A Happy Marriage by Rafael Yglesias Read Free Book Online

join her at this mystical place of make-believe reason. “Are you sure it is a citywide numbering system, and not borough by borough? They were pretty proud of us being in Manhattan. It said P.S. 173 Manhattan on everything. In fact, we had to write it on every piece of homework just like that, P.S. 173 Manhattan.” Of course, making his case with deductions like that was silly. But he had intuited right about what might convince Margaret. She furrowed her brow and looked off while Bernard let his chair tip forward with a thud.
    “You’re making that up,” Bernard complained. “I didn’t write Queens below the name of my school.”
    “Well, that’s because you went to a fancy Forest Hills school,” Enrique said. He remembered that earlier Margaret had identified Bernard as having been raised in the “fancy” part of Queens as opposed to her “tiny and ridiculous part,” an important distinction in the odd reverse snobbery of their antiwar, antimaterialist youth. Indeed, Bernard tried to squirm out of the characterization, claiming Forest Hills wasn’t fancy. “Oh, yes it was,” Margaret insisted with a mocking smile that made Bernard flinch. “My neighborhood in Queens is so dreary they don’t even have a name for it. It’s just called Adjacent,” she said, one of many comments that Enrique found fascinating because they smacked to him of the sort of dispassionate and witty observation that a writer might make.
    “Wait!” Margaret thrust her hand out as if she were a school traffic guard saving them from crossing on the red. She peered beyond Enrique while she remembered, “You’re right. I wrote my name on the top line, then my class, and then below—‘P.S. 173, Queens’! I wrote ‘Queens.’ I just thought…” And she stalled out, staring into the middle distance, as if someone had removed all her batteries.
    Enrique found himself leaping in after that unspoken thought, trying to swim in her head, “…that it was borough pride and not an important distinction. P.S. 173 Queens, P.S. 173 Manhattan: that’s why we both grew up with enough number two pencils.”
    Her eyes settled on his. She smiled, showing off those less than perfect teeth, too small and with gaps, undermining her otherwise commanding beauty just enough so that Enrique could manage to look at her without a gasp of awe. “Anyway,” she added, “we had to buy our own pencils.”
    Bernard was unwilling to give up. “No,” he said. “I don’t believe it. The city isn’t capable of that nicety. You made a mistake,” he mumbled at Enrique, reaching for his decellophaned cigarette pack to begin a tapping concerto.
    “About the name of the school I went to for six years?” Enrique said, catching Margaret’s eye and lifting his brows to imply that they were in agreement about the idiocy of Bernard’s logic, although he was perfectly aware that it had been her position. “I’ll tell you what,” Enrique offered. “We can hop on the IRT here at Sheridan Square, get out at 168th Street and Broadway, walk the six blocks to P.S. 173, and you can show me how wrong I am about this central fact of my childhood.” There was a little too muchanger in the final sarcastic phrase, “this central fact of my childhood,” the sort of prideful humor he had learned from his father, who would manage at once to mock himself for his grandiosity and let you know that, should you test his greatness, it would flatten you.
    Margaret had had enough. She yawned. “Not me. No subway ride for me.” Little tears had formed at the corners of her eyes and she picked one off with the tip of her index finger. “I have to go to bed. I’m too old to pull these all-nighters. I’ve got to crash.”
    This was gladdening news to Enrique, because his geographic calculations about their good-byes would now come to fruition. Spirit renewed, he copied his expansive father in a way that did not involve temper, although it did display Sabas pride, by picking