Chapter Six #4
Neither of them attended church, so there was no talk of a religious service.
There was no talk of any kind of service, in fact, for over a month.
But as soon as they went from dating to engaged, Felix started saying “I love you” when he told her goodbye at night, and Margaret started saying “I love you, too.” So that was something.
She wondered if he was a virgin. Had his six-month engagement to his ex-fiancée been chaste? And if it had, was it by his choice, or Helen’s? Margaret couldn’t ask—she didn’t want to embarrass him and, more important, she didn’t want to talk about her own (quite recent) sexual adventures.
Then, in late February, five weeks into their engagement, Felix took ill in a restaurant before they even had a chance to order, and he had to dash off to the men’s room to be sick.
He came back to the table looking pale and sweaty, and had to dash off again.
He didn’t know what was wrong with him, he said.
He hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast. They took a cab to his apartment building, but he didn’t want her to come up, paid the driver to take her to the lodging house.
She didn’t see him or hear from him for three days. He’d gotten cold feet, she thought. He was trying to figure out how to let her down easy.
But on the fourth day, Felix called and said his stomach was better, his fever had broken. Did she feel like going over to City Hall?
They said their vows the next day, and he got them a room at the Deshler that evening, where he became chatty and jittery as they undressed.
He shouldn’t have had all that wine with dinner, he said—but he’d only had one glass and hadn’t finished it.
He turned off most of the lights. “I’ll make this work, don’t worry,” he said, then asked her to lie under the covers while he, still in his shorts, sat on the edge of the mattress, facing away from her, his hand moving in his lap.
She wanted to tell him it was okay, they didn’t have to do anything (even though it was their wedding night and she’d been waiting for months to be with him).
But he turned to her and asked if she was ready.
She nodded. He grinned in the near-dark, said, if she heard him right, “Let someone in,” then climbed onto the bed and under the covers and pulled off his shorts.
A few moments later, he eased into her with the care and precision of someone parking a new car.
“Oh,” he said, as if caught off guard. He closed his eyes and readjusted his approach. “Oh,” he said again, figuring something out. Then, more softly, “Oh,” as if he understood.
Soon, he finished and rolled off her and let out a long, happy sigh.
She lay against him, her head resting on his chest. “Why did you say ‘Let someone in,’ just before?”
“What? Oh—not ‘Let someone.’ ‘Let’s elbow.’ It’s just something we used to say on the football field. ‘Let’s elbow in.’ You know, when we were in a huddle, before a big play.”
Not the sexiest pillow talk she’d ever heard, and not an improvement over let someone in.
“Are we okay?” he asked, sounding hopeful.
It was such an open question. She hadn’t had an orgasm; did he mean the one-sided sex?
The fact that they’d eloped that afternoon, and here they were?
He was asking, at least; he was thinking about her.
Yes, she told him, they were okay. She turned her head slightly and kissed the vicinity of his heart.
—
They called his parents in Cleveland. Felix and Margaret shared the receiver in the hotel room while Russ and Lillian Salt shared the receiver in their house.
When Felix told them he’d gotten married, the Salts took so long to respond that Margaret thought they’d hung up.
Then they congratulated him. Felix glanced at Margaret, urging her to speak, and she told them what a wonderful son they had and how she was looking forward to meeting them.
They congratulated her too. Lillian Salt asked Margaret where she was from, and when Margaret said “Doyle,” Lillian said, “Ah,” and, thankfully, didn’t ask anything else.
They exchanged a few more pleasantries and hung up.
“Not the warmest people in the world,” Felix told Margaret.
At least your doozies didn’t abandon you, she thought. “Will I meet them?”
He said he supposed that would have to happen eventually, but he was in no hurry. What about her? Didn’t she want to call her aunt?
Margaret still hadn’t told him about the orphanage and couldn’t see how a group call was possible without that being revealed. No, she said. Aunt Lydia was traveling right now; Margaret would call her when she was back.
She almost wished she’d told Felix the truth about her past in the beginning.
It might have made things a little easier.
But she hadn’t known how the facts of her upbringing might affect his regard for her.
No matter how well she presented herself, if he knew she’d been born unwanted and had slunk away from an orphanage, wouldn’t he see her differently?
As lesser, maybe even desperate? Her two pairs of shoes, her sad little lodging house.
The last thing she needed—then, and now—was for him to see her as a charity case.
And the longer it went, the more difficult it was to even contemplate telling him.
He gave up the place he’d been renting, she moved out of the lodging house, and they took up residence in a furnished one-bedroom apartment on the third floor of a perfectly nice building just off Broad Street.
The walls were a smoky shade of blue and the living room furniture was a smoky shade of green (the previous tenants had smoked), but the place was grand, really, the ceilings high, and she got no end of joy walking around dusting and straightening things.
Not that there was much to dust or straighten.
Alone on the sofa one evening after work, she called Lydia, who was delighted to hear Margaret’s voice. She’d had a feeling it was good news, she said, when the charges weren’t reversed.
—
He convinced her to quit her job, which was never going to pay much—even the greeter position Mr. Higgs had nodded toward wouldn’t have come with much of a raise.
Felix was making plenty for both of them, he said, and he was expecting a promotion before long.
So on the following Friday, at the end of her shift, Margaret hung her uniform in her locker and told Mrs. Conroy she wouldn’t be coming back.
Mrs. Conroy was complaining about getting no advance notice as Margaret walked out the front door.
She had so much catching up to do. Movies, restaurants, a nightclub here and there. They went out three, sometimes four nights a week and did something—Felix was always game, so long as he could be in bed early enough to get a full night’s sleep.
They kissed good morning and good night more deeply now.
He’d got better at it. He got better at sex, too, and learned how to give her an orgasm—but the whole enterprise remained a challenge.
They did it, to the best of her calculations, an average of once a month.
They tried to do it more often than that, but those times he either couldn’t stay hard or couldn’t get that way to begin with, which was embarrassing and frustrating for him, she knew.
The closest he’d ever come to being short with her was to ask her to please stop telling him he had no reason to be embarrassed.
It wasn’t her, he assured her; it was him, and it was temporary.
She soon figured out that their best shot at avoiding yet another awkward foundering was in the foreplay.
She tried all sorts of things to loosen him up.
Playful things. Creative things. (Bernard things.) Felix had the sexual creativity of a turnip, but he took instructions well and was always optimistic.
She used her hand and whispered into his ear, “You can do it, honey,” and “That’s it, baby,” over and over, and sometimes that was effective, like pulling a cord to start a lawn mower.
When it wasn’t, well, she had to stop whispering at some point, and that was awkward.
She asked him, one evening, the two of them lying side by side in the dark, after another abandoned attempt, if he and Helen had been compatible, sexually.
He took a while to answer. “We didn’t get that far, because we weren’t married—she wanted to wait.”
“But you were attracted to each other?”
“Oh,” he said, “yeah. We sure were.”
Until they weren’t, Margaret guessed.
As for the two of them: once every four or five weeks the tumblers clicked, and there he was.
—
During the first two years of their marriage, she bought a cookbook and taught herself how to cook beyond the basics she’d picked up from Lydia.
Felix’s favorite was her chicken and dumplings, though she never thought it came out the same way twice.
She learned makeup and housecleaning tips from a magazine called Best Wife.
She took more art classes at the museum—drawing and painting—all taught by a woman named Mrs. Parrish, who looked to be in her sixties and had apricot hair.
“Don’t be ashamed of having no talent” was her motto.
Also, “Use your frustration.” But Margaret wasn’t ashamed or frustrated. She just enjoyed being in class.
She attended talks at the museum too (steering clear of the docent she’d dated).
“The Arc of Nineteenth Century Painting in America.” “From Cassatt to Braque: A Journey in Paint.” She joined a women’s social club, where she was, by far, the youngest person.
She learned how to play backgammon and hearts but, to her great embarrassment, discovered that she didn’t know how to make small talk.
She must have been quiet on all those dates—including the ones with Felix; she couldn’t remember a single thing she’d said.