every infusion of chemo, fingers entwined for each of three surgeries until obliged to release her to the OR’s whooshing doors. Even during those enforced separations he didn’t separate,