Free A Happy Marriage by Rafael Yglesias Page B

bold and public a gesture. With or without an audience, he might lack the nerve to kiss Margaret. Sal’s suggestion caused him to forget to ask his friend if he ought to be wearing this huge, hot sweater on his bony frame. The thick wool felt especially close once he’d donned his green Army coat, trudged down the five flights, and pushed open the heavy metal door out onto dirty and frigid Eighth Street. He knew from the ice-cold mask of air that caused his eyes to wince and the tip of his nose to go numb that he ought not to be perspiring in this weather. He could already feel one particularly large and hot drop run down the washboard of his ribs to his bony hip. He paused to decide if he had time to run back upstairs, take another shower, and remove the tent of a sweater.
    During this internal debate, his eyes drifted to the five black steps of Bernard Weinstein’s building. He wondered, for perhaps the ten thousandth time, whether his nemesis was one of Margaret’s guests this evening. Certainly Bernard was orphaned. More so than Enrique. Bernard’s parents had divorced when he was a child, his mother had died while he was in college, and his fatherhad long since remarried a woman who, Bernard claimed, hated him. Why don’t I feel sorry for the scumbag? Enrique wondered. Whether he ought to or not, it seemed likely Margaret would take pity on Bernard and invite him to a dinner of holiday orphans. Enrique had been pretty sure he would have to contend with Bernard and his barbs since the day he got Margaret’s call inviting him to join “a crazy group. I don’t even know who’s going to show up. I’ve invited everybody I could think of who’s stuck in New York without family. And I have no idea what I’m going to make. We may starve.”
    That was his chance to ask if Bernard would be among them, but he was too paralyzed with pleasure and surprise that she had called him back. He had been unable to find a reply other than “Can I bring anything?” a question provoked by a memory of how his parents behaved. Of course what his mother could offer was a delicious salad made from her vegetable garden in Maine, or his father a signature blueberry pie, featuring a thin, crisp, and buttery crust, whereas Enrique could do no better than hand over a can of Campbell’s soup. “How about a bottle of Mateus?” Margaret said and released her abbreviated shout of a laugh. “I’ll bring a case,” he said gamely and asked what time he should appear. “Sevenish,” she said.
    He hung up and felt humiliated, by what exactly he couldn’t say. Replaying her joke about Mateus, he wondered if she was laughing at him, and had been laughing at him all along with her probes about his education. His mind reevaluated her cutoff laugh as a suppression of mockery rather than modesty, and he began to suspect that the role he was playing was a pathetic character in a Dostoyevsky novel: a lonely, hapless young man humiliating himself by pursuing a beautiful young woman obviously above his station; that he would eventually split Bernard Weinstein’s skull with a hatchet, then Weinstein’s unpublished manuscript wouldbe posthumously hailed as a masterpiece, while Enrique’s sole claim to fame would be as the envious monster who had robbed the world of a delicate genius.
    It was in this hopeless frame of mind that he decided against going back to shower and remove the sauna of a sweater. He was certain to fail no matter what he wore, and so, perspiring in the cold, he marched toward Margaret’s in a state of excited doom.
    Having left his building at six-thirty, he arrived at his destination three blocks away at six-forty. Since he knew being early was tacky, he walked quickly past 55 East Ninth Street, spooked anyway by the doorman, who scowled at the double glass doors as if they were about to admit his greatest enemy.
    For someone who had lived all but two years of his twenty-one in Manhattan, Enrique had little experience with