A Happy Marriage by Rafael Yglesias Read Free Book Online Page B

“I’m freezing!”
    Enrique said nothing to Bernard during their three-block return trip, mumbling a good night at his door, tramping up the five flights to his bed, and collapsing into sleep with neither the initiative nor the energy to masturbate. Four hours later, he staggered up from the defeat of his solitary twin bed, groggy and sullen and determined to win the next round. He had to do something about his longing to be with her. Although he couldn’t remember a single image, he felt as if he had dreamed of nothing but Margaret. He paused long enough to brew a cup of coffee in his new Chemex pot and down it before calling Bernard. He said to the faint hello, “You awake?”
    “Oh, I was up early. I couldn’t sleep for long,” Bernard answered in a pregnant tone, as if that fact were significant.
    “Yeah, I feel like shit. Like I’m hungover.”
    “Fuck, you really can’t drink,” Bernard mumbled.
    “No, I don’t mean…Oh, forget it. I was calling for Margaret’s number. What is it?”
    There was a silence. Enrique was poised with a number two pencil (the irony amused him) and his favorite pad, a National brand notebook with lined, pale green pages. He looked at the lead tip and listened to the phone’s quiet as if it were a code. “Bernard?”
    “Why do you want it?”
    Enrique didn’t bother to consider why he was being asked so foolish a question. “I want to ask her out.”
    Another silence.
    “Bernard?”
    “Um…I…” Even for laconic Bernard, the pauses were remarkable. At last he finished in a rush, “…don’t want to give it to you.”
    “What?” No response. “Why not?”
    “I don’t think you should date her,” he said so matter-of-factly that Enrique hesitated to answer. He tried a laugh because it seemed to him a real possibility that Bernard was teasing him.
    “Bernard?” he said in a singsong attempt to be light. “You’re kidding. What’s…? Come on, what’s her number?”
    “I’m not kidding.”
    “You won’t? You really won’t give me her number?”
    “No.” There was a remarkable absence of emotion. A simple statement of fact.
    “Why not?” Enrique whined, unmanned somehow by the confidence of Bernard’s no. “Are you planning on dating her?”
    “No. You know that. I explained my relationship to Margaret. We’re friends.”
    “So what do you care?”
    “You shouldn’t go out with her. She’s out of your league.”
    Enrique repeated each word as if he were learning a new language: “She’s—out—of—my—league?”
    “Uh-huh. I have to go, Enrique. I’m writing. I’ll see you at poker tonight, okay? Seven?”
    “You won’t give me her phone number, but you expect me to let you play poker at my house?”
    “Uh-huh. See you later.” And he hung up.
    Enrique held the phone to his ear for a moment as if waiting for Bernard to get back on and say he was joking, then slammed the phone down so hard that the receiver bounced off the base, skidded on his desk, and dropped off the edge, leaving a black mark on the glossy sheen of the recently polyurethaned wood floor.
    “Jesus fucking Christ!” he announced to the room and wondered how this could have happened to him. Four years ago he had been interviewed by Time magazine, and The New York Review of Books had declared his first novel to be one of the best on adolescence in literary history. How could a girl from Queens who did freelance work as a graphic designer be considered out of his league? And how could an unpublished slab of gray flesh make such a judgment? And since when were there leagues when it came to men and women? Is this nineteenth-century England? Am I Pip and she Estella? Bernard and Margaret, according to last night’s conversation, were members of Students for a Democratic Society in college. Margaret said she supported the Black Panther takeover of the Straight at Cornell, at least their aims if not their methods, although she didn’t flinch at the sight of their guns.