Matrimony (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Joshua Henkin

  “What does ‘lovelorn’ mean, anyway?” someone asked.

  “It’s when you love someone,” Rufus said, “and they don’t love you back.” There was a longing, dolorous tone to Rufus’s voice. He appeared to be speaking from experience.

  Professor Chesterfield read from Sue Persimmon’s exercise. Sue was blond and full-figured, and she was staring raptly at Professor Chesterfield, but she had written, literally, about a greasy spoon and only now had she realized her mistake.

  “‘The spoon was very greasy,’” Professor Chesterfield read. “‘Megan didn’t want to eat from a spoon that had so much gunk on it.’”

  Professor Chesterfield read from Rufus’s exercise. “‘Bill picked up his fork and knife, looked warily around him, and cut into his collared greens.’ Rufus,” Professor Chesterfield said, “kindly undress your vegetables.”

  Professor Chesterfield read from another exercise. “‘Tom’s French toast stared back at him, uncomfortable, indignant.’ What we have here, ladies and gentlemen, is a piece of indignant French toast. I’ve never seen one of those before, but then it’s a new year.”

  The students looked up mutely.

  “Class dismissed,” Professor Chesterfield said. He motioned to Julian and Carter to stay behind. “I like you guys,” he said. “You’re the only two students in the class with even an ounce of talent. Not that you have much of it.”

  “No, sir,” Julian said.

  “Are you two friends?”

  “Don’t know him,” Carter said.

  “Well, you should get to know each other.”

  Outside the classroom Julian read through his exercise. Professor Chesterfield had written one word on it. “Sophomoric.” On Carter’s exercise there was one word, too. “Pusillanimous.”

  “Jesus,” Julian said.

  “Well, fuck,” said Carter, and he crumpled up his exercise and fired it across the hallway, where it landed in the trash can.

  The next morning in the courtyard Julian saw Carter leaning indolently against a tree. Julian was tall and thin, with straight dark hair that fell across his face. Carter was squatter and more compact, but he held himself in such a way as to make a person think he had no shape at all. He had short-cropped blond hair and a tiny scar above his upper lip.

  “So we’re supposed to be friends,” Julian said.

  “Papal decree,” said Carter.

  “‘Sophomoric’ and ‘pusillanimous.’ Do you know what those words mean?”

  “They mean Chesterfield thinks we suck.”

  “Actually, he likes us,” Julian said. “Why else would he bother to criticize us? You heard what he said. The only two students with any talent.”

  “He said we didn’t have much of it.”

  “But more than anyone else.”

  They walked across campus, and outside the student union whom should they see sitting on a park bench wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat but Professor Chesterfield himself. “Hello, Heinz. Hello, Wainwright.”

  The next evening they saw him again, outside the Bison Bar and Grill. Professor Chesterfield was wearing another hat, this one made of felt, and he tipped it at them in greeting. “Well, hello,” he said, and disappeared inside.

  At Safeway the following afternoon they found him bent over the frozen food examining the turkeys. His cart was filled with a quart of skimmed milk, a head of lettuce, a tomato, and twenty, maybe thirty cans of cat food.

  “The man has a cat,” Julian said.

  “I doubt it,” said Carter.

  “Then why’s he buying cat food?”

  “Who knows?”

  They spotted him the next day in the English department where he emerged from his office followed by Sue Persimmon. Sue looked every bit as pretty as she had in class, except now she appeared tousled, as did Professor Chesterfield. Professor Chesterfield went jauntily up the stairs, taking them two at a time, blond, sloe-eyed Sue Persimmon in her white sundress and silver anklet trailing amiably behind him.

  “I bet they’re having an affair,” Julian said.

  “How’s that possible?” said Carter. “The semester’s just begun.”

  “Maybe he works fast.”

  They saw him yet again, this time at the gym, where Professor Chesterfield was holding his own in what appeared to be the over-forty game of pickup basketball. He was surprisingly agile-footed. He had a dead eye from the outside and he played exuberant, harassing defense; no one wanted to be guarded by him.

  The next week, however, he limped into class with a cane.

  “What happened to you?” Astrid said.

  Professor Chesterfield hoisted himself onto his desk and removed a dog muzzle from his briefcase. “Some rules.” There was, he explained, an almost unbearable urge on the part of the student writer to explain his short story as the class discussed it. This wasn’t to be permitted in his classroom. “Someday, when your stories are published in The New Yorker”—a ludicrously gigantic smile crossed Professor Chesterfield’s face, as if the thought of his students being published in The New Yorker were too outrageous to entertain—“you won’t be able to stand over your reader’s shoulder and tell him what you meant. For that reason, the writer won’t speak until after his story has been discussed.”

  In many writing classes, the students sat in a circle and the professor guided them as they expressed themselves. But this wasn’t, Professor Chesterfield said, how he conducted things. His students spent their whole lives expressing themselves, through word and deed, and in his classroom, at least, a moratorium would be placed on expressing oneself.

  Professor Chesterfield read from Cara Friedberg’s story, which was called “The Great Tragedy.” At the beginning of the story, a young woman was breaking up with her boyfriend at a pizza joint. In the middle of the story, a young woman was breaking up with her boyfriend at a pizza joint. At the end of the story, a young woman was breaking up with her boyfriend at a pizza joint. Twenty-three pages of breaking up with your boyfriend at a pizza joint, and then there was a twenty-fourth page on which the young woman, ruing her decision to break up with her boyfriend, goes back to find him. Regrettably, her boyfriend has departed, and in her frenzied search for him she gets mown down by a bus. The young woman is dead; where can the story go? Nowhere, not least because the story has been written in first-person. But it goes on anyway, for one final sentence, in a magical stroke of narrative reincarnation: “I lay there cold and lifeless in Sean’s arms; rigor mortis had started to set in.”

  “Karen Friedman,” Rufus said, already breaking Professor Chesterfield’s rule against expressing himself. He was referring to Cara’s protagonist. “It’s pretty close to Cara Friedberg, don’t you think?”

  “Does this matter?” Over the years, Professor Chesterfield pointed out, his students focused on the smallest, least crucial details and ignored everything else.

  “I find the story unbelievable,” Astrid said.

  Julian nodded. He found many things unbelievable about the story, not least the climactic bus accident.

  “I like the last sentence,” Rufus said. He read it aloud. “‘I lay there cold and lifeless in Sean’s arms; rigor mortis had started to set in.’”

  “What do you like about it?” Professor Chesterfield asked.

  “The semicolon.”

  “It’s an excellent semicolon,” Professor Chesterfield agreed. “In fact, throughout the story Cara uses semicolons properly, and for that reason I’m going to give her an A in the class.”

  “You are?” said Rufus.

  “It’s been my experience,” Professor Chesterfield said, “that the average college student thinks of the semicolon as a very large comma. But Cara doesn’t, so I will give her an A. In fact, I will say this right now: whosoever uses semicolons correctly in this class will get an A for the year.”

  “No matter how bad the writing is?” Rufus said.

  Professor Chesterfield was so uninterested in grades that one time when a student came to com
plain about a C, he changed the grade to an A before the young man could even finish talking. “As for this particular story, it’s a dead character speaking in the last sentence, but it’s a dead character who knows her semicolons.”

  Next came Simon Pelfrey’s story, which was called “Strumming in the Zone.” There was time travel in the story, and though the story didn’t say so explicitly, the characters, Julian surmised, were intended to be werewolves. At the very least, they were extremely hairy human beings. They spoke in what seemed like English, except that periodically the letter “z” would appear, orphan-like, in the middle of a sentence. It was as if Simon had committed the same typo over and over again.

  “It was an experiment,” Simon explained when it was his turn to speak. “I’m writing experimental fiction.”

  “God bless the American teenager,” Professor Chesterfield said, “and his experimental fiction.” The previous year, he told the class, one of his students, in her own idea of an experiment, had written a story about a husband and wife, only at the end of the story the reader learns that the wife isn’t a wife but a cat. “Fooled you,” the writer seemed to be saying. Professor Chesterfield tried to explain the difference between writing fiction and telling a riddle. On the blackboard he wrote, “THOU SHALT NOT CONFUSE A SHORT STORY WITH A RUBIK’S CUBE.”

  “What was the experiment?” someone asked Simon.

  “I was wondering that myself,” Professor Chesterfield said.

  “The letter ‘z,’” Simon said, “is the last letter in the alphabet. I was trying to say something about endings.” He looked up at Professor Chesterfield. “The letter ‘z’ appeared in my story exactly a hundred times. I imagine that casts things in a different light.”

  “What about your characters?” Julian said. “Are they supposed to be werewolves or people?”

  “I left it open,” Simon said. “I didn’t want to bias the reader.”

  “Well, thank you, Simon,” Professor Chesterfield said. “Thank you for sharing.” He gave the muzzle an affectionate squeeze.

  He approached the blackboard.

  THOU SHALT POPULATE YOUR STORIES WITH HOMO SAPIENS.

  “And one more thing,” Professor Chesterfield said. “Would everyone please stop writing the same story?” According to Professor Chesterfield, the male students always wrote about fathers and sons going hunting together and the females always wrote about depressed young women who curl up into a ball.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” said Sue Persimmon, who seemed to take this personally.

  Julian looked knowingly at Carter. Maybe that was what had happened in Professor Chesterfield’s office. Sue had curled up into a ball.

  At the end of class, Professor Chesterfield asked Julian and Carter to stay behind again. “There’s a lot of bad writing here.”

  “The worst,” said Julian.

  “It’s easy to be a critic, isn’t it, Wainwright?” Professor Chesterfield got up from his desk and, without limping, walked across the classroom and out the door, leaving his cane and muzzle behind him.

  That first semester Julian spent a lot of time watching. He watched his classmates as they walked to and from class, the sets of feet going up and down the steps of Thompson Hall, the air emerging from everyone’s lungs as the weather got colder. He watched the cigarette smoke, and the dust that flew up at the clapping of mittens, and he felt buoyed by it all.

  In those fall months, he took to befriending the municipal workers in Northington, and soon he knew the names of the local policemen and firemen, of the meter maid, whom he greeted, “Good morning, Elaine,” saluting her as he passed. He would buy milk and orange juice and Pepperidge Farm Mint Milano cookies from the local grocers in town, alternating among them, like a man spreading his largesse. But he went most often to Mr. Kang, the Korean grocer, who, when Julian came in, would tell Julian about his childhood in Korea; then Julian, holding a carton of milk in each hand, would tell Mr. Kang about his own childhood.

  On one of his morning walks Julian found a stray Beagle who took a liking to him and followed him on the footpath back to campus, staying outside his dorm and bleating until Julian didn’t have the heart to leave him outside. There was a tag with the owner’s name around the dog’s collar, and when Julian called Mr. Quincy to pick the dog up, Mr. Quincy was so grateful he thrust a fifty-dollar bill into Julian’s hand and refused to take it back.

  A few mornings a week Julian began to walk Mr. Quincy’s Beagle, and then other dogs, too, and soon he could be seen walking along the streets of Northington with eight or nine dogs at his side, Retrievers, Collies, Shepherds, a St. Bernard, and Mary, his favorite, an aging Newfoundland who trailed the rest of the pack like a den mother and who, like Julian, seemed filled with the spirit of discovery, turning her head from side to side like someone perched on a parade float. Mary was so big a few of the Northington children thought she was a bear until Julian assured them she was a dog, and he allowed them to feed Mary scraps of meat, which he carried in a cellophane baggie inside his knapsack.

  Sometimes, late at night, on the way back from a movie or simply alone walking through town, taken with the sense that his life was romantic, that the life of a young man at college was the only life to live, yet filled at the same time with a melancholy whose roots he couldn’t unearth, feeling unappreciated, turned down by some girl, Julian would stop at Mr. Kang’s grocery where he would find Mr. Kang tending to the fruits and vegetables. Mr. Kang used a hose that sprayed a mist so fine Julian could practically see the individual particles of water. Inside, Mrs. Kang was at the cash register examining a bulb of fennel. Julian thought he would like nothing better than to own a grocery, he and some future Mrs. Wainwright, the two of them tending the fruits and vegetables, late nights in the storeroom in back, punching the keys on their matching calculators. Other times, however, there was nothing he would have liked less than to be hovering over the produce in the growing cold, and he would comfort Mr. Kang with the fact that he’d be closing at midnight whereas the Korean grocers in New York City were open twenty-four hours a day.

  “New York’s the city that never sleeps,” Julian said. He started to sing—“New York, New York, it’s a hell of a town”—and as he did, he thought about the Korean grocers in New York City, the one in his parents’ neighborhood next to the pizza place on Second Avenue, how everyone ended up in their own niche, the Korean grocers and the Israeli taxi drivers and the old mustachioed Italian men selling cherry and rainbow ices in Central Park, as if the whole thing had been ordained by some invisible force. He thought about the Irish girl who served him vanilla milk shakes at the diner at three in the morning, the construction men perched high above midtown, and George, the elevator man in his parents’ building, who, when he got off at midnight, took the subway back to Queens. Walking along the streets of New York, Julian liked to stare into the windows of people’s apartments and contemplate the lives that went on inside, the way he liked to contemplate Mr. Kang’s life, his life outside the produce store, his life with Mrs. Kang. “I have to go home and study,” he said.

  “It’s too late to study,” said Mr. Kang.

  “That’s the problem. I’ve only just started.” Julian shook Mr. Kang’s hand and waved at Mrs. Kang inside the store. Then he wended his way back to campus, holding a bag of Golden Delicious apples Mr. Kang had given him for free, and as he walked toward the college gates he ate an apple down to the core and then he ate another one.

  So Julian and Carter were becoming friends. But Julian couldn’t tell whether Carter liked him. It came down to this: Julian was a rich kid from New York City and Carter wasn’t. According to Carter, Graymont was filled with rich kids from New York City, and Carter was from California, just outside San Francisco, and he had no interest in New York City. He equated Graymont with New England and New England with wealth and wealth with New York City and New York City with bullshit, and Carter hated bullshit, he’d grown up in a place utterly devoid of bullshit, in
a completely bullshit-less town.

  No bullshit in San Francisco? Julian had been to San Francisco, and there was plenty of bullshit there, even if it was different from the bullshit in New York. Carter was from the suburbs, besides. The suburbs were all bullshit.

  In Carter’s opinion, everything was more impressive on the West Coast. There was a great cultural divide that flowed with the waters of the Mississippi and cast its shadow across the Rocky Mountains and the Mojave Desert and accounted for the fact that in creative writing class Carter was the only one who didn’t take notes and, in general, all the other students cared and he didn’t. His first day at Graymont, Carter showed up in torn blue jeans and scuffed boots made of alligator leather and with several days’ growth of beard on his face. That first semester, he would walk across campus with his sneakers untied, his blue jeans frayed, his shirt not fully buttoned, running his hand through his hair as if he were in a permanent state of having just woken up.

  But if Carter didn’t care, why, right now, was he asking Julian to read his short stories, and why was he standing in Julian’s room watching him like a voyeur? Carter’s stories were good—they were really good, Julian thought—but when Julian told Carter this, Carter just shrugged.

  According to Carter, there was a sexual abandon where he had grown up that helped account for the fact that he’d lost his virginity at thirteen whereas Julian hadn’t lost his until much later. “And thirteen was late,” Carter said.

  Often, Julian felt Carter didn’t have time for him, but then Carter would show up at his dorm and they’d go play pickup basketball, and late at night they’d walk to the Store 24 or stop for cheeseburgers and onion rings at the Bison Bar and Grill and then go play poker with the guys down the hall. After Professor Chesterfield’s class they would return to the dorms and Carter would ask to see Julian’s stories. Carter liked Julian’s stories and he liked Julian himself, and one night, drunk on beers and having smoked some pot, Carter admitted that the reason he talked so much about the West Coast was that he missed home, he missed his mother and father, and he found the East Coast daunting, the history of it, the wealth, New England especially, where he’d gone to prep school on scholarship for a couple of years before returning home and graduating from his local public school. That was why he had come to Graymont, to show himself he wasn’t intimidated by New England and by people like Julian who came from New York City and had lots of money and had been to places he’d never been to, such as Europe. And although it was true he’d lost his virginity, it hadn’t been at thirteen, and when Carter told Julian this he looked as if he were going to cry.