He watched the alarm clock numbers flip, the room shot through with a dull orange glow. There was a distant mewling, the neighbor’s cat, its own insomnia accompanying his. The clock read four in the morning, then five. He thought of his childhood, of those early years, when he was three and four, when his parents placed a clock in his bedroom with the instructions that he wasn’t to wake them until the little hand was on seven. He felt an unaccountable power, thinking he knew something Mia didn’t, when the truth was the opposite: what he knew now she had known all along.
His lone hope was that it hadn’t happened. That Carter was engaged in wishful thinking. That he was delusional.
He awoke an hour later, to Mia’s touch. “Julian, sweetie, I missed you.” She kissed him on the neck, the nose, the lips, the eyebrows. “How was your trip?”
“It was fine.”
She kissed him again, wrapping her arms around his neck, but he pushed her away.
Then he told her everything.
She was silent as he spoke, her fingers drumming against her thighs, and he knew that what he’d held on to, the scant hope, was false. There had been no lying, no wishful thinking, no delusion.
“So it’s true?”
She nodded.
Then there was more silence as she went to make herself a cup of coffee. She offered him some, too, but he refused, and now she was back in bed, the steam shrouding her. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I truly, truly am.”
“Is that all you can say?”
And in the midst of this, he looked at her, his wife, saw the wisp of hair dangling down her forehead, and he thought how beautiful she was and how much he loved her, and this made it even worse. “You slept with my best friend. You betrayed me.”
“If I could take it back, I would. Really, Julian, I so wish it hadn’t happened.”
He’d wanted tears and chest-beating, her laying herself prostrate before him. Not that it would have made him feel better. But this distance, this equanimity, felt even worse. “Why did you do it?”
She was silent.
He was still in his T-shirt and boxers, and he felt curiously vulnerable half-naked in front of her, so he went into the bathroom and put on some clothes.
When he returned, she had gotten dressed, too. She seemed more composed now, though she had the damp, pallid look of someone who had been crying. There was so much more to say, but he had no idea what to tell her, and it seemed as likely that they’d spend the whole day locked in their bedroom in silence. “When did you sleep with him?”
“Spring of senior year.”
“When, exactly?”
“Jesus, Julian, I can’t remember the precise date.”
“We got married senior year.”
“I know that.”
“Were we already engaged?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You mean we might have been?”
“No,” she said. “We weren’t.”
“Did he come on to you?”
She hesitated.
“Did you come on to him?”
“In which case I’d be more guilty?”
He didn’t answer her.
“Oh, Julian, I have no idea who came on to whom.”
“How’s that possible?”
“It was nine years ago. Think of what we’ve been through in the last nine years. My mother died. We got married. We made a home together. I barely remember what I was like at twenty-two.”
“I remember,” he said. “I loved you.”
“I loved you, too.”
“Then how could you have done this to me?”
She didn’t have an answer for him.
“Where was I when it happened?”
“You were away, I think. Gone for the weekend.”
“Where?”
“I can’t remember.” She recalled a difficult conversation with her mother—she’d gone back into the hospital, the cancer had gotten worse—a rain-soaked night, the campus derelict, the smell of Carter’s aftershave, and his voice, a haunting laughter.
“Were you drunk?” Julian asked.
“As if that would excuse me? The truth is, I’ve repressed it. I don’t find it very pleasant to think about.”
“Well, I don’t either.”
“Yet you’re pummeling me with questions.”
He turned away from her now.
“It was nine years ago,” she repeated. She wanted to tell him the statute of limitations had elapsed. But was there ever a statute of limitations on something like this? “My mother was dying, Julian. Doesn’t that count for anything?”
It occurred to him that even if he managed to forgive her, he would always know that what had happened once could happen another time; he could never look at her the way he used to. He was ashamed to admit how credulous he’d been, but he’d trusted her so implicitly that when he’d tried to imagine her cheating on him he couldn’t do it. She hadn’t seemed like the cheating kind, and now that was gone, and along with it the notion that there was a cheating kind. He’d been so wrong about something so fundamental he didn’t know any longer what to believe. “Our marriage has been a lie.”
“Oh, Julian…”
“Listen to me,” he said. “If you’d told me the truth when it happened, we wouldn’t have gotten married. We probably would have broken up.”
“Then I’m glad I didn’t tell you.”
“And married me under false pretenses?”
“I love you,” she said. “I can’t imagine my life without you.”
“Until yesterday, I couldn’t either.”
A chill ran through her; the hair on her arms stood on end. She started to cry and he did, too, and she thought maybe she should leave and return at the end of the day. Perhaps then they would see things differently.
But when she came home that afternoon, Julian was back to where they’d been that morning. And she was tired of it. Tired of his accusations when she could offer no more than an honest apology, and since that didn’t appear to be enough, maybe it was best if she didn’t say anything. She sat in the kitchen eating leftover Chinese food, and Julian, with no appetite and nothing to say himself, simply watched her pick at her vegetables.
“I did something terrible,” she said. “I’m not denying it. But are you going to hold it over me for the rest of my life?”
“I honestly don’t know.”
“Julian,” she said, “we can work this out.”
He wanted to embrace her, to tell her everything would be fine, but he couldn’t because things weren’t fine, and it occurred to him now, watching her, that they never would be fine again.
“So this is it?” she said. “You’re leaving me?”
I don’t know you anymore. He’d heard those words in movies, read them in novels, and he was a writer, his life was words, he had to be able to do better than that. But language, his one refuge, was failing him. He’d be miserable without her; he could see that. He was already miserable without her and she was still there.
Just three days ago, on the way to the airport, they’d been talking about having children. She wanted them; he knew that. But what she longed to tell him now was that it was him she wanted to have children with. Without him, children meant nothing to her. And if he was going to leave her, and if in five years, or ten, she was on her own, she couldn’t see doing it by herself. Without him, her plans were meaningless.
He had the front door open, and she imagined he was waiting for her to haul him back. “Where are you going to spend the night?” He seemed capable of anything. She saw him on a bench in the Arboretum, camped out on the steps of Angell Hall, curled up like a bear beneath his office desk, his jeans jacket cloaking him. “Will you be all right?”
“I don’t know.”
Then he was out the door and down the hallway, a figure she watched through their bedroom window, diminishing in the shadows beneath the streetlights of Kerrytown, dwindling in the darkness.
The next morning, she ca
nceled her therapy appointments for the day. The day after that she did the same thing, but on the third day she went back to work, and soon a week had passed and she realized he wasn’t returning.
He must have stopped by when she wasn’t there, because she came home one night to find his apartment key on the table and most of his belongings removed from his drawers. He’d left a note with the phone number where he was staying, but when she called him he was silent, and she was, too.
“Julian, can’t you at least talk to me?”
“I don’t have anything to say.”
“But eventually?”
“I don’t know.”
She had never balanced her checkbook before, but she began to do so, keeping track of the checks Julian wrote and the money he withdrew, following him along the streets by the paper trail he was leaving. In their bedroom, she and Julian each had a dresser, but since he was taller than she was he’d taken the top drawers of each dresser and she’d taken the bottom ones. Now that he’d left, the sensible thing would have been to consolidate dressers, but she couldn’t bring herself do that. So she continued to use the bottom half of each dresser and left Julian’s drawers unoccupied.
The password for her bank card was Julian’s date of birth, and the password for her e-mail account was the date they’d met. She could have switched passwords, but doing so felt like a bad omen; that way he would never come back. But she changed her screensaver, which was a photo of Julian eating scrambled eggs—he was smiling, holding his fork away from himself, as if he were waving the eggs at her—and replaced it with a photo of Olivia, looking up from her desk, in an apartment in New York City, which was where she was living now, trying to make a go of it as a dancer.
Their first night in Ann Arbor, she and Julian had arrayed candles about the bedroom and made love on their futon. “Sex in Michigan,” Julian said. The Lower Peninsula of Michigan resembled a mitt, and the natives held up their right hand, palm out, to show you where in the state they were from. “I’m from here,” Julian said, pointing to the base of his thumb, feeling already like a true Michigander.
“Enough with this old futon,” Mia said. They’d slept on it in college; she wanted to get a real bed. So they placed the futon on the street, their first donation to Ann Arbor recycling or to some passing student who wanted an old bed, and went off to the store to buy a new one.
But the next morning their futon was still sitting outside, and the morning after that it was, too. Feeling sentimental about it, they hauled it back inside and folded it up in the closet. That was where it had been the last eight years, until now, convinced she could detect the smell of Julian on their mattress, she removed the futon. She’d been sleeping on it for a week now, slumped on the floor like a college student again.
She learned from a friend that Julian was subletting an apartment near Burns Park, and she started to walk there afternoons, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. One day she saw him in front of the college hockey rink. She considered crossing the street to greet him, but she didn’t know what to say, and as she stood there watching him, he continued up State Street toward Packard, disappearing with the cars.
As the weeks passed, she did her best to accept her solitude. When the bills came she paid them immediately, and she felt a strength in doing this, for she had always relied on Julian to pay the bills. She went to the movies, and she drove into Detroit, which she had rarely done before. Once, she drove to Windsor, to Canada, across the Ambassador Bridge, trying to look at the world as bigger than she’d imagined it.
And in July, when Art Fair came to town, she spent a couple of hours every morning wandering among the exhibits. There were hundreds of booths and tens of thousands of people, and State Street was awash in curly fries and funnel cakes. Julian liked to say that for a week every summer all of Ohio and Indiana made a hajj to Ann Arbor. He and Mia used to barricade themselves in their apartment, almost, it seemed, as a kind of protest, and a couple of years they actually left town. Now, wandering among the booths, Mia saw her visit to Art Fair as part of her new openness, and she imagined Julian, wherever he was, sneering at the spectacle; she was happy not to be doing that this year. She felt that without him she was more willing to see the good in things, and she liked herself better for that, even if, despairingly, she still searched for him among the crowds.
Then, when she tired of this, she went for lunch at Park Avenue Deli, where she would get the spinach and mozzarella sandwich and drink a lemonade, and after that, she would head to Rackham to work on her dissertation. Whenever she sat in front of the computer, she was reminded of what Julian had said about writing, how inspiration didn’t matter, what you needed was to tie yourself to your chair, and she heard his voice, as she so often still did, and she took this as reassurance. Once, wanting to hear his voice for real, she called the number where he was staying. But no one answered and in a way she was relieved, and she went back to walking through Julian’s new neighborhood, telling herself that if she saw him again this time she would know what to say.
Spending time with Sigrid and Ivan, Francine and Saxton, and Will and Paige, she felt acutely Julian’s absence, and never more so than when they went out of their way to include her in their activities, to make her feel that she wasn’t alone.
When somebody asked her what had gone wrong, she said, “It’s complicated.” But it wasn’t complicated. She’d slept with Julian’s best friend and he’d left her. It sounded so grave, articulated that way, but it was grave, and it was the very gravity that had eluded her. She hadn’t told anyone she’d cheated on Julian because she knew people would think she’d gotten what she deserved.
Finally, though, she told Sigrid. “It was nine years ago,” she said, “but that’s no excuse, because Julian and I were already committed to each other.”
“Why did you do it?”
Her instinct was to say she didn’t know. And the truth was she didn’t. The betrayal itself, when it came to her, when, as always, she felt conscience-stricken, seemed to have been perpetrated by someone else. For that was how she remembered that year, from the moment her mother was diagnosed right through the funeral, seven quicksilver months when she couldn’t own anything and she felt—there was no other way to put it—inhabited. But in the last few weeks some details had returned to her. A nighttime ride on Carter’s scooter, the wind pummeling them, the feeling that he was taking her somewhere. Carter was going out with Pilar, but his feelings for Pilar, he told Mia, had nothing to do with his feelings for her, and he had a cool, poised logic she couldn’t gainsay. Julian was, in fact, away—she remembered this now—home for the weekend to see some friends. And maybe that was part of it: she resented Julian for abandoning her while her mother was dying. Pilar was away, too. Carter with his persistence and his platitudes—“It doesn’t have to be a big deal”—and he flattered her, sure, but she wasn’t someone who was easily flattered. It was the way Carter made you feel guilty, how he could convince you that you owed him something. “It’s the least you can do.” Had he actually said those words? She had a sudden, glancing vision, Carter in her bedroom, pressing her against the closet where Julian’s shirts hung, for there was a violence to the sex, coming from her as much as from him.
But guilt explained only so much. That spring, feeling helpless, seeing the tight, dour faces of the doctors, she’d watched her mother waste away. “What difference will it make?” Carter said, meaning the sex, and with her mother dying she thought he was right: nothing made a difference. All she could think of was that day with Carter in the co-op kitchen, and his words: “My mother had breast cancer.” Of course he hadn’t told her this before; she’d never been able to get a word out of him. He’d been six at the time; he couldn’t remember much. But she didn’t care; she wanted him to tell her what had happened, for the simple reason that his mother had been cured. That night, when Carter wanted to have sex with her, she thought maybe if she slept with him his luck would rub off. Failing that, she thought he would ta
lk to her. But he didn’t talk to her. He fucked her and he came and he rolled off her and fell asleep. And not knowing what to do, she fell asleep herself, only to wake up disgusted.
She was sitting with Sigrid outside the computing center, and for an instant she thought she saw Julian. But it wasn’t him, just someone else queued up at the printing station. “I have to go,” she said. But she just sat there after Sigrid had departed, staring vacantly ahead, and half an hour passed before she looked up and realized she had to be at the clinic.
Up in Montreal, she found her father at McGill, in the room where he taught his classes. She used to sit in the back of the room while he worked, sometimes even while he was teaching, doing her homework to the sound of chalk pressed against the blackboard, equations blooming across the slate. The day the building was unveiled, she’d been here with her parents for the celebration, and afterward she’d gone upstairs to see her father’s new office, where she looked out the window at campus, holding a glass of champagne she’d drunk too much of, feeling the ground blur beneath her. “It’s my new perch,” her father said, and she felt as if it were hers, too. She’d probably done more homework in Rutherford than anywhere else in the world. She had a memory of an earlier building, of running through the corridors playing tag with her father, only to be scooped up by a stranger who turned out to be the dean of sciences, then being rescued by her father, who said, “It’s all right, Warren, that’s my daughter, Mia.”
She watched her father now from across the room. He wore his signature outfit: the flannel shirt with the collar open, the jacket with the elbows patched. As a boy, he’d had to wear a uniform to school, and he’d done all he could to circumvent the rules, leaving the necktie unknotted, failing to wear the white shirt he was supposed to. It was the kind of transgression that would have gotten a lesser student in trouble. “Are you hungry?”
She nodded.
“Cheeseburgers?”
She smiled. It was her mother who hadn’t permitted junk food in the house, who had read all the food and drink labels and applied the rule that any ingredient she couldn’t pronounce wasn’t to be consumed. So it was left to her father to sneak licorice to her, to buy her cotton candy when her mother wasn’t looking, to allow her when she was ten to eat her favorite snack, SpaghettiOs straight from the can, to take her after school for cheeseburgers, which her mother disapproved of so close to dinner. At twelve and thirteen, when she became religious, she stopped going out for cheeseburgers with her father. She knew he missed this, and she did, too, even if she hadn’t been able to admit it at the time. He had offered to take her to the Jewish delis in town to buy smoked meat, but the food there wasn’t kosher. A couple of times they drove to Hampstead and Côte Saint-Luc to get kosher meat sandwiches, but in the end she felt it wasn’t worth the drive, and it was always a school night, anyway, and she had homework to do.
Matrimony Page 17
