Matrimony

by Joshua Henkin

  It had been years now since she’d kept kosher, but she didn’t like cheeseburgers anymore. Perhaps it was a relic from when she’d been religious; she’d lost the taste for them. Still, she was happy to join her father while he ate, glad to be back home visiting him.

  In the bottom of a closet, she found an old T-shirt of her mother’s with a name tag sewn inside the collar. When she went to summer camp, she’d been required to have name tags on all her clothes, but she disliked name tags and refused to let her mother sew them on her clothes unless she sewed them on her own clothes, too.

  Her father still had his old datebooks, even his old checkbooks, from as long as thirty years ago. Every summer, when they did their big housecleaning, her mother would put those checkbooks aside in the hope that he would finally agree to dispose of them. But he was always returning them to their marked boxes. Her mother had called him a secret sentimentalist, and though Mia had never thought of him that way, she realized now that it was true.

  She found a pile of unmarked cassettes. “What are those?”

  “They’re what Mom sent me when she was in Greece. We communicated by tape that summer.”

  “You were apart?”

  “Summer of 1964,” he said. “Mom was doing research.”

  “You never told me that.”

  “You see?” he said, smiling at her. “And you thought you knew everything.”

  She touched the top cassette. Her mother’s voice from thirty-five years ago. She’d have liked to listen to one of those tapes. But they weren’t meant for her, and the longer she stared at them the more she was convinced her mother wasn’t really on them. She could imagine events from before she was born—World War II, the red scare, the Cuban missile crisis—but her parents themselves, going on dates, “courting each other,” as her father liked to say: all that confounded her.

  She didn’t want to look at the photo albums—where could she begin?—but there were a few loose photos of her mother as a girl. Mia was astonished by how much she resembled her mother. Babies were said to look like their fathers, evolution’s way of encouraging men to stick around, but she had done things in reverse: she had looked like her mother when she was a baby and now, years later, she resembled her father. The clump of dark curls, the long, narrow face, the cleft like a brand on her chin. Though some people thought her parents looked alike, and she supposed that over time they had started to. “Who’s this?”

  Her father smiled. “That’s the guy who tried to break Mom and me up.”

  “Another suitor?”

  “In a manner of speaking.” On their first date, her father said, he had gone to her mother’s apartment to pick her up. A photograph of a young man hung on the wall above her desk—a boyfriend, Arthur Mendelsohn presumed, and he wondered why she’d consented to go out with him. He almost didn’t ask her out a second time, but he ran into her in the rain in Harvard Square, and because she was just standing there allowing herself to get wet, he assumed she was waiting for him to ask her out again. “What about your boyfriend?” he said. “That photo above your desk?”

  “Him?” her mother said. “That’s Paul Klee!”

  Apparently, as a young man Paul Klee had cut a striking figure, striking enough almost to have derailed Mia’s parents’ relationship before it even started.

  “And you still have that photo?”

  Her father shrugged. “I didn’t see fit to throw it out.”

  “You’ve kept everything, haven’t you?”

  “I suppose I have.”

  He was quiet now, and she was, too, the way they often were together. Her mother had done most of the talking; she acted as a go-between for the two of them. “Have you heard from Julian?”

  She shook her head. She’d spoken in generalities—there had been problems in the marriage—and it saddened her to talk this way, but she didn’t know how to go about it differently. Her father believed in solutions, or at least in the possibility that there was a solution, and now, as she implied through her silence that there wasn’t one, he seemed not to know what to say.

  She bent over to do her laces.

  “Look at you,” he said. “Tying your shoelaces with two loops.”

  “It’s how you taught me.”

  “I did?”

  She must have been three, four at most. He’d always been eager to start her early; it had been true with everything. “Two loops were easier,” she explained. She hadn’t had the fine motor skills at that age.

  “And now?”

  “I guess I’ve gotten used to it.” She recalled an anniversary her parents had celebrated. How old had she been? Five? Six? She’d picked roses from the neighbors’ garden, and when her parents found out where the flowers had come from, they made her apologize to the neighbors. But she’d always suspected they were secretly pleased. They didn’t like the neighbors, a sour, misanthropic couple. Years later, when they moved out, it became a joke that she’d chased them away, that she’d done the whole neighborhood a service.

  “Dad, what do you do on yours and Mom’s anniversary?”

  “I think about her,” he said.

  “I do, too.”

  “I know,” he said. “You call every year.”

  She was silent.

  “It’s the burden of the elder child, isn’t it, to take care of the parents.”

  “Oh, Dad, I don’t take care of you. I haven’t even managed to live in the same country.”

  “You remember birthdays and anniversaries.”

  “Remembering isn’t hard.”

  “Maybe not, but Mom and I were eldest children ourselves, and we swore when you were born that we’d do our best not to turn you into a dutiful daughter. And despite our good efforts, look at you.”

  “I’m not so dutiful.”

  “You’re here.”

  She understood he was talking about Olivia. “If it’s any consolation, she doesn’t call me much, either.”

  “So I shouldn’t take it personally?”

  “No, Dad.”

  He got up to prepare dinner. Once, before he was married, he’d heated a can of peas in the oven only to have it explode. He’d been known to live off frankfurters for weeks at a time. He looked thin now, but he always had; she was glad to see he was eating.

  He poured them each some wine, and she gazed at him now through her wineglass, the undulating shape of him, her father. On the kitchen counter lay a page of equations. He was busy at work; there was nothing to worry about. Except, she knew, he was worried about her.

  Finally, Julian came back for the rest of his belongings. She was standing in the kitchen when he arrived, unsure of what to say. “How are you?”

  “I’m okay,” he said. “You?”

  “I’m okay, too.”

  She fixed herself a piece of toast, searching for a conversational gambit, and when she couldn’t find one, she wandered into the bedroom and sat down. This was her home. Though really it was their home, and now that he’d left, she felt as if none of it belonged to her, as if she’d been squatting for years and the police had been called. “I hear you’re living in Burns Park.”

  He nodded.

  “Will you be here in the fall?”

  “Probably,” he said. “I’ve agreed to teach again, but I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m thinking of taking a trip. Maybe going overseas. I’ve never really traveled before.”

  “Of course you’ve traveled. Your parents took you to tons of places.”

  “I mean without my parents.”

  “What about our honeymoon?” she wanted to say. “And our cross-country trip that summer in college?” He couldn’t leave her, not like this, leave not just her home but the state she lived in, perhaps the very country.

  He took out his checkbook to pay the bills. Watching him sign his name, she realized that beyond the heartbreak there were practical concerns, for everything that had been his had been hers, too, and though everythin
g that had been hers had been his as well, he’d had so much more than she had.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, as if he knew what she was thinking. “I’m not going to fight you over money.”

  Her heart lurched: was he going to ask for a divorce?

  Then he was in the closet, methodically taking what was his. Later she would convince herself she’d seen moistness around his eyes, but what struck her at the time was his abject dispassion. She’d expected accusations, a rehashing on a minor scale of what had come before, but what she got instead was a lump for a heart, the rigid cast of his back as, carrying a trash bag like a vagrant, he made his way out the door.

  She agreed to go for coffee with a friend of Sigrid’s, an anthropology graduate student who had recently gone through a breakup himself. Sitting across from him, she feared he would talk about his ex-girlfriend and that she would have to reciprocate and talk about Julian. But, to his credit, he was as circumspect as she was. For a moment, she looked at him and thought he was handsome, with a long, sloping face and dark eyes, and she allowed herself to think he was interesting. She could understand why Sigrid had set them up; in other circumstances she might have been attracted to him.

  Later, though, she grew depressed: she was thirty-one and going on dates. In spare moments, she wondered about old boyfriends, Glen, for instance, whom she’d gone out with in high school and who was now living in Indiana, having married a woman who had grown up there. She recalled a German exchange student she’d met when she was fifteen, how everything between them in their brief relationship had been fraught with import for the simple reason that he spoke such poor English and she spoke no German and it took so much effort for them to communicate.

  But it was Derek she thought about most, Derek, whom she’d met when she was eighteen. She was taking off a year before college, working as a nanny to two French children, and it was in a café in Aix-en-Provence that she saw Derek for the first time, standing in line with his knapsack of groceries.

  “You’re too young to be a mother,” Derek said, seeing Claudette and Emile trailing behind Mia.

  “You’re right,” Mia said. “I’m their au pair.”

  Mia introduced the children to Derek, and then, realizing she hadn’t done so already, she introduced herself.

  Derek spoke to her in his clumsy French, until it was determined that she knew English, too, that English, in fact, was her first language. Derek’s English was clumsy as well, but in a different way from how his French was clumsy. He sounded as if he’d learned English from an elderly British lady, which, it turned out, he had. “How do you do?” he said. “I’m pleased to meet you.”

  Sitting across from Mia, Derek said, “Do you think the baby needs his diaper changed?”

  “It’s possible.” Mia reached into her bag and removed a diaper.

  “Wait,” Derek said. “I’ll do it. I’m good at changing diapers.” He laid Emile across the table and moved him from side to side, as if he were basting a turkey. “Not so bad,” he said when he was done.

  Mia wasn’t sure what Derek meant, whether he was saying that changing diapers wasn’t so bad or that he wasn’t so bad at doing it. But since both were true, she said, “You’re right.”

  “My brother has children,” Derek explained. “You have to be careful when you change the boys. They pee in your face.”

  After that day, Derek would come to the café to look for Mia. He asked her to tell him when she would be there, but she rarely knew in advance. Emile napped irregularly, and sometimes Claudette had a play date. Occasionally Mia would be allowed to borrow the family car to take the children to parks and museums in nearby towns, and sometimes on longer excursions, to Lyon, for example, where she would walk with Claudette and Emile through the different neighborhoods, past the men hawking wares on the street. She enjoyed these trips, liked having the children to herself, discovering a city that was new to all three of them. Most of all, she liked being behind the wheel of their parents’ Peugeot, the shifting up and down from gear to gear, the activity of driving. Other times, however, without the car, consigned to a house that wasn’t hers, pressed into the company of two toddlers, she found herself growing lonely. She was by nature a solitary person; in high school and before she had always preferred to remain on the periphery. But it was one thing to be on the periphery voluntarily, another thing to have no choice in the matter. Now, in Provence, she longed for companionship. She would walk past the café, hoping Derek would be there, always glancing in as she went by.

  Derek had long, fragile-looking fingers, and the image Mia kept was of him scooping his hands through a barrel of mangoes. He looked like a schoolboy carrying his groceries in his knapsack. On that knapsack, like a heraldic coat of arms, was a patch with the words “Derek and the Dominos” on it.

  Mia would come to the café at eleven in the morning and find Derek waiting for her. And at two. And at four-thirty.

  “I thought you were a student,” she said.

  “I am.”

  “Are you playing hooky?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Don’t you go to class?”

  “Sure I do.” Derek removed his folder and showed Mia his notes, as if she were the professor checking his homework.

  His name was Takeshi in Japanese, which was, Mia thought, a long way from Derek, but here in Provence with all these English-speaking foreign students he wanted a name English-speakers could pronounce, so he chose Derek, after Derek and the Dominos. Derek loved American rock music. He was always asking Mia about obscure American bands, and every time she didn’t know one he looked at her with a mixture of disbelief and disappointment. It was as if he thought that being proximate to the United States, having grown up in a country that actually touched it, Mia had a knowledge of American music that wasn’t available to him.

  They read The International Herald Tribune together, Derek scanning for news about Japan. He told Mia about Prime Minister Nakasone and the Japanese economy. He spoke adoringly of Japanese cuisine, and of his own mother’s cooking, which was, he said, what he missed most about home. “I want to take you out for sushi,” he said.

  “But I don’t like sushi.”

  “Are you a vegetarian?”

  “No,” she said. “I just don’t like fish.”

  But Derek still wanted to take her out for sushi, so they agreed to go and Mia would eat the vegetable sushi.

  The following week, when they went out, Mia and Derek ate asparagus sushi and shiitake mushroom sushi and a plate of oshinko, Japanese pickles, though Derek, apologetically, also ate some fish.

  And the next morning when he saw her at the café, he had a present for her.

  “Sushi earrings!” Mia exclaimed. Each one was a plastic shrimp pinioned to a bed of rice.

  “Just don’t eat them,” Derek said.

  Mia introduced Derek to the family she worked for and to the other people she knew in town. “This is my friend Derek,” she would say, and Derek would stick out his hand and say, “I’m pleased to meet you.”

  But afterward, once the person had left, Derek became taciturn and morose. “Why do you always tell people I’m your friend?”

  “Because you are my friend.”

  “I don’t want to be your friend,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  Derek was silent, and in that silence Mia waited for him to say what she realized she’d been waiting for him to say for some time now. “I want to be more than friends.”

  “Oh, Derek.”

  “I like you.”

  “I like you, too, Derek.”

  “But you don’t want to be my girlfriend?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  She could have told him she wasn’t attracted to him, but why wasn’t she attracted to him? At the university, the American girls herded after him, seeing the gentleness Mia saw in him and finding him exotic as well, so different from the boys they’d gone to high school with. But Derek didn�
��t wish to be thought of as exotic. And he wasn’t drawn to these American girls, though in his own way, doing so with as much humility as the circumstances would allow, he let slip to Mia that these girls were interested in him, hoping that the knowledge that other girls liked him would make Mia like him, too. But it didn’t work. Mia tried to imagine Derek in Japan, wondered whether in Kyoto he would seem as unprotected as he did in France, or whether, speaking his own language, he would have a layer of guardedness he couldn’t muster here. All she knew was that in Aix, talking English, Derek spoke with so little artifice it should have been enough to make her like him. But it didn’t. “I don’t know why.”

  In Mia’s experience, when you told a guy you didn’t like him he tried to convince you you did; he turned your feelings into a subject of debate. But Derek, thank God, didn’t do this. It wasn’t everything or nothing—he was still willing to be her friend—and Mia was so relieved that the next time she saw him, standing outside the café with his knapsack of groceries, she allowed him to kiss her. It was just a kiss, she figured; it wasn’t a big deal.

  But to Derek it was. He took it as a sign that Mia had reconsidered, and when it became clear that she hadn’t, he grew disconsolate. “I think I love you,” he said.