A Happy Marriage Read Free Page B

pacing in prominent view in the waiting area, afraid to break for a piss. He wanted to be the first face remembered out of anesthesia’s woozy awakening, including the shivering agony before morphine drapes fell to hide her from the latest wounds. But that’s fanciful, isn’t it? he asked himself. The same drugs that cleared pain also wiped away the memory of his comforting words and kisses,although she seemed to know, always know, that he had been there.
    Enrique was so diligent he would have suspected himself of insincerity except that he had missed once. Badly. Nearly three years ago, he had left it to her beloved friend Lily to walk the overnight hospital hall of terror after the urologist finally delivered to Margaret the diagnosis of bladder cancer that he had confided to Enrique two days before. Sure, Enrique had the excuse that their youngest, sixteen-year-old Max, was home alone, still ignorant of why his mother was staying in the hospital for a third night after what was supposed to have been an hour-long procedure. Sure, but he could have arranged something else, as he had done subsequently many times. His half sister, Rebecca; or Lily; or someone could have stayed with Max while Enrique attended to what was more urgent: to embrace Margaret’s dread, to encourage and console her, to cheer and to love her although he was scared to the bone, sick to the soul with fear.
    But all those desperate feelings were long ago, two years and eight months ago, one hundred and forty-seven days and nights in the hospital ago, three major surgeries, a half dozen minor surgeries, and fourteen months of chemo ago, two remissions and two recurrences ago. Looking back through the defeated glaze of fatigue, it seemed inevitable now that it would end like this, this inch-by-inch dying, this one-track terminus when hope had become a skeleton’s grin.
    Margaret seemed hardly to breathe or dream, small figure made smaller by the fetal hunch, and yet he didn’t believe it was a peaceful sleep, or true sleep at all. The drugs dimmed her consciousness, but they did not let her forget the accumulating loss of pleasurable life, and certainly not the looming dead end ahead.
    He looked out the window at a dense, rain-swollen sky lowering over the East River and sipped a Dean & Deluca’s coffee. Anytaste with the promise of energy, no matter how short-lived, was welcome to join the fight against pervasive fatigue. Yet despite two cups, he could feel his forehead, eyelids, cheeks all sag as if he’d been scalped and a mask of flesh was sloughing down to his chin. If Enrique let his eyes shut briefly to rest them from the burn of Sloan-Kettering’s air-conditioning, in an instant the private room’s carpeted floor fell away and he was afloat—until a nod, a voice, the vibration of his cell phone startled him back to a state of exhausted alertness. These days friends urged him to get more sleep and immediately withdrew the advice because of its evident impracticality. However, to silence his willfully dense half brother—who, in lieu of visiting Margaret at the hospital, insisted on inviting Enrique over to his apartment for dinner—he had to spell out the logic of his schedule: “I want to be at the hospital at night when she’s most alone and I don’t want to abandon Max so that means sleeping at Sloan, getting up at dawn—which, believe me, is no problem in a hospital—to get downtown to wake up Maxy to try to convince him to eat something and walk him to the subway and then take a shower, change my clothes and get back up to Sloan for morning rounds which I usually miss anyway, ’cause they do them early which doesn’t matter since I can catch the doctors again in the afternoon just before I head down to dinner with Max.”
    He had talked like that since the earliest days of combat with Margaret’s disease, in narrative spurts sorely in need of punctuation and editing, without proper endings or middles. It was a symptom of