Matrimony

by Joshua Henkin

  “New York,” Julian said. “Though the last place I lived was Ann Arbor.” He looked up at Henry. “How about you?”

  “I grew up in Hanover,” Henry said. “And then I went to Dartmouth. You’d think I’d have had more imagination.”

  “I’ve never been to Hanover,” Julian said, “but I suspect it might be my next stop. I’ve been making a tour of college towns.”

  “How long did you live in Ann Arbor?”

  “Nine years.”

  “Can you imagine living here for nine years?”

  “Right now, I can’t imagine living here for nine weeks.”

  “I hear Ann Arbor’s a nice place,” Henry said.

  “It’s all right. The problem is, everyone’s either twenty or fifty. You hit your thirties and you’re not sure what to do. You end up sleeping with your students.”

  “Is that what you did?”

  “In one case. Though she wasn’t my student any longer. I was on the rebound. My wife and I had just split up.” He’d been hopeful about Trilby, and he could tell that she’d been hopeful, too, but in the end they’d been disappointed. Another time, another place, other circumstances: he really had liked her. It had been five years since she’d been his student, but they’d never been able to get past that; what had started as one thing hadn’t managed to become something else. Or maybe it had simply been too soon. He had slept with a couple of other people, kindhearted, attractive women who took a sincere interest in him and he’d thought he’d be able to do the same for them. He’d managed to get himself into bed with them, but that, he learned, was the easy part; it was everything else he failed at. That was another reason he had come to Iowa City. To try again with someone else, knowing he wouldn’t run into Mia.

  He was in Henry’s study now, where in the middle of the desk sat an old typewriter. “Do you actually write on that?”

  “Sometimes,” Henry said. “Word processors have their uses, but I’m suspicious of them. The screen makes things look neat before they actually are.”

  Julian pointed to a box. “Is your novel in there?”

  Henry nodded.

  “Will you bring it in to workshop?”

  “It’s done,” Henry said. “My agent will sell it or she won’t. It’s time to move on to other things.”

  “I was working on a novel myself,” Julian said. “That’s why I came to Iowa. To try to get back to it.”

  “Will you be showing it to class?”

  “First I have to finish it. And after yesterday, why show anything to those jerks?”

  “They’re just jealous,” Henry said. “They’re not the ones who were published in Harper’s.”

  “It’s just one story.”

  “What about that spread in The Village Voice?”

  Julian shrugged. “The world is full of prognosticators.” The feature in the Voice had called him promising. It was how Professor Chesterfield had described him, what countless others had said about him over the years, and every time he heard the word he thought of what Cyril Connolly had said: “Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.” He was thirty-two now. When was he going to fulfill his promise?

  Henry said, “It’s never a bad sign when people hate your work. It shows you inspired passion.”

  “Is that what you told yourself after you were up? That you must be on to something if they were so vicious to you?”

  “I tried to,” Henry said. “But sure, it hurts.” He picked up the box that held his novel. It looked as if he were going to open it, but he just hefted it to his chest and returned it to the floor. “If it counts for anything, I really liked your story.”

  “Thanks, Henry.” Harper’s had liked his story, too. They had considered publishing it, but ultimately decided it needed more work, so they returned it to him, hoping he would revise and resubmit it. He’d been working on it over the summer, and he’d brought the revised version in to workshop to see what his classmates thought. The story was quiet; all his work was. Perhaps it was a matter of differing aesthetics. There had emerged in American fiction a strain of excess, he believed, a group of knowing authors whose every sentence seemed to shout, “Look how smart I am.” He had nothing against muscular prose; it was the flexing of those muscles that he objected to, and, along with it, a disregard for character, which, for him, was what fiction was about. He’d been at Iowa only a few weeks, but already he could detect a clique of students for whom character was beside the point. “You’re a good guy, Henry. People told me I wouldn’t like anyone at Iowa, but I like you.”

  Henry laughed. “I like you, too, Julian.”

  “On the other hand, the last friend I made in a writing workshop slept with my wife.” Julian hadn’t spoken to Carter since that day in Berkeley, more than a year ago now; it seemed possible they would never speak again. He tried to tell himself it didn’t matter, and certainly, compared with losing Mia, it didn’t. But then, without expecting it, he would find himself thinking about Carter. He’d be reminded of him, often by people who were nothing like him, the way, standing next to Henry painting his house, he found Carter coming to mind. Carter had been his best friend, and now he was gone, too; one loss compounded the other.

  “Well, I’ll do my best not to sleep with your wife.”

  Julian laughed. “That’s probably a good idea.”

  The house was only half painted. And there was the inside, which Henry had neglected to mention until now. “Do you want to come back tomorrow?”

  Julian smiled. “With a friend like you, I’ll never get any writing done.”

  “It’s best to be overscheduled,” Henry said. “Too much time on your hands and a person becomes lazy.”

  “Of course you would think that. You went to medical school.”

  “Is that a yes?”

  “I’ll let you know tomorrow morning. It depends how much writing I get done today.”

  Julian walked down Fairchild Street, and he was a block away, on Church, when he realized he was still holding Henry’s paint roller.

  When he returned to the house, he found Henry on the ladder again, attending to a wall.

  “It’s yours,” Henry said. “My token of gratitude. Maybe you’ll find some use for it.”

  Julian laughed. “My house is already painted. I rented it that way.”

  But Henry had turned around and was going over a trouble spot. More revision, Julian thought. The heat spread across Henry’s shoulders, the brim of his baseball cap shielding him from the sun.

  Second semester came, and Julian’s spirits lifted. He had come to Iowa to write, and he’d never been anyplace where people cared so much about writing. How easy it was when you were laboring on your own to feel that what you were doing was frivolous. But at Iowa there was no doubt that writing mattered, and he allowed himself, in the company of other writers, to believe that nothing was as urgent as crafting a good sentence, as creating vital characters.

  He had sold another story to Harper’s, the one that had been attacked in class last semester, and though Henry told him he should gloat, he didn’t want to. The other workshop members, as if appreciating this, appeared to hold him in greater esteem; even the two classmates who’d used his photograph as a dartboard congratulated him on his success.

  This semester, the director of the Writers’ Workshop was his instructor. There were twelve students in class, and only once they were seated would the instructor make his solemn entrance. The instructor told the students that at the beginning of a story the writer hands the reader a backpack. He places certain objects in that backpack, telling the reader to keep them in mind, and if the reader gets to the end of the story and it doesn’t matter what’s in that backpack, the reader feels cheated. Julian thought about that analogy as he wrote. He watched admiringly as the instructor dissected a story, and though he himself wasn’t exempt from criticism, it was clear that the instructor respected his work, and this meant a great deal to him.

  After workshop, he
joined his classmates at the Mill for hamburgers, pizza, and pitchers of beer, and on Saturdays he participated in the weekly softball games, fiction writers against poets. That year, one of the visiting instructors organized practices the day before the games, and Julian went out on Friday afternoons to shag fly balls with him. He reminded himself of the legacy of Iowa, how when the Writers’ Workshop was founded it had been held in Quonset huts in the parking lot of the student union. He listed to himself, like a litany, the people who had studied at Iowa—Wallace Stegner, Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver, Andre Dubus—young writers like him, who had become successful; placing himself in their company, he felt buoyant.

  At times, however, feeling lonely and beset by the cold, relying on his list of writers to buck himself up, he wondered again why he had come to Iowa. The previous week, he’d been at a party where a fistfight had broken out over Nathaniel Hawthorne, and though he hadn’t been part of the fight, he felt sullied by it, embarrassed by the fact that he fraternized with people who threw punches over Hawthorne and, worse, were proud of it.

  And, sure, he’d had two stories accepted at Harper’s, but he hadn’t been able to get back to his novel, which was why he had come to Iowa in the first place. Then his classmates would bring him up short again with the glee of their judgments—why did being cruel make people so happy?—for the class had been vicious to Henry once more, over the opening chapters of his new novel. Henry’s novel was great, Julian thought; their classmates were just jealous.

  After workshop, playing pool with Henry at the Foxhead, Julian was even more upset than he would have been if his own work had been attacked. “I hate everyone here,” he said. “I’m thinking of dropping out.”

  Late one night, unable to work, he called Professor Chesterfield. They hadn’t spoken in years, but Professor Chesterfield was the one who had encouraged him, and Julian needed his advice.

  “How are you, Wainwright?”

  “Terrible.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  Julian didn’t know where to start. He and Mia had separated. He was living in a town he didn’t like, among classmates he found mean-spirited. He’d stopped working on his novel. “Did you get an MFA?”

  “No,” said Professor Chesterfield. “They weren’t as popular back then.”

  Of course they weren’t, Julian thought. Hemingway hadn’t gone to school to write; neither had Faulkner. For years, novels had been written without writing workshops, and everyone had done just fine. “My wife and I split up.”

  “That must raise the stakes,” Professor Chesterfield said. “It’s what happened with my novel. There wasn’t enough room for both it and my wife.”

  Julian wished he could have said the same thing, that he and Mia had split up over his novel. Not that it would have made him feel better. But infidelity? How paltry, he thought. How inconsequential.

  As the semester wore on, he started to skip the public readings at Prairie Lights and attend college basketball games instead. One cold February night, the snow collecting in drifts on Dubuque Street and along the banks of the Iowa River, he went to see Iowa play the University of Michigan. Sitting in the crowd with the Iowa fans, he heard the chants of “Let’s go Blue!” He listened to the Michigan fight song being played, and he thought of the games he’d gone to with Mia and he felt wistful and alone.

  Michigan won and he went home happy, but later that night his mother called, and as soon as he picked up he could tell she was crying.

  “Dad’s gone,” she said. “He left me.”

  In the elevator of his parents’ building, Julian said a quiet hello to George. George had been at the helm since Julian was a boy, and now, as he rode silently to his parents’ apartment, he felt as if he were being transported to his own funeral. He had his key, but he decided to knock. When his mother didn’t answer, he rang the bell.

  It was noon, but his mother was still in her bathrobe, and her hair looked as if it had been branded on her forehead.

  “Mom.”

  She hugged him.

  Out! Out! Out! The first words he’d ever spoken, yet when he arrived at college, when he’d finally gotten out, he was surprised to discover that he was homesick. He hadn’t been close to his parents; or the way that he’d been close to them, especially to his mother, had encouraged him to run. But he’d never known where to run, or how to return. Though he’d always held out the hope that someday they’d be closer. He would go away and do the things he needed to do, and in his selfishness, his indifference to his parents, he would freeze them as they’d been when he was a child. Now his father had left his mother, and what he felt more than anything was that his parents were mortal; they were going to die. He was a boy again, the toddler into whose room his mother would come at night, when he called to her in his nightmares, when he cried out for milk. “When did things go wrong?”

  “We’ve had problems for years,” she said. “You must know that.”

  He didn’t and he did. He recalled his parents fighting, and himself beneath the covers, ostensibly asleep, putting a pillow over his head. His father not home yet, ten o’clock, eleven o’clock, sometimes after midnight, his mother waiting up for him before finally turning in herself. For a time, he feared his father wasn’t coming home at all, but then he’d be there the next morning eating his half-grapefruit and reading his Wall Street Journal and Julian would feel foolish for having been worried. His father was a workaholic, but then all his friends’ fathers were workaholics, and so many of his classmates’ parents had gotten divorced that, by comparison, his own parents’ marriage had seemed tranquil. True, there had been another group, whose parents had stayed together until the children left for college, with a rash of divorces freshman year, but his parents hadn’t fallen into that category, either. They’d hung on, and he had come to assume they always would. “Is someone else involved? Does Dad have a girlfriend?”

  “Not as far as I know.” His mother looked up at him. “I almost left him years ago.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “It’s not easy to leave. Dad was a good provider, and I’ve always been terrified of being poor. When I was a girl, my father lost his job. He was out of work for nearly three years.”

  “I didn’t realize that.”

  “The economy wasn’t doing well, and jobs were hard to find, even for attorneys. My parents had been living beyond their means. There was a boat, some fancy clothes, too much jewelry, and too many expensive vacations, and my parents piled up a lot of debt. The creditors were calling, but my parents did everything to keep up appearances, and I inherited that. I put myself through Wellesley working three jobs, but my friends were the rich girls, and I was so good at hiding how poor I was I almost convinced myself it wasn’t true. Then I met your father. He appealed to me, Julian, a good-looking young man from a prosperous family, and as sure as I was standing there, he wasn’t going to pile up debt the way my father had. And I was right about that. Not that there haven’t been sacrifices. I had dreams of following my father into law. Of becoming the first female lawyer in our family.”

  “But Dad wouldn’t let you?”

  “It was just understood that I would stay home. And I was all right with it. I’ve always been willing to compromise.”

  “Perhaps too much?”

  “By nature I’m an accommodator. Though the real compromise was the original one. I’m a romantic at heart, and even at twenty-two I knew marrying your father wasn’t the romantic decision.”

  “You’re saying you didn’t love him?”

  “I did, but he’s a certain kind of person, and I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t realize it from the start.”

  She took him into her bedroom, where she opened his father’s dresser drawers. The underwear was gone, and the socks and undershirts. The trousers had been removed from the closets; the shoes were missing. As a boy, Julian used to take out the shoe trees and clomp around in those shoes, pretending to be his father, wanting to be him, even
trying on his suit jackets, though his hands reached only as far as the elbows. He would grab his father’s briefcase and walk around the living room, someone with a purpose, going somewhere. For years now he’d been hesitant to enter his parents’ bedroom, and when he did he felt a quickening of breath. All those drawers and closets. The secrets contained within. And now his father’s dresser drawers were empty.

  “Back in college, there was this man I used to flirt with who worked at the local diner in Wellesley. He was a musician from Belgium, his English wasn’t good, but I could have seen myself falling in love with him.”

  “But you didn’t?”

  “Dad came along and I went with him.”

  “And you think you’d have been happier with the other guy?”

  “Not necessarily. It’s just easy for me to see different paths.”

  He wanted to tell his mother to stick it out, but he himself hadn’t stuck it out, though his parents had begged him to give Mia another chance. What, he’d thought then, did they know about marriage, his parents who had been married longer than he’d been alive but whose marriage had occurred—did all children tacitly feel this way?—for the sole purpose of bringing him into existence? They’d sat with him in this very apartment trying to understand what had gone wrong with Mia, and how could he explain it to them when he couldn’t understand it himself?

  His mother looked up at him. “I thought I was ready for this to happen, but you’re never ready. Nothing could have prepared me for the moving truck, or for going into our bedroom and seeing his empty drawers.”

  “I’m so sorry, Mom.” He’d learned more about his mother in the last hour than he’d known his whole life, though no doubt she would have told him years ago, if only he’d asked. “Where’s Dad staying?”

  “He’s renting an apartment on Fifty-eighth and Park.”