A Happy Marriage by Rafael Yglesias

Author:Rafael Yglesias
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2009-09-20T04:00:00+00:00

chapter thirteen

The Great Seducer

EENRIQUE TOLD MARGARET everything about himself. He had read the metaphor, “He poured his heart out to her” in Stendhal and Dickens and Balzac and Lermontov and probably sarcastically in Philip Roth’s novels. What came out of him didn’t seem to be his heart, however. He emptied his soul, or his self, or whatever made him think he was unique. He disclosed all of his feelings and life secrets, or believed that he did; and he recounted every anecdote in his twenty-one-year-old life.

During that long night of December 30, 1975, while hours and hours passed into the early morning of a new day, the thick darkness outside the wall of windows behind Margaret’s pretty head remained unchanged, punctuated but not revealed by the amber halos of New York’s streetlights. Inside, there was no dark thanks to Margaret having, like Enrique, bought one of the new halogen standing lamps. She did not dim it for romance. There were no lit candles or the mellowing intoxication of wine. He was surrounded by a cheerful, searching illumination: intense light bounced off the mostly bare white walls, into her blue eyes and out of her ringing voice. They exchanged life stories like students cramming for a test, emptying a pot of coffee and smoking half a pack of cigarettes each. His body was rigid with tension: alert as a predator and as wary as prey. His anxiety didn’t arise from baring his feelings to this attentive young woman with her depthless and astonished eyes; rather, he vibrated with anticipation that when he ran out of things to say, he was going to have to proceed with making love. Nay, not love alone. He would have to sexually sate this creature, who seemed to him more beautiful and clever with every passing moment, a human female perhaps, but of such a higher order that he felt there ought to be another classification for so superb a mutation of the species.

Enrique had had little time to reflect on what he had learned about Margaret. His sole opportunity came during a bathroom break, when he excused himself shortly after four o’clock in the morning. The accommodation was tiny even by New York City’s standards. There were two feet of cleared space between the tub-shower, sink, and toilet, all squeezed into an area hardly larger than a closet. On the only free wall—the rest being mirror, tub, door—there was an abstract work of art: four thick, broad strokes of black paint on a small white canvas, in the shape of arches or humps, arranged as if they might be clouds floating free or a quartet of angry cats. He looked at it while his bladder seemed to empty ten persons’ worth of urine, a comically long and noisy process, and got nothing from the art, the same nothing he usually got from abstract paintings—he couldn’t help but attempt to decode them, although he knew the proper approach was to “feel” the work. He hoped this innocuous painting wasn’t by Margaret, although he felt sure it was.

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